FREEDOM OF SPEECH*

American protesters larping as jihadists clashed with police Tuesday night as they attempted to storm the New York City mayor’s residence.

The scene was at once chaotic and hilarious. Here’s a video of a cop chasing down a white dude in a t-shirt wearing that checkered kuffiya head scarf. It’s sad in a funny way. The same jihadists they support would happily kidnap, torture and then behead them on a livestream. They’d do the same to their children. That or enslave them.

And what was the source of their foment?

The Trump-ordered deportation of foreign green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil, the leader of Columbia’s pro-Hamas protests. I’m being as literal as possible there, Khalil is pro-Hamas. He was the spokesperson for and one of the leaders of a student organization called Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

Here they are “commemorating” the anniversary of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” which is what Hamas called the Oct. 7 attack on a civilian hippie festival in Israel.

“One comrade opened by citing Mao,” starts the second paragraph of the write-up.

These are not good people. Khalil came here, legally, and chose to represent them and defend a known terrorist organization. He chose to defend actions meant to disrupt routine academic proceedings. He gave voice to an organization that interrupted classes and harassed students, often based solely on ethnicity or creed.

And he did it all to defend and promote the murderous actions of a designated enemy of the stars and stripes.

Case closed as far as I’m concerned. Send him packing. There’s plenty of immigrants who’d happily trade places and become functioning, contributing and even patriotic members of the American citizenry.

(I’ve been to naturalization ceremonies, I’ve seen it firsthand.)

And it’s here I should be ultra clear: I think it’s perfectly fine to hate anyone at any time for any reason. I’ve been in rush hour traffic. Hate is perfectly legal, while driving on the sidewalk is not.

The First Amendment and its case history is clear on this.

I also think it’s perfectly fine to not support Israel. Just as it’s fine to support a Palestinian state and so on. Caustic hatred of Israel is perfectly above board in America, as far as I’m concerned.

Isn’t it weird, however, that a political left and the media that represents it has suddenly drawn free speech battle lines around a foreigner who led a pro-terrorist protest group dedicated, by its own mission statement, to the “eradication of western civilization”?

Is that not an odd subset of the “free speech” debate around which to take a stand? Foreign, hates jews, elite university, dedicated to “eradication” of the west?

None of this is surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention the last few years. As the elite academic left that feeds American institutions, like the media, has become ever more radical, it has also become ever more foreign.

“At selective universities, about a third of total enrollment comes from abroad,” writes Heritage Research Fellow Jay P. Greene. “At Columbia it is almost half. Once foreign enrollment reaches a certain level, these universities cease to be American institutions, raising questions about why taxpayers should have to subsidize them.”

Why should the kid I graduated high school with, who went on to a trade school and became a successful, debt-free electrician with no “elite” degree, have to fund a foreign radical’s ivy league education and apparently legal stay in the United States?

He shouldn’t, in my opinion. Khalil has no God-given or constitutional right to be in the US, to attend our schools, to endorse our enemies, to harass our citizens, and to give intellectual subsidy to structures designed to destroy western civilization.

Elections have consequences. Trump is within his purview to freeze $400 million in Columbia research funding. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is perfectly within his purview to revoke visas he deems harmful to American interests.

If liberals and the media that supports them want to change that, they need to make a persuasive argument that foreigners dedicated to destroying our way of life are worth subsidizing and win some upcoming elections.

And to them I say: Good luck.

AUTHOR

Geoffrey Ingersoll

Geoffrey Ingersoll graduated from Penn State in 2004 and quickly achieved becoming a Teach For America reject. He then enlisted in the Marines as a writer. He enrolled in NYU’s graduate journalism program after his honorable discharge in 2009, discovering in the process that Greenwich Village is scarier than Baghdad. Geoffrey has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ, and New Jersey.

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