Mainstream media is in a frenzy about his deportation
I’m all for student protests at college campuses. It’s an exercise in free speech rights that any student can participate in. I myself participated in several anti-war protests on the campus of the University of Michigan in 1970, during the Vietnam war. That war was unpopular among students, and for good reason.
I remember one of the more famous hippies in my dorm walking down the hallway one day, with his hair cut, in a suit and carrying a briefcase. Everyone was shocked. The reality of war was demonstrated to us that day in the dorm.
Everyone on the floor knew what had happened. Our guy had gotten a low draft number and he was on his way to boot camp, and probably overseas to snuff some gooks (or more likely, to get his ass shot off).
So when the government arrests a student protester and wants to deport him, I don’t agree at all with that. Didn’t agree with Trump doing it. But the media frenzy around Mr. Khalil prompted me to look him up. Why did the media single THIS guy out to be the poster boy for Trump fascism?
Well, I did a little research and encountered an outfit called Middle East Eye. Turns out this is a British organization that covers Middle East issues, unsurprisingly. The website is at middleeasteye.net.
I found an article on Mahmoud Khalil on this site, titled “Who is Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student activist facing deportation from the US?” The subheading is, “The Trump administration has accused the 29-year-old green card holder, without providing any evidence, of being a supporter of ‘terrorism’” This is one of dozens of articles I have found bashing Trump for being against free speech: Deport an innocent Middle East student just because he disagrees with the gummint line.
I wasn’t even going to read the article because it’s pretty long. But then I saw in the subheader that this guy is 29 years old. A little long in the tooth to be a student, even at the graduate level. OK, maybe he’s doing a PhD or a high-level post-grad program. I got curious so I read the entire article. I came upon this, under the heading “Who Is Mahmoud Khalil?”
“Khalil was born in 1995 and raised in Syria, where his family had lived as refugees for decades following their forced removal from the city of Tiberias in Palestine during the Nakba in 1948.
“After the war in Syria began over a decade ago, Khalil’s family sought refuge outside of the country, with many ending up in Europe and other parts of the Middle East. Khalil worked for several years in Beirut, including at the Syria Office in the British embassy in Beirut.
“Andrew Waller, a former British diplomat, who worked at the embassy during Khalil’s time in Beirut, described Khalil ‘as an extremely kind and conscientious person and he was loved by his colleagues at the Syria Office.”
“Waller rubbished Trump’s description of Khalil as grounds for defamation. ‘You couldn’t find anyone who’d say a bad word about him. He was very good at his job,’ he told Middle East Eye, adding that Khalil had gone ‘through a vetting process to get the job and was cleared to work on sensitive issues for the British government.’
“Following his work in Beirut, in 2022 Khalil was accepted into the master’s programme in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs…”
[emphasis mime]
— Source: https://www.middleeasteye.net/profile/mahmoud-khalil-who-is-palestinian-student-columbia-facing-deportation-us
OK, so we know Mr. Khalil was doing a Masters program, not a PhD or post-doc work, at the age of 29. The article doesn’t provide much background info on Mr. Khalil, but I’m guessing that he spent the time of a normal college student (18–21) just trying to survive in Syria.
More importantly, we know from the article that he worked for “several years” at the Syria Office at the British embassy in Beirut. Was he a British government employee there? It seems so, as Mr. Waller states that his “colleagues” at the Syria Office loved him. What kind of work was Mr. Khalil doing at the British embassy? The article doesn’t say, but we get a hint two paragraphs later.
Waller states that Khalil had gone “through a vetting process to get the job…” What job? [Mr. Khalil] “was cleared to work on sensitive issues for the British government.”
Huh? Why would a government employee have to get “vetted” for a job? Oh right, because he was “cleared” to work on “sensitive issues.” This implies he had a security clearance. The words “sensitive issues,” is code for intelligence work. Later in the article it says that following his work for the British government he was accepted into a masters program at Columbia.
That seems odd to me. After working with “sensitive” (classified) info for the British government “for years,” he gets sent to Columbia University to do a Masters program? That sequence of events should be the other way around. First you get qualified by getting a Masters and then you earn a job working with sensitive information.
What did Mr. Khalil actually do at Columbia University? Well, the article says that
“Khalil functioned as an intermediary between students and university administrators over the student movement’s demands for university divestment from weapons companies profiting from Israel’s war on the besieged enclave. Khalil did not participate in the encampments himself, opting instead to negotiate with administrators and offer guidance to the students. Several colleagues and friends described Khalil as a mentor, an elder brother, and an inspirational figure to the student community….
“Khalil ‘was always standing in front of a camera, and he would always talk about how he felt guilty because he couldn’t do more for his people facing genocide.’”
Sure, but couldn’t he do that in the UK? Why does he have to come to Columbia to get his Masters? There are plenty of great universities in England.
Is Mr. Khalil is a British spy here in the US? I don’t know. Working with university administrators and being an overseer to students and having a guidance role to students would be a good way to apply his intelligence capabilities at Columbia for the British government. Just sayin’.
Perhaps this is why Trump wants to deport him.
On the other hand, Mr. Khalil completed his Masters degree in December 2024 and is expected to graduate in May 2025. So maybe this guy is exactly as described in the article: just a great, wonderful, sweet guy who felt the need to express himself politically. If that is true, there is no reason to deport him. I personally object to governments deporting students merely for expressing their political views.
However, there are two sides to every story. The story of Mr. Khalil is more complicated than it looks like on the surface. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but whenever I see a media circus surrounding some person I have never heard of before, I suspect that an Information Operation is playing out on the stage of public opinion.
I am very curious to see how this shakes out, because Mr, Khalil is still in the public spotlight.
