Last Saturday, federal agents made the first arrest in the Trump Administration’s promised campaign to deport international students who participated in protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza on their college campuses. Syrian-born Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, was taken from his home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in front of his wife, who is eight months pregnant.
In a statement following the arrest, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Khalil—who has not been charged with a crime—had “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and that other such activists risked having their visas and green cards cancelled under the authority of a January executive order that many analysts have compared to Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban. Since Khalil’s arrest, The Atlantic has reported the administration has another green card holder in its sights. A judge has since halted Khalil’s deportation, and he remains in detention in Louisiana. Following his arrest, the White House shared a photo of Khalil to its social media accounts with the text: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.”
The Trump Administration’s targeting of Khalil and other Palestine solidarity activists is the latest flashpoint in a cascade of global anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment. But analysts say it’s also an attack on freedom of speech and the right to protest. And while xenophobia and Islamophobia have long histories in the United States, their convergence in the context of U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza has left many in the United States and abroad fearful for the future.
Since taking office, the Trump Administration has wielded the Palestinian solidarity movement on college campuses as a tool to crack down on dissent. The administration is reportedly using artificial intelligence technologies to scan the social media accounts of international students for evidence they are “pro-Hamas,”which Middle East analyst Yousef Munayyer called proof that “Palestine is the canary in the coal mine of authoritarianism and repression.”
Officials have also promised to halt federal funding for schools that allow “illegal” demonstrations on campus, later announcing the administration would cancel $400 million in funding to Columbia University, where Khalil was a student, due to its “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” That accusation comes as student activists are suing Columbia over its harsh response to Palestine solidarity protests, after the university brought in police officers armed with guns and sledgehammers to evict a student encampment and carry out mass arrests.
Elia Ayoub, the United Kingdom-based Lebanese writer of Hauntologies and co-founder of the From the Periphery media collective, sees parallels between the anti-Jewish propaganda and policies of Nazi Germany and other Western powers during the rise of global fascism in the 1930s, and the types of racist and Islamophobic rhetoric common today. In each case, he says, religious minorities have been cast as alien, foreign, and fundamentally incompatible with Western civilization.
“If democracy is understood as equality under the law, and this is diminished by a ‘lesser than’ rhetoric, that doesn’t just victimize the specific groups it’s targeting, it erodes the fundamental principle that the state is supposedly built on.” Ayoub says, adding that Western support for Israel has shifted how Islamophobia takes shape. “Today, it’s less a matter of fighting the Taliban or ISIS or whatever, but of supporting Israel’s project, the genocide in Gaza, more explicitly and unconditionally.”
For Ayoub, the character of today’s anti-Muslim sentiment parallels the Islamophobic rhetoric that abounded in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and throughout the “war on terror,” during which former President George W. Bush made some effort to deny that his policies broadly targeted Islam, but also presented the war to the public as part of a Christian crusade. “And today, you have in power people who are messianic crusaders,” says Ayoub. “They’re thinking about these issues, vis-à-vis Israel-Palestine.”
U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza has only emboldened those who embrace the “crusade” rhetoric against Arabs and Muslims at home. Anti-Muslim hate speech has spiked online in the months since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported that it received more than 8,000 complaints in 2023—the highest number it’s recorded—with almost half of all complaints filed in the final three months of that year.
Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of Chicago CAIR, tells The Progressive that the “notion that America is more American with white, Christian, English-speaking populations—versus those who might be brown or Muslim or Hindu or Spanish-speaking, or something else” is just one of the factors fueling anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment. Rehab sees growing challenges for the community under the administration of President Donald Trump, including changes to asylum procedures, raids by immigration authorities, and the White House’s unflagging support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These challenges are especially present in Chicago, which is home to the largest Palestinian community in the United States.
“When there’s a demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians and Arabs in the administration, and a belittling of their experiences and suffering, and chest-beating in support of the aggressors. . . .the attacks on freedoms of students, on protesters and those who bear different opinions and political views from the administration, all of that feeds into Islamophobia,” Rehab says.
The attacks on the Muslim and Arab communities go beyond official policy. In February, Elon Musk posted on X a list of Arab- and Muslim-American charities that he called “terrorist organizations.” Among them were the Islamic Relief Agency, which focuses on disaster and emergency aid, Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, which promotes gender equity and civil rights, and the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which provides free medical treatment to Palestinian children.
“The Orwellian attacks on civic life and civil organizations are concerning,” Rehab says, because it raises the possibility “that they would come after any organization whose politics they don’t like.”
Some of the groups on the list Musk shared have been previously targeted with similar accusations: In 2014, Israel accused Islamic Relief of funding Hamas, though an audit by the British professional services company KPMG found no evidence to support this claim. And in 2023, reporting by The New Yorker found evidence of a smear campaign by the United Arab Emirates against Islamic Relief, trying to link it to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The United States is far from the only country dealing with a growing crisis of Islamophobia. Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric is also on the rise in Europe, where there is significant overlap between Muslim and migrant communities. Analyzing survey data from 2022, an October study by the E.U. Agency for Fundamental Rights found that nearly half of Muslims in the European Union said they experienced racism, compared to 39 percent in 2016, with those in Austria, Germany and Finland reporting the worst levels of discrimination. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch’s Almaz Teferra said in an interview that anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim incidents had surged in the European Union since October 7. But rather than taking stock, E.U. countries “specifically called on Muslims to distance themselves publicly from antisemitism—as if antisemitism in Europe could be attributed solely to an entire ethnic or religious minority.”
Last month, a report from the corporate accountability group Ekō found that the social media companies Meta and X approved ads in German, for their German markets promoting violent hate speech against migrants, including calls for their murder and imprisonment. The ads were pulled before their scheduled run in the days leading up to the German federal election in February.
In the end, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party took second place in the federal polls, with the active backing of Musk—who the E.U. Commission accused in January of interfering in foreign elections. And while the other major parties have said they won’t form a coalition with the AfD, they have adopted many of its anti-migrant policies. Meanwhile, in December, one day after the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was ousted—after nearly fourteen years of war and more than fifty of dictatorship—Germany’s current center-left government announced it would freeze any pending asylum applications from Syrians, as did France, the United Kingdom, and several other European powers.
Still, despite the rise of far-right, nativist elements globally, Ayoub sees reason for hope. “The guise of the far right is very chaotic and messy,” he says, noting that the early days of the Trump Administration have been marked by infighting. “So you can identify the fault line and work to make it worse for them . . . . [The far right] is not this force of nature—like ‘hey, we see this tsunami coming, and we have to run away.’ It’s not. These are people, and people can be defeated.”
