On March 8, United States federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University, for potential deportation. The arrest came as part of President Donald Trump’s new policy of revoking the visas or green cards of Hamas supporters to crack down on antisemitic and terrorism-supporting campus demonstrations.
Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, campus protesters have harassed Jewish students, vandalized college property, and burned American flags.
Khalil distributed Hamas-supporting flyers and printed materials, organized break-ins of campus buildings and classrooms, posted anti-American sentiments online, and called for “armed struggle” in his activism for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) student organization. These potentially constitute violations of federal laws against material support for terror, conspiring to promote disorderly conduct, and sedition – all exceptions to protected speech.
Yet Khalil’s arrest has met with staunch opposition, expressed in a letter signed by Democrats in Congress, and thousands of social media posts that support him. A federal judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation pending full legal proceedings.
Khalil’s case raises questions as to why Americans are defending terrorism-supporting protests on campus, while ignoring the plight of the currently targeted Alawites and Christians facing violence and ethnic cleansing in Syria by Islamists with an ideology identical to that of Hamas.
Gaza has been the hyper-focus of the global “human rights” agenda since the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Though Israel’s difficult and asymmetrical war on Hamas only began after the organization’s murder of more than 1,200 innocent people and the kidnapping of 251 people, a “human rights” agenda has been weaponized against Israel by NGOs and the international community: the United Nations, its International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and at times the European Union.
The United Nations, for example, inexplicably accepted as fact death statistics provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and quoted them as fact. The “ministry,” though, has provided unsubstantiated numbers that were proven to be fabricated.
For instance, the numbers of civilians purportedly killed were intermingled with those of militants. Some numbers were statistically impossible as reported over time; rosters of the deceased contained discrepancies and false names, and included natural deaths.
Still, NGOs, the UN, the ICJ, and ICC, in their cases against Israel and its representatives, depicted Israel’s urban warfare against Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” The ICC issued arrest warrants for “war crimes” against Israel’s prime minister and minister of defense based on Hamas’s information, and the UN called for a ceasefire without demanding that Hamas release hostages, some of them children and the elderly.
Double standardness and willful blindness
Compare this international reaction to that of the aftermath of the December 2024 Islamist overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), in which at least 1,000 Alawites and Christians were murdered. Despite his al-Qaeda and ISIS background, and the sectarian killings, the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has been mainstreamed and internationally legitimized.
He met with UN Secretary-General António Guterres on March 4, on the sidelines of the Arab League Summit in Cairo. In December 2024, he met with American diplomats, and in January he met with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in Damascus, while also meeting with Arab leaders.
In addition, Reuters reported that Syria’s Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani is set to attend an EU-hosted donor summit in Brussels on March 17 – the first time Syria’s new government will be formally represented at this yearly conference.
The West's willful blindness to HTS has been stunning. At most, Michael Ohnmacht, the European Union’s chargé d’affaires to Syria, made a March 9 statement urging all parties to “exercise restraint” and respect Syrian diversity, without directly blaming al-Sharaa or HTS.
Germany and France condemned the atrocities on March 8 and 9, with Germany calling reports “shocking,” but neither explicitly criticized al-Sharaa, focusing instead on “accountability.”
The “human rights industrial complex’s” double standard – a scathing critique of Israel, which has, in complete comportment with international law, fought Hamas Islamist militants who massacred Israeli civilians – while treating al-Sharaa and HTS with kid gloves for doing the same to Alawites and Christians in Syria – is the height of hypocrisy.
It closely parallels the irony of progressive college students protesting in support of murderous terrorists Hamas, while no campus protests were held for murdered Alawites or Christians.
The selective outrage at the democratic Jewish state of Israel, while turning a blind eye or downplaying the sectarian violence and genocidal tribal murder perpetrated by HTS supporters in Syria, is a matter of political convenience.
Israel has been a target for “human rights” political warfare because it is convenient to corner Jews and the Jewish state, while it is politically inconvenient – and politically incorrect – to criticize Sunni-Shi’ite tribal clan warfare in Syria or anywhere else.
This is why the international community and the Western Left have failed to uphold, and instead uproot, human rights. They understand that the real violators pose the real threat to Western civilization, as proclaimed in an Instagram post by Khalil’s organization.
The West’s mission is clear. The UN and its associated bodies must overcome and confront their fear of the extremist al-Qaeda-Hamas-ISIS-Iran-proxy matrix if they wish to salvage what is left of human rights.
Failure to do so will cause the system to self-destruct, putting the last nail in the coffin of the human rights discourse, as its weak condemnation of clan and sectarian genocide in Syria has so graphically illustrated.
The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
