The Pro-Israel Meltdown Over Mahmoud Khalil's NYT Interview: When is Violence Inevitable?; Why is FIRE Suing Marco Rubio: With 1A Lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick
Israel supporters twist Mahmoud Khalil's New York Times interview into blatant propaganda in an effort to smear him as a terrorist. Plus: First Amendment lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick explains why FIRE is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio. ----------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the case of Mahmoud Khalil made national headlines, even international headlines, because he was the very first student who was snatched either off the street or out of his apartment by ICE agents under the Trump administration's brand new policy of expelling Israel critics who they deem supportive of Hamas, which is basically anyone who criticizes Israel, whether they're PhD students on green cards or anything else.
On June 20th, a federal judge ordered Khalil, who is a green colour holder, released from ICE detention facilities pending the deportation proceedings on the ground that he had never been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, and presents no threat to anyone or to the public in general.
That release has enabled Khalil to make rounds giving interviews to various outlets, and he gave one last week, late last week, to the New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein.
One excerpt of Khalil's interview went viral, largely due to Israel supporters, of course, who claimed he was apologizing for, if not actively supporting, Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel.
We'll examine his comments to see if he really did say that, but also to examine the important questions raised by all of this about who has the right to use violence and when, who is a terrorist or who is a freedom fighter, and whether anything Khalil said actually remotely poses a danger to the United States.
Then the free speech group FIRE.org is what the ACLU once was, a group of lawyers and activists passionately devoted to defending free speech against any and all attacks on it, regardless of whether the censorship target is on the right, the left, or anything in between.
FIRE first gained notice when they were defending the speech rights of conservative students on college campuses.
But then they became just as passionate about censorship attacks aimed at Israel critics or pro-Palestinian voices.
FIRE announced this week that it was suing Marco Rubio and the U.S. State Department under the First Amendment, arguing that the government has the right to deport foreign nationals, but not to do so as punishment for their political expression.
One of the lawyers spearheading that effort at FHIR is Connor Fitzpatrick, and he will be here with us tonight to discuss the city lawsuit and all related issues.
Before we get to all that, a couple quick program notes.
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Now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We have covered the case of Mahmoud Khalil many times on this show.
He was the sort of test case, the canary in the coal mine, showing that the Trump administration intended to not deport all foreign students or most foreign students or just foreign students who expressed a political opinion or engage in political activism.
That's not the Trump administration's policy at all.
They don't even have a policy of deporting foreign students on U.S. soil for criticizing the United States.
What they do have is a policy of deporting foreign students in the United States or at American universities who criticize Israel or protest against that foreign country.
And since the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, he was detained at his apartment building in his apartment where he lives with his American wife.
And she was eight months pregnant.
Their newborn infant has now been born and she's an American citizen.
His newborn infant is an American citizen and he's a green Card on the path to American citizenship.
Since then, there have been many other cases of students being snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents in unmarked cars, including a Tufts PhD student who Reza Osturk, who the Trump administration admits,
did nothing other than co-author an op-ed in her Tufts student newspaper, where she called on the administration, along with three other students who are co-authors, to implement the student senate's decision that the administration should divest from Israel.
That's all she did.
Nothing against Jews, nothing in favor of Hamas, nothing, any of that.
She just criticized Israel and urged divestment as this because the student faculty had voted for it.
It was essentially saying abide by the student faculty.
And she too was snatched off the street, put in ICE detention.
She too has been released, and there have been many other cases since.
And in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, as I said, a federal judge said you can continue your deportation process against him and he will continue to contest it in court.
He has also sued the Trump administration for violating his rights.
And he has that case, which he's litigating as well.
And so the federal court said you can continue the deportation proceeding, but there's no basis or justification for keeping him in a detention prison while all this proceeds.
If you win the detention process, you can obviously deport him.
I mean, the deportation process, but there's no reason why he should rot in a jail rather than being at home with his wife and child while this process proceeds because he's never done anything remotely to suggest that he's a threat to anybody.
He was never arrested as part of the student protest or any other time in his life, never convicted of a crime, never the subject of a complaint with the police.
And so he's now out and he's giving interviews, as is his right.
And he's given several interviews.
One of them was late last week or on Saturday with the New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein.
There you see the article that Ezra Klein published in the New York Times.
The Trump administration tried to silence Mahmoud Khalil.
So I asked him to talk.
There was a couple of passages that have made the rounds.
Here's the first excerpt where he basically, it's the interview and he kind of explains what happened to him.
The first thing Noor told me on the phone was that the White House has tweeted about you.
I was like, like, what?
Like, what's happening?
What did Trump say about you that day?
Shalom Ahmoud.
Across the 2024 election, Donald Trump.
Shalom Mahmoud.
Using the common expression in Israel in Yiddish for goodbye, in Hebrew, rather.
And I mean, if that doesn't tell the whole story, that's an official tweet from the White House.
I don't know what does.
Here's the rest of this intro.
Across the 2024 election, Donald Trump and the people behind him said again and again that they were here to restore free speech to this country.
I will immediately restore free speech.
Restore free speech.
Free speech, finally protecting free speech.
Committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
And then they got power, and they came after speech in a way the left never dared doing.
Never considered doing, never wanted to do.
You saw it with the hunt to cancel any grant that had the word divers.
Okay, I gotta just stop there.
I agree with this analysis about the Mahmoud Khalil case, but please, please don't indulge this fiction that, quote unquote, the left, and when Ezra says that he means Democrats, the left, as the left, has never really been in power unless you just think Corey Booker and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Obama and Hillary are the left.
The actual left has never had power.
And when Democrats had power, we just had a massive systemic censorship campaign against American citizens to have their dissent removed, have their accounts closed.
There was all kinds of censorship under the Biden administration alone.
We covered it all, but just that as a side.
Dared doing.
Never considered doing, never wanted to do.
You saw it with a hunt to cancel any grant that had the word diversity anywhere near it.
You saw it as countless organizations that depended on the government or that feared the government began reworking their mission statements or censoring their websites to avoid any words that might offend anyone in this administration.
You saw it as border agents looked through travelers' phones to see if they had said anything that the administration wouldn't like.
And you saw it as immigration agents begin yanking people off the streets for the crime of nothing more than speech.
Among the first of these was Mahmoud Khalil, who'd been a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia, a leader in the school's anti-Israel protests.
This is a movement, an anti-war movement.
Khalil's a green card holder.
He's married to a U.S. citizen.
His sole offense had been to speak out against Israel in a way this administration did not like.
He was detained under authority the U.S. Secretary of State has to cancel the residency of non-citizens who threaten U.S. foreign policy.
Did this grad student at Columbia actually threaten U.S. foreign policy?
Is that how fragile our foreign policy is?
No one really believed that.
Khalil was not followed into his building by plainclothes officers and taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana for more than 100 days, imprisoned there while his wife gave birth because the U.S. government feared him.
He was imprisoned there because the U.S. government wanted others like him to fear them.
It wanted non-citizens and immigrants to stop speaking out.
It wanted everyone to ask if they could do this to Khalil, could they do it to me?
If they could detain him on such flimsy grounds, could they not come up with a reason to detain me?
All right, that was all very theatrical and very melodramatic.
The gestures, the pauses, the study dialogue, the music, the body language, whatever.
And there's a lot of claims he made in there that were very tendentious about whether that was actually censorship of the kind we've seen before in the time that we're seeing now.
But that does more or less just try and strip it of its New York Times theater and Ezra Klein wanting to show that he's very just disturbed by the Trump administration, even though he wasn't at all by the Biden administration's censorship program.
But that was a reasonably accurate description of what happened in his case.
Now, here is the clip, one of the clips that viralized all over social media and then into articles.
It's going to be the subject of all sorts of op-eds and already has been.
Here's one of those exchanges.
To me, it felt frightening that we had to reach this moment.
Ezra asked about October 7th and what his views are on that.
And this is the context for that.
To me, it felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle.
I remember I didn't sleep for a number of days and Noor was very worried about just my health.
And it was heavy.
I still remember, I was like, this couldn't happen.
And what do you mean we had to reach this moment?
What moment is this?
I was interning at UNURWA at that point, United Nations Judefund Works Agency at the UN, at their New York office.
And as part of my internship, my research and work was focused on Palestine, on the situation in the West Bank and Ang.
And you can see that the situation is not sustainable.
You have an Israeli government that's absolutely ignoring Palestinians.
They are trying to make that deal with Saudi and just happy about their Apraham Accord without looking at Palestinians as if Palestinians are not part of the equation.
And they circumvent the Palestinian question.
And it's clear it's becoming more and more violent.
Like, you know, by October 6th, over 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers.
Over 40 of them were children.
So that's what.
What he means by that, just by the way, is when he says that over 200 Palestinians were killed in Gaza in the West Bank.
by the IDF and by settlers, he means just in 2023 alone.
So from January 1st up until October 6th, a lot of people like to portray Israel as just sort of minding its own business, being peaceful, doing nothing out of the blue for no reason whatsoever.
Hamas attacked, even though there was no problem at all there.
There was no conflict.
When in reality, for the first nine months of 2023, before October 7th, the Israelis had repeatedly bombed Gaza and the West Bank.
They had repeatedly killed innocent people, including many children, as they have pretty much every year for decades.
Now, obviously, that doesn't mean, and he doesn't mean that that makes October 7th justified.
We'll show you a clip where that makes it, where he makes that very manifest.
But, you know, it's like trying to talk about 9-11 without talking about what the United States did to that region over many decades that provoked so much anti-American hatred.
And that remains taboo to this very day.
That's the reason when young Americans discovered that letter written by Osam bin Laden in 2002, trying to explain to Americans why there was so much animus to the United States.
And he said it's not because you let women wear bikinis.
He didn't say it was because you have a Congress that votes democratically.
Dozens of countries let women wear bikinis and have a Congress and none of them has been attacked by al-Qaeda.
Certainly not on the scale of 9-11.
And he said, look, it's because you have to realize you've been engaged in all sorts of violence and aggression in our region.
You've been killing our women and children, innocent men.
You've been putting your troops in our most sacred soil, like Saudi Arabia.
You've been overthrowing our governments and imposing pro-American dictators who brutally repress our people because that's what the United States wants.
And you've been supporting Israel with arms and finance and diplomatic support.
And that's what enables the repression of the Palestinians.
Those were the reasons he gave.
And it's still so taboo that when people on TikTok started discovering this letter in late 2023, 2024, the U.S. government demanded it be censored.
It was under the Biden administration.
And the Guardian, a newspaper, immediately removed the letter from their site, which had been there since 2002 because they didn't want people to see it.
And all the links got all the links to that document became unworkable.
And after that, TikTok basically banned any discussion of that letter.
That's how sensitive this whole question is.
No one ever wants anybody asking what is the context, what is the cause when violence is brought back to the United States or to Israel.
It's just all you have to know is the United States of Israel totally innocent, minding their own business, never hurting anybody.
And out of nowhere, these savages, these Muslim savages attacked.
And he's laying out the actual context, the historical context.
That even in 2023, you don't have to go very far back, before October 7th, the Israelis were killing, as they always do, large numbers of innocent people, including children.
That's what were the events leading up to October 7th.
I mean, those are just facts.
I mean by like, unfortunately, we couldn't avoid such a moment.
And yeah, it was absolutely difficult, like, you know, to see not only the horrific images, but also the response of Israel.
Because they knew that's what Netanyahu wants.
So, you know, all throughout, he started by saying when October 7th Happened.
I felt physically sick.
I couldn't sleep.
He wasn't celebrating it.
He wasn't justifying it.
He wasn't cheering it.
He was saying it was horrible that we got to this moment, we being the world, we being all the people interested in that situation.
Not we, Hamas, which is all what was attributed to him.
He was saying it's tragic that this has been going on for so long, all this killing, and it basically made it inevitable that, of course, Hamas is going to try and bring back violence to Israel, given everything Israel does to Gaza and to the West Bank.
He's saying I wish we, the world, could have avoided October 7th, but it became horrible.
And he said, you saw these horrible images from October 7th, as well as what Israel then did in response.
He's lamented the whole thing.
He's not justifying it.
He's not cheering what Hamas did on October 7th.
He's repeatedly made clear what his views are of October 7th.
And here's a clip where he talks about killing civilians.
Which, I mean, it's obvious, is not.
You know, would not write.
I've heard you in other news be very clear in condemning killing of civilians.
October 7th was obviously an operation that did kill a lot of civilians.
Do you see that as unavoidable, that Hamas had no other choice?
Do you see it as a mistake?
Well, I know it's targeting civilians is wrong.
That's why we've been calling for an international independent investigation to hold perpetrators into accountability.
And it's very important, like for us who believe in international law, that this should happen.
I mean, how much clearer can he be?
A bunch of Zionist accounts, pro-Israel accounts, Hasbro accounts, propaganda accounts circulated that first clip I showed you, tried to convince people that what he was saying there was we, meaning me, speaking for Hamas, we had to do what we did on October 7th because it was inevitable.
That's not even remotely what he said.
And when asked directly about it in the very same interview, what do you think of October 7th and what happened there with the killing of civilians?
He said targeting civilians is horrific.
It's a violation of international law.
It needs to be contempt.
We want to uphold international law so that people who target civilians are held accountable.
I mean, what else is he supposed to do to make his views clear?
That's my view on October 7th.
I believe that the part of the October 7th attack that deliberately killed civilians, however many were killed as a result of that, was unjustified.
I said that right after October 7th, I believe as a principle, killing innocent civilians is unjustified.
And I know there are arguments to justify it, that everybody in Israel joins the IDF, everybody in Israel is basically occupying land that doesn't belong to them.
But I do think it's an important principle to uphold.
But I definitely think the primary operation, which was aimed at military facilities and police stations and the armed state, was justified.
And that was what a lot of October 7th was.
And they purposely lied about that.
They said 1,400 innocent people were killed.
And then it turned out that there weren't 1,400.
There were 1,150.
And of the 1,150, something like 400 were active duty IDF soldiers, many of them captured or killed while in battle against Hamas.
And of the remaining 600 or 650-so civilians, many of them are killed by the Israeli army under the Hannibal Doctrine that says it's better to kill an Israeli citizen than to allow them to be taken hostage.
You look at those kibbutzes on the border with Gaza, they're completely destroyed in a way that you couldn't do if you're hangliding into Israel with some military weapons, with some rifles and guns, automatic weapons.
These were blown up by tanks.
And the IDF admits that.
The Israeli government admits that.
So what he's saying here is: what do you think of October 7th?
I think a targeted killing of civilians is wrong.
And people who do it need to be held accountable by international law, the opposite of what is being said about him.
Here's a little more of what he said about how he sees Jews and Arabs.
I guess the perspective of Jewish or Israeli students, or Israeli Jewish students, I should say Columbia, would be that there was a huge attack that killed 1,200 some people, murdered 1,200 some people, that they were afraid of anti-Semitic violence erupting around the world.
And they needed to hear something about that.
Again, what we ask is not to omit their suffering or their perspective.
We wanted to have equality.
As we want, like in the whole movement, this movement is about equality and justice.
And Colombia did that, like without even the students asking for it.
Like the first statement coming from Colombia Tozono on the evening of October 7.
There were, you know, there were, oh, there are a lot of people inside that Columbia protest movement.
We've interviewed them on our show, but a lot of them are interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, including Jewish students who worked in the protest movement, who said the reason Mahmoud Khalil, he wasn't the leader or the spokesman, he was the mediator between himself and the school, between this protest groups and the administration, was because he was trusted and respected by everybody.
He's a little bit older than the average Columbia student.
He's 31.
And undergraduate students are in their early 20s or even younger.
And people respect his demeanor.
He was very kind to everybody.
If there were ever anti-Semitic statements said anywhere near the encampment that he heard, he would tell people that's not appropriate here.
That's not part of what our movement is.
And he had a lot of Jewish students who know him very well saying he's like the last person who would be harboring anti-Semitism.
And yet, this propaganda campaign worked super well by people who just saw the two-minute clip framed as it was framed.
Here's Mike Cernovich, who oftentimes is very balanced on the question of Israel and Palestine.
He kind of goes back and forth, but in response to this video, he was very clear and said, quote, get him the fuck out of my country.
Bacha Unger Sargon, a friend of our show, she's been on before, to talk about many things, including debating Israel and Gaza twice.
She said this person is the exact terrorist sympathizer that Secretary Marco Rubio said he was.
It is appalling how many Democrats were willfully conned by a person who justifies terrorism, which we already, which we all knew, out of hatred of Trump and Israel.
Hatred of Trump and Israel.
Okay, so she's saying he justified terrorism.
You heard the clip, and we're going to get to that in a second.
Here's Barry Weiss, all crew on August 6th about the Khalil clip.
This is absolutely insane.
Listen and think about what he's saying here.
We couldn't avoid the slaughter of the Beabis children.
Really?
Eli Lake, Mahmoud Khalil is a con artist.
His job is to fool dumb American leftists into embracing a death cult.
It's amazing that Columbia would ever admit him and that he was given a green card.
I still think he's owed due process as a permanent resident, but this man is a dirtbag.
Here is Stephen Miller, not the one who works at the White House, but the person who writes the name Red Sneeze on Twitter.
He said, we had no choice but to use motorized paragon.
He's satirically paraphrasing what he thinks Khalil said.
He said, we had no choice but to use monetarized paragliders of death and machine gun down a bunch of innocent concert goers and families in their homes is certainly a take.
You just heard him say targeting civilians is never justified.
Here's Sean McGuire, who's the fanatical Zionist and Israel loyalist who has drawn a lot of attention to himself in controversy by some completely outlandish statements.
But he's a partner in a big Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
But he said this, quote, as a reminder, Zoran Mandani has been campaigning with Mahmoud Khalil.
Now, I just want to say this.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan, when people in that country would fight back against American troops occupying their country, or when people who are Muslim or Arab went to Afghanistan to support the people of Afghanistan against this occupation, and they shot at or threw rocks at American troops.
If the American military caught them, they were often taken to Guantanamo and called terrorists.
Think about that.
They were targeting only American soldiers, not civilians, an occupying foreign army in Afghanistan.
And for that, we call them terrorists if they're defending their homeland in Afghanistan.
And a lot of them got taken to Guantanamo.
That's how warped the terrorism term is.
If you're a Muslim or Arab and you engage in violence, even against a foreign occupying force and only against soldiers, you will be called a terrorist.
There are people in the West Bank who live there, and the IDF occupies it, and the UN and the entire world consider that occupation illegal.
And the American government did for decades until this second term of the Trump administration.
When people who are civilians living in the West Bank, with the IDF completely dominating, occupying, and controlling every single aspect of their life, if they so much as throw a stone at one of the occupying soldiers, the military, the Israeli military, not civilians, they're often gunned down and then the Israeli says, yeah, we killed a terrorist.
So we've now taken the term terrorist and we mean it basically as anyone who does violence to us, even if they're only targeting military and soldiers, military targets and soldiers.
And when we kill civilians, when Israel kills civilians, that's not terrorism, that's just legitimate self-defense.
You just have to be very aware of how these words are being manipulated constantly.
It's just an endless stream of propaganda.
And whatever else you think about this conflict, the facts are very well known.
This is Palestinian land.
They were living there for hundreds of years.
And then Europe wanted to atone for the Holocaust that they permitted to take place on European soil against Jews and decided to atone for that, not by giving them European land.
They didn't give them Bavaria to have their own country.
That would have been sensible.
Hey, Germany did it, so one of the prices Germany should pay is the Jews want the homeland.
Let's give the Jews part of Germany.
They didn't give France part of France, part of Eastern Europe.
The British, after Israel used terrorist attacks on the British who were occupying there, they bombed the King David Hotel.
They killed dozens of people.
A terrorist group called the Irgon, it was with Menalcombegin, who later became prime minister of Israel.
And ever since, the Israelis have been using constant force to suffocate and demean, dominate and control and deny statehood and autonomy to the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
And even Israelis who are honest, even Israeli soldiers and military officials say, of course I understand why people in Gaza are part of Hamas and use violence.
If I were a Palestinian and I saw what the Israelis were doing to me, I would too.
From The Economist, October 10th, 2023, just three days after the October 7th attack, former general in the IDF and the deputy national security advisor is who this is about.
Quote, the crisis shows the failure of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, says Shlomo Bram, the former military strategist argues that a divide and conquer strategy can never bring peace.
Quote, in 2009, Benjamin Netyahu replaced the political process with a strategy of divide and conquer, which was aimed at weakening the Palestinian government in Ramallah on the West Bank and strengthening Hamas's hold on power in the Gaza Strip.
Mr. Netanyahu believed this to be the best way to ensure there'd be no viable political process ever possible.
The prime minister took this policy to a new level in building his current government, a coalition with extreme religious, ultra-nationalistic parties, which state quite openly that Israel would never enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, give equal rights to the Palestinians under a one-state solution, or stop plundering of their lands through settlement building.
The current crisis demonstrates the utter failure of this strategy.
It is absurd to hope that Israel can indefinitely contain with its military might and security services millions of Palestinians who claim the right to self-determination in a free, normal life.
Eventually, the oppressed will rise against their oppressor.
This is all that Mahmoud Khalil was saying, although he didn't even say it as strongly as this IDF general.
Eventually, the oppressed will rise against the oppressor.
Everybody knows this.
It's so fundamental.
Yet when Palestinians attack Israel, we're all supposed to pretend that it just came out of nowhere because they have like a primitive savage religion.
And anyone who points this out, which is so basic, the CIA has documents, Dochran recognizing this, of course you have to.
And then Mahmoud Khalil says exactly this, something so basic, like, yeah, it was inevitable that something like October 7th was going to happen, unfortunately.
Now he's Hamas and he has to get the F out of the country.
The ADF general goes on, quote, suffering under oppression and a strong desire for freedom breed resourcefulness.
The Hamas fighters who planned last weekend's attack were indeed very resourceful and exploiting Israel's unpreparedness.
That was infinitely more justifying of the October 7th attack than anything Mahmoud Khalil said.
Here's Ami Aylan, who is the former head of the Shin Bet, the Domestic Israeli Intelligence Service, who said that if he were Palestinian, he would fight Israel forever.
If you were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or...
If you were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza, what would your view be of Israel?
I would fight against Israel in order to achieve my liberty.
How would you fight?
How dirty?
I would do everything in order to achieve my liberty, and that's it.
You cannot deter a person or a group of people if they believe that they have nothing to lose.
We Israelis, we shall have security only when they will have hope.
Most Israelis did not see it because we refused to see it.
And when we refused to see the daily life of Palestinians, we did not understand why they are facing us or acting against us the way they do.
Whether we liked it or not, we control the life of millions.
I mean, this is not controversial.
Anybody who has served in the military, anyone who has studied wars, guerrilla resistance movements, understands this so basically.
This was what was decree taboo after 9-11.
Was any kind of, I mean, Americans were asking, hey, like, why do they hate us?
Why did they attack us?
Totally normal question for the American citizenry to wonder about.
And they were fed this July by neocons.
Oh, it's because you're so free, Americans, and they just hate that.
They hate freedom.
That's why they attack you.
Not because we've been bombing their country for decades and killing all these people because we have troops in Saudi Arabia, because we impose on them pro-American, pro-Israel dictators who repress Muslims in those countries like the Shah of Iran.
Not because we support Israel?
No, no, perish the thought.
It's because we let women wear bikinis on the beach and you can say bad words sometimes on television and they just hate this freedom.
They hate it so much they need to kill it.
That is absolutely what we were told because any honest discussion would lead people to understand exactly what this really military official said.
I think most Americans do believe, and I've heard so many people say it, that, oh, everything was so peaceful in Israel and Gaza.
Everything was fine, and then Hamas just brought violence out of nowhere.
I mean, leaving aside the fact that these are people who live under severe oppression by the foreign military, Israel blockades Gaza, controls every aspect of their life, who gets in, who gets out, what gets in, what gets out.
They bomb the airport, they control everything, and obviously in the West Bank, even more so.
They were killing the Israelis who were Gazans and Palestinians in the West Bank throughout all of 2023.
Here from Relief Web.
This was September 18th, so just three weeks before October 7th.
Three weeks.
2023 marks the deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank.
Quote, at least 38 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began said save the children.
This horrific record was reached this month after the deaths of two 16-year-old boys on two separate occasions.
On average, it equates to more than one Palestinian child killed per week.
At least six Israeli children have also been killed this year.
As the second consecutive year for record numbers of child fatalities in the West Bank, this highlights the worsening situation for children's safety across the occupied Palestinian territory.
A Palestinian child interviewed by Save the Children last year was one of the children killed this month.
His words are a haunting reminder of the fears Palestinians face on a regular basis.
And his death drives home the reality of these risks.
Quote, Yusuf said, quote, my dream is to be able to look at anything on my way to school, like birds and greenery.
I want to see the things I always imagine.
I don't want to smell gas or see soldiers everywhere.
I don't want to be scared or to go outside.
I don't want another to be scared to go, scared that I might get hurt or roam the streets looking for me, fearful I was hurt by Israeli soldiers.
That's before October 7th.
For years, Israeli officials had this very playful term, two very playful terms, called mowing the lawn, which is when they would kind of go into Gaza and just kill some people, reduce the population sum, make clear that they can be killed at any time by the sky.
And then the other playful term was putting them on a diet, meaning we control what comes in Afghanistan.
We're going to let a lot less food in and put them on a diet.
I don't know of any government that openly speaks in such sociopathic terms, but whether they speak of it or not, if they do it, obviously the people to whom it's being done at some point are going to take up arms and fight back.
Anybody with minimal dignity would.
Here from The Guardian, April of 2006, quote, Israel's policy was summed up by Dove Weisglass, an advisor to Ehud Omert, the Israeli prime minister, earlier this year.
Quote, the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger, he said.
The hunger pains are supposed to encourage the Palestinians to force Hamas to change its attitude toward Israel or force Hamas out of government.
I mean, that's pure terrorism.
If you use violence, which is obviously what starving people are, putting them on a diet is, in order to make them engage in political change, that's the definition of terrorism.
And the idea that the Palestinian people in Gaza are going to overthrow Hamas while they're hungry, while they're put on a diet, it's madness.
It's insanity.
It's sick sadism.
The Washington Post, May of 2021, quote, with strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of, quote, mowing the grass returns to Gaza.
Quote, for more than a decade, when analysts described the strategy utilized by Israel against Palestinian militants in the West Bank, they've used a metaphor.
With their displays of overwhelming military strength, Israeli forces were, quote, mowing the grass.
The phrase implies the Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and their supply of crude but effective homemade weapons are like weeds that need to be cut back.
Such tactics have faced significant criticism from the International Human Rights Group, often due to the disproportionate number of deaths caused by Israeli forces compared to those caused by the Palestinian militants during conflict.
Quote, it's just like mowing your front lawn.
This is constant hard work, David M. Weinberg of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security wrote for the Jerusalem Post this week, quote, if you fail to do so, weeds grow wild and snakes begin to slither around in the brush.
This is the dehumanizing language they've used to talk about Palestinians for decades.
Basically, always animals.
Israeli officials have been open about their arms, of their aims with such tactics.
Quote, this sort of maintenance needs to be carried out from time to time, perhaps even more often.
Yov Golant, a former military commander of Israel's southern district who is now in politics, said in a radio interview in 2014.
And of course that same Yov Golant went on to be defense minister at the time October 7th happened.
And he was the one who stood up right away and said, we're not going to let any food or water or medicine or fuel into Gaza.
Now, you know, this is a debate that has been going on for a long time.
And I think probably one of the best illustrations of this is an interview that Noam Chomsky gave to A Canadian neocon named Evan Solomon.
He was like this young, like smug, totally banal supporter of the war on terror, centered on Israel.
And he was interviewing Noam Chomsky, who wrote a book about 9-11 that basically tried to get Americans to see we've done far worse to them than 9-11.
And when you do that, you're going to get violence back.
And here was Chomsky's kind of philosophy about foreign policy laid out in a way that was much more extreme than anything Mahmoud Khalil said.
You asked us after September 11, one of your points was we ought to look in the mirror, we being America or the West.
We ought to look in the mirror at our own.
Was that a way of saying, look, people like Bin Laden are angry at us for good reason?
No, I'm not.
In other words, is there a way to justify?
That's what I was saying.
The statement of mine that you just quoted is a very conservative statement.
In fact, it was articulated by George Bush's favorite philosopher, Jesus Christ, who pointed out famously defined the notion hypocrite.
A hypocrite is a person who focuses on the other fellows' crimes and refuses to look at his own.
That's the definition of hypocrite by George Bush's favorite philosopher.
When I repeat that, I'm not taking a radical position.
I'm taking a position which is just elementary morality.
But even if he is a hypocrite, and they are.
Not he, everyone.
Okay, even if he's.
Let me ask you another question.
See, just here's an experiment.
Try to find a phrase in the massive commentary on September 11th, which is not hypocritical in the sense of George Bush's favorite philosopher.
Find one phrase.
I don't think you can do it.
Okay, but before I don't want to get Gnostic here and religious on it, but I do want to.
This is not religion.
This is elementary morality.
If people cannot rise to the level of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others, they have no right to talk about right and wrong or good and bad.
But let's talk about even Ian Wright.
And look, there's nobody pure, but an argument has been made.
I know that the U.S. has committed atrocities.
However, they did oust a more brutal regime, the Taliban.
There was.
It wasn't even a warring.
There wasn't even a warring.
I mean, poor Chomsky, seriously, like he was one of the very few people after 9-11 who was standing up and saying all this and just dealing with a wall of brainwashed idiots who basically are just tribalistic, like utterly incapable of understanding the motives of other people.
And they've been inculcated not to understand it.
And so when Mahmoud Khalil makes a statement as banal and as Chomsky as conservative, as saying, look, if you don't solve this problem, if you constantly have Israeli killing and repression of Palestinians, of course we're going to get to this point of October 7th.
It's inevitable.
When he says something so mild like that, it becomes like shocking to the American ear.
Like, how could he do anything other than just condemn Hamas and say that they're monsters who out of nowhere did this to Israel?
And then Barry West, like, what about the Beabis babies?
What about all the babies in Palestine and in the West Bank and in Gaza who Israel killed for decades, including all throughout 2023?
What about them?
And the reality is that a lot of Israel supporters, and you see this in all this language about, you know, they're roaches and they have to put them on a diet and mow the lawn, or weeds grow and rats have the ability to run around.
They are inculcated to see these people in the West Bank and Gaza not as human, as subhuman.
When Joe Font announced that we're going to block Israel, where Israel's going to block all food and water from entering Gaza, he said they're animals, and that's exactly how they see them.
But if you see human beings as animals and you treat them as animals, or worse than animals, most people just don't go around killing animals for no reason.
I mean, the factory farm industry does on a mass scale, but at least they have the excuse that they're making a profit.
If you just treat people like animals, if you kill them whenever you feel like it, if you blockade their countries, control their countries, humiliate them day after day after day after day, of course they're going to fight back.
You don't have to justify it.
You don't have to say it's moral.
It's inevitable though.
And it's so immature and such propaganda that anytime anyone says that they're now guilty of whatever, terrorism, defending terrorism or justifying October 7th, it isn't remotely what he did.
All right.
We're going to leave it there just for the moment because we have our guest here who we definitely want to get to because he has a very important lawsuit to talk about.
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We've talked before many times, in fact, about our admiration for FHIR, which is a group that actually, their acronym stands for Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
And it essentially does what the ACLU had previously done, which is defend everybody's free speech rights, regardless of ideology or partisanship or anything else.
They're just simply relentless and principled defenders of free speech.
We've had many, many, if not most, of the lawyers with FHIR on our show, and we're delighted to welcome yet another person.
We're trying to get the entire group on our show.
He's Connor Fitzpatrick, and he's a senior attorney at FHIR.
He previously practiced litigation at Miller, Canfield, Paddock, and Stone in Detroit and taught First Amendment law at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
He is the lead attorney in FIRE's recently announced suit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their immigration policies based on deporting people for their views.
And he joins us tonight to discuss that suit and many other related issues.
Connor, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
All right, so let's talk about this lawsuit.
I think FIRE announced it, if I'm not mistaken, on Monday.
And it's a lawsuit brought against Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and the U.S. Department, the U.S. State Department, as a result of these deportation policies against foreign students legally in the United States, Mahmoud Khalil being the example that we just covered, but there are a lot of other ones as well.
What's the core argument of the lawsuit?
Right.
So we filed suit yesterday against Secretary of State Marco Rubio for really what's been a pattern over the last five months of this administration targeting legally present non-citizens in this country for deportation based on protected speech.
We've seen, as you mentioned, the administration target Mahmoud Khalil.
We've also seen the administration target Ramesia Oz Turk and others for bedrock protected speech, like going to a protest or writing an op-ed in a student newspaper.
And what Secretary Rubio is doing is he's abusing two provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act to try and deport people for protected speech.
And so we're stepping in and we're challenging these laws on First Amendment grounds, saying that no government of any party should have the ability to throw people out of the country because of their ideas.
Now, there are a lot of people who defend what the Trump administration is doing here.
Trust me, I've heard from them for a very long time as we've been covering this case and denouncing what has been being done.
And I just want to go through a couple of what I guess are the strongest arguments.
One of which is, look, Donald Trump campaigned on not only deporting people in the country illegally on a mass scale, but also preventing people from entering our country who might in some way pose a threat or people who are in the country who in some way pose a threat, just people we don't want here.
And the government, no one's entitled to be in the United States, so this region goes.
No foreign national has a right to be in the United States, only with the government's consent and permission.
Every government has the right to decide who can come into its country or not.
And so all this is the government making decisions about which foreign nationals can and can't be in the United States based on who they think is contributing positively and why do they not have the right to do that?
So a couple of thoughts there.
The first, with respect to the idea that they campaigned on the idea of doing what they're doing now, the nice thing about the Constitution is that our rights aren't up for a vote.
Popular ideas do not need the government's protection.
The First Amendment has always been there to protect the dissenter, those who are expressing in some circles unpopular ideas.
So the fact that they ran on violating constitutional rights and won does not mean that they get to violate the Constitution.
It simply means that the Constitution needs to be asserted in a federal court and that's what we're doing now.
But to the second part of your question, sort of the idea of who we allow into the country, it is a true statement of the law that the political branches of government traditionally do have a little bit more discretion in deciding who to allow into the United States in the first place.
However, what we know, and this is from a Supreme Court case in 1945, what we know is that once you're on our shores, once you're in the United States of America, the First Amendment protects you.
And what we mean by that is that the First Amendment prohibits the government from treating you favorably or unfavorably based on whether or not they like what you have to say.
I think one of the confusions that I think is understandable comes from this notion of whether the government can deny certain benefits to people.
Meaning, let's say the Trump administration adopted a policy, not that it was going to deport foreign students who were critical of Israel or protested against Israel, which is the policy, but let's assume that they just said, you know what, we don't want any more foreign students in our country.
We just don't think it's beneficial for our country.
We think they're taking up spots that Americans should take instead.
These people are learning from our universities and going back to their countries and giving them the benefits here.
We just don't want foreign students.
And so we're going to deny all visas, retract all visas to all foreign students, regardless of their political views on anything.
Is that something the Trump administration would have the right to do?
So I'll be honest, that's a little bit outside of my ballywick as a First Amendment attorney.
The hypothetical you posited to me certainly has a few things that would be concerning about free that would be concerning to free speech.
The idea that we don't like that they're coming here taking our knowledge and spreading ideas and then going back.
But where the First Amendment really kicks in in full force is when the government, like the government is doing now, tries to pick and choose people for favorable and unfavorable treatment based on whether the government of the day agrees with the views of the speaker.
That's when fire gets involved and that's when the First Amendment gets involved.
I guess like the reason I ask that is, you know, sometimes I think, and again, this is a concept in very fundamental to First Amendment law, but that isn't immediately obvious, which is, let's just take the example of, say, unemployment benefits.
The government offers unemployment benefits for people who get fired and they define how much time you get these benefits, what these benefits are, but the government could change that anytime.
They could pay less.
They could shorten the time.
Or they don't even, they're not even really required to give unemployment benefits.
They could just say, we don't believe in unemployment benefits anymore.
There's nothing in the Constitution mandating those.
But if the government were to say, everybody's going to get unemployment benefits unless you criticize Donald Trump, and if you criticize Donald Trump, you're going to lose your unemployment benefits.
A lot of people I know will say, well, we can give unemployment benefits to anybody we want or take them away at any time.
So what's wrong with saying you're not going to get unemployment benefits if you criticize Donald Trump?
They're not guaranteed in the first place.
Right.
So the problem with that and why the First Amendment has a very big problem with that is it is the government differentiating between people based on whether or not the government likes what you have to say.
And I'll use sort of an easy example.
Think of sort of an entitlement benefit, like a social security check.
That is something that people are entitled to receive under statute.
It would not be lawful for Congress to pass a law saying that those individuals who are registered Democrats are going to see a 50% cut in their social security check because, well, the government needs to save money.
Because that is singling someone out based on their ideology, based on their voting record, and subjecting them to disfavored treatment.
So at the point that the government is going to make something available to the general public, it cannot pick and choose who it provides that to on the basis of protected speech.
Another argument that is definitely one that's embraced by a lot of people who support the Trump administration's policy, and it's definitely a widespread belief.
And again, I understand why it is.
It's not immediately obvious why it's not true.
Is that, yeah, okay, I'm a full believer in the First Amendment.
I want a robust protection of free speech for American citizens, but these people are not American citizens.
They're guests in our country.
And the Constitution isn't for them.
Like they, or even if it is, to some extent, not nearly as much as it applies to American citizens.
What's your answer to that?
The Constitution is for everyone who is on the shores of the United States of America.
And I'll give you an example.
Think about the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men are created equal, that we have inalienable rights.
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The core truth of America has always been that we don't view rights as a present that we get from the government, from some benevolent king or parliament, that we have liberty because we are human beings, that that is why we are inherently free.
And so we know not only from the founding, from the writings of people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but going to the Supreme Court decisions of the 1940s, that the protections of the First Amendment are afforded to non-citizens because the First Amendment, first and foremost, is a shackle on the government.
The First Amendment is not a grant of a right.
It is a shackle on the government to abridge speech.
So at any point that Congress is trying to legislate in a way that abridges speech, that interferes in the marketplace of ideas to try and push or punish one idea or another, that is what the First Amendment prevents Congress from doing.
It puts up a no-trespassing sign and says the marketplace of ideas is somewhere that you, Congress, and the executive branch, may never trespass upon.
Yeah, and I often tell conservatives who seem inclined to want to support what the Trump administration is doing on the grounds that these are just foreigners, that if you just imagine Joe Biden saying, we're going to deport anybody from our country who criticizes me or says good things about Donald Trump, I think nobody would have trouble understanding why he would be violating the First Amendment.
Let me ask about another argument, which I know you're going to confront in this lawsuit, which I think the government is always making.
You reference this law and this legal authority on which Marco Rubio is relying, which they interpret as conferring to the State Department the power to deport anybody who in some way is undermining or subverting or impeding U.S. foreign policy.
And their argument is central to our foreign policy is that we support and fight with and arm our close ally, Israel.
We judge that to be in our self-interest.
So anybody who comes to our country who's a foreigner and starts agitating against our foreign policy by trying to convince people that Israel is committing genocide or that they are somehow war criminals, these people are agitating against our foreign policy and therefore jeopardizing and undermining our foreign policy.
And that gives us justification under this law to deport them.
So that is certainly how countries like China and Russia approach free speech.
And I'll give you a direct example.
If you look at Article 51 of the Chinese Constitution, it purports to grant Chinese citizens the right to free speech unless it conflicts with the interest of the State.
So once you start giving the government the power to restrict speech, so long as the government thinks it's in the best interest of the country to restrict your speech, that is a loophole with infinite diameter.
And it is flatly contrary to the American tradition of open and honest debate.
And to go back to your earlier example of what if a prior administration had used this, I would imagine that my Republican friends would not have been okay if the Biden administration had decided that any non-citizen espousing the idea that, say, COVID came from a Chinese lab rather than an open-air market, we're going to deport them, that that opinion is harming our relationship with China.
And so anyone who differs from the official line on where COVID came from, we're going to deport you.
I would imagine my friends on the right side of the aisle would not be okay with that, and rightly so, because the First Amendment forever takes away the power from the government of subjecting people to punishment, whether it's a jail cell or a deportation flight, because the government doesn't like what they have to say.
Yeah, or you can imagine Biden saying, you know what, we're going to deport every student who supports and praises Israel because our foreign policy is to try to rein Israel in, even though that wasn't, I'm just saying hypothetically.
And so we're going to deport anyone who's ever said anything good things about Israel.
I think a lot of conservatives would have no problem understanding why that too is an attack on free speech.
All right.
You know, I've talked about this before, and I think it's true for a lot of people who make free speech one of their central causes.
For me, at least, and you're probably too young to have lived through this, so you undoubtedly know about it.
You know, one of the things that really shaped my understanding of not just free speech, but just kind of the idea of pursuing principled regardless of party was the ACLU's defense of the American Nazi Party's right to march through Skokie.
These were almost entirely Jewish lawyers who were generally on the left.
Skokie was a town filled with Holocaust survivors.
You can see why they'd be traumatized, having people in Nazi uniforms march down the street.
A lot of them actually came from concentration camps.
And yet the ACLU defended them.
And we look back on that now kind of as though it was heroic and principled and noble, at least many people do.
But at the time, that case almost destroyed the ACLU.
Huge numbers of funders and donors to the ACLU said, no, this is disgusting.
This is a cause I cannot support.
Now, what's interesting is FHIR, as I first started perceiving it, was most often defending the rights of conservative students on campus against censorship by the administration.
At least that was one big part of what FHIR was doing.
And it got a lot of support among conservatives.
Ever since you also began denouncing censorship attempts against Israel critics or pro-Palestinian voices, which this is not the first time you've done it.
There's been many cases.
I often see sentiments like this.
I think we have a few that I saw today in response to your announcement.
I loved FHIR when I thought it only went after my political opponents.
Didn't realize they actually sincerely believed in free speech as a consistent principle.
That was somebody kind of mocking these people who were saying things like, guess I'm done donating to FHIR.
I'm glad now that I never gave FHIR any money.
They used to be fairly conservative.
Now they're supporting Hamas, WTF, free speech for citizens only.
Fire has become a waste.
Fire is a joke of an organization.
All tweets below your announcement about this lawsuit.
Have you experienced a lot of pushback from previous supporters who, as that first tweet said, are now realizing that you actually took seriously the principle of free speech and weren't just there to defend it in the case of conservatives whose free speech was being attacked?
So our true supporters, the ones who support free speech, have been very much on our side.
Occasionally we'll get some supporters who might have seen one case or another that we're defending possibly a view that they're a little bit more in concert with.
And they think that we're an organization that just defends causes that they like.
And so when we file a lawsuit that defends a cause or a speaker that they don't like as much, they say, well, I never knew FHIR would have done this.
Of course, had they visited our website, which I encourage everyone to do, thefire.org, they would see our consistent, principled, nonpartisan defense of free speech.
Now, here's the thing, Glenn.
Free speech is hard.
Free speech requires not only listening to and tolerating, but defending the rights of people to speak whose views you might find absolutely abhorrent.
But the only alternative to free speech is allowing the government to decide which views they are going to allow us to hear.
Whether it's from a non-citizen who might be visiting one of our universities or just here vacationing at Disneyland, or whether it's a university lecturer, we would have to cede power to the government to decide which views and which people's views we are allowed to hear.
And we are far safer, whether you're a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, or anything in between, you are far better leaving that up to yourself to decide which views you want to hear, which views you want to agree with, than handing that authority over to some government bureaucrat.
Yeah, it's very well said.
And it obviously comes from a lot of thinking from somebody who has devoted themselves to a defense of the First Amendment and free speech.
I really appreciate the work FIRE does in general.
I think this lawsuit in particular is very important.
We'll continue to follow it.
We'd love to have you back on as there are more developments, and we appreciate your coming on tonight.
