Professor William Jacobson is the owner and publisher of the Legal Insurrection blog. He is also a professor at Cornell Law School.
He recently spoke to talk host Tony Katz about Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel agitator at Columbia University who was arrested and is now set for deportation.
The left has tried in vain to frame this as a free speech issue, but as Jacobson points out, it really is not about free speech.
Partial transcript via Legal Insurrection:
WILLIAM JACOBSON: Well, I think you have to distinguish, immigration is a very different situation than someone who’s a US citizen. The government can’t deport, to my knowledge, a US citizen. They can either prosecute you for a crime or they have to leave you alone pretty much. But when you’re here on an immigration, whether it’s a visa or a green card, you’re playing by a different set of rules. You have no right to be here unless you comply with the rules, unlike US citizens. And so it’s a very different situation, and I think the government does have a key role there. It does have an interest and a right to keep people out who give support for terrorism. It’s right in the statute … whether this person did or not is something they’ll have to prove, whether they engage in criminal activity while here, is something they’re going to have to prove.
But if they can prove all of those things, there’s no reason why we as a country need to let in people who come here for the very purpose of not only advocating the overthrow of the US government, not only advocating the destruction of our society, but engaging in organizing violent conduct, harassing conduct.
Remember this guy deprived hundreds, if not thousands, of Columbia students of their rights. He deprived them of their right to education. He deprived them of their right to speech through these crazy, violent, intimidating marches that they did, and checkpoints and not allowing students to get to class.
This is not a guy who has respected anybody else’s rights, yet we as a country will respect his rights to the extent he has them.
This is not a free speech issue. If you were going to prove, as they claim, that he’s only being prosecuted because he’s quote unquote pro-Palestinian, then you would have to find similar conduct by a pro-Israel student, which is not prosecuted. The problem with these free speech arguments by the anti-Israel crowd is they are the only ones taking over buildings. They are the only ones trashing buildings. They are the only ones intimidating staff.
Watch the video below:
It’s actually funny to hear people on the left suddenly pretending to care about free speech on college campuses. Left wing students will practically burn a campus down if Ann Coulter is invited to speak.
