Some people are better off keeping their mouths shut.
Such is the case with Mahmoud Khalil, who — when still a student arrested by ICE agents for his involvement in Columbia pro-Palestine protests — could be propped up as a martyr by the movement.
Khalil was released from jail in June, and each time he’s encountered a microphone or a camera ever since, he’s made himself as unsympathetic as possible.
First, it was refusing to condemn Hamas on CNN. Now, he’s gone as far as to seemingly justify October 7th in a New York Times interview.
“To me, [October 7] was a desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here, that Palestinians are part of the equation,” Khalil said in a Tuesday podcast conversation with Times reporter Ezra Klein.
Klein asked Khalil whether he saw Oct. 7’s design in the minds of Hamas as a provocation of war or “something that needed to happen to break the equilibrium” in the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
“It’s more the latter — just to break the cycle, to break that Palestinians are not being heard,” Khalil, 30, answered.
He also said that he found it “frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle.” Had to? One can imagine it might also have been frightening for the 1,200 people murdered by Hamas that day.
During the interview, Khalil also dismissed complaints about antisemitism on campus as primarily the result of “manufactured hysteria.”
He offered a non-specific catch-all disclaimer that “targeting civilians is wrong,” but his comments made clear that Khalil feels a great deal of sympathy and understanding towards Hamas.
Klein asked him clarifying questions and teased out his positions, but the host, who isn’t known to go lightly on his guests, offered only limp pushback. In fact, it was a remarkably fluffy interview, much of which centered around Khalil and his personal story and even his grandmother.
This isn’t Khalil’s first time carrying water for Hamas in the mainstream media.
Last month on CNN, Khalil refused to condemn the internationally recognized terrorist organization when asked by anchor Pamela Brown, “Do you specifically condemn Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, not just for their actions on October 7?”
Again, he pulled out his vague condemnation of killing “all civilians, full stop” — but not of Hamas.
When pushed once more about “Hamas specifically,” he doubled down in his vagueness: “No, I am very clear with condemning all civilians. I’m very straight in my position in that part. “But it’s disingenuous to ask about condemning Hamas while Palestinians are the ones being starved now by Israel.”
He went on to call the question “selective outrage of condemnation” and to claim it is “disingenuous and absurd to ask such questions.”
Khalil, who was born in Syria to Palestinian parents, was arrested by ICE officers in March at his Columbia residence and targeted for deportation on the charge of Secretary of State Marco Rubio that campus protests posed a threat to US foreign policy interests.
In June, a federal judge ordered Khalil be released on bail while his immigration case is pending.
There was widespread outrage about his situation — even from Jewish organizations — during his 100-plus days behind bars. But now that he’s out and on his media tour, he finally has the chance to show his true colors. Turns out they’re not very pretty.
“We cannot ask Palestinians to be perfect victims after 75 years of dispossession,” Khalil argued to Klein.
That statement would be fair enough… if not made in the context of a conversation about October 7th. A downtrodden people shouldn’t be expected to act “perfectly,” but not murdering innocent civilians at a music festival is a pretty low bar.
Students for Justice in Palestine made Khalil the face of their movement. Where are the statements distancing themselves from this sort of rhetoric? Or from Ilhan Omar, who so passionately embraced him as a hero?
The silence is deafening. So too are Khalil’s loud, proud, and consistent efforts to justify Hamas’s most horrific actions.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
