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2025-08-07 Home Front: WoT
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''We'' couldn't avoid carrying out the October 7th massacre because Israel was making peace with the Saudis, and the Palestinians felt left out.
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| The Times of Israel reports on the story: |
Mahmoud Khalil justifies Oct. 7, downplays antisemitism at Columbia, in NYT interview
The pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel US protest leader detained by ICE in March calls claims of hostility to Jews at NY university ‘manufactured hysteria,’ in discussion with Ezra Klein
Six weeks after being released from US federal detention, Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Paleostinian protest leader to be arrested by President Donald Trump
...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party...
’s administration last spring, has defended Hamas
..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and said concerns about antisemitism at Columbia University reflect a "manufactured hysteria."
Khalil first made the latter allegation in a jailhouse letter in April, soon after he was detained by immigration authorities over his role in the university’s pro-Paleostinian protests, which critics said were fueling antisemitism.
He repeated it in a wide-ranging interview with New York Times
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
columnist Ezra Klein published on Tuesday. The interview appeared to mark the most extensive public questioning that Khalil has faced about the allegations of antisemitic activity that made him a symbol of the Trump administration’s crackdown on colleges.
In the interview, Klein delved into Khalil’s arrest on March 10, which stemmed from allegations that he had fueled antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus, and subsequent three-month detainment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana. In June, in Khalil’s first interview since he was released from federal detention, he told the New York Times that his detainment "felt like kidnapping."
During the interview, Klein repeatedly invoked his Jewish identity, but when he brought up his personal experience with antisemitism and allegations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Khalil pushed back.
"Look, I’m Jewish. I don’t take antisemitism lightly. You should see my inbox. And it can be true that Jews can be unsafe, but the idea — it is real that there was antisemitism at Columbia, yet nobody there ended up as unsafe as you did," said Klein.
"I would push back regarding antisemitism at Columbia. I would really push back on that," replied Khalil, to which Klein responded: "There was none?"
"I wouldn’t say there was none. I would say there is this manufactured hysteria about antisemitism at Columbia because of the protests," Khalil replied.
He added: "Proud Boys were at the doors of Columbia, the very right-wing group. And there are incidents here and there. But it’s not like antisemitism is happening at Columbia because of the Paleostine movement."
Khalil’s arrest in March by immigration authorities marked a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s campaign against antisemitism on college campuses. In its wake, several other non-citizen pro-Paleostinian student protesters faced arrests and deportation efforts, prompting outcry and calls for due process, including from many Jewish groups.
Last month, Columbia, where Khalil earned a graduate degree, reached a $221 million dollar settlement with the federal government over antisemitism allegations. In June, the school released a report that found that nearly two-thirds of its Jewish students reported not feeling accepted for their religious identity during the school year that included Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught in Israel.
"This is why I would always push back," continued Khalil in his response to Klein’s invocation of antisemitism at Columbia. "I have a strong belief that antisemitism and anti-Paleostinian racism rise together. The incidents rise together because the same groups are perpetrating that in different ways."
Khalil also defended the phrases "Globalize the intifada" and "From the river to the sea, Paleostine will be free," which pro-Paleostinian activists claim are nonviolent mostly peaceful but many Jews and Israelis interpret as calls to expanding Paleostinian campaigns of terror attacks on civilians and for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Holy Land.
He also said that Hamas’s October 7 atrocities violated international law because they targeted civilians, but characterized it as inevitable.
Some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were slaughtered in the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel amid acts of brutality including sexual assault, torture, dismemberment and mutilation that overtly targeted civilians in their homes and at a music festival; 251 were kidnapped to the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response ...
Strip, where 49, not all of them alive, are still being held hostage alongside of the body of a soldier killed in 2014.
Early in the interview, Klein asked Khalil whether he thought Hamas attacked Israel to provoke "some kind of war," or whether he saw it "as something that needed to happen to break the equilibrium" in a conflict that had stagnated.
"It’s more the latter — just to break the cycle, to break that Paleostinians are not being heard," said Khalil. "And to me, it’s a desperate attempt to tell the world that Paleostinians are here, that Paleostinians are part of the equation. That was my interpretation of why Hamas did the October 7 attacks on Israel."
While noting that he’s against the targeting of civilians, Khalil repeated several times that "we cannot ask Paleostinians to be perfect victims."
He also implied that the onslaught stemmed in part from the movement toward an Israel-Saudi Arabia
 ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
normalization deal.
"At that point, there was no political process," he claims. "It was clear that the Saudi-Israel deal is very imminent, and Paleostinians wouldn’t have any path to statehood and self-determination. So they had to do that, according to their calculations — which, it’s obvious, were not right."
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Posted by Fred 2025-08-07 00:00||
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