Do Mahmoud Khalil's Lawyers Want Him Deported?
Seems like it, judging by their latest stunt...
Mahmoud Khalil, now a household name that I wish I didn’t know at all, recently submitted an op/ed to the Columbia Spectator that went viral. Since apparently the good old-fashioned pen-to-paper letter writing methods available in jail have gone out of vogue, he instead dictated it to one of his 19 lawyers, who then passed along the message to the media.
He starts by calling his arrest an “abduction” and saying that it’s “reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon.” Funny how we never once heard him call out Assad and the 500,000 Syrians he killed during Mahmoud’s so-called “activism” at Columbia. He then goes on to blame the Jews for his arrest before equating himself and his friends with the victims of Nazi sympathizers.
Here are my favorite lines:
“This movement has always been grassroots. It was led by students—many younger than me—who risked their careers, their degrees, and their futures to demand divestment. Anyone who has truly engaged with the movement knows that claims that its goals and purpose are rooted in antisemitism are mere fabrication.”
We all engaged with this movement by watching it in real-time for a year and a half, starting on October 8th, 2023. It’s rooted in antisemitism, promise. How do I know? Because it was literally terrorism against Jews that triggered it. Just as you would never expect a white supremacist to admit their racism openly, never expect an antisemite to own up to their Jew-hate, ever.
“If I am deprived of my child in the first moments of his life, the people responsible will have been, among others, these students.”
The most telling part of this sentence is the subject: “I.” He views himself as “deprived of his child,” and not the other way around. Going to fix this for him: “If my wife and newborn child are deprived of my support during my confinement and subsequent deportation, it will be because of my own actions to promote terrorism at the Ivy League university I graduated from.”
I saved the best paragraph for last:
“Especially in light of the dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, I can’t help but think that if I were in Palestine [what does this have to do with Tel Aviv U?], some of these students [the Jewish ones?] would be the ones stopping me at checkpoints [he thinks actual Columbia students are working the checkpoints?], raiding my university [which university would that be?], piloting the drones surveilling my community [I’m sure those are just Amazon delivery drones], or killing my neighbors in their homes [and I can’t help but think that he glorified and celebrated the Hamas terrorists who murdered Israelis in their homes on October 7th—except I don’t need to think it, because we literally saw him do exactly that in real time]. While students were building solidarity at Columbia [translation: while pro-Hamas hoodlums were causing chaos at Columbia], some pro-Israel students were participating in the genocide as military personnel during their school breaks [totally, I can see them enlisting in the IDF specifically during the school breaks to join the most genocidal brigade that would take them], only to return to campus and claim victimhood in the classroom.” [well he’s claiming victimhood from his ICE cell, so I guess he wins the victim competition on that one].
The letter ends with him quoting a martyred Gazan “journalist” who turned out to be working for Hamas.
Raise your hand if you sympathize with Mahmoud more after reading this letter. I’m no immigration law expert, but I cannot imagine that this screed is going to go over well at his deportation hearing. Why his lawyers submitted it to the media is beyond me. Do they want him to lose?
The good news is that when he’s deported to his native Syria, he will no doubt be happy to find that Assad is no longer in power there.
When you lead an organization that calls for violence to achieve its goals, you cannot be surprised when the state takes it seriously. I think some who bolster terrorist organizations have been so placated by their successes infiltrating the west and normalizing the rhetoric of terror that this pushback is actually bewildering to them. I’m not supportive of much this administration is doing but removing foreign sponsors of terror is a good thing.
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" it aint.
Khalil, his org and his "movement" cannot escape or wash off the moral stain they put on themselves by celebrating the 10/7 terrorist massacre and calling for more.
Just think of the other liberation movements that preceded them:
When the IRA blew up buildings in England, did anyone cheer the murder of civilians? Were their marches in support? If the ANC had murdered 1200 Afrikaaner civilians, while raping women and killing children, would this have made their Western supporters proud?
The Hamasniks are only able to hold their heads high and maintain their demented crusade against the Jewish state (even if they do know to cover their faces), because of the abject moral failure of our entire liberal class—profs, admins, journalists and politicians, most esp the Dems. In a sane functioning society, the moment any person or group starts celebrating the mass murder of civilians is the moment they move beyond the pale and are ejected from civil society. There is no excuse here.
The children of the intifada revolution are ugly and ignorant, but most of the blame here falls upon the people who are supposed to teach and guide them. But opposing the newest Left crusade of "decolonization" would have meant confronting the angry mob of cool kids who proclaim themselves to be the human incarnation of Social Justice, rebutting the "apartheid" and "genocide" lies, and standing up for the right of Israel to exist.
This low bar was still too much for our liberal class, who are best exemplified by the revolving cast of non-entities who run Columbia, cowardly conformists all, with no higher principles than their careers and maintaining social status. This is also why it's taken a right-wing authoritarian to finally stand up for Jewish students—the liberal class is simply too weak and compromised to do so. Khalil is their student, their creation, the symbol of their failure.