How to Spot Zionist Nonsense

Zionism is the gravest threat to free speech and other civil liberties. An examination of two recent media clips can help us spot Zionist lies…

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Last week I wrote about New York governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to remove a help wanted ad for a Palestinian Studies professor position at Hunter College, part of the CUNY system. I explained why claims made by Hochul and other Zionists that college campuses, and America generally, are unsafe for Jewish students/people due to the supposed antisemitism of pro-Palestine protests, are false. I pondered why, despite what I called the “sheer absurdity” of such claims, so many people continue to believe them. Attempting to answer my own question, I identified the press as the primary culprit, explaining that people who don’t have a good working knowledge of Israel, Palestine, Zionism, et al, are easily susceptible to media manipulation about them. I observed that lurid claims regarding what goes on at college campuses are more readily believed by people who do not spend any time on them. (I should have added that claims about universities are also more likely to be believed by people who have been bombarded for decades with state-corporate propaganda targeting higher education, especially the humanities – a group that includes all Americans.)

I noted that the same Americans who, today, sit aghast in front of their screens as they are told that the situation at our universities resembles an ongoing Kristallnacht, are the same people who, twenty years ago, sat aghast in front of their televisions as they were told that Saddam Hussein was definitively in possession of WMDs. I explained that virtually every pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protest, everywhere in the country, on and off college campuses, featured massive participation from Jews, thus making the “violent antisemitic protests” narrative completely untenable. To the latter point, I referenced, albeit parenthetically, the then-ongoing protests led primarily by Jewish people, from the organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), at Trump Tower, against Trump’s egregious detention of Columbia protestor Mahmoud Khalil.

Since I wrote all that, two recent clips from mainstream media have been brought to my attention, both of which relate to Mahmoud Khalil and JVP’s protests demanding his release. Both are extremely useful case studies that can help us understand why so many Americans hold such wild views on these matters. The first clip is from Fox News. It demonstrates just how shameless that wretched network is, how brazen are its lies, and what utter contempt it has for its own audience. The second clip is from CNN. It is noteworthy because it demonstrates how brazen the Trump administration and its conservative lackeys are in their lies, as well as for – surprisingly – offering real (albeit insufficient) pushback against some of the administration’s claims.

But first, I need to address the situation regarding Mahmoud Khalil. Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian man and a green card holder. He protested against Israel’s genocide while he was a graduate student at Columbia University, and at one point negotiated on behalf of the protest movement in talks with the university. For this reason, and this reason alone, on March 8^th, the Trump administration had ICE effectively kidnap him outside his home in front of his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant. The video of the kidnapping, as filmed by Khalil’s distraught wife, has been available online for some time now:

The Trump administration has not charged Khalil with any crime. Instead, it has all but admitted to kidnapping him because they disagreed with his political views. In order to fully appreciate the breathtaking absurdity – and unprecedented danger – of the administration’s claims, take a look at this interview by Michel Martin of NPR with Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. I try not to do this too often, but I’m going to include virtually the entire interview here, so that people have a chance to see the boldfaced lies of this administration to the fullest extent. Really, you have to see it to believe it:

Michel Martin: Mahmoud Khalil says he acted as a spokesperson for pro-Palestinian demonstrators and as a mediator with Columbia University, where he was a graduate student. As you know, Mr. Edgar, any conduct that can be legally sanctioned must be described. So, what is the specific conduct the government alleges that Mr. Khalil engaged in that merits removal from the United States?

Troy Edgar: I think what you saw there is you've got somebody that has come into the country on a visa. And as he's going through the visa process, he is coming in to basically be a student that is not going to be supporting terrorism. So, the issue is he was let into the country on this visa. He has been promoting this antisemitism activity at the university. And at this point, the State Department has revoked his visa for supporting a terrorist type organization. And we're the enforcing agencies, so we've come in to basically arrest him.

Martin: A White House official told the Free Press that there's no allegation that he broke any laws. So, again, I have to ask, what specifically constitutes terrorist activity that he was supporting? What exactly do you say he did?

Edgar: Well, like I said, when you apply for a visa, you go through the process to be able to say that you're here on a student visa, that doesn't afford you all the rights of coming in and basically going through this process, agitating and supporting Hamas. So, at this point, yeah, the Secretary of State and the State Department maintains the right to revoke the visa, and that's what they've done.

Martin: How did he support Hamas? Exactly what did he do?

Edgar: Well, I think you can see it on TV, right? This is somebody that we've invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he's put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.

Martin: He's a permanent resident. He's not a visa holder. He's a legal permanent resident. He has the green card, at least he did, until it's alleged that it was revoked. If the allegation is that Mr. Khalil organized protests and made speeches after which other people engaged in prohibited activity, or, say, violent activity. Well, Mr. Trump gave a political speech on January 6, 2021, after which some individuals engaged in violent and illegal acts. How is this any different?

Edgar: President Trump's a citizen and the president of the United States. This is a person that came in under a visa. And again, the secretary of state at any point can take a look and evaluate that visa and decide if they want to revoke it.

Martin: He's a legal permanent resident. I have to keep insisting on that. He is a legal permanent resident. So what is the standard? Is any criticism of the Israeli government a deportable offense?

Edgar: Like I said, I think that at this point when he entered into the country on a student visa, at any point we can go through and evaluate what his status is.

Martin: Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?

Edgar: Like I said, if you go through the process and you're a student and you're here on a visa and you go through it, at any point …

Martin: Is any criticism of the government a deportable offense?

Edgar: Let me put it this way, Michel, imagine if he came in and filled out the form and said, 'I want a student visa.' They asked him, 'What are you going to do here?' And he says, 'I'm going to go and protest.' We would have never let him into the country.

Martin: Is protesting a deportable offense?

Edgar: You're focused on protests. I'm focused on the visa process. He went through a legal process ...

Martin: Are you saying he lied on his application? He's a lawful permanent resident, married to an American citizen.

Edgar: I think if he would have declared he's a terrorist, we would have never let him in.

Martin: And what did he engage in that constitutes terrorist activity?

Edgar: I mean, Michel, have you watched it on TV? It's pretty clear.

Michel: No, it isn't. Well, explain it to those of us who have not or perhaps others have not. What exactly did you do?

Edgar: Well, I think it's clear or we wouldn't be talking about it. I mean, the reality is that if you watch and see what he's done on the university …

Martin: Do you not know? Are you telling us that you're not aware?

Edgar: I find it interesting that you're not aware.

First, we see that Edgar keeps lying about (or else, is somehow ignorant of) Khalil’s legal status – he’s a green card holder, AKA a lawful permanent resident, with comparable rights to a citizen – not a visa applicant, which confers far fewer rights. But that’s the least of it. Edgar accused Khalil of “supporting terrorism,” “promoting this antisemitism,” and “supporting a terrorist type organization.” While Martin did not challenge Edgar regarding Khalil’s supposed antisemitism – a point to which we will return – she did at least challenge the rest of his claims. She asked him what “terrorist activity” Khalil supported, and in what way he supported it, to which Edgar replied that Khalil had been “agitating and supporting Hamas.” Martin asked how exactly he had been supporting Hamas, to which Edgar replied that, as we all “can see on TV,” Khalil “put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” and that it was for this reason that Khalil’s green card was taken away.

Those of us who have been involved in the struggle against Israel’s genocide have long tried to explain that Zionists – be they liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Jew or gentile, religious or secular – invariably equate being “against genocide” or “pro-Palestine” with being “antisemitic,” “pro-Hamas,” “supportive of terrorism,” et al. Now the Trump administration is making this false equivalence, overtly, without any hesitation or shame. A high-ranking official at DHS explicitly claimed that “pro-Palestine activity” constituted “antisemitism,” “support for terrorism,” and “support for Hamas.” Based on this open, obvious lie, the Trump administration kidnapped a permanent resident and sent him to an internment camp in Louisiana.

I don’t know if you realize how insane and dangerous this is. It is not hyperbole to say that this is the single greatest violation of the right to freedom of speech in my lifetime. It is also one of the greatest threats to the right to due process as well. (I would argue that the global drone assassination campaign waged first by Obama, and then by Trump, probably constituted the greatest threat to due process, since, in that case, the U.S. accused people of being terrorists, then murdered them, whereas Trump has only deported or imprisoned people – thus far, at least.) And you can be sure that if the administration feels that it has the power to do this, they will not stop at green card holders. They will do this to citizens, too. Maybe you noticed the four other questions that Edgar dodged:

“Is any criticism of the Israeli government a deportable offense?”

“Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?”

“Is any criticism of the government a deportable offense?”

“Is protesting a deportable offense?”

The Trump administration has already gone after a number of other students who are non-citizens. Ranjani Srinivasan, for instance, is an Indian citizen on a student visa that was abruptly cancelled unexpectedly. Srinivasan barely evaded ICE agents by boarding a last-minute flight to Canada. Chillingly, she appears to not even have taken part in any protest activity. According to the New York Times, Srinivasan was targeted merely for “her activity on social media,” which “had been mostly limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted ‘human rights violations’ in the war in Gaza. And she said that she had signed several open letters related to the war, including one by architecture scholars that called for ‘Palestinian liberation.’ ‘I’m just surprised that I’m a person of interest,’ she said. ‘I’m kind of a rando, like, absolute rando[.]’” Despite this, DHS accused her of being “involved in activities supporting Hamas.” Naturally, the administration “did not provide any evidence for its allegations.”

They’ve also arrested Dr. Badar Khan Suri, another Indian citizen and postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University. Suri is married to an American citizen of Palestinian heritage, which likely explains the arrest. The Trump administration has accused Suri of “oppos[ing] U.S. foreign policy toward Israel,” “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” and having “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” according to Politico. At the time Politico reported on this, Dr. Suri had been unable to contact his wife or his lawyer. And that’s just two examples; there are others, such as this Palestinian student from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, who had also taken part in protests at Columbia.

If nothing else, this outrageous and blatantly authoritarian behavior demonstrates, decisively, that when conservatives and Trump supporters claim to cherish principles like “freedom of speech,” “small government,” “respect for the constitution,” “family values,” and the like, they are simply lying. They want an all-powerful surveillance/police state that is capable of operating everywhere; one that rips people away from their families by kidnapping and interring them for saying and thinking things they don’t like.

But then, we knew that already. In any event, on to the two media clips I mentioned. When protesters from Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish-led group, carried out a large demonstration inside Trump Tower against the administration’s kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, Fox News was on hand to provide some of the worst coverage of any issue I’ve ever seen in a cable news segment. Even for Fox, it was egregious. The segment was from Harris Faulkner’s show, and can be seen in full here:

Choosing not to mention that these were mostly Jewish protesters from Jewish Voice for Peace, Faulkner made these comments: “look at some of the signage in here, I mean, they hate Israel, they hate Jewish Americans, they are anti-American.” Even for Fox, trying to get your audience to believe that Jewish activists “hate Jewish Americans” is pretty outrageous. So is telling them that those Jewish activists’ signs indicated this hatred at the exact moment the camera focuses on what those signs actually say. In case you didn’t watch the clip above or can’t see them in the thumbnail, here are what their signs said:

· Jews Say Do Not Comply

· Fight Nazis Not Students

· Opposing Fascism is a Jewish Tradition

· You Can’t Deport a Movement

· Free Mahmoud, Free Palestine

· Never Again for Anyone

Yeah, real antisemitic stuff there. Also visible throughout Faulkner’s shrieking were the activists’ shirts, the front of which read, “Not In Our Name,” while the back declared, “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel.” Later in the broadcast, Faulkner added, “This is not a safe situation. If you are Jewish in that building, do you feel safe?”

You cannot, as the saying goes, make this stuff up.

Yet this is how anti-genocide protests and movements have been covered over the past year-and-a-half. Millions of Americans who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause of stopping a genocide (who could be against that?) or, in this case, Mahmoud Khalil’s basic civil rights, have been manipulated – blatantly, as we can see here – into believing that raging antisemites are chasing down Jews in the streets of New York. I should also note the outrageous hypocrisy of Faulkner’s comments about how this does not constitute a free speech issue. She said, “when you hate, when people feel under threat from what you’re saying, that’s actually not protected speech.” I should not have to point out that Fox and right-wing media generally have historically been at the forefront of defending the most extreme forms of hate speech as a matter of course.

Faulkner’s guest, Ari Fleischer, agreed. He called this “the speech facade, the myth that this is about speech.” The real issue, he insisted, “ha[s] nothing to do with speech. It has everything to do with creating an encampment. That is where Zionists are prohibited, where Jewish students are not allowed to walk on their own campus. These are crimes. These are deportable acts.” I’m grateful to Fleischer for making such boldface lies, because it gives me an opportunity to address something I’d overlooked in my piece from last week. In addition to Kathy Hochul, that article addressed the claims made by Jeffrey Lax, who according to a New York Times piece I quoted, is both “a CUNY professor and founder of the group Students, Alumni and Faculty for Equality on Campus, which ‘advocates for Zionist Jews discriminated against and excluded on college campuses.’”

Both Fleischer and Lax are perpetuating a ridiculous idea that Zionist Jews are “discriminated against and excluded” on campuses, and that Jewish students in general “are not allowed to walk on their own campus.” I have heard some version of this claim repeated ad nauseum since the encampments went up last year, and the odds are that you have, too. Having myself participated in one of those encampments, as well as having visited several others, I think I would have noticed if there had been a deliberate attempt to bar Jews from them. Certainly, that would have been hard to square with the massive Jewish presence at all of them, particularly the Columbia encampment that Mahmoud Khalil was a part of.

Thus we can see that Fleischer’s claim that “Jewish students [were] not allowed to walk on their own campus” at the Columbia encampment is an outright lie. Not a misstatement – a lie. Fleischer, Lax, and Faulkner know that what they are saying is not true. They are just lying. It really is that simple. They are lying because no one will call them out on it, because in American media, you can lie about these things with impunity, especially if the person you are lying about is Palestinian or an Arab or a Muslim. (They are also aware that their viewers want to hear this stuff, and that hell will freeze over before any of them think critically about their media consumption.)

Fleischer, you may recall, was the Press Secretary for the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq War. In that capacity, he lied, constantly, about Iraqi WMDs and connections to al Qaeda (both nonexistent). In the same way, he lied repeatedly during this segment, as when he claimed that “these people, the base of the Democrat Party, are pro-Hamas.” It is deeply alarming (though sadly not surprising) that Fox brings on people like this to “educate” their audience about anything, let alone such consequential subjects as Israel, Palestine, university life, antisemitism, free speech, or the right to protest.

The other panelists were similarly breathtaking in their idiocy. Responding to Khalil’s wife’s assertion that her husband was kidnapped, Kayleigh McEnany had the gall to assert that “the American government does not kidnap people” - a comment that must have tickled Fleischer, who dutifully served the administration that presided over a regime of international kidnapping known as “extraordinary rendition.” But Faulkner was by far the most absurd of the bunch. Despite having just insisted that this issue was not about free speech, Faulkner then did a 180 and insisted that freedom isn’t just for the people you like, but for everyone – which, of course, is precisely the argument (well, one of many) for freeing Mahmoud Khalil immediately. She went on to suggest that “Jewish Americans are [going to be] afraid when they go to sleep tonight because of the stuff that’s happening on the streets of some of our cities,” that Khalil lead protests “against Jewish Americans, many of them aligned with pro-Hamas [sic],” and that the anti-genocide encampments last year were “basically were holding hostages on one of the campuses because they hate Jews.”

You will note that Fox is taking the same line as deputy secretary Edgar – endlessly repeating that Mahmoud Khalil and the (in this case, mostly Jewish) protesters hated Jews, loved Hamas, and supported terrorism. Unlike NPR’s interview with Edgar, there was no one on hand to offer pushback to any of this – or as Fox used to like to say, the segment was “Fair and Balanced.” In the next clip, however, there was at least some pushback.

The above clip was taken from Abby Phillip’s CNN show. It featured Phillip and a panel of guests, including Republican Bruce Blakeman, the county executive of New York’s Nassau County, who was on-hand to defend the kidnapping of Khalil. By this point, you will not be all that surprised by what he had to say. After Phillip laid out the free speech implications of the kidnapping (“I think the question here is whether speech can result in someone’s legal rights being taken away”), Blakeman began raving that Khalil “is a virulent antisemite,” a claim for which he presented zero evidence, and which elicited zero pushback from other panelists. It’s quite remarkable that a person can make claims like this on national television, defaming someone without providing a shred of evidence. It is also distressing that the other panelists just let this slide.

Blakeman went on to say that “he’s paid by a terrorist organization,” at which point other panelists thankfully interrupted and asked for some evidence. “I have evidence,” Blakeman replied immediately. “He’s a paid protestor,” he repeated. “By who?” the other panelists asked. “Well, I didn’t ask my intelligence division exactly who paid for him, but…” At this point he was cut off again, pressed for evidence that Khalil had been paid, and by whom. Blakeman merely repeated that “he’s being paid by organizations that are anti-American, that are engaged in nefarious activities.” He repeated that he didn’t ask his “intel division” about specifics. (Though he got cut off a bit, Blakeman’s full comment was, “he’s paid by a terrorist organization that beheads babies,” which was a reference to the [false] claim that Hamas beheaded babies on October 7^th, 2023. Thus, Blakeman was clearly suggesting that Khalil was being paid by Hamas.) He then attempted to turn the interview around on the rest of the panel: “Are you ok with intimidating Jewish students?!? Are you ok with hate speech?!?”

When this didn’t work, Blakeman resorted to the classic “appeal to authority” fallacy - namely, the authority of the security state. “Why don’t you ask the NYPD intelligence bureau? Why don’t you ask the FBI or the CIA? They know exactly what’s going on.” (Whenever I hear drivel like this, I recall the historian Lloyd C. Gardner’s quip that “evidence no one else has access to remains the escape hatch of government officials backed into a corner.”) Asked point blank to clarify whether he could state “for a fact” that Mahmoud Khalil was being paid by a terrorist organization, Blakeman replied, “I can state with a fact [sic] that he’s being paid, as the other professional protesters are being paid, by anti-American organizations that are engaged in nefarious activities.” There’s no reason for me to go on – you get the point.

Both this CNN clip and the above clip from Fox showcase Zionist lies on full display. So does the NPR interview with deputy secretary Edgar. They also showcase how not to respond to them. When confronted with Zionist lies (that so-and-so is a radical antisemite, a terrorist sympathizer, a pro-Hamas radical, a violent Jew-hater), there is only one appropriate response, and that is to ask for some bloody evidence. No one – not a single person – involved in defending the kidnapping and internment of Mahmoud Khalil has offered even the slightest evidence for the claims that he was spreading antisemitism. Unfortunately, no one in the mainstream – not NPR, Fox, or CNN – seems capable of, or willing to, identify this as an unsupported claim in need of substantiation. But that’s no excuse for the rest of us to let such claims pass us by without skepticism. The only statements I’ve been able to find from Khalil on the topic of antisemitism seem pretty anodyne to me (from the Guardian: “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he told CNN last spring. In response to accusations of antisemitism made against the movement, he told CNN that there was “no place for antisemitism” and said: “Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.”)

But Zionists are long past the point where they feel it is acceptable to smear anti-genocide activists as antisemites. Similarly, they have no qualms about labelling them “terrorists,” “terrorist supporters,” “Hamas supporters,” and the like. The appropriate response to these claims is very simple – put up or shut up. Let’s see some evidence that Mahmoud Khalil, or anyone else who expressed support for Palestinian liberation over the past year-and-a-half, supports Hamas and/or terrorism. This goes for the other claims as well. Several of the bad-faith actors quoted above alleged that the anti-genocide protests were “violent.” Again, give me a specific example. You can’t just say these things.

The irony, of course, is that while Hamas is indeed a terrorist organization, Israel is a much, much worse terrorist organization, and is guilty of exponentially more atrocities than Hamas could ever hope to be (there’s also the not-insignificant matter of Hamas being the predictable response to decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, occupation, and murder, as well as having been created with large amounts of Israeli support). Virtually every reputable human rights organization in the world has argued that Israel is guilty of genocide (at the very least, genocidal acts) in Gaza, with no sign of stopping. Anyone who supports that is, by definition, a terrorist supporter.

It is long past time that we make Zionism, or any expression of support for Israel, a social taboo. People who express such sentiments should be made to feel like outcasts in polite society. To the extent that the lies of people like Fleischer have kernels of truth to them, it is this: Zionists - college students or otherwise - are indeed deeply uncomfortable that their ideology, and the nation state they identify with, are finally being exposed for what they really are: ugly, racist realities. It is this that makes them “feel uncomfortable,” not some mythical upsurge of antisemitism. That’s good. People who support genocide, and who consciously believe that American or Israeli lives matter more than Palestinian or Arab ones, should feel uncomfortable. We should keep up the pressure.

That’s at the interpersonal level. At the activist level, we should be pushing for an arms embargo on Israel, as well as a total boycott of the country, modeled on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the boycott against apartheid South Africa. If a boycott can bring down that regime, it can bring down this one.

And we should free Mahmoud Khalil, along with all other political prisoners.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.