As MSNBC — not exactly a bastion of journalistic excellence — desperately continues its self-defeating efforts to portray Mahmoud Khalil, the antisemitic pro-Hamas activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University last spring, the network’s latest ridiculous claim is that the Trump administration is using “authoritarian logic” against the agitator.
On Saturday’s episode of MSNBC’s “Velshi,” guest-host Melissa Murray welcomed Khalil’s attorney, Raher Azmy, who warned, “They will” go after others. Murray followed up with a false claim:
So, regardless of where you fall on the Gaza question, this is really concerning just generally for the rule of law. This is someone who is exercising First Amendment rights and has been detained and hasn’t had an opportunity to exercise his due process rights to challenge his deportation, his detention. What does this mean for ordinary citizens, lawful green card holders, and all of us generally?
Before we get to Azmy’s response, Secretary of State Marco Rubio in early March flatly disagreed that Khalil’s First Amendment rights have been violated:
This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. If you tell us, when you apply, ‘Hi, I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa, I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages.
If you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us, when you apply for your visa, and by the way, ‘I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities, I intend to shut down your universities…
If you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa, I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that, once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it.
Bingo.
Here’s Azmy response to Murray:
Yeah, I mean, under the government’s pretty chilling authoritarian logic, one could be arrested, detained, and deported if you’re not a U.S. citizen simply because you disagree with the foreign policy objectives of the United States. And as Mahmoud suggests, that is not in no way limited to Palestine. That’s just the tip of the spear. But it’s a power they want to claim to go after other activists as well. And they will.
Lemme see… nonsense, nonsense, and more nonsense.
Neither Azmy nor Murray can cite a single example to support such ridiculous claims, all of which are simply scaremongering about nonsense, none of which are going to come true during Trump’s watch. That is, of course, unless Trump trots out the “Hitler” or “fascist” thingy and promptly tosses his “enemies” into “concentration camps.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC will continue doing MSNBC things — until the silly outlet is no more.
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