At about 8:30 pm on March 8th 2025, unidentified agents seized a student from the lobby of his apartment building in Columbia University housing.
The agents were not in uniform, did not identify what agency they worked for, and threatened to also arrest the student’s pregnant wife. They also did not have a warrant for the arrest.
Worse, the agents didn’t even seem to know on what grounds they were arresting him – their stated reason changed when they were confronted with the potential illegitimacy of their actions.
Nevertheless, they proceeded to seize the student, bundling him into an unmarked vehicle and taking him to an unknown location.
This sounds like a scene from some Dystopian novel or film set in some totalitarian state.
It’s reality, however, in 2025 in America. The detainee in question is still being held, weeks later: and it still isn’t clear that he has committed any crime.
So let’s get into this.
An ongoing question for me has been the question of why the Trump administration has been so intent on things like withdrawing the US from the UN Human Rights Council.
With the case of Mahmoud Khalil, we might get a sense of the probable answer.
If any more proof were needed that Donald Trump is, in his own words, the ‘best friend Israel ever had’ (to put it mildly), the treatment of Khalil is it.
The arrest of the student protester by ICE, and his intended deportation, has rightly provoked considerable outrage from those who care about human rights, civil liberties and freedom of speech.
The details and accounts of his arrest are disturbing on their own: but the palpably smug response by Trump himself to the arrest said it all. ‘SHALOM, MAHMOUD‘, posted the President of the United States on social media. He continued, “ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.“
Not that this should’ve been a surprise. Trump had said this was coming months ago, promising to go after those who had been involved in pro-Gaza protests on college campuses last year.
The excessive and violent suppression of student protesters last year – itself an extraordinary violation of the students’ rights to protest and peaceful assembly – was troubling enough. Columbia University was at the heart of the protests: and peaceful students were shocked at how immediately the New York Police Department was called in to crack down.
Not since 1968 and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War had this kind of measure been taken against student activists. That’s how serous a moment this was.
But now, even long after the events and at a time when such protests are no longer occurring, the Trump administration appears obsessed with acting as Israel’s iron fist in the US.
In keeping with this, the ‘president’ has confirmed Khalil’s case will be simply the first of many.
What’s much more interesting than Donald Trump’s status as Israel’s right hand (he is in fact a High Priest, according to Jewish ritual – see here) is that the Columbia University that has applauded the mistreatment of its own students, is in fact infested with Israeli assets or operatives at the senior level.
And this explains, among other things, why the university’s leadership has been completely silent about Khalil’s treatment.
As reiterated by Alan MacLeod at MintPress, ‘the professor at the center of the Columbia University deportation scandal is a former Israeli intelligence official‘.
Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo has ties to the IDF, as well as having been in Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. Her husband is Israel’s official United Nations spokesperson.
Furthermore, as MacLeod highlighted last year, the university is heavily funded and controlled by wealthy figures linked with Israel, such as Leon Cooperman, Len Blavatnik and even Leslie Wexner (who was a major patron of Israeli/US intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein).
These were the types of individuals who called for the National Guard to be brought in to violently end the demonstrations.
Further, the targeting of Khalil specifically was driven by far-right Jewish group ‘Betar US‘ and Canary Mission: and with Jewish affiliates of the Columbia University lobbying Republican politicians to focus on the student.
The Betar group says it has sent “thousands of names” of protesters to the Trump administration for arrest and deportation. The Zionist group has claimed to be using facial recognition technology and social media to monitor and intimidate pro-Palestine activists, reporting them to US immigration authorities.
All of this would probably indicate that all the talk last year of rampant antisemitism on the campus was mostly fabricated – primarily to help demonise the young protesters.
Fabricated or weaponised ‘antisemitism’ is hardly a new strategy anymore. It has been deployed everywhere.
But this supposed antisemitism is the main justification Trump and co have used to make ‘terrorists’ out of protesters.
It has be said, the university’s treatment of its own students has been extraordinary. Institutions that were once seen in America as proud havens for free speech, open debate and yes, protests specifically, are now apparently simply extensions of state suppression.
The evidence for Khalil being a ‘Hamas supporter’ appears to be, as Adam Dick lays out here, non existent.
As many have already explained, Mahmoud Khalil has actually committed no crime beyond exercising First Amendment rights to free speech.
He also is in the US entirely legally as a green card holder.
But it likely goes further than just Israel’s control of the United States.
In addition to playing the subservient role of Zionist enforcer, the Trump administration is also making an example out of him to gage how far they can go in criminalising free speech and protest and violating civil liberties.
They’re testing the waters: the more they can get away with now, the more they can calculate the equations for future expansion of powers and abuses.
It is also a way of discouraging future protest or dissent through fear.
Ironically, the same administration that has been waffling on – primarily via J.D Vance – about free speech in Europe (and the UK specifically) is itself cracking down harshly on free expression in the US, making criminals out of student protesters, and seeking to categorise things like BLM and Antifa as terrorist groups.
Student protesters opposed to genocide are also in the same loose category: calling for Palestinian rights or an end to slaughter equates to being a ‘Hamas supporter’ – and being a supporter essentially equates to being part of the terrorist equation somehow.
Beyond standard ‘antisemitism’ strategy, what’s also noteworthy is the language that is being used to explain the detention of Mahmoud Khalil.
As highlighted by FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) on March 11th, the White House has fully admitted Khalil hasn’t committed a crime: rather, it announced he is ‘being targeted under a law… characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America”…’
Let’s take that in again: ‘adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests‘.
Alright, so what does that mean? And how far can that Orwellian word-salad be stretched and contorted?
I mean it’s easy to stretch that language to implicate virtually *anybody* at any time.
For example, anyone who protested against the Iraq War.
But we can go one better. Trump, J.D Vance and the Republicans can all be accused of going against the US national interest and national security: by, for example, withdrawing military assistance to Ukraine. After all, the aiding of Ukraine’s war effort was well-established US foreign policy, wasn’t it? It was entrenched military policy, wasn’t it?
An administration opposed to it is therefore acting against the previously established ‘national interest’, isn’t it? See how easy it is to use manipulative and vague language and terms to criminalise someone?
Moreover, it wasn’t American ‘national interest’ that Khalil or any of the other protesters were arguably being disloyal to – but Israel’s interests. A foreign country.
But again, Trump is ‘the best friend Israel ever had’, so all of this makes perfect sense.
This is the same White House, after all, that has essentially demonised and disempowered the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court for the sake of protecting Israel’s war criminals.
Now Americans are being oppressed and abused by their own government for the sake of a foreign entity’s reputation and/or ego.
That’s how ugly the US/Israel relationship now is.
If there’s something in all of this Draconian bleakness to take some heart in, it’s that the protesters who recently marched on Trump Tower to call for Khalil’s release were led by Jewish activists. Reminding us, not for the first time, that the most vociferous American protesters against Israel’s crimes have been Jewish. 100 or so of them were arrested.
And that’s not new. Zionism’s longstanding attempt to hijack or dominate all Jewish allegiance or identity has never worked. But they have no regard for Jews who don’t follow the script.
But, at this rate, one wonders how long it will be before the fanatics come after insufficiently-loyal Jewish voices the same way they’re going after people like Khalil.
A Trump administration entirely beholden to the Golden Calf wouldn’t take much convincing.
As for free speech in America? Let’s see how much longer even the pretense of it lasts.
