Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and the New 'Palmer Raids' (Part I)

Deportation as a weapon—from Emma Goldman to Mahmoud Khalil

By now I’m sure you have seen the video: masked agents abduct a Muslim woman off a street in Somerville, Massachusetts as she is on her way to break the Ramadan fast with friends. She is a PhD student, a Fulbright scholar. And just like millions of others in the United States where the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the right of citizens and non-citizens to free speech, she is someone who has spoken out against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It is for this reason, we must assume, that she was surveilled for two days by undercover agents, then abducted and handcuffed by plain-clothes captors who misidentified themselves as the “police” (which they are not), and then placed in the back seat of a car and whisked away—ultimately, we learn, to a concentration camp in Louisiana. The same state where U.S. agents have taken Mahmoud Khalil.

One hundred and six years earlier, in 1919,…