An Open Letter to Mahmoud Khalil and Noor Abdalla’s Newborn Child

Dear Little One,

I do not know your government name. But I know what my government wants to name you. Criminal. Terrorist. Problem. A threat to national security. Better off dead. Everything they’re naming your father: Mahmoud Khalil. Everything except a precious child of God, which you are.

When I heard two plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents abducted your father for protesting the genocide in Gaza, I trembled. When I found out he was captured at Columbia University, where I teach, right in front of your mother, Noor, who had been carrying you in her womb for eight turbulent months, my chest sank into my stomach.

I have not stopped thinking of you since. Your heart has been beating on the door of my conscience.

I’m here to tell you, Little One, that the world is yours. All of it. Not because you have the right to own the Earth, but because you have a responsibility to steward its survival and splendor.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I was surprised your father was taken. I’m the child of persecuted people who were kidnapped, locked in chains, and ripped away from their families by the founders of this country. I know America became the most powerful nation on Earth by seizing the labor of Black folks and the land of Indigenous people. I also know that Columbia, where your father helped lead the student protests, was never an institution that values freedom—academic or otherwise. It is a gatekeeper of the U.S. empire and the largest real estate owner in New York City.

That’s why I won’t belabor what the circumstances of your birth already prove. Fascism is here. It is criminal to learn. Telling the truth can get you doxxed, locked up, or kicked out of the country. Nobody is safe.

I wish this were not the case. I wish I could write to you about the beauty of the Earth without the brutality of its inhabitants. I wish I could show you the majesty of the Amazon, the Earth’s largest rainforest, without the greedy CEOs that have remade it into a commodity. I wish I could describe the sound and smell of Baltimore, Miami, and St. Louis without the pop! of a cop’s gun or the stench of a homeless woman languishing on the street.

I wish I could paint you a picture of your people, the Palestinian people, without barren olive trees, countless checkpoints, shopping malls built atop graves, and a 25-miles-long open-air prison where over 50,000 Palestinians, including nearly 16,000 children, have been slaughtered by the Israeli military. I wish I could read you a story without the cries of a mother and her baby buried beneath rubble.

But I’m afraid that the writing is on the wall, Little One. And the wall—whether snaking through Palestine or enclosing the borders and prisons of America—is stained with blood and wrapped in barbed wire.

I do not mean to frighten you. Only to share what you need to know to survive. Not just your little limbs and endearing eyes, but your precious heart. For those who think they hate you will attack your inner life. Do not be complicit. We can only lose if we surrender the sword of truth and the shield of self-regard. So guard your heart. Reject bitterness and hatred. Heartbreak is better than having no heart at all.

The truth is: It is themselves they fail to love. And this is but one symptom of the sickness we bear today. The decay of moral life, the death of the human spirit.

But all is not lost. The miracle of this moment is that even genocide cannot exterminate our will to live, nor the love that endures through the pain. This is what makes you profoundly dangerous to the powers that be, although you have yet to take your first step or mumble your first word. For you are proof of irrepressible life.

A new world is not waiting to be born. It is here!

I caught a glimpse of its beauty at Columbia’s encampment. Sprawled between sleeping bags was a makeshift library, medical clinic, food stations, art murals, music circles, and signs that read “Stop Funding Genocide” and “Jews for Free Palestine.” Muslim students held Jummah while Jewish students observed Seder and Christians organized Sunday service. Professors and organizers co-led teach-ins on global politics and the history of student activism as kids flew kites and police helicopters hovered above.

There was no fee to learn or break bread or receive medical support. The only debt we accrued is the love and care we owe to one another. The encampment was education (and life!) at its best. Not because it was perfect. It wasn’t. But because it modeled what it means for a multiracial and multifaith community to learn how to live together and support each other.

Some will try to convince you that opponents of genocide are champions of hate. Don’t be fooled by their lies. Their efforts to defame your father and all those acting with moral courage reveal who they are, not you.

James Baldwin, who came of age not far from where your father was abducted, knew this better than any writer I’ve read. In 1963, just a few months before four Klu Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, brutally murdering four black girls during Sunday school, he penned a letter to his teenage nephew, James. “I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name.”

Little One, know this. The world will try to define you by your zip code, skin color, religious tradition, and native tongue. And some will try to make you feel small and worthless. But identity is a birthright, not a birthmark. Your right, and responsibility, is to decide who you will grow up to be.

I pray you grow strong and beautiful. I pray you grow to be curious and committed to something bigger than yourself. I pray you cherish life, even when it hurts. I pray you and your father laugh together beneath the shade of olive trees. I pray you and your mother dance until the stars shimmer. I pray you reap the fruits of their labor, and all of us who sow seeds of freedom on this wretched Earth. I pray you fight so that, one day, no child will become a martyr. I pray you always believe another world is possible. And that—even beneath the shadow of death—there is beauty in the struggle.

When I found out you were born, I felt a mixture of fury, relief, and joy. I hate that your father is trapped in a cage in Louisiana, over 1,400 miles away, as your mother brought you into this world in New York City. I hate that this government kept him from holding her hand and hearing your very first cry. I wept at the idea of you weeping without his tender touch and wonderstruck eyes.

And yet, I thank God you entered History’s gates at such a time as this. I know that may sound strange, even cruel. If we do not change course, by the time you’re able to read this letter, Miami might drown; the Amazon may be no more; and another generation of Palestinian children will have grown up beneath war-torn skies. This is not the world any child should inherit, or any adult should have to endure.

But, alas, here you are. And I’m here to tell you, Little One, that the world is yours. All of it. Not because you have the right to own the Earth, but because you have a responsibility to steward its survival and splendor.

The sunset is yours to cherish. The evergreen is yours to tend and explore. Children are yours to raise, teach, and protect. Elders are yours to learn from and look after. Walls are yours to tear down. Wars are yours to end. Secrets are yours to keep. Ancestors are yours to grieve, honor, and avenge. Your parents are yours to love. And you, you are ours to keep! We belong to each other.

Please know that you are loved. And that, with love, we will fight for your life, and for your father’s life, and for every and all life—to the death.

Sumud and Salām,

nyle