Will Western Civilization survive?

Conservatives are sometimes accused of creating caricatures of academic leftism. In all honesty, it would be hard to create caricatures of this kind, since the radical left remains solidly in control of higher education in America—and this is especially true on the nation’s most elite campuses. You can’t make these people up. New York’s Columbia University serves as one of the most obvious offenders in this regard, and that has been true since activists took over the campus in the 1960s. Now, Columbia’s expansive Morningside Heights campus is the epicenter of what is shaping up as an epic battle. But the battle isn’t really over academic affairs. It’s about whether Western Civilization should survive.

For several decades now, the academic left has seen Western Civilization as the oppressive past that must give way to the utopian future, and the United States and Israel are painted at the center of the left’s bullseye. All this burst onto the headlines when Hamas carried out its murderous terror attack upon Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. When Israel defended its national existence and invaded Gaza, Columbia’s campus became a giant platform for political stagecraft, with activists supporting the Palestinians orchestrating demonstrations on the campus that effectively shut down the academic programs. Notably, Jewish students experienced open displays of anti-Semitism and received open threats.

But the activism wasn’t just directed at the present government of Israel. The demonstrators called for the end to Israel’s existence and at least some of the students and activists openly supported Hamas—an Islamic terror organization that calls for both Israel and the United States to fall.

This brings us to Mahmoud Khalil, who at the time of the demonstrations was a graduate student and leader of the pro-Palestinian protests. Just days ago, the Trump administration moved to deport Khalil on the basis of his actions. Khalil holds a green card from the government and had status as a permanent resident, but he said he came to the United States to pursue graduate education. Instead, he has become a test case for whether or not America retains the moral mettle to defend itself and remove open threats from our midst.

Immigration officials arrested Khalil, who is now in a federal detention center in Louisiana as he fights the administration’s efforts to deport him. His defenders claim that Khalil had merely expressed his political opinions under First Amendment protections and that his arrest is an affront to academic freedom and free speech. Trump administration officials cited a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that grants the government the power to deport an “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Well, Mahmoud Khalil has been associated with a group known as Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which openly calls for an end to “Western colonization” as the foundation of all evil. Their statement also contains all the expected Marxist drivel and claims of intersectionality. “We are committed to creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization, and also to combating anti-Blackness, queerphobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.” Hold on that last one. In the worldview of the ideological left, Israel is a “settler colonial state.”

Not coincidentally, that argument can be traced right to the campus of Columbia University, where the late Professor Edward Said pioneered “post-colonial studies” and the argument that Israel’s existence and founding is the result of imperialism and colonialism, and thus Israel exists only as a form of oppression.

The CUAD group also states: “All systems of oppression are interlinked: the fates of the people of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” That’s a lot to handle between classes.

The group has openly supported Hamas and celebrated its leader at the time, Yahya Sinwar, and was reported to have removed an Instagram post stating, “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Sure looks like it.

Do the nations of the West have the courage to defend our own civilization and our own values? We believe in free speech and other constitutional freedoms, but Mahmoud Khalil is not an American citizen. Many European nations have undermined their own national security by accepting unprecedented numbers of immigrants (legal and illegal) who openly express hatred for their host nation and solidarity with its enemies. The academic left and all the predictable groups will claim the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is an attack on academic freedom and the very purpose of the university. All that is rubbish, but you can count on lawyers lining up to take the case and make the argument.

By the way, Homeland Security officials deported a physician over the weekend after she attempted to enter the United States with a visa after she “openly admitted” to supporting the terrorist group Hezbollah and attending the funeral of its leader. Major media reported that Dr. Rasha Alawieh had photographs of Hassan Nasralla, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on her phone, along with those identified as Hezbollah’s “fighters and martyrs.” Get this: Dr. Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist, holds an appointment on the faculty of Brown University, another Ivy League university.

Western Civilization has enemies, and plenty of them are found among students and professors on our elite campuses. That civilization will either defend itself or surrender. Any civilization that encourages its enemies to populate its elite institutions is just announcing its surrender, and will deserve its defeat.