It seems the Trump administration was right about Mahmoud Khalil. He really is a hothead with iffy views that grate against America’s geopolitical interests.
Khalil is the Syrian-born activist who played a key role in the ugly rage against Israel that gripped Columbia University in New York City last year. He made global headlines in March when he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and detained for 104 days as the State Department investigated his campus antics.
His Israel-bashing activism, which feverishly depicts the Jewish nation as the most wicked nation and America as an idiot for supporting it, is harmful to our foreign policy, said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So we might have to send him packing.
Khalil became a cause celebre among campus rads and the Berniecrat Left. “What about his free speech?!” cried people who’ve spent the past decade cancelling feminists for saying you can’t have a penis and be a woman. Eventually Khalil was released, after a judge ruled his detention “unconstitutional”. Phew, said his witless cheerleaders, for this is a man of good moral temperament, not an anti-Israel bigot.
Really? A new interview with Khalil suggests otherwise. It suggests Rubio and the rest were on to something when they furrowed their brows over these foreign visitors to the US who whip up crazed animus against Israel.
Khalil sat down for a chat with Ezra Klein of the New York Times. And he has damned himself with his own words.
Consider the Hamas question. Khalil and his champions insisted he was not “pro-Hamas”. Okay, well maybe they can explain why he speaks so sympathetically about Hamas’s most barbarous act: its October 7 pogrom.
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t avoid such a moment,” he says of that atrocity. We? Why would someone who opposes Hamas use the first-person plural pronoun when talking about its mass violence?
His words lend a gloss of legitimacy to what Hamas did that day. It was “just” an attempt to “break the cycle”. It was a “desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians… are part of the equation”.
Khalil makes October 7 sound like a therapeutic cry for help. The only people who were crying for help that day, Mahmoud, were the Israeli women being raped and the Israeli children being murdered.
He pays lip service to the tragic nature of October 7. “Targeting civilians is wrong…”, he says. “But” – but! – “Palestinians don’t have to be perfect victims.”
Wait, what? What a messed-up thing to say about the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. He seems to be implying that anyone who comes down too heavily on October 7 is making unreasonable demands of Palestinians to be “perfect victims”. No, we’re just asking them not to invade Israel and butcher its men, women and children.
He also says there was a “manufactured hysteria about anti-Semitism at Columbia”. Would he, or anyone else on the Left, so cavalierly minimise racism against any other minority? I doubt it.
Anti-Semitism was rife at Columbia during those unhinged protests against Israel. Jewish students were harassed, the Jewish nation was branded the “scum of nations” and the “pigs of the Earth”. Shame on Khalil for downplaying this explosion in Jew-hate among Ivy League brats in 2024. He also defends the chilling chant “Globalise the Intifada”. The Second Intifada (2000-2005) involved some violent acts, he graciously concedes, but it was “overwhelmingly” a “peaceful” uprising.
What drivel. A thousand Israelis were massacred in the Second Intifada. They were torn apart in bus bombings, blown up at pizzerias, slain at discotheques. First we had CNN referring to “mostly peaceful” BLM riots. Now we have Khalil yapping about a mostly peaceful violent uprising against the world’s only Jewish state.
Jews in the West are right to be sickened by the chant “Globalise the Intifada”. They know what it means: that Hamas’s violent loathing of Jews should be exported around the world.
The interview is an eye-opener. It confirms just how pathological the “Palestine cause” has become not only for Khalil but for huge numbers of privileged radicals across the West.
Their frothing contempt for Israel has robbed them of their moral reason and even basic decency. To such an extent that they can say “we” and make apologetic noises in relation to that day of abject savagery.
Does America benefit from having people like Khalil? After this interview, many will say a resounding No.
It seems the Trump administration was right about Mahmoud Khalil. He really is a hothead with iffy views that grate against America’s geopolitical interests.
Khalil is the Syrian-born activist who played a key role in the ugly rage against Israel that gripped Columbia University in New York City last year. He made global headlines in March when he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and detained for 104 days as the State Department investigated his campus antics.
His Israel-bashing activism, which feverishly depicts the Jewish nation as the most wicked nation and America as an idiot for supporting it, is harmful to our foreign policy, said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So we might have to send him packing.
Khalil became a cause celebre among campus rads and the Berniecrat Left. “What about his free speech?!” cried people who’ve spent the past decade cancelling feminists for saying you can’t have a penis and be a woman. Eventually Khalil was released, after a judge ruled his detention “unconstitutional”. Phew, said his witless cheerleaders, for this is a man of good moral temperament, not an anti-Israel bigot.
Really? A new interview with Khalil suggests otherwise. It suggests Rubio and the rest were on to something when they furrowed their brows over these foreign visitors to the US who whip up crazed animus against Israel.
Khalil sat down for a chat with Ezra Klein of the New York Times. And he has damned himself with his own words.
Consider the Hamas question. Khalil and his champions insisted he was not “pro-Hamas”. Okay, well maybe they can explain why he speaks so sympathetically about Hamas’s most barbarous act: its October 7 pogrom.
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t avoid such a moment,” he says of that atrocity. We? Why would someone who opposes Hamas use the first-person plural pronoun when talking about its mass violence?
His words lend a gloss of legitimacy to what Hamas did that day. It was “just” an attempt to “break the cycle”. It was a “desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians… are part of the equation”.
Khalil makes October 7 sound like a therapeutic cry for help. The only people who were crying for help that day, Mahmoud, were the Israeli women being raped and the Israeli children being murdered.
He pays lip service to the tragic nature of October 7. “Targeting civilians is wrong…”, he says. “But” – but! – “Palestinians don’t have to be perfect victims.”
Wait, what? What a messed-up thing to say about the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. He seems to be implying that anyone who comes down too heavily on October 7 is making unreasonable demands of Palestinians to be “perfect victims”. No, we’re just asking them not to invade Israel and butcher its men, women and children.
He also says there was a “manufactured hysteria about anti-Semitism at Columbia”. Would he, or anyone else on the Left, so cavalierly minimise racism against any other minority? I doubt it.
Anti-Semitism was rife at Columbia during those unhinged protests against Israel. Jewish students were harassed, the Jewish nation was branded the “scum of nations” and the “pigs of the Earth”. Shame on Khalil for downplaying this explosion in Jew-hate among Ivy League brats in 2024. He also defends the chilling chant “Globalise the Intifada”. The Second Intifada (2000-2005) involved some violent acts, he graciously concedes, but it was “overwhelmingly” a “peaceful” uprising.
What drivel. A thousand Israelis were massacred in the Second Intifada. They were torn apart in bus bombings, blown up at pizzerias, slain at discotheques. First we had CNN referring to “mostly peaceful” BLM riots. Now we have Khalil yapping about a mostly peaceful violent uprising against the world’s only Jewish state.
Jews in the West are right to be sickened by the chant “Globalise the Intifada”. They know what it means: that Hamas’s violent loathing of Jews should be exported around the world.
The interview is an eye-opener. It confirms just how pathological the “Palestine cause” has become not only for Khalil but for huge numbers of privileged radicals across the West.
Their frothing contempt for Israel has robbed them of their moral reason and even basic decency. To such an extent that they can say “we” and make apologetic noises in relation to that day of abject savagery.
Does America benefit from having people like Khalil? After this interview, many will say a resounding No.