The deportation proceedings initiated by the administration of the United States of America against the Algerian national, Mahmoud Khalil, and the Indian national, Badar Khan Suri, have aroused considerable interest for a variety of reasons.

First, since both individuals are married to American citizens, the judicial pronouncements in both cases will go some way in determining whether family ties of non-citizens accord them extra privileges. Had they not been married to Americans, both Khalil and Suri would either have been put on flights home or been compelled to exercise the ‘self-deportation’ option, as did Ranjani Srinivasan, another Indian citizen who was registered as a graduate student at Columbia University.

Secondly, it is important to remember that neither Khalil nor Suri is an illegal immigrant who could be peremptorily repatriated back to his country of origin. Nor, for that matter, had they overstayed their visa entitlements. At the time of their arrest, one was a graduate student at Columbia University and the other a post-doctoral researcher at Georgetown University. What was held against them was their apparent active support for Hamas, an organisation designated by the US administration as a terrorist body. In the case of Suri, whose wife is a naturalised American citizen from Gaza, the department of homeland security has charged him with “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism.” On his part, Khalil was the spokesman forthe students who were at the forefrontof demonstrations (occasionally violent) in and around Columbia after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Although he wasn’t a direct participant in the agitation, there is little doubt that the protestors justified the massacre of nearly 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. Additionally, the protestors harassed Jewish students, prevented many of them from attending classes, and taunted them with chants that included “Go back to Poland.”

Finally, while student protests involving a multiplicity of causes — both well-publicised and truly obscure — are part of campus life in most democracies, particularly in Western democracies where students often perceive themselves as an opinion-making vanguard, what explains the targeted and exemplary crackdown on those who have created an over-politicised livelihood for themselves over the Israel-Palestine conflict? What political message is Donald Trump seeking to convey?

In the annals of the post-War student protests in Western democracies, there has been a clutch of causes that have excited the imagination. The most significant of these were the anti-Vietnam War protests in the late-1960s. Those protests merged with an emerging counterculture to create a mindset that has formed the core of what is loosely described as the liberal mentality. Its long-term impact has been profound, particularly in the way it has moulded attitudes in the arts, media, academia and even multilateral bodies such as the United Nations. However, it is important to bear in mind that the political influence of post-1960s liberalism is wildly disproportionate to its electoral impact globally. What came to be known as the ‘silent majority’ won elections, only to find itself outflanked by an influential and articulate minority.

It is still too early to suggest that the impact of the Palestine solidarity campaigns will have the same social influence as the anti-Vietnam War upsurge more than five decades ago. What can be said with a measure of perverse certitude is that the transformation of Che Guevara into a pop icon and ‘Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, we shall fight, and we shall win’ into excitable cries of entitled disquiet have been matched by the keffiyeh as a fashion symbol and the Palestine flag as a universal symbol of protest. Neither the climate change activists nor those campaigning to pressure the whole of Europe to join a new crusade against Russia over Ukraine have been able to match the extraordinary visibility that the pro-Palestine campaign has managed in just over two years. It is as if the spectacle of Jewish blood spilt has been an intoxicating trigger.

Much of this over-excitement also stems from the wave of intellectual celebrity endorsement of Hamas’s massacre of the innocents on October 7, 2023. Many of these have been documented in “'Progressives’ and the Hamas Pogrom: An A-Z Guide” (October 2023 issue of Fathom, www.fathomjournal.org). A few examples are indicative.

Judith Butler, the celebrated guru of gender studies, wrote: “Understanding Hamas/ Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of the global Left, is extremely important.” The celebrated British psychoanalyst, Dylan Evans, tweeted on October 12: “It is rapidly becoming… clear that the so-called ‘final solution’ wasn’t ...final enough” and “It’s time to unleash total Jihad on Israel.” The lesser-known fixtures in academia were worse. Mike Tosca, an associate professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, tweeted: “Israelis are all pigs. Savages. Irredeemable excrement… may they all rot in hell.” Then there was the lecturer at Stanford University who asked Jewish and Israeli students in his class to identify themselves and stand in a corner, saying: “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” The lecturer, who was identified as one Ameer Hasan Loggins, was subsequently suspended by the university. And finally, there were those at the big demonstration in London on October 14 who chanted “Khaybar, Khaybur, Ya Yahud” invoking the victorious Muslim battle against the Jews in 628 CE. This would suggest that the accusation of support for the destruction of Israel — the ‘river to the sea’ slogan heard in the demonstrations — being intertwined with vicious anti-Semitism isn’t far off the mark.

Just as the onslaught of Woke and DEI led to a complete loss of common sense in the higher echelons of Western academia, the viciousness of the pro-Palestine protests led to university authorities looking the other way. They were intimidated into pretending that it was free speech and democracy. What else can explain the “It depends” response of the former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, when asked if it was permissible to call for genocide against Jews?

In the past, certainly during the Vietnam protests, there was no worthwhile counter-pressure on the campus authorities to temper youthful exuberance and prevent the wilful hijacking of the impressionable by professional agitators, what in the Indian context has been dubbed andolanjeevis by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Where Trump differs from the erstwhile Republican and conservative establishments is in positing the MAGA movement as a countervailing force that can, when necessary, use the coercive powers of the State to prevent turbulence in the American campuses. This is not to gloss over the reality of the Trump administration being the most pro-Israeli dispensation since 1948. The president and his support base also know fully well that those who secure the right to live in America aren’t necessarily those who adhere to what the legendary Superman professed: ‘truth, justice and the American way.’