Mahmoud Khalil’s harrowing and unlawful detention on March 8th captured widespread attention after plain-clothes ICE agents handcuffed and forced the permanent resident and recent graduate of Columbia University into an unmarked vehicle. The events of that night have resonated deeply in public discourse ever since.
Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s pregnant wife, caught the arrest on video:
Born to Palestinian parents sheltering in a Syrian refugee camp, Khalil has been a fierce advocate for Palestinian freedom. While I don’t know him personally, I’m a Columbia PhD student directly involved with the anti-genocide divestment movement; all of us knew Khalil, at least in passing. His gentle voice and calm, yet passionate presence brought an air of steadiness to the chaos that lit my campus on fire during the months following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ordered the deportation citing an obscure federal statute, insists Khalil poses a foreign policy threat to the United States while the Trump administration argues that all pro-Palestinian activism, including Khalil’s, is antisemitic. According to critics, these allegations are a thinly-veiled pretext for undermining the First Amendment. These critics include Jewish groups and protesters demanding his release, some of whom disagree with Khalil’s politics.
Analysts warn this incident endangers higher education, immigrants, free speech, freedom of the press—and reveals the inherent injustice at work in the immigration enforcement system. But less attention has been paid to the role that white Christian nationalism has played in fostering the twin roots of Khalil’s arrest: McCarthyism and the historical intolerance for dissent.
McCarthyism and white Christian nationalism
Khalil’s arrest was not an anomaly, it was an inflection point; a moment encapsulating America’s current expressions of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hostility. But this moment is not without precedent. Contemporary allegations of “antisemitism” chill free speech and political dissent just as McCarthy-era accusations of communism did, fusing state repression with the imperatives of white Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism “blurs the distinctions between Christian identity and American identity,” mixing regressive politics and a religio-political devotion to one’s country. White Christian nationalism elides American belonging with white supremacy and conservative Christian morality, rendering non-whites and non-Christians not merely outsiders, but threats to the United States. This framework rejects diversity, equity, or inclusion (DEI) and is fundamentally antithetical to plurality, despite America’s foundational commitments to individual liberty and religious freedom.
America watched the anti-democratic mindset of white Christian nationalism on prime-time television during the Cold War’s McCarthy hearings, which presented “godless communism” as a threat to national security and moral purity. The Red Scare thrived on this vision, transforming dissent into heresy and elevating national loyalty to a form of religious devotion. The Truman Doctrine depicted communism as a contagion needing containment and Christianity became the remedy for the nation’s moral decay. Prominent evangelist Billy Graham and other influential public moralists linked communism to atheism and a broader moral decline, influencing American propaganda at home and abroad.
Understanding the US as an elect Christian nation, McCarthyism cast communism not as a mere political adversary but as an existential evil—a godless, foreign cancer infiltrating US institutions and governing bodies. Catholic Senator Joseph McCarthy drew upon the broader Protestant-infused nationalism that had long framed America’s enemies in racialized religious terms.
McCarthyist tactics reflected American governance’s long-standing attempts to systematically curb dissent through legal and extralegal means. The fervor fueling McCarthyism wasn’t simply about rooting out communists; it was about enforcing a vision of American identity—white, Christian, and uncritically patriotic. Such visions of patriotism required unwavering allegiance and rejected any form of critique or dissent.
From McCarthy to Mahmoud
The Cold War-era apparatus that enforced McCarthyism—the surveillance, blacklists, and crackdowns on those deemed “un-American”—laid the groundwork for the US’s current surveillance state, which disproportionately targets Arabs, Muslims, and other non-white, non-Christian individuals and communities.
Just as anti-communist rhetoric once served to purge academics, artists, and activists from public life, disingenuous allegations of antisemitism today warp legitimate concerns into a tool for criminalizing pro-Palestinian activism, paradoxically undermining the safety of Jewish communities. Such efforts erase nuance, blur distinctions, and dismiss critiques of Israeli policy as sinister threats to Jewish existence. All who call for an end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians—including Jews—are now accused of antisemitism and, following Rubio’s logic, may be seen as threats to national security.
This is not to suggest that antisemitism at Columbia and across the nation is a fiction; it is a deeply real and urgent problem that should be unequivocally condemned, like all forms of racism and bigotry. But the most consistent and pressing threat of US antisemitism has often been from the American political Right. The weaponization of “antisemitism,” according to Ben Lorber, allows “Christian nationalists [to] cynically position themselves as defenders of Jews while pursuing policies inimical to the safety and thriving of Jewish communities, along with our friends and neighbors.”
Khalil’s arrest and ongoing detention lays bare another uncomfortable truth: the precarious, liminal racial status of Arabs in America. Unlike other racialized communities, Arab Americans have been denied a coherent racial identity, suspended between erasure and hyper-visibility. On paper, the US Census Bureau classifies Arabs as white, but US government and law enforcement routinely deny Arab Americans the privileges and protections whiteness confers. This contradiction excludes Arab Americans from full American belonging while obscuring their struggles for racial justice within mainstream civil rights discourse.
At the same time, America’s security apparatus flattens the identities of Arabs and other Brown communities into the ever-expanding specter of “The Terrorist.” In the wake of 9/11, American Arabs and American Muslims find themselves hyper-visible as threats, and invisible as rights-bearing citizens and residents, portrayed in direct conflict with America itself (which is to say whiteness, Christianity, and US imperialism). Nowhere is this more evident than in the student encampments erected across campuses to protest Israel’s genocide and demand Palestine’s freedom, for which Columbia has emerged as the poster child.
Columbia’s complicity in Khalil’s detainment has a long and violent precedent in American history. During the Red Scare, universities blacklisted and purged dissident professors, including prominent academics like Chandler Davis and Moses Finley, who were dismissed for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Vietnam War era brought brutal crackdowns on student protesters; in 1968, Columbia administrators invited police to storm campus buildings, leading to the arrests of over 700 students and echoed in the arrests of 109 Columbia students occupying the same Hamilton Hall exactly 56 years later to the day.
All these incidents, culminating in Khalil’s arrest, demonstrate that universities will position themselves as neutral arbiters while actively enabling state violence against their own students to protect their own financial interests. But history also offers a different lesson. Student movements have long been the lifeblood of transformative change, refusing to accept the constraints imposed by the state and daring to imagine a different world. The repression witnessed today isn’t a sign of our weakness but of our strength. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest was meant to instill fear, to convince us that resistance is futile. But history tells us otherwise. Every era of repression has been met with a resurgence of struggle—a rupture and repair. This moment will be no exception.
