Mahmoud Khalil justifies Oct. 7, downplays antisemitism at Columbia, in NYT interview

[ad_1] Six weeks after being launched from US federal detention, Mahmoud Khalil, the primary pro-Palestinian protest chief to be arrested by President Donald Trump’s administration final spring, has defended Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and mentioned considerations about antisemitism at Columbia College mirror a “manufactured hysteria.”

Khalil first made the latter allegation in a jailhouse letter in April, quickly after he was detained by immigration authorities over his function within the college’s pro-Palestinian protests, which critics mentioned had been fueling antisemitism.

He repeated it in a wide-ranging interview with New York Occasions columnist Ezra Klein revealed on Tuesday. The interview appeared to mark probably the most intensive public questioning that Khalil has confronted concerning the allegations of antisemitic exercise that made him a logo of the Trump administration’s crackdown on schools.

Within the interview, Klein delved into Khalil’s arrest on March 10, which stemmed from allegations that he had fueled antisemitism on Columbia College’s campus, and subsequent three-month detainment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention middle in Louisiana. In June, in Khalil’s first interview since he was launched from federal detention, he advised the New York Occasions that his detainment “felt like kidnapping.”

Through the interview, Klein repeatedly invoked his Jewish id, however when he introduced up his private expertise with antisemitism and allegations of antisemitism at Columbia College, Khalil pushed again.

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By signing up, you comply with the terms “Look, I’m Jewish. I don’t take antisemitism evenly. It is best to see my inbox. And it may be true that Jews may be unsafe, however the concept — it's actual that there was antisemitism at Columbia, but no person there ended up as unsafe as you probably did,” mentioned Klein.

“I might push again relating to antisemitism at Columbia. I might actually push again on that,” replied Khalil, to which Klein responded: “There was none?”

Protesters demand the discharge of Columbia protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil at a rally in New York Metropolis, March 10, 2025. (Luke Tress/Occasions of Israel)

“I wouldn’t say there was none. I might say there's this manufactured hysteria about antisemitism at Columbia due to the protests,” Khalil replied.

He added: “Proud Boys had been on the doorways of Columbia, the very right-wing group. And there are incidents right here and there. However it’s not like antisemitism is going on at Columbia due to the Palestine motion.”

There doesn't seem like any proof that members of the Proud Boys had been at Columbia. A Columbia antisemitism activity power reported final 12 months that Jews experienced “crushing” discrimination on campus , a lot of it associated to the pro-Palestinian protest motion.

Khalil’s arrest in March by immigration authorities marked a flashpoint within the Trump administration’s marketing campaign towards antisemitism on faculty campuses. In its wake, a number of different non-citizen pro-Palestinian scholar protesters confronted arrests and deportation efforts, prompting outcry and requires due course of, together with from many Jewish teams.

Final month, Columbia, the place Khalil earned a graduate diploma, reached a $221 million greenback settlement with the federal authorities over antisemitism allegations. In June, the college launched a report that discovered that just about two-thirds of its Jewish college students reported not feeling accepted for his or her spiritual id in the course of the faculty 12 months that included Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught in Israel.

Professional-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters march exterior Columbia College in New York Metropolis on April 18, 2024. (Kena Betancur / AFP)

“This is the reason I might all the time push again,” continued Khalil in his response to Klein’s invocation of antisemitism at Columbia. “I've a powerful perception that antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism rise collectively. The incidents rise collectively as a result of the identical teams are perpetrating that in several methods.”

Khalil additionally defended the phrases “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the ocean, Palestine will likely be free,” which pro-Palestinian activists declare are nonviolent however many Jews and Israelis interpret as calls to increasing Palestinian campaigns of terror assaults on civilians and for the ethnic cleaning of Jews from the Holy Land.

He additionally mentioned that Hamas’s October 7 atrocities violated worldwide regulation as a result of they focused civilians, however characterised it as inevitable. Shortly earlier than Khalil’s arrest, he led a protest the place activists distributed Hamas propaganda on campus.

Some 1,200 individuals, most of them civilians, had been slaughtered within the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel amid acts of brutality together with sexual assault, torture, dismemberment and mutilation that overtly focused civilians of their houses and at a music pageant; 251 had been kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, the place 49, not all of them alive, are nonetheless being held hostage alongside of the physique of a soldier killed in 2014.

Early within the interview, Klein requested Khalil whether or not he thought Hamas attacked Israel to impress “some sort of battle,” or whether or not he noticed it “as one thing that wanted to occur to interrupt the equilibrium” in a battle that had stagnated.

“It’s extra the latter — simply to interrupt the cycle, to interrupt that Palestinians will not be being heard,” mentioned Khalil. “And to me, it’s a determined try to inform the world that Palestinians are right here, that Palestinians are a part of the equation. That was my interpretation of why Hamas did the October 7 assaults on Israel.”

Whereas noting that he’s towards the concentrating on of civilians, Khalil repeated a number of occasions that “we can not ask Palestinians to be excellent victims.”

He additionally implied that the onslaught stemmed partly from the motion towards an Israel-Saudi Arabia normalization deal.

“At that time, there was no political course of,” he claims. “It was clear that the Saudi-Israel deal could be very imminent, and Palestinians wouldn’t have any path to statehood and self-determination. So that they had to do this, in accordance with their calculations — which, it’s apparent, weren't proper.”

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