Who Is More American Donald Trump or Mahmoud Khalil?
What makes one a patriot?
What good is one’s faith if a Texas church cannot protect you from an ICE raid, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
What will an education do for you if an ICE raid will interrupt your Maryland classroom, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
What good is free speech against ICE’s equipment, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
To be a patriot is to hold onto American principles and strive for America’s positive potential. Blindly accepting everything occurring in the United States is antithetical to patriotism. Mahmoud Khalil practiced the most American of principles: civil disobedience. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said of the participants of The Boston Tea Party, “There’s nothing that expresses a massive civil disobedience anymore.” American civil disobedience is a proud tradition, having been practiced by the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Rosa Parks, César Chávez, and it is not yet a dead tradition. The truest essence of the American spirit is found in civil disobedience, in questioning authority, Mahmoud Khalil has the American spirit within him.
What is un-American: battling against and asserting un-American principles such as denying free speech. Donald Trump, by the very act of illegally arresting Mahmoud Khalil sheerly for expressing a difference of opinion, has shown himself to be un-American. Trump, being the fascist that he is, has made Mahmoud Khalil a political prisoner due to a thought crime. We need to go no further to prove this point: Mahmoud Khalil is more American than Donald Trump.
Mahmoud Khalil’s “presence is contrary to [your] national and foreign policy interests, and [he is] not welcome here” because of Trump’s un-American, unpatriotic beliefs. We can not let the unpatriotic define patriotism and the un-American dictate what America is. Yet, it is deeply un-American people like Donald Trump who have been allowed to imprison the American spirit and claim it as their emblem.
The Tlingit hold a practice of selling emblems: the tribe/clan that emblem was sold to gains the power of that emblem. We have sold out our emblem of free speech to hucksters who equate free speech with the right to use slurs and the power to shut down adversarial words. Mahmoud Khalil never sold any emblem and will pay the consequences for following the rightful principle courageously, as did John Lewis before him. Meanwhile, the un-American sellouts, like Trump, face no consequences and wield American power to enforce un-American principles, turning America into an adversary of its ideals.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” the goal here is to rid America of Americans, making America conform to an un-American fascist vision. But Trump’s national interests are not the national interests, our American interests are those of American patriots like Susan B Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Muhammad Ali, and Mahmoud Khalil.
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