Americans find it easier to mourn the death of free speech than the death of 60,000 Palestinians

A day after the kidnapping and imprisonment of Mahmoud Khalil, I found myself chatting with an American peer. It had been a little over five months since both of us had left America to pursue postgraduate education in the United Kingdom. In this time, both of us had been spectators to America’s right-wing spiral–the re-election of Donald Trump, the rise of big tech moguls moonlighting as policymakers, the ritual dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives in education, and, most recently, the arbitrary detentions and deportations of pro-Palestine permanent residents and international students. These were only some of the seemingly “un-American” acts that had come to define, embarrass, and scare liberal America. 

In a well-meaning gesture, he asked me, “given everything that’s happening right now… are you worried? Will you be visiting the U.S. anytime soon?” His nervousness stemmed from knowing about my involvement in pro-Palestine organizing in the United States–and the blacklists, sanctions, and online hate that had followed it. Despite having lived in Pakistan for most of my life, I explained to him that I was born in the U.S. and carry a blue passport—and therefore not as worried, nor as seemingly vulnerable, as many of my international student peers in the States. At least for now.   

He sighed with relief and proceeded to confess: Mahmoud Khalil’s imprisonment had changed how he viewed “the protests” in America. At first, pro-Palestine rhetoric had only simmered in the background of his college day-to-day, if at all. Now it was front and center of his mind––detained students and academics were, in fact, central to the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent. Free speech was under siege and something had to be done. America could not slide back into McCarthyism. 

“This is not who we are,” he sighed. 

On November 4, 1975, the University of Michigan hosted a teach-in titled The Bicentennial Dilemma: Who’s in Control? Speaking at the closing ceremony, Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani political scientist, professor, and public intellectual, delivered a lecture on “Revolution in the Third World”–a self-characterized “ramble” exploring what he stated were “organic linkages” between imperialism abroad and its consequences for authoritarianism in the U.S. A prominent anti-Vietnam war activist and a member of the Harrisburg Seven–a group accused of attempting to make a citizen’s arrest of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger–Eqbal was intimately aware of the repressive potential of the state. “A man cannot be violent and sadistic to his mistress, and gentle to his wife,” he declared, alluding to the inherent dangers of giving free rein to brutality abroad. By the time of his death in 1999, Eqbal had witnessed and long warned of the dangers posed by American–or American-sponsored–aggression in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Palestine, and beyond.

The 1960s and 1970s had seen the American-led devastation of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as the sustained support for authoritarian regimes in Brazil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, and South Africa. Today, the depraved violence of this era and its afterlives are well documented. Yet, at the time of his lecture, Eqbal was concerned deeply with how this violence had been rendered “invisible” for the average, apathetic, American eye. The U.S. war on the Global South was waged in service of strategic and capitalist imperatives. To Eqbal, these were reflections of a broader imperial design: to secure control over material resources while extending patronage to regional powers tasked with safeguarding American geopolitical ambitions. Concealing the brazen violence inherent to this project from the public view was a necessary illusion–maintained by both Democrat and Republican administrations to maintain popular consent for war.  

A complex and tightly managed regime of deception and control over information allowed the United States to not only preserve legitimacy for its imperialist endeavors but simultaneously allow the average American to remain couched in systemic ignorance. The empire was meant to remain distant and irrelevant. Americans, Eqbal argued, had remained insulated from defeat. Nor had they experienced the agony or the trauma of wars of subjugation, manufactured exclusively for non-American shores and peoples. America could not make sense of the tragedy because it had been deviously sheltered from it. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the world bore witness to American barbarism: massacres, carpet bombing, assassinations, and regime changes. These crimes tragically shifted the course of millions of lives across the world, upending entire nations. To the rest of the world, these wars were never invisible. Nor was the violence distant. It was inescapable and required confronting in the wreckage of daily life.

Cracks in the American consensus, Eqbal claimed, were laid bare when the “war started coming home.” American caskets were piloted back, along with scores of maimed veterans. Hundreds of billions had been spent in service of a war that seemed irredeemably lost. The fragility of the American illusion had prompted the state to tighten its grip on domestic life, especially as the grounds for dissent became more visible. The security apparatus of the state, initially deployed to manufacture consent for the war, now turned inwards. Anti-war activists like Eqbal himself were arrested. At Kent State, American students stared down the barrel of a gun. Watergate provided further evidence of the authoritarianism latent within American democracy, which now found itself violently and disparagingly unmasked. To Eqbal, it signified the counterrevolutionary currents of American imperialism discovering their roots at home. 

The war was no longer invisible to the American eye. 

My peer’s naivete is an expression of the systemic innocence built into the fabric of Americanness–a feature of American society that continues to help defend, mold, and perpetuate empire. Except now, the rest of the world has fewer reasons to tolerate these claims to innocence. As a televised genocide unfolds before our eyes–a blockade on humanitarian aid, water, fuel, thousands of murdered children, and blatant calls for ethnic cleansing–America has no excuses left. The atrocities in Gaza are unmistakably visible: on campuses, in the workplace, and on every phone screen. Turning a blind eye to the assault on Palestine is an active choice.

The occupation of Palestine has long been an investment for the United States–long before Trump vocalized his intent on annexing Gaza for commercial gain. This decades-long investment has been a means to placate Zionist voters, and lobbies, and to ensure that America’s strategic partnership with the apartheid state remained intact. Trump’s detentions must be situated within the larger, bipartisan context of America arming, enabling, and justifying Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land and lives. America’s “authoritarian turn” has manifested in various ways over the last eighteen months–the smokescreen of campus antisemitism, barring Palestinians from speaking at the Democratic National Convention, and a persistent refusal to reconsider financing Israel’s crimes against humanity. Even now, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reluctantly condemns Mahmoud Khalil’s detention, he caveats it by vilifying the “opinions and policies” that Khalil seemingly stands for. Cory Booker’s twenty-five-hour-long marathon speech made only the most negligible mention of Gaza–not to mention his consistent endorsement of the Israeli assaults–once again rendering the genocide insignificant for the liberal conscience. 

Yet, it is important to note that America’s silence–and its complicity–did not begin with Palestine, and will not end with it. As airstrikes ravage Yemen and murder people in residential areas, most of America remains hyper-fixated on the callousness with which a journalist was added to a Signal chat. The procedural ineptitude of office-bearers is scrutinized more than the fact that a five-year-old Yemeni boy, Hamad, was killed as a result of the “war plans” the world now has access to. These priorities remind us that the assaults on Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and my native Pakistan will never become visible to the American eye. They are a reminder of the looks of disbelief we would receive from Democrats upon revealing that we chose to not vote for Obama, Clinton, or Biden, owing to their genocidal legacies abroad.

And that remains the American dilemma: it is easier to mourn the death of free speech than it is to mourn the deaths of more than sixty thousand people in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil, the person, is a secondary concern–as is what he fights for. America fails to grapple with the fact that Mahmoud’s right to speak for his people’s liberation is inseparable from his Palestinian origin and the material plight of Palestine. What the liberal conscience elides, even in this moment, is that he was coerced into exercising that right by the ruthlessness of an assault bankrolled by the United States. Campaigns to resuscitate free speech cannot afford to ignore this fact. As America is shaken awake by images of abducted students–shoved into unmarked cars in broad daylight–circulating on the same phone screens that carry footage from Gaza, it must confront the reality that it remains responsible for bringing the war home. 

Eqbal’s polemic on “invisible wars” documents the enduring logic of American hegemony, and the tools that have been deployed to enforce it in successive decades. It is a historical retelling of American authoritarianism and its domestic casualties: the first responders, like Mahmoud Khalil, who, moved by the tragedy of imperial conquest and genocide, bear the brunt of state repression; and the insular masses that belatedly and reluctantly open their eyes to the erosion of freedoms at home–and home only. To many of us who have been protesting the genocide, the deportation of students is a shocking and disturbing development. But it is a development that cannot be understood in isolation, decontextualized from the wider, bipartisan architecture of state repression. Nor can it be untethered from the fact that it was nurtured in a climate of apathy–an apathy that has let countless lives, both at home and abroad, be consumed by the American imperial project. If liberal Americans still take pride in their freedoms, they must reckon with this one above all: the freedom to not look away. 

Asmer Asrar Safi
Asmer Asrar Safi is a recent graduate of Harvard University from Lahore, Pakistan and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the intellectual history of Muslim revolutionary traditions in 20th-century South Asia. He was a former member of the Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) Coalition, and currently organizes with the Pakistan Forum, a progressive diaspora-wide publication inspired by the work of Eqbal Ahmad.