The Media Research Center has a thing for dishonestly smearing protesters as terrorists, even though it doesn’t have any actual evidence to back it up. Jorge Bonilla served up that bogus narrative again in a March 21 post:
The media continue to fall over themselves in order to protect the reputations of suspected jihadists on our college campuses, as they face deportation pursuant to current immigration law. And once again, they continue to raise the free speech straw man as they attempt to create sympathies for these detainees.
Watch NBC’s report on Georgetown academic Bidar Khan Suri in its entirety[:] […]
Once again, a terror-adjacent foreign national with a legal right to work and live in the United States is the beneficiary of the media’s deployment of a straw man defense. Whether it’s this Georgetown academic, or Mahmoud Khalil, or the Hezbollah doctor that was recently deported, the media’s defense of choice is free speech.
No one is looking to strip anyone’s free speech rights, and people are free to say what they want. In this case, though, there is some of that free speech that gets weighed against national security risks pursuant to federal law- which may lead to deportation of the individual that exercised that free speech. And no one is exempt from that.
Given that Suri has only been accused of supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel on social media — something that is not illegal — it is very much a free speech issue, and it’s obvious to everyone but Bonilla that the Trump administration is trying to strip Suri’s free speech rights and Suri is not free to say what he wants; indeed, Bonilla can’t be bothered to prove that Suri said anything that caused a “national security risk.” While Suri’s wife’s father had once served as an adviser to a Hamas leader, there’s no evidence that Suri took part in protests, the Department of Homeland Security has not provided evidence to back up its claim of his “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism,” and it has offered no evidence Suri has broken any laws.
Despite all that, Bonilla concluded by huffing: “By advocating for this academic with literal familial ties to Hamas, the medieval savages that executed the barbaric attacks on October 7th, the media remain stuck in their pattern of usefully idiotic terror apologia.” Seems like Bonilla is the real useful idiot here — he’s reflexively willing to smear people as terrorists whom he refuses to prove have ever committed a crime.