Two weeks ago, a judge ordered the release of a 34-year-old named Mohsen Mahdawi, a graduate student detained weeks earlier by Department of Homeland Security agents in Vermont. The usual suspects, including pundits, professors, and our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, celebrated Mahdawi’s newfound freedom, arguing that detaining him—during his naturalization interview, no less—was an egregious overreach and that the Trump administration had no good case to make against Mahdawi. It was such a perfect storm of virtue signaling, complete with Mahdawi himself delivering a defiant speech from the courthouse steps, that the facts, as they usually do in such cases, were drowned out by the sound and fury.
Who, then, is Mahdawi, and should he be granted that greatest of privileges, an American citizenship? Thanks to the work of journalist David Collier and others, we now have a much better idea of the truth, which, it turns out, wasn’t all that hard to find. While The New York Times, for example, portrayed Mahdawi as just two clicks beneath the late Pope Francis on the sainthood scale, Collier did something much less breathless and much more old-fashioned: he listened to what Mahdawi was saying and then simply checked the facts.
As anyone who has seen Mahdawi tell his life story, on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, knows, his activism began when he was 10 years old, when his best friend was shot and killed in front of him at the al-Fara refugee camp, not far from Nablus. It’s a heartbreaking story; it’s also one that is very easy to corroborate, as a plethora of Palestinian and international human rights organizations provide detailed accounts of Palestinian civilian casualties. And so, anyone interested in doing what historians, scholars, and journalists were all trained to do is free to consult with these records and check the relevant year for any children shot and killed by the Israeli army.
Do that, and you’ll discover that the answer is zero. One child did die at al-Fara during the relevant time frame, but he was hurt by an explosive gas canister, not a bullet, and his fatal injury occurred in a remote field, not in the heart of the crowded camp, as Mahdawi had repeatedly said.
By now, I imagine some readers clucking their tongues, arguing that even if a young man misremembered some details of his traumatic childhood, we oughtn’t assume malice. Very well! But Mahdawi’s story gets more picaresque. During one single night as a 12-year-old, he told the media on several occasions, he was forced to scrape seven bodies off the wall and collect the human remains of his friends and neighbors massacred by the Israel Defense Forces in a vicious attack. Consult the facts again, and you’ll learn that during the years in question, the years of the Second Palestinian Intifada, only four people died in al-Fara, or roughly one person per year. That’s a different reality than seven casualties in a single night.
And if that’s not enough, Mahdawi’s social media accounts are also thick with blatant and vile antisemitic incitement, including the chant “Khaybar Khaybar Ya Yahud,” referring to a battle in 628 at the Arabian city of Khaybar during which the Prophet Muhammad slaughtered many of the town’s Jewish residents. The call, popular with Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, is widely understood to be a threat that Muslims will soon return to massacre all living Jews and has therefore been classified as hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League and other civil rights groups.
All of which brings us back to Mahdawi’s current legal predicament. You are free to take the side of DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, and argue that American citizenship is a privilege, and that “when you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.” Or you could take the opposing viewpoint and claim that denying a U.S. permanent resident the right to naturalization requires meeting a higher evidentiary bar, and that while Mahdawi was an organizer of some raucous anti-Jewish protests at Columbia University, his actions do not merit denaturalization.
What you cannot do, however, is lie.
Dr. Asaf Romirowsky is a historian and the Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East as well as the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
