Hannah E. Meyers Mahmoud Khalil Doesn’t Deserve to Be in the U.S. The former Columbia University student has been a ringleader of anti-Semitic activity and pro-Hamas demonstrations.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-columbia-deport-hamas
Manhattan is home to one less terror-supporter.
On Saturday, immigration enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian national with U.S. permanent resident status, and removed him to a detention facility in Louisiana. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson explained that Khalil’s arrest, in coordination with the State Department, was made “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and because Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” A hearing is set for Wednesday after a federal judge blocked Khalil’s deportation on Monday—but the White House has doubled down on its intent to deport him.
Khalil was arrested at his Columbia University-owned apartment, near the school where he’s spent much of the last year and a half as a student leading pro-Hamas demonstrations. He has been a ringleader of the anti-Semitic activity that has kept Columbia in lockdown, and has helped escalate disorder at its sister school, Barnard College.
Khalil’s removal offers a lesson that the free world has been reluctant to learn since the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel: sometimes expulsion is the best solution. This is especially true for those who commit the kinds of anonymous violence that have characterized the anti-Israel movement at Columbia and Barnard, and which Khalil, as a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has helped propel.
Khalil has been candid about his commitment to make Columbia uninhabitable until the university denounces Israel. “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” he declared. At Columbia, that “resist[ance]” has involved everything from erecting encampments on school property to directing death wishes at Zionists to storming Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and taking maintenance staff hostage.
Columbia sealed its gates last spring to anyone but active students and faculty. It wasn’t enough to prevent students, their faces swaddled in keffiyehs, from barging into a class on the History of Modern Israel this past January and handing out anti-Semitic fliers. As Columbia University Apartheid Divest declared on social media, “We disrupted a zionist [sic] class, and you should too.”
Barnard president Laura Rosenbury later expelled two participating students. “When rules are broken, when there is no remorse, no reflection, and no willingness to change, we must act,” she explained. Her justified action sparked upheaval at the school, with mobs of students crowding into Barnard buildings beating snare drums, preventing students from going to classes, and even assaulting a campus employee. The demonstrators then squatted in the school’s Milstein Library, blasting music.
Videos appear to show Khalil standing with a bullhorn near the library’s entrance surrounded by keffiyeh-masked disruptors. The gathering featured propaganda bearing the label “Hamas Media Office,” including a booklet celebrating the October 7 massacre entitled, “Our Narrative . . . Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Khalil’s detention coincided with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Sunday post on X that the Trump administration would revoke the visas and green cards “of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
The recent campus expulsions of pro-Hamas students find a parallel in the Trump administration’s approach to Gaza. The president has described a plan for removing Gazans from the land they occupy, allowing the area to be rebuilt and reconstituted as a different society. For two decades, Gazans have been bent on anonymous violence. The land is permeated with high-tech, hidden tunnels used for attacks and for holding Jews and Israelis hostage. Hamas fighters in Gaza wrap their faces with keffiyehs as they slaughter innocents and celebrate the murder of babies.
The keffiyeh has become an international symbol of anonymous violence, accelerated by its adoption at American universities. It is a ubiquitous sight at campus protests, where entitled students, otherwise reluctant to commit acts of “cultural appropriation,” enthusiastically appropriate the symbol of a barbaric terrorist culture.
Whether it’s restoring order on campus or formulating a new policy on Gaza, the same principle applies: anonymous violence is unacceptable. Gazans don’t deserve to live next door to Israel if they use tunnels and masks to make Israel unlivable for Israelis. Columbia and Barnard students don’t deserve to attend the university if they remain intent on undermining education and menacing Jews. And Mahmoud Khalil does not deserve American residency if he uses his time here to support a murderous international movement.
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