Get out of my country, Mahmoud Khalil

Plus: Tucker Carlson’s red-pilled Groyper army

Hamasniks

Though I have always done my best to comprehend the arguments of my political opponents, I simply can't wrap my head around the contention that the United States has any responsibility to hand permanent residency or citizenship, the greatest gift we offer, to an America-hating terror fanboy like Mahmoud Khalil.

There are millions of deserving people around the world dying to come here who would respect our laws and culture and become productive, peaceful citizens. People are always going on about how our immigration policy should focus on newcomers with skills. Wouldn’t it be better if we attracted foreigners who would make good Americans? At least let’s offer citizenship to those running from illiberal, violent philosophies not those trying to import them, like Khalil. He offers this country nothing of value.

I grew up around immigrants who had defected from communist nations. These were the most patriotic people I have ever known. They worked their asses off to build a life from the ground up. This brat—who somehow was allowed to come here on a student visa—is leading an insurrection at an Ivy league school. All he’s done as a guest here is make this country a lesser place.

This is not a First Amendment issue. No one has written a law abridging his right to free expression or claimed that visitors can’t speak their mind. No one is banning pro-Hamas protests. The country is lousy with them. But nowhere in the Constitution are we compelled to give citizenship to foreigners who support Islamists or any kind of terrorism. Green cards offer the highest level of protection before citizenship, yes, but they are still part of the vetting process. If we would refuse a visa to someone championing a terrorist group that murders Americans, we should have the right to revoke immigration status for the very same reason at any point.

And, anyway, Khalil lied on his visa application and broke the deal he made with the United States.

From my piece in the Examiner:

The Hamas-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations noted that Khalil “is a lawful permanent resident of our nation who has not been charged with or convicted of a single crime.” So what?

You don’t need to be convicted of a crime to lose your immigration status. The immigration card system exists so that newcomers can be properly vetted. To become a citizen, you must exhibit “good moral character,” a criterion that Khalil doesn’t come close to meeting by any objective standard. Just obey the law, pay taxes, and stay out of trouble. Orchestrating and participating in harassment, vandalism, bigotry, and civil unrest at a once-esteemed Ivy League university falls under the label of “trouble.”

Then again, according to 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(B), Khalil’s permanent residency can also be denied or revoked if he “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” (My italics.)

Khalil, who came here initially on a student visa, does little else. The CUAD brags about fighting for the “total eradication of Western civilization” and explicitly advocates “global intifada” and “armed resistance” by Hamas, an organization designated a terrorist group by the U.S. Justice Department. As the New York Times reported last year, the group was “openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.” (Me again.)

Full piece here.

Mollie and I discuss the case, and other topics on this week’s podcast.

Tucker Carlson’s red-pilled Groyper army

Over the past couple of weeks, Joe Rogan has featured two conspiracy nuts as guests, antisemitic “researcher” Ian Carroll and Hitler apologist “historian” Daryl Cooper. Last week Theo Von, another popular podcaster, brought on nitwit Jew-hater Candace Owens as a guest. (Honestly, I’m running out of pejoratives.)

From my Examiner piece this week:

Owens, who has nearly 7 million followers on X, is the model of a quasi-educated bigot who grabs strands of history and extrapolates to create alternative realities that are plausible to her credulous audience. During a recent interview with an accused sex trafficker Tristan Tate, she suggested that communist dictator Joseph Stalin was secretly Jewish and used the Soviet Union as a tool against Christians. “I found a friend who,” she explains, “understands Georgian, and they were like, everybody knows that Stalin was Jewish, and I am like, Americans don’t know this.”

No, we don’t. Not if we’ve read a book. Then again, Owens accuses rabbis who disagree with her of being “drunk on Christian blood,” an old-school blood libel, and says Zionists are engaged in a “holocaust,” a new-school blood libel. Unsurprisingly, she is skeptical of the actual Holocaust. She’s a 9/11 truther. She peddles the debunked Khazar theory (the fiction that Ashkenazi Jewish have no historic roots in Israel.) Israel, contends Owens, is “a safe haven for pedophiles” where “they practice incest and pedophilia as a sacramental right.”

In many ways, though, Cooper is worse than Owens and Carroll. While the latter two sound like unhinged crackpots, Cooper adopts the tone of a scholar, buttressing his one big idea—that a peace-seeking Hitler was compelled into war and the Holocaust by “psychopath” Winston Churchill—with enough genuine historical facts to make this bullshit sound plausible and reasonable to people who don’t know any better.

Most of Cooper’s appearance on Rogan was just rehash of events that any layperson who’s read a William Shirer book could have told you. But it’s not easy hiding your ignorance for two-plus hours. At one point, Cooper went on a rant about how Hitler tempered antisemitism when speaking to the German public. This is objectively false. Hitler, of course, first called Jews a "pestilence" in a public address in 1922. He published a relatively famous book on his deep animosity towards the Jews in the 1920s, as well. In 1933, he declared a national day of boycotting Jewish businesses. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws stripped Jews of basic citizenship rights. In Hitler’s 1939 Reichstag speech — “Prophecy Speech”— he warned that European Jews would be annihilated: “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

Much of this normalization of these Israel and Jew haters can be traced back to Tucker Carlson, who called Cooper, “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Owens has been a regular guest on his show, joining numerous Hamas boosters, petrostate sheiks, and cranks. (I write this as a one-time fan, who was a guest on his shows at MSNBC and FOX News. Tucker blurbed two of my books.)

Tucker is far more sophisticated than most deranged X influencers, relying on euphemisms and proxies to spread his ugly anti-historical message. A few days ago, for example, Carlson blamed “neocons” — wink, wink — for the destruction of “ancient Christian communities, from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between. Can this be an accident? You wonder.”

Does it? Is he contending that George W. Bush, probably under the influence of rootless “neocons,” invaded Iraq specifically to destroy the Christian community of the Middle East? Because that sounds like a big story.

Now a rational person might not think that it’s amazing that neocons have been hoodwinking Muslims for centuries, from Turkey to Africa, into massacring and driving out Christians. Not long ago, Tucker featured the PLO’s favorite “pastor,” Munther Isaac, who blamed the Jews for the destruction of the Christian community in Bethlehem — even though the Christian population in that city plummeted exactly when the Israelis handed the place to the Palestinian Authority. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a consistently growing Christian population. Only a person without even a rudimentary grasp of the situation could possibly believe Israel would rather have Islamist neighbors than Christians. But that fact doesn’t help Tucker build animosity.

The very day Tucker was blaming neocons for the Syrian mess, he released an interview with an “emir” of Qatar, a top patron of the al-Qaeda spin-offs that took down the Assad regime and now threaten Christians. You won’t be surprised to learn that Tucker didn’t bring it up. Qatar, says Tucker, is just being smeared by warmongering “neocons.”

Since I filed that piece, Carlson featured a rando guest who bandied about idiotic theories about the friendly fire USS Liberty incident, when Israel accidentally attacked an American research ship near the Egypt coast during the Six Day War. Which is to say, Tucker has now officially spent more time on an accident that happened nearly 60 years ago than he has about the 35 Americans who just slaughtered by Hamas.

I’m still on a Hackman kick (RIP)

This week:

Good reads

Cardinal Dolan: The Evils of Antisemitism — Timothy Cardinal Dolan - FP