About Those Students Arrested by the Department of Homeland Security

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 300 foreign students, such as Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts, who are here in the United States on student visas, have now been arrested, and are threatened with deportation by the Department of Homeland Security. These 300 have been variously charged with a variety of offenses: providing support to Hamas, a designated terrorist group, both in person and on social media; calling for the destruction of the state of Israel (“From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free”), urging violence against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the Intifada”), participating in campus violence, including physically harassing and attacking Jewish students, trying to shut down classes taught by Jewish professors, entering and vandalizing campus buildings, attacking campus police and janitorial staff, and much more. Douglas Murray discusses it all here.

All this gets especially messy because at the same time that portions of the right want to effect outrage at things which are essentially unimportant, the left is trying to focus on a much more important free-speech battle.

They believe that if someone supports a radical terrorist group or comes to the United States and tries to cause civil unrest or vandalism that they should somehow be protected by the First Amendment.

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In recent days and weeks even some esteemed conservative writers have backed up this position.

As well as the case of Mahmoud Khalil, there is now also the case of Rumeysa Ozturk. Like Khalil, this person came into the US claiming to be a student. She came in on a student visa.

The Turkish-born student has now been detained. She seems — like Khalil — to have made a fundamental misunderstanding about what it means to come to the US as a student.

First of all she — like him — is not protected by the same laws that would protect an American citizen. She was not born in this country, is not a citizen of this country and was — in fact — a guest in this country.

But the left — and some on the right — are gearing up to make her their latest “free-speech martyr.” Yet even free speech for American citizens stop at the moment that you support the harassment of American students.

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It stops at the moment that you encourage and engage in acts of vandalism and violence on American college campuses — among other places. And it stops when you support foreign and domestic terrorist movements.

As Marco Rubio said yesterday, there is no reason why any country in the world should invite people into it whose intent is to cause civil strife. What country would invite people in and then reward them for trying to cause trouble in their host country?

As Rubio said of the Ozturk case: “We gave you a visa to study and earn a degree — not to become a social activist tearing up our campuses. If you use your visa to do that, we’ll take it away. And I encourage every country to do the same.”

Senator Josh Hawley managed to hold the sane eminently sensible line yesterday when he berated people claiming that assaulting campus police and smashing up buildings is “protected speech.” It isn’t.

Words are not violence. Violence is violence. The woke left never liked to remember this. But conservatives shouldn’t forget it either.

The defenders of these students who have been arrested and will have their cases heard in a court of law keep claiming that what is at stake is “their right to freedom of speech.” No, it is not. Theirs is not a free speech matter. What is at stake, among other things, is the violent part these people play in suppressing the freedom of speech of others. They shout down pro-Israel speakers, entering lecture halls to interrupt such speakers with chants — “Stop Ethnic Cleansing,” “End the Genocide,” “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” and most threatening of all, “Globalize the Intifada.” They violently invade university buildings, and vandalize them, writing pro-Hamas graffiti on walls. They attack campus police trying to regulate the tent encampments that they set up in the middle of campuses. At Columbia, the pro-Hamas brigade entered Hamilton Hall, and proceeded to break furniture and write on the walls. When members of the janitorial staff tried to stop them, they were attacked. One of the janitors was so wounded that he spent five days in the hospital.

Right now, Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk are being presented as martyrs on the altar of free speech. But it is the active participation in violence of the former, and the approval expressed for Palestinian violence by the other, that have gotten them in trouble. They were greatly privileged to have been allowed into our country for study. But they greatly abused that privilege, and if justice is done, Khalil will be back in the despotic mess that is Gaza, or possibly end up teaching at Birzeit University (ranked as the 1,946th university in the world) in Judea (or is Samaria?). As for Ms. Ozturk, she can look forward, if justice is done in her case, to returning to Turkey, to be ruled by the dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as he tightens the screws of his regime. Neither one will be able to exercise the freedom of speech they so abused in warm-hearted and welcoming America. Both will lament their paradise lost, which only when they are far away, in their respective political hellholes, will they begin to appreciate.