Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Part I

---

Does the U.S. Have the Determination to Defend Itself? The ‘Test Case’ of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University

Most Americans probably know by now that Columbia University, there in New York City, is pretty much the epicenter of some of the big controversies of our day. At the center of that controversy is a young Palestinian man in the United States as a legal resident with a green card. His name is Mahmoud Khalil, and he was, in many ways, the symbolic head of the Palestinian-supporting demonstrations over the past couple of years there at Columbia. He’s been closely identified with the Palestinian cause. And the Trump administration moved to deny his permanent resident status and basically to undo his residential claims and to deport him simply because he has declared himself, in effect, the enemy of the United States government.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. Immediately on the left you have cries that this is a violation of academic freedom. It is a violation of free speech. And you have the constant arguments coming that the right of free speech, including for a resident alien, a permanent resident, it is irrevocable, and it trumps every other right and every other concern. And then you have those on the other side who are saying, “What kind of society would effectively commit suicide by willfully bringing people in who want to see the demise of that very nation and society, along with those of its allies?”

So, as you look at this, you recognize the worldview issues are thick, and they are many. Quite frankly, the most we can do is to take a stick at whacking this question and see how many worldview issues we can deal with at one time. One of them is what in the world does it mean for someone to be here on this kind of status?

In this case, it is a young man who applied to come to the United States to study at Columbia University and was granted permanent resident status. Now, what does that mean? It means that the person is not merely here on some kind of educational visa, but has a permanent resident status, so he can stay here to study. But that means incongruity with national laws, and it also means that there are limits. The question is what kind of limits are we talking about, and did this young man indeed exceed those limits?

Well, you have those on the Left who are immediately saying, this is a test case for whether or not we intend to be a free society, whether or not democracy is going to rule, whether or not we believe in constitutional rights, free expression, et cetera. But there are others who are saying, common sense just simply demands that any sane country would not accept, on this status, someone coming in to study who is publicly agitating for the end of Western civilization, not to mention the non-existence of Israel, one of our key allies.

So, there have to be deeper roots here. You know this. There have to be deeper roots to what’s going on, and that’s where we need to look back, number one, at Columbia University. Now, other universities are involved in the same kind of activity, but there’s no doubt that Columbia has been a standout.

And anyone who knows American History for say the last 60 or 70 years should be unsurprised that Columbia University there, Morningside Heights, Manhattan, that it is the epicenter of this kind of political activism. For one thing, it’s New York City. New York City is like a magnet that attracts these kinds of movements. But when it comes to Columbia University, you are looking at one of the Ivy League institutions, you’re also looking at what has been the epicenter for a lot of student protests for a long time. Infamously, some of those turned violent in the 1960s. You had agitational groups, you had student groups, extremist groups, some calling for the end of the United States itself, a complete reordering of society, neo-Marxist groups. In some case, just Marxist groups. You had organizations such as the Weathermen, the SDS, and others very well represented in the causes at that time. You had student activism, riots, protests, and you had a student takeover of the administration building at Columbia University. It was not a great moment for institutional leadership, for university leadership at that time.

But even as, eventually, the protesters effectively wore out their welcome, they made their point, and since then, it has increasingly appeared that Columbia University exists as something of an intellectual bastion for the ideological Left, mostly represented by the faculty, and something of an ideological playground for activist students.

But remember, all of this comes with a cost. In the context of the savage attack undertaken by Hamas against Israel in October of 2023, the protests that broke out on the campus basically made Jewish students not only feel unsafe, they were unsafe on the campus, and it shut down operations.

Now, at this point, you find out whether or not two things actually apply, number one, the rule of law. Does an academic institution operate by the rule of law which doesn’t allow insurrectionists like this to take over the campus? Increasingly, well, we saw that in 2023 into 2024, a lot of universities basically just surrendered to the inmates, so to speak.

It’s one thing to say vote for Trump or against Trump. You can count on those campuses overwhelmingly against Trump, almost unthinkable that one could do otherwise, but that’s not what’s at issue. Can you come out and say, “I want the United States of America to come to an end. I demand a complete revolution and a Marxist government put in its place”? Can you say that on a campus like that? Well, actually in terms of the Marxist argument, you can make that kind of statement. But can you say, “I want to offer encouragement to the declared enemies of the United States of America. I want to offer aid and comfort and ideological support and political support to those who are carrying out extremist acts, acts of hatred, acts of mass murder”?

Well, there has to be some line there. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that the vast majority of Americans say there has to be some line there. And I think most Americans would say that line is particularly important when one is effectively a guest of the United States of America. So, we’re looking at all these issues colliding in one place. Like I say, the word epicenter really does apply here. Columbia University, everything’s on the line.

Now, some of this is just going to have to come out in some kind of evidentiary process, some kind of weighing of the evidence, but it certainly appears that Mahmoud Khalil was, if not directly involved, then incredibly coordinated with a group known as Columbia University Apartheid Divest. That’s CUAD has made its opposition to Israel very, very clear. Support for the Palestinian cause very, very clear seemingly at almost any cost. It has also posted one post on Instagram, since deleted, said, “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Well, those words are pretty easy to understand, fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.

Now, here’s where, just for example, you would think some sanity might break out even on a campus like Columbia University, because just look at Columbia University. Just look at the campus. It cries out Western civilization. And remember, the historic universities were established to continue and perpetuate Western civilization. So this is basically a group that says, “Everything that Columbia University was founded to represent, we want to completely eradicate.” The words are total eradication. And Columbia University says, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Now, there are any number of people who can tell you stories of how things have gone wrong at Columbia University. Columbia has been the epicenter for so many of these far left protests. A matter of just over a decade ago, I was invited to speak at Columbia University as part of a process bringing persons from different kinds of religious backgrounds to speak to how we can deal with each other with respect. Now, there was no problem on the panel, none at all, none at all. Except when they invited me, they invited a conservative evangelical Protestant Christian who was going to speak my mind, and when I was asked the questions, I spoke my mind. As you might expect, that got me in trouble on the campus of Columbia University.

Now, the platform on which I was participating as a speaker, it was being moderated by the then president of the university, who was quite civil. And we finished the panel and had lunch. That’s pretty much the way that kind of event goes. But then I was invited to speak to student groups, and that’s where things got very ugly. They got very ugly, very fast.

The main issue was the fact that I said that religious liberty allows religious groups, and I’m speaking particularly explicitly as a Christian, it allows Christians to speak to the truth of Christianity in the public square, not only in the confines of our churches. So, I was saying, “Religious liberty means I can come to a place like New York City, and I can articulate my convictions. I can go to Washington, D.C., and articulate my convictions.”

And I was told, no mistake, by many of the students–now, again, this wasn’t an official student statement. It didn’t have to be. It was overwhelming. The students basically said, “That’s unacceptable. There’s certain forms of speech that simply, these days, should not be allowed, such as–and this, of course, you already have guessed it was the key issue–should a man be legally able to marry another man? Et cetera. That was the issue. According to them, human flourishing, human good, human interests suggest that one cannot possibly argue otherwise without that speech becoming, brace for it, itself a form of violence.

This is the very same university today. And, of course, after the Hamas attack upon Israel, let’s just remind ourselves. You have an Islamic terror organization that invaded Israel to carry out the biggest mass killing event in Israel since its battle for its own independence. And we are looking at a continuing atrocity that is driven by Islamic terrorism. And you have there at Columbia University further evidence of the ideological foundation there.

Part II

---

Which Faculty at Columbia University Support Its Campus Protests? The Unveiling of the Worldview Divide Between Columbia’s Faculty Departments

You had a professor decades ago named Edward Said. Edward Said was the pioneer of what became known as post-colonial studies. Basically, the easiest way to describe it is that it is a form of cultural neo-Marxism arguing that the main distinction in world history is between the oppressed and the oppressor, or, in the case of Said, the imperialist and those who suffer by imperialist oppression.

And of course, since so much of the Near East was, at one point, under the control of the British Empire, and then he would argue the hegemony of the American empire, Israel being the representation as a colonial interest. In other words, key to that Palestinian argument is that Israel is, itself, evidence of colonialism rather than existing as a legitimate nation on its own. That’s one of the key Palestinian arguments.

Now, of course, that’s more sophisticated than what most of these students are representing. The fact is, however, they are there largely because of the faculty who are pioneers in these areas, not only the late Professor Edward Said, but many who continue along the lines of the same argument.

And this is where you have the cultural Marxism, which is I think exactly the right term to use here. You have the critical theory, you have the intersectionality, and all of this plays out. And the intersectionality, by the way, is a part of the leftist ideology, suggests that one oppressed group has to owe allegiance to other oppressed groups in order to commonly press back against oppressor forces.

Key to understanding this is that all of Western civilization is understood as the oppressor or oppressing force, Christianity at the heart of that, by the way. It is also their argument that Israel is a part of Western civilization, a legacy of Western imperialism, an artificial nation there, which exists in a predatory manner upon the Palestinian people, and thus, Israel has to be destroyed, Western civilization. If Western civilization is destroyed, Israel will go with it.

Of course, the reality is that Western civilization is there in the Near East, represented mostly by Israel in terms of, say, democratic self-government, our understanding of human liberty and human dignity. Yes, there are common ties there and we understand, as Christians, some of those are downright theological. No apology there.

All right, I said you’re not even able to, say, take a swing at all the worldview pitches coming at us on this, but one of them has to do with the faculty at Columbia, and this tells us a lot about what’s going on on university campuses. The Wall Street Journal ran a great article with the headline, “Strife at Columbia Spurs a Civil War Among Faculty.” Okay, so we’re told that sympathy for the students, and that means sympathy for the student or former student, Mahmoud Khalil, but it also means for the students, especially the leftist students on the campus who have been rioting and involved in protests and activism and all the rest. Where does the support for those students come from on the faculty? It’s not evenly distributed.

This is really interesting, huge worldview implications here. If you’re going to look at the faculty of a massive university like Columbia, which faculty is going to be really pro-leftist student, and which faculty is going be less so? Well, the liberal arts, they’re pretty much the heart of the ideological Left. The Chemistry Department, not quite so much. The Physics Department, Astronomy Department, not quite so much. You have a distinction on the faculty between the liberal arts on the one hand and the social sciences on the one hand, left, left, further left, and then the sciences. It’s not to say that that’s a bastion of conservative thought, it’s just to say they don’t wake up every morning trying to figure out oppressed versus oppressor. They wake up every morning thinking, “I wonder if that equation works.”

Now, one of the sad things is the extent to which postmodern, non-realist thought, leftist ideologies have infected the entire department. By the way, in disciplines like chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics, established faculty will say that younger faculty are coming in more and more leftist in terms of their ideology. And you see that, by the way, in doctoral dissertations. It’s no longer about, say, a physics problem. Now, it’s about how to overcome male dominance or white dominance in the field of physics. You can look at the dissertation titles and say, well, already we have evidence of what’s happening, but at least it’s progressing more slowly in the hard sciences.

By the way, there are certain fields that are pretty inflexible to a lot of this, you would think, in terms of application, but here’s where you need to think about something such as medicine. Because you could say, “Well, in medicine, that ought to be non-ideological,” except for the fact that medical practice, well, it establishes itself in terms of institutions. One of those institutions is a medical school, and someone’s deciding who does and does not get admitted to those schools, who does and does not get hired on the faculty of those schools. And when those schools are in very liberal spaces, they get taken over by that liberal culture. That’s just the way it works. Pretty soon, you have medicine translated into an ideological discipline.

Part III

---

What Kind of Society Allows for Subversive Acts Against Its Own Existence? Western Civilization Cannot Survive If It Does Not Defend Itself

Now, one other big worldview angle, we need to ask this. What kind of society would invite and allow for the perpetuation of subversive attacks upon its own existence? What kind of sane society would do this? Simon Hankinson writing in The Telegraph of London, that’s a rather conservative paper there in London, he writes a piece, and the headline is Mahmoud Khalil is a test case for the survival of Western civilisation.

I think that’s actually right. I think that’s a defensible headline. This is a test case for the survival of Western civilization. Western civilization is only going to continue to exist, and I’m just going to assume for a moment, I don’t have to define what that is, the entire inheritance of the Christian West. It’s only going to exist if the people who live in it are willing to perpetuate it and to defend it, nations such as the United States, political communities such as Europe, that’s increasingly being subverted, particularly in academic contexts in the United States and pretty more widely in Europe.

Hankinson writes, “We are in the midst of an ideological struggle between open borders and national sovereignty. The globalist left believes that anyone worldwide should be able to flee to the Western democracy of their choice and gain admittance. They think that all asylum claims should be approved, even if based on poverty, hardship or other reasons not falling under the 1952 Refugee Convention. Even when claims are denied, they would rather find an excuse not to deport the claimant.”

He then asks the key question, “Do Western societies have culturally suicidal levels of tolerance for behavior from immigrants, legal and illegal?” He points out that in Britain the rule seems to apply that the migrant never loses. He says, “This is the migrant never loses narrative.” In other words, the government can never come up with enough evidence to kick anyone out. The presumption is nobody gets kicked out, ever.

He then goes writing about the Nigerian woman who was allowed to claim asylum eight times before succeeding on patently bogus grounds. He talks about the bizarre asylum approval of a Palestinian family who applied through a program meant only for Ukrainians. And then he writes about the Albanian whose deportation was halted, in part because his son, “didn’t like foreign chicken nuggets.” I don’t know about the case, but I can tell you I’ve seen plenty like it. But then turning even more serious, Hankinson writes, “Meanwhile, in Germany, an Afghan man intentionally drove a car into a crowd in Munich, injuring 28 people, the latest in a spate of attacks by asylum seekers, or failed asylum seekers, who had not been deported.”

So the West is clearly in a crisis, and I mean all of Western civilization. That means not just that it has accepted so many people claiming refugee status from other parts of the world, it’s that it has allowed to come, and then allowed to stay, persons who say they want to bring about the end of the civilization they have come, supposedly, to join. What does that tell you?

It’s in that sense that The Telegraph of London says that the case of Mahmoud Khalil is a, again, test case for the survival of Western civilization. I think it’s very difficult to deny that it is certainly something like that. It is certainly a test case and on trial is not only this individual, but the resolution of those in Western civilization to perpetuate it and to defend it.

Before leaving this case entirely, I want to point out that an editorial statement in the Wall Street Journal also got to the key point, “A green card comes with legal obligations including the disavowal of terrorism.” Let’s just say that’s going to be very hard to pull off as a defense when it comes to the case of Mahmoud Khalil. But in this case, it’s not just Khalil who, in a sense, is on trial. It’s the United States government as well. Do we have the determination even to defend ourselves and our government, our society, our civilization?

Part IV

---

The University Must Serve More Than a Political Purpose: The University Must Serve the Universals of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful

All right, shifting just a little bit, the Trump administration, in recent days, has announced action against a large number of American colleges and universities because of their continuation of DEI policies. That is diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. It’s very much a part of the ideological Left, and it’s so deeply ingrained in institutions I’ve long been saying the problem is that they’re just going to rename it, that they’re not going to stop it, they’re just going to rename it. They’re going to continue to use race-based, group-based, identity-based, LGBTQ-based kinds of preferences, and the Trump administration is at least taking action to try to prevent that from happening.

Very interesting to hear the howls that are coming from university administrators, the defenses, all of a sudden, of supposedly the sanctity of higher education, and you have the White House intervening in this way, and they say it’s quite illegitimate. I just want to point out that those same universities are taking billions of dollars from the taxpayer and the federal government. They’re taking those monies, and the Trump administration is speaking the one language that even university administrators understand, and that’s the language that ends with dollars and cents. And in this case, there are no cents. It’s all dollars.

So, why would Columbia University be paying attention to all this? Well, of course, they’ve got federal agents right there on the property, federal investigators, but they have also been told that the Trump administration is going to hold up $400 million of federal money for this year alone, $400 million. These are very rich institutions. We’re talking about endowments in the billions of dollars. We’re talking about campuses, faculties. We’re talking about untold riches on these campuses, but even on those campuses, a missing $400 million in one year is going to get somebody’s attention. Somebody is going to lose a job. Somebody’s program is not going to get funded. Somebody is going to, let’s just say, face some budget constraints. $400 million is still, even in this economy, $400 million.

Now, you also have all kinds of plaintiff pleas, emergency declarations, manifestos going out in support of American higher education, America’s prestigious universities, and the entire academic culture. “It’s under threat,” they’re saying.

The New York Times actually ran an opinion piece Sunday with the headline, “We’ll Miss Universities When They’re Gone.” Well, fat chance for that. Meghan O’Rourke wrote the piece. She is editor of the Yale Review and a professor in the English Department at Yale University. You have been warned. She’s trying to argue for why, in this moment, America’s colleges and universities, particularly the most prestigious ones, are much needed. She says, “The university is always politicized one way or the other.”

And I’ll just point out that that one way or the other is generally one way. No one really talks about the moment, in the midst of all these crises, when the university culture was dominated by conservatives. Go look for that headline, you’re not going to find it. But nonetheless, she goes on to explain, at least to the readers of The New York Times, why even conservatives, why all Americans should support these very liberal institutions, even with their tax monies. 

She says this, “The answer is earnest and aspirational because the serious reflective work of scholarship benefits us all because academic freedom makes it possible to critique institutionally from within at a time when institutions rule our lives, because it permits intellectuals and scientists to question realities we’ve become complacent about, because it creates space for values that live outside the capitalist marketplace, because it houses art and artists. Yes, the university can be like any community anywhere, divisive, censorious, sometimes too ideological, homogeneous, but when it works, it trains people to think critically, powerfully, and unflinchingly.” Here’s the amazing thing. She thinks that kind of statement is supposed to be translated into support for the modern, prestigious, liberal ideological university. Yeah. Are you persuaded?

I want to make very clear that I do believe in the idea of the university. I do believe in the capacity of colleges and universities to do much good, but I also believe every bit as much that every institution is committed to some kind of ultimate mission and ultimate identity and ultimate purpose. And if that is merely some kind of political purpose, it will be turned over to the political purposes of the Left and will turn subversive to the very society that instituted it, that founded it, and it will turn against the very universals that are supposed to stand at the very center of the university.

Remember, the university didn’t emerge out of nothing. It emerged out of Christianity, out of a Christian commitment to the unity of the universals in the Christian Gospel and in Christ. So, now, in a secular age, you have the claim that it’s a university. And if there’s any uni in it, it is the near univocal power of the ideological Left, on most campuses. But as to a commitment to unity in the good, the beautiful, the true, and in a comprehensive worldview, that’s pretty much out because the source of that unity is now openly derided. It’s just another form of imperialism.