Essay: Safe
A protest demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil at Foley Square on March 10, 2025, in New York City. (David Dee Delgado / Getty Images)
First published on March 19, 2025
Who is safe in the United States?
tl:dr no one (even if white people think they are. They’re safer than most of us; true. But really: no one.)
For a brief moment five years ago the playing field of safety seemed to level slightly. Those who’d never experienced the terror of the unknown ahead or curfews enforced at gunpoint that kept you at home, became as unmoored as the rest of us in Covid-19 lockdown.
But that playing field has never and will never be level and we understood that safety, like normal, was never meant for all of us.
An anarchist feminist worth her fire will tell you that the State–the Fascist Daddy State not the Nanny one that the right wing whine about–sells you safety in exchange for obedience and I don’t want to be protected, I want to be free. Besides, I don’t carry the currency of lies required for such transactions. Fascism tries to sell me a limited edition version in return for my vote. I know it’s as fake as the handbags on Canal Street.
What is safety?
tl:dr an illusion (even if it’s packaged to white people in the U.S. as “You are safer than everyone else as long as the people in charge look like you because they will guarantee that people who don’t look like you are less safe which will make you suffer the illusion that you are safe. That is especially the case with white women. Donald Trump, who has assaulted at least two dozen white women, has told women he is their protector whether they like it or not. He means white women, not the rest of us)
And when you look close enough, you conclude there is nothing to see because you are not a “terrorist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” or a “gang member,” and therefore you must be safe. Because as Elon says, “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
“Mr. Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped. He was reminded of prior experience fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013. It was shortly after this that Mr. Khalil left Syria.”
So you don’t see that men in t-shirts and jeans, without a warrant, who refused to identify themselves abducted a man from his home, while threatening to also abduct his eight-month pregnant wife because she was filming the abduction and would not leave his side as they took him to an unmarked car. Or you look but you don’t see that it could happen to you because he does not look like you and he is Palestinian and is now a political prisoner in an immigration jail because he opposed Israel’s genocide in his homeland against people who look like him and whose bodies were shattered and incinerated by bombs your tax dollars financed.
And because those of us who have looked into the eyes of safety and seen the emptiness of a great deceiver are those of us who look and sound like Mahmoud Khalil, we know what it means to be abducted, and what it means for people you know to be forcibly disappeared, and what it means to be a political prisoner held without charge or trial and who is being punished for dissent
And because we know that the United States often does its dirty work abroad aka “extraordinary rendition,” we remember former CIA agent Robert Baer’s description of its outsourcing of horrors to the part of the world we come from.
"If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt."
The C.I.A.’s global kidnap, detention and torture operation known as “extraordinary rendition,” was adopted after the 9/11 attacks. Suspected militants who were captured in Afghanistan were sent to other countries, which held them in secret detention and allowed C.I.A. personnel to torture them.
Mahmoud, a refugee born in a refugee camp to refugees, fled one set of dirty hands to be caught by dirty hands here.
“Mr. Mahmoud felt as though he was being kidnapped. He was reminded of prior experience fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013. It was shortly after this that Mr. Khalil left Syria,” his lawyers wrote in a lawsuit demanding that the Columbia University graduate be released from custody immediately.
The refugee, son of the refugee, made refugee twice over, knows how illusory safety is.
“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I’m a political prisoner,” his letter from prison in the U.S. begins. “Who has the right to have rights?”
And because those of us who have been punished for dissent know safety to be the tyrant’s pacifier for the “people,” we know that the tyrant must assure his “people” that they have nothing to fear because they have nothing in common with those he punishes.
And so the far right, pro-Israel group Betar, that claimed credit for Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction, labeled him an “operative,” who was “promoting the eradication, the destruction and the devolution of western civilization.” You know, that great bastion of empathy.
Betar said that it had “been working on deportations and will continue to do so”, and warned that the effort would extend beyond immigrants. “Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month,” it boasted. Mahmoud Khalil is a permanent resident but “permanent” and “legal” are as illusory as safety under a fascist regime.
The Department of Homeland Security has accused Mahmoud Khalil of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” The White House said that pro-Hamas propaganda was distributed at the campus protests that he organized.
All because he protested a genocide.
“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I’m a political prisoner,” his letter from prison in the U.S. begins. “Who has the right to have rights?”
The State Department and the White House want to use a provision that allows green card holders to be removed from the country if they present “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The leap, frog, and a jump to passport holders being dragged away by men in t-shirts and jeans who do not identify themselves is not that difficult in Daddy’s Fascist State.
And so what safety for a mere visa holder in the time of fascism.
Just days after the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, U.S. authorities deported physician Dr. Rasha Alawieh to Lebanon after discovering "sympathetic photos and videos" of the former longtime leader of Hezbollah in her cell phone's deleted items folder. Dr. Alawieh, who held an H-1B visa, was detained at Logan International Airport in Boston after returning from a trip to Lebanon to see family. Her cousin then filed a lawsuit seeking to halt her deportation. Dr. Alawieh’s expulsion was despite a judge’s order that should have halted her immediate removal.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh. Photo via The Providence Journal
Dr. Alawieh has been employed by Brown Medicine, a non-profit medical practice affiliated with Brown University’s medical school. Following news of her deportation, Brown issued guidance advising its international students, staff and faculty to consider postponing or delaying personal travel outside the United States "out of an abundance of caution."
And you look at Dr. Alawieh and you see a woman in hijab and unless you see that to be a visibly Muslim woman in the U.S. is to fall through the cracks of a triple oppression–racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia–you don’t recognise that a lack of empathy is what is delivering “western civilization” to fascism.
And you want to talk about “sympathetic photos” that are enough to have you expelled from the country, have you seen the fascist propaganda published by Donald Trump’s Salvadoran sidekick Nayib Bukele of hooded and heavily armed guards in his Terrorism Confinement Centre subduing Venezuelan immigrants who have had their hair shaved and their hands and feet in shackles. The Trump regime calls the men “gang members” and “foreign terrorists?” Today’s renditions to dirty hands abroad.
Many of the deportees do not have U.S. criminal records, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official acknowledged in court documents. And they were deported under a law last invoked during wartime that doesn’t require them to be charged with a crime.
What many of them did have are tattoos.
In this photo provided by El Salvador's presidential press office, prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Sunday, March 16, 2025. AP/El Salvador presidential press office
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says the U.S. is paying El Salvador about $6 million "for the detention of these foreign terrorists.” The deportation to El Salvador of the 200 men, like Dr. Alawieh’s expulsion, happened despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring their deportations.
“Oopsie,” wrote Bukele on social media, which was then shared by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House.
Oopsie. So much empathy!
When you look but you don’t see that the terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, and gang members can be you, you labour under the false assumption that you are safe.
I can’t afford sadness right now and so I hastily purchase its cheaper fast fashion cousin, anger, even though I know its seams will fall apart as quickly as a dress’ from Zara.
It’s easy to pull the thread: three people I know, including a friend, have been forcibly disappeared by the Egyptian regime. Men in t-shirts and jeans entrapped me until the uniformed riot police could come and beat me, sexually assault me and drag me without arrest or charge to detention in 2011. One of my cousins is called Mahmoud. My sister is eight months pregnant. My brother was one of the thousands of Muslim men who had to submit to special registration under the Patriot Act merely for being Muslim in post-9/11 USA and did not leave the country for 10 years so that he would not lose his job or visa. The Muslim Ban is about to restart. The Patriot Act is as fascist as it sounds and it targets Muslims today as in post-9/11 USA but you are safe because you aren’t Muslim or a terrorist or have sympathetic pictures on your phone and are not gang members who Trump uses to keep white women frightened, grateful and safe
When you look but you don’t see that the terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, and gang members can be you, you labour under the false assumption that you are safe.
I moved to the U.S. in 2000. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, I have learned that many white people in the U.S. have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and its institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from state power, which they think will work for rather than ever hurt them. That stubborn belief in U.S. exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought. Black, Indigenous, and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions.
And so no matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism -- be it via military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists -- warned and warned, white people in the U.S. arrogantly shook their head that it couldn’t happen here. And now they’re shaking their head that it couldn’t happen to them because they’re not terrorists or terrorist sympathizers or gang members.
When you look and see yourself in the terrorist, the terrorist sympathizer, and the gang member is when you recognise the illusion and more importantly delusion of safety. And that’s when you recognize empathy for the weapon it is against fascism and that’s when you see why Elon hates it.
Who has the right to have rights?
Five years ago we were all wondering if we were safe
Who in the United States is safe?
None of us are safe unless all of us are safe. Because none of us are free unless all of us are free.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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