There has been a slight shift in tone since last week. A few voices are appearing in the press to point out that Mahmoud Khalil isn’t just an innocent bystander of a pro-Palestinian group. He was a leader of an extremist group that hated Israel and American and praised a series of terrorist groups and individuals. Saturday the NY Post published a story based on an interview with a former classmate of Khalil’s. The female grad student dropped a class he was in and filed complaints about his behavior but says nothing was done.
The female graduate student, who is Jewish, said she even dropped a class they took together last fall at the Ivy’s famed School of International and Public Affairs because he made her feel so “uncomfortable” — and her formal complaints to the college fell on deaf ears…
“I just didn’t want to become a target of his,” she said.
The student, however, anonymously filed two Title VI complaints with Columbia administrators about his antisemitic rants within the group chat — but nothing ever came of them, she said.
Khalil didn’t show up for class very often but had a sticker on his laptop showing all of Israel blacked out on a map.
“It was just so clear that the thing driving him most in life is destroying Israel and everyone within it and anyone who supports it, and probably all Jews … That to me was scary, that something could consume you like that,” the first-year student said.
And Khalil routinely “targeted” Jewish students in a WhatsApp group chat the class shared, she added.
“Once or twice a week, he would just go in [the group chat] and basically instigate crazy claims that were just very antisemitic and really inflammatory, and would get into fights with people,” she said.
She says she feels safer on campus now that he is gone. “He seems very much like he hates America and everything it stands for, and I think he’s done a lot to cause harm and violence here, and I could see him doing more,” she said.
Today, a journalism professor from NYU wrote an article defending Khalil’s right to free speech, but a major point of her article is that she doubts he would do the same for her because he really is an extremist.
What is striking about the college demonstrations of the past two years…is that much of the pro-Palestine movement has morphed from demanding a Palestinian state, which I support, to expressing a vitriolic anti-Zionism that aims for nothing less than the annihilation of a sovereign nation.
This is evident at Columbia. Its main protest organization is Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which claims to represent almost 100 student organizations. The group defines itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” It regards both Israel and the United States as illegitimate “settler colonial” entities. (It refers to our country as “Turtle Island.”) CUAD likes terrorist groups — or, in its words, “armed resistance.” With grandiose bombast, it effusively praises Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas — and in particular, Hamas’s massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, which it found especially inspiring. CUAD has promised that it will “not stop demonstrating until Zionism ends.”
In January, in an incident CUAD praised on Instagram, masked, kaffiyeh-swathed students stormed into a class on Israeli history taught by an Israeli professor (whom CUAD described as an “ex-IDF soldier”), attempting to shut it down. They distributed leaflets, which the class’s students promptly tore up. One flyer depicted a large black jackboot stomping on a Star of David with the motto “Crush Zionism”; another showed a burning Israeli flag with the tagline “Burn Zionism to the Ground.” More recently, masked students occupied the library at adjacent Barnard College and distributed leaflets from the “Hamas Media Office” glorifying Yahya Sinwar, the (since-assassinated) mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks. Sinwar’s life was dedicated to murdering Jews, and he was good at it…
CUAD is, to put it mildly, no defender of either free speech or academic freedom, both of which, its mission statement says, “distract from Israel’s actively committing genocide.”
The irony of this situation, she notes, is that Khalil and CUAD are now relying on the very freedoms of the country they ignore and despise to free him. And if he is eventually freed, they will go right back to despising this country anyway.
Last week I criticized the NY Times for failing to point out just how extreme Khalil’s group really is, even going so far as to ignore their own reporting about the group’s support for terrorism. This week they seem to have come around, at least a little bit, toward connecting him to CUAD’s support for Hamas.
…at a discussion sponsored by the coalition of student protesters, he remarked that whether Palestinian resistance was peaceful or armed, “Israel and their propaganda always find something to attack.” He added, “They — we — have tried armed resistance, which is, again, legitimate under international law.” But Israel calls it terrorism, he said…
It remains unclear what exactly Mr. Khalil is believed to have done. He is accused by the White House and others of organizing protests, such as the one in the Barnard library, where participants distributed fliers promoting Hamas. A flier that was shown in online postings from the library said it had been produced by the “Hamas Media Office.” It was titled “Our Narrative” and listed Hamas’s code name for the Oct. 7 attacks, with an image of fighters standing on a tank. It is unclear whether Mr. Khalil knew the fliers were there…
Mr. Davidai, the professor who tweeted the photo at Secretary Rubio, said in an interview that he believed Mr. Khalil was entitled to due process under the law. But, he added, it does not so much matter whether Mr. Khalil personally handled fliers promoting terrorists, if the group he represented did.
“When you lead an organization, you are accountable for your organization’s actions,” Mr. Davidai said. “When you lead an organization that openly and proudly supports a U.S. designated terrorist organization, you are accountable to the spreading of propaganda.”
It’s not a full-throated admission that Khalil supports terrorism but it’s better than what they were saying last week. Still, this correction to the story is amusing.
A correction was made on March 17, 2025: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Mahmoud Khalil was a permanent citizen of the United States. He is a permanent resident.
They granted him citizenship in the first version of this story. Maybe just a mistake but a telling one.
