What a fascism expert sees in Mahmoud Khalil’s fight for justice

On Saturday, March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student, was detained by federal agents wearing plain clothes and badges. The agents declined to identify themselves or provide a warrant—only later was it confirmed they worked for ICE. His detention sparked widespread protests and debates over free speech and governmental overreach.

Khalil, a lawful U.S. resident, is being targeted to have his green card revoked under an obscure provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, with the Trump administration alleging hisinvolvement in pro-Palestinian protests posed "serious adverse foreign policy consequences."

The arrest, captured in a video recorded by his wife, Noor Abdalla, shows the agents confronting Khalil in the hallway of their university-owned residence. Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, can be heard pleading for information and expressing distress as her husband is handcuffed and led away.

The developments of fascist similitudes goes beyond the singular; the detainment of other pro-Palestinian activists like Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University researcher, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright Scholar pursuing a PhD at Tufts University, have also raised significant concerns about the erosion of civil liberties and the rise of authoritarian practices.

To explore the broader implications of Khalil's detention, Raseef22 spoke with Alberto Toscano,  author of "Late Fascism" and columnist for In These Times, about what this case signifies for the state of democracy and civil liberties today.

This interview was conducted on March 17th and was slightly edited for clarity and style.

How do both major U.S. political parties contribute to the criminalization of dissent, particularly in cases like Khalil’s, and the broader suppression of Palestinian advocacy?

If we begin with what happened in the wake of October 7th, we can note very quickly the convergence amongst the majority of both parties in undertaking a whole set of different initiatives oriented towards criminalizing or repressing dissent vis-a-vis the United States’ complicity and support for the assault on and genocide in Gaza.

And also, crucially focusing on the repression of Palestine's solidarity in U.S. universities — so-called ‘elite universities,’ Ivy League universities and so on — we can register that convergence and bipartisan character in much of the criminalization of dissent and of Palestinian solidarity movements on a number of different levels.

When it comes to this criminalization of dissent, again, with important exceptions on those left of the Democratic Party and a few Republican figures, there is a remarkable level of homogeneity and common intent around the question of Palestine solidarity on campuses.

A very obvious one is the various statements and bills that made their way through Congress. Perhaps most salient being the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which seeks to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, including all of its examples that pretty much dictate a kind of equation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

That act was not ratified by the Senate for a number of complicated reasons, but is now being brought back into the house. I believe the initial vote was 320 to 91, with some Republicans and mainly progressive Democrats voting against it.

Democrats have played a very significant role in the repression of Palestinian solidarity. Most recently the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, demanded that the City of University of New York (CUNY) rescind a position for Palestinian studies at Hunter College, a component of CUNY, on the basis that the very idea of having this position was a sign of anti-Semitic animus.

When it comes to this criminalization of dissent, again, with important exceptions on [those] left of the Democratic Party and a few Republican figures, there is a remarkable level of homogeneity and common intent [around the question of Palestine solidarity on campuses].

How do you think this has culminated into what happened to Khalil?

I suppose the first thing we should note is that all of this repression has a long history and many continuities, right? I think it would be both analytically and politically misleading to see this moment as unprecedented, though we shouldn't underestimate how extreme it is.

In the context of the so-called “War on Terror”, these very repressive policies curtailing civil liberties and dissent, targeting foreign nationals including students, were enacted not just in the U.S. but across the world. Both the ideology but also the legal provisions that make up the U.S.’ anti-terrorism doctrine are deeply linked from the start to anti-Palestinian animus, and anti-Palestinian racism.

It's important to note that the platform of the Republican National Committee and Trump campaign, was written to support, very explicitly, the deporting or revoking of visas of supporters of Palestinian causes, often under the cover of terms like ‘terrorism’ and ‘jihadism,’ or ‘pro-Hamas radicals.’

It's also worth noting that one of the twenty points of this platform was to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.” This is also linked to the broader push against progressivism, or liberalism, at American universities. It's been very explicit. It is, amongst other things, a product not just of Trump's own ideological position, but of donors to and supporters of the Republican Party that insisted on this being part of the platform.

I think this persecution and now attempted kidnapping and attempt at deportation of Mahmoud Khalil is the effort to enact this part of the platform — and I think also to test both politically and legally how far they can go.

This is also happening in terms of a broader deportation agenda as we saw in the concurrent, but unrelated in many ways, issue of their deportation of undocumented people to the dystopian jails in El Salvador. It’s also linked to the repression of pro-Palestinian solidarity and of campus dissent more broadly as part of a broader politics in which deportation and victimizing of foreign nationals is central.

Beyond the U.S., we’re seeing a rise in far-right movements and authoritarian policies worldwide. What economic, cultural, or geopolitical factors do you think are driving this global shift toward fascism?

I think it's tricky to identify causes that necessarily fit all cases of authoritarianism or the rise to prominence of reactionary and racist, or fascist, movements. But we can start by saying that, historically, far right movements in general and fascist movements in particular have thrived in moments of social crisis in moments where either material and economic realities or social perceptions and anxieties painted a catastrophic horizon of one kind or another. Neither the causes nor the outcomes of the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2008 were really resolved. The inequality and the speculative political economy that it was based in has only intensified.

The kinds of crises or the kinds of social pathologies or social or economic discontent that one encounters in the U.S. today is not directly comparable to the experience, say, in the origins of historical fascism or indeed of Nazism. We're talking about a more creeping, and slower, but significant phenomena.

This is also linked to the broader push against progressivism, or liberalism, at American universities. It's been very explicit. It is, amongst other things, a product not just of Trump's own ideological position, but of donors to and supporters of the Republican Party that insisted on this being part of the platform.

In many places this is definitely the case; in Europe there is increasing indebtedness, social precarity, and inequality, which are effects of particularly regressive forms of capitalism. This has — rather than being resolved through redistributive or more progressive economic policies — been met with austerity and stigmatizing or scapegoating of migrants in particular, as well as other groups.

How does Khalil’s case fit into this broader trend?

One of the things that I've been puzzling over in terms of thinking about the role of this political persecution of migrants and foreign residents in the present, is that I think it's related to — but plays a different function than — the general anti-migrant politics. So, if we think of Trump’s campaign slogans on mass deportations, the rhetoric about the border, and about this invented social panic around so-called migrant crime, all of that is a rhetoric that's very much aimed at his base, but also at broader consumption in the U.S. and elsewhere. In many ways [this has been] the responsibility of mainstream media in turning immigration into a ‘problem’ and the reason for all sorts of social ills. It has become a kind of common sense, regardless of the underlying facts when it comes to Khalil's case.

When it comes to the repression of Palestinian solidarity and campus dissent more broadly, my impression is that this is much more of an elite phenomenon. I don't think there's great clamor, even from Trump's base, for these kinds of politics.

I think it’s the politics of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the whole galaxy of associated organizations that are pushing a kind of extremist, pro-Israel agenda. It's the politics of millionaire and billionaire donors who have made their views about campus protests extremely vocal. I'm thinking of Bill Ackman and others; it's also the view of a whole set of ideological or cultural warriors on the far right who are obsessed with universities. The likes of Christopher Rufo and others have made it a crucial plank of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and of Trump's second presidency to attack and dismantle the intellectual infrastructure of what they see both as elite liberalism and its collusion with ‘dangerous campus radicals.’

I did note that Trump had also mentioned during the campaign that he was going to use the existing immigration and nationality act to “deny entry to all communists and all Marxists,” so you have this kind of obsession, [a rhetoric that] the campuses are entirely controlled by the extreme left. So it's not even that there's leftist or anti-Americans in U.S. colleges, but that the colleges themselves are depicted as [quintessentially] Marxist organizations.

The U.S. has a long history of targeting activists, from COINTELPRO to the Holy Land Five. How does the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and other Palestinian advocates reflect a continuation of these historical patterns?

The continuity is extremely strong, and in many ways we can write the history of this continuity, as many people have, by identifying the origins of the very laws that are being wielded both in Khalil’s case and also in these various executive orders.

It's the politics of millionaire and billionaire donors who have made their views about campus protests extremely vocal. I'm thinking of Bill Ackman and others; it's also the view of a whole set of ideological or cultural warriors on the far right who are obsessed with universities.

This goes all the way back to the very origins of the Republic, with laws like the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in a context of a quasi-war, as it was called with France, where a number of supposedly subversive French citizens and intellectuals were, if not deported, at least pushed to leave. This practice is what the scholar Julia Rose Kraut has called “ideological exclusion” in [her] very relevant book, “The Threat of Dissent.” This goes back to the immediate context of the Bolshevik Revolution. Some of these laws were passed already, being referred to to justify present or future deportations, [including] the ones that were referred to in Khalil's case, specifically the one that permits the Secretary of State Marco Rubio to determine that an individual poses a threat to national security.

In the arrest document for Khalil, there's a mention of this particular part of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 237A. As a recent article in Politico pointed out, this is something introduced in the McCarran Walter Act of 1952, in the context of the Red Scare McCarthyism and rampant anti-communism by two Democratic senators: Pat McCarran from Nevada and Francis Walter from Pennsylvania. This was a system that codified a whole number of ethno-nationally defined quotas.

People at the time held very strong anti-Semitic dimensions, i.e. it was both targeted at Jewish communists and leftists, as well as post-Holocaust migrants from Eastern Europe. Apparently, one of its main authors, McCarran, was a rampant anti-Semite to boot.

There is a deep history of defining U.S. national security by opposition to political subversion, which is defined ideologically; anarchism, socialism, communism—and in the context of the War on Terror, so-called jihadism, and so on and so forth. But all of those definitions are almost invariably racialized. We see that very evidently in the repression of anti-Palestinian solidarity.

Some of these other laws that have been mentioned in parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act even include a direct reference to Palestine. Not only are terrorism and immigration laws almost invariably introduced with reference to Palestinian liberation and solidarity with Palestinian liberation, but to this day the Immigration and Nationality Act explicitly mentions the Palestinian Liberation Organization as terrorists by definition, notwithstanding the fact that its members represent Palestine at the United Nations.

What we see in the Khalil case is a recycling of a set of anti-immigration laws that include the sedimented history of all of these political conflicts and the definitions of U.S. social security against certain political enemies: communists, socialists, anarchists, and Palestinians, amongst others. I think that it's very important people are conscious of the interweaving of these two histories; the history of anti-communism, but also just of anti-leftism more broadly, and the history of anti-Palestinian animus and anti-Palestinian racism.

There is a deep history of defining U.S. national security by opposition to political subversion, which is defined ideologically; anarchism, socialism, communism—and in the context of the War on Terror, so-called jihadism, and so on and so forth. But all of those definitions are almost invariably racialized. We see that very evidently in the repression of anti-Palestinian solidarity.

When it comes to this concerted attack on campus radicalism, these two phenomena are viewed by the Trump administration and also even by a number of its self described liberals as being interlinked. Part of the concerted attack against Palestinian solidarity is also an attack on progressive and anti-racist and anti-colonial politics more broadly, in part because of the objective reason that these political strands are, in many ways, interwoven.

There's something very economical, so to speak, on the part of this far right administration in attacking Palestinian solidarity in such a deliberate, concerted, and extreme way, because I think they see it as a wedge. [They see it] both as something that they want to attack in its own right, given their commitment to Zionism and to the support of Israel at all costs, but also as something that allows them to attack a whole panoply of other progressive causes at the same time.

Fascist regimes often rely on propaganda to dehumanize their targets. How do you see media narratives shaping public perception of figures like Khalil and the Palestinian cause more broadly?

This is where the dehumanizing tenor that the humanizing purpose of the language of terrorism is so key. This is something that we've known from critical media analysis and scholarship for a long time. In my own thinking about these issues, I was particularly moved and inspired by the reading of Edward Said’s Covering Islam. [It] traces in an incredibly powerful way […] the category of terrorism and the racializing and Orientalist frameworks regarding Muslim people in Muslim-majority countries, Palestinians, Arabs, and the way that, through copious media and fictional production, one thinks of the hideous films we were fed in the 1980s. All of this has been aimed at creating this unshakable identification between terrorism and certain people, groups, bodies, and beliefs.

Those terms are treated synonymously by both the far right press and also among some liberal Zionists. Terrorism is treated as synonymous with Palestinian, and these are treated as synonymous with some notion of inhuman savagery or what have you. It’s a particular mode of dehumanization because instead of making an explicitly racial argument about inferiority, it identifies the ‘other’ — in this case, the Palestinian — as the bearer of inhuman and barbarous violence. Therefore, a kind of absolute enemy, an enemy against whom anything is legitimate.

That's also where the whole use of this formulation [comes from], like the ‘pro-Hamas radicals.’ [Think about the] way in which Hamas itself was described — not in terms of military or resistance groups that can engage in war crimes, but actually as something entirely different: a demonic, genocidal entity that is responsible for atrocities by definition. Once that's in place, then this use of this terminology of ‘Hamas-aligned’ basically means that, by association, anyone who is a supporter even in principle of Palestinian resistance or Palestinian liberation is identified with the worst atrocities real or imagined that can be ascribed to Hamas or to other Palestinian resistance factions.

Fascism often operates through the veneer of legality. How are laws and legal systems being weaponized in cases like Khalil’s to suppress dissent, and what parallels do you see to historical fascist regimes?

Contrary to what we might be led to believe by historical common sense, fascist and authoritarian regimes have rarely just abrogated or abolished legality, and have far more often redeployed existing laws to further their designs. Looking at this legal or juridical dimension, we can reflect critically on the continuities between liberal or non-authoritarian politics and the fascist regimes that develop out of them. [Identifying] enemies of the state as a direct prerogative of a leader or dictator, or as a prerogative of a fascist regime or party, is something that is a significant element in the history of fascism.

Terrorism is treated as synonymous with Palestinian, and these are treated as synonymous with some notion of inhuman savagery or what have you. It’s a particular mode of dehumanization because instead of making an explicitly racial argument about inferiority, it identifies the ‘other’ — in this case, the Palestinian — as the bearer of inhuman and barbarous violence. Therefore, a kind of absolute enemy, an enemy against whom anything is legitimate.

For instance, in the 1920s, the Italian fascist government passed a law basically denationalizing or stripping citizenship from anti-fascists, in particular those who had decided to go into exile. What I think becomes tricky is that the U. S., and indeed other states, have employed this kind of prerogative and this ability to persecute individuals before many times. Instead of seeing this straightforwardly as a sign of a linear transition into something that we might want to call full blown authoritarianism or fascism, I think we have to see it as the expression and the weaponization of authoritarian and fascistic potentials that are already written into the laws themselves.

When I try to think through how languages of fascism have continued to provide some illumination, after the end of Italian fascism and of German Nazism, I turn to the writings of imprisoned Black liberation intellectuals like Angela Davis or George Jackson, for whom the link between law and fascist potentials within the U.S. was extremely concrete. They were persecuted by a state that saw itself as liberal, often under governments that were run by liberal Democrats, as political subversives who were racialized in their political subversiveness.

Progressive movements have historically evolved their strategies under repression. What might the Left’s ongoing pushback look like, and what lessons from past movements — like 1960s anti-war protests — could define this new phase of organizing?

It's a really daunting question, because the powers of repression that are being employed and that are exemplified by Khalil’s case — and also the fact that they've announced this as just the first of many — are really formidable.

They're formidable in the sense that the organized violence of the state is evident in arrests that seem to stretch or transcend even constitutional legality. The violence of detention and deportation is extremely difficult to resist. At the same time, there's already a large number of extremely experienced and committed organizations at work that have been doing the work of resisting the deportation and detention regime as it involves undocumented migrants. They’re doing legal defense, intellectual analysis, scholarly activist critique, and so on.

In many ways the principle issue that confronts us both in the U.S. and elsewhere is really the coordination of a set of distinct movements and organizations and practices into a more cohesive, but also more consequential opposition. That might involve a whole set of different practices, whether it is involving the forms of workplace power, including strikes of trade unions, or people within the legal profession engaging in oppositional activity, or continued forms of dissent under these conditions of repression.

This is a moment [when] the political forms in which to resist in a consequential and effective way still have to be invented.

Looking at this legal or juridical dimension, we can reflect critically on the continuities between liberal or non-authoritarian politics and the fascist regimes that develop out of them. Identifying enemies of the state as a direct prerogative of a leader or dictator, or as a prerogative of a fascist regime or party, is something that is a significant element in the history of fascism.

If you take individual cases like Khalil's, aside from campaigning and making it into a single public and political issue — which I think there's been relative success in doing, including forcing often fence-sitting Democrats to speak out to the extent that they're able about this — this is still something that now is in the domain of lawyers and legal cases.

When it comes to the broader campaigns against dissent and against Palestine solidarity, one also needs more explicitly political and collective strategies — not just legal ones. This is rendered even more urgent, but also more difficult, by the fact that institutions — and I'm thinking primarily of universities with very few significant exceptions — are entirely complicit in the sense that they initiated these forms of repression and scapegoating, [some] long before the Trump administration came to power.

How does one operate in these hostile environments where you can't trust your institutions, notwithstanding their supposed missions to defend academic freedom and to defend their students?

I thought it was particularly galling, but also frightening, that, very shortly before his arrest or abduction, Khalil had made very explicit requests to Columbia University to attend to his case and to defend him from this campaign of vilification. Being able to find other ways of collectively defending those most vulnerable to these forms of oppression is going to prove really important. But it's a very challenging prospect, because the repressive powers of the state are so overwhelming and the official opposition is either supine or complicit.