[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
Pro-Hamas brownshirts are presenting themselves as the true victims of the demonstrations at Columbia last year: “Anti-Israel activists seek to sue Columbia University, allege student persecution,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, April 6, 2025:
The activist cited the example of CUAD leading member Mahmoud Khalil, who had been arrested on March 8 by immigration authorities, as someone who had been persecuted. The legal case for Khalil’s deportation is ongoing, with a judge ruling last Tuesday that his case would be heard in New Jersey and not in Louisiana, where he has been detained.
Mahmoud Khalil is facing prosecution, not persecution, by the federal government. It is not his speech, but his threatening and bullying behavior, and that of others he has encouraged to do the same, that has landed him in trouble with the government and may lead to his deportation.
Khalil’s appeal for a restraining order against the congressional Committee on Education and Workforce for requesting Columbia disciplinary records was rejected on Friday. Committee Chairman Tim Walberg said in a statement that it was a victory for oversight of antisemitism on campuses.
If Mahmoud Khalil has nothing to hide, if all he was doing this past year was exercising his “freedom of speech,” then why should he be so intent on having his disciplinary records at Columbia kept secret? What might he have done that would paint a different picture of this “martyr to free speech”? Columbia should give the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce whatever they know about Mahmoud Khalil.
Activists alleged further abuse on Wednesday night when students who chained themselves to two campus gates were removed by security personnel. A Palestinian student alleged that she was targeted with particular animus by the security officers.
One Palestinian student alleges she “was targeted with particular animus” by a campus policeman as he tried to remove the chain she had used to attach herself to a gate leading into the campus. He didn’t yell at her. He didn’t physically abuse her. If he had done either of those things, we would have heard about it. But videos were made of the police action that showed that those things did not occur. How, then, did he express that “particular animus”? Perhaps he looked sternly at her. Or his face betrayed disapproval of her behavior, as she yelled or screeched at him, and tried to fight him off from removing her chain from the gate. Whatever that “particular animus” was, it did not amount to much. And as the thin-skinned Palestinian student, whose feelings were hurt, needs to be taught, de minimis non curat lex.
The students who chained themselves to Earl Hall and St. Paul’s Chapel demanded to know the names of the board of trustees members who were alleged to have reported Khalil to government officials. Columbia denied these allegations on Wednesday, and said Thursday that it was investigating the rules violations….
Columbia says that its trustees did not report Mahmoud Khalil to the government. But if they had done so, what would be wrong with that? If a student has violated both the rules of the university, and the laws of the land, why shouldn’t he (or she) be reported to the proper authorities?
SDS said on Instagram on Thursday that students would continue to disrupt campus activity until demands were met.
This is extortion from students claiming to be from the old-left SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but almost certainly that is subterfuge, and it is the Islamofascists who are conducting this campaign to threaten the administrators at Columbia University, hoping to discover who has reported some of their number, including Mahmoud Khalil, to the government. The group that claims to be SDS threatens to disrupt the workings of the university: we will disrupt everything, we will vandalize buildings (like the restroom in Lerner Hall); we will mock and curse the new acting president, Claire Shipman, and signal that she is our enemy by putting up photos of her with- a red inverted triangle – a sign that Hamas uses to designate its enemies. No doubt Claire Shipman takes this threat seriously, and she is now accompanied everywhere by campus police.
CUAD said on X on Thursday that “every Trustee and every Administrator is complicit in Mahmoud’s abduction. It’s their role in the genocide of the Palestinian people that has paved the way for this brutal repression today.”
There is no “genocide” of the Palestinian people. Let us, one more time, repeat the facts. When Israel took over Gaza in 1967, 400,000 people lived there. When Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, the population had more than tripled, to 1.3 million. When Israel took over Judea and Samara (a/k/a the West Bank) in 1967, 900,000 Arabs lived there. Now there are three million. In Israel behind the Green Line, there were 160,000 Arabs in 1949. Now there are two million. Genocide? What genocide?
And one more thing: Mahmoud Khalil was not “abducted.” That suggests an illegal seizure by kidnappers. In fact, he was arrested in accordance with the law, by agents of ICE. He was told that he was being arrested for “activities aligned to Hamas.” His whereabouts are known; he is now awaiting transfer from Louisiana to New Jersey, where he will have a court hearing on his status. If that is “abduction,” then every single person taken into custody by the police has been abducted.
“Shipman’s abrupt appointment to presidency merely reveals everything we’ve always known – that Columbia administrators are puppets of the genocidal board of trustees,” said CUAD.
Who are the puppets here? Who repeats ad nauseam the handful of chants that Hamas propagandists want to hear chanted? Who are the mindless brownshirts of the present age? Who lemming-like follow their leader — Mahmoud Khalil or another Palestinian just like him — off a moral cliff?
