By Seth Mandel
Tuesday, April 01, 2025
Amid the flurry of agitated headlines and stories about
the Trump administration’s supposed crackdown on immigrants’ “pro-Palestinian
speech,” the case of Momodou Taal is a cautionary tale.
Taal, a graduate student at Cornell, announced yesterday
that he is giving up his legal fight to stay in the country. Taal’s case was
probably the one with the biggest gap between the reporting and the reality,
and his deportation holds an important lesson for those inclined to take
anti-Zionist activists at their word.
The case against Taal was clear-cut, and Taal’s legal
challenge was cynical, dishonest, and frivolous. Moreover, Taal sought not only
to keep his visa but to legally cancel much or all of Trump’s executive order
combating anti-Semitism. Even if successful, Taal’s challenge to the order
would not have changed immigration law. So it was merely a gratuitous attempt
to unravel the civil rights of Jews on campus. And yet, he was painted in a
sympathetic light by journalists and activists whose aims aligned with Taal’s.
Let’s start at the beginning. In the spring of 2024,
students constructed a Hamas-inspired tent encampment on a disallowed quad.
They had deliberately
misled the school by “indicat[ing] there would not be any tents” in their
protest. Despite their dishonesty, the tentifada activists were offered another
area in which to set up their anti-Israel protest tents. They refused the
offer.
Momodou Taal was among the leaders of the group. He and
the others were warned that if they did not move their tentifada to the
approved area, students would be subject to disciplinary action including
suspension. Taal was therefore suspended.
None of this so far reflects well on Taal or poorly on
Cornell. But Taal was on a student visa, which meant this suspension was a
warning he’d have to take seriously: another suspension would almost certainly
mean the revocation of his visa.
Knowing this, Taal helped lead a protest a few months
later in which his group of pro-Hamas activists shoved past police guarding a
career fair for students and began deconstructing exhibits and banging pots and
pans. The group broke school safety rules and, of course, there is the matter
of assault and trespassing. So Taal was suspended
again. This triggered his visa cancellation.
Incredibly, the school made an absurdly magnanimous
gesture after Taal appealed his suspension. Interim Provost John Siliciano
decided to bar Taal from campus but let him do dissertation work remotely, thus
reinstating his academic participation and allowing him to keep his visa.
In this way, Taal was part of another pattern: Contrary
to the prevailing narrative, foreign students—especially those participating in
the Hamas solidarity camps—have been given special treatment that has not
generally been made available to U.S. students. Schools have not wanted to
cause foreign students to be deported, so they have bent the rules for them to
help them avoid the strict consequences of their lawlessness. This happened
earlier in the protest movement at MIT as well. These students were given wider
latitude to break rules because they are foreign students.
Taal’s sympathies for Hamas aren’t in question. His
response to the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres and sexual violence carried out by Hamas
against innocent Israelis was to tweet “Glory to
the resistance!” alongside a Palestinian flag. He also wrote “Today has shown
us what is possible when you are organized.” The pogrom appears to have made
him very happy.
Because Taal reveled in the attention from his Hamasnik
activism, and because he had already proved himself a good candidate for
deportation, there wasn’t much doubt he’d be held responsible for his actions
by the Trump administration. And so his visa was revoked, again, finally.
This is where Taal’s behavior gets uniquely obnoxious. He
sued the Trump administration to undo the anti-Semitism executive order and to
stop his deportation. He did so after his visa was revoked. The judge in Taal’s
initial hearing was
perplexed. “Any future harm alleged in their affidavits appears to be
speculative and even moot because of the revocation of Taal’s visa,” the judge
said.
Contrary to some reporting,
he was not punished for suing the Trump administration; he sued the Trump
administration in a partially successful attempt to fool reporters and
activists into misleading the public.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Taal announced yesterday
that he was self-deporting.
Taal’s statement is self-pitying and remarkably
dishonest, even for Taal. He lied about the entire affair and whined about
having to listen “ad nauseum” to the safety concerns of “Zionist students.” He signed off with “long
live the student intifada.”
There is no moral defense of Taal or his actions or what
he was asking the courts to do. And those who instinctively jumped to his
defense ought to engage in some self-reflection.
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