As student visas continue to be revoked, many left-leaning news outlets and writers have expressed wariness of Trump’s motivations. They characterize the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which the Trump Administration has used as a basis to revoke student visas, as tendentious grounds for action and worse, creates a climate that echoes McCarthyism.
The identities of some of these students have not been disclosed, though some of the more public figures include Momodou Taal, Alireza Doroudi, Leqaa Kordia, and Yunseo Chung, all of whom were involved in the wave of thousands of pro-Palestinian protests that have continued since October 7, 2023. Arguably the most public of these figures, Mahmoud Khalil, recently penned a letter to Columbia that highlights the core issue of the visa-revoking, especially as relates to pro-Palestinian students.
Khalil’s letter invokes the “kidnapping of international students who stand for Palestine.” This line bears an immediate similitude with an ongoing loss suffered on the Israeli side. Anyone with an awareness of the conflict will notice a classic pro-Palestinian rhetorical move: gaslighting. They don’t have hostages; we’re the ones with hostages. They didn’t suffer a genocide; they inflicted genocide on us.
This does not represent the most insidious move that Khalil makes in the letter. Khalil casts the pro-Palestinian movement as a largely peaceful one, centered on “community care” and “bake sales” while at the same time accusing those supporting Israel of perpetuating senseless violence. Khalil does this by deriding Israeli Columbia students in a dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, postulating that “were [Khalil] in Palestine,” they would be “killing [his] neighbors in their homes.”
Even as he derides the actions of Israeli soldiers protecting Israel from terrorism through combative means, he also denounces the students who “sit comfortably behind their screens” submitting his name and others to platforms like Canary Mission. There’s no way to win—fighting for the Israeli army means murdering civilians, while nonviolent action against pro-Palestinians means being too much of a coward to engage.
These rhetorical turns, especially the second one, make more sense with a frame of disbelief. No matter what he appears to be saying on the surface, Khalil is part of a violent movement, with violent ends, composed of members who say they are peaceful when it is politically expedient and when they see the opportunity to cast themselves as victims, and violent when they feel empowered enough to speak honestly to their base.
[RELATED: Deporting Radicalism: Trump’s Crackdown on Anti-Israel Campus Protests]
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian organization that apologized for its apology regarding Khymani James’s Instagram Live statement in which he said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” declared after the event that “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance…where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.” Khalil was the lead negotiator for this organization, acting in that capacity day and night. He has since tried to distance himself from the organization. Khalil himself has also called on the student body to “resist.” And, if any doubt remains as to whether this extends beyond peaceful protest, Khalil clarifies: “Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky.”
Perhaps it would be possible to believe that this statement did not have malicious intent were it not for the instigation of violence on Columbia’s campus in concert with the protests and encampments, as well as the violence that spread across the country in connection with the encampments. Columbia raised the profile of these encampments, as one of the most prestigious of the early schools to join, and while Khalil claimed during the height of the encampment season last April that he was not personally participating in the protests to protect his student visa (a statement that seems ironic now), he clearly supported them by being a spokesman. We would be hard pressed to ignore the connection between the camps, the violence they encouraged, and the support of violence endemic to so much of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Such violent connections may be underscored even more by the outcome of Haggai et. al. v Keswani et. al., a lawsuit brought against Khalil and other leaders of pro-Palestinian student groups that alleges they had prior knowledge of the Oct 7 attacks and acted as the “propaganda arm” of Hamas. A particularly revealing bit of testimony comes from one of the hostages, Shlomo Zvi, who, while being held in captivity by Hamas, was shown pictures of protests at Columbia and endured his captors “bragg[ing] about having Hamas operatives on Columbia’s campus.”
When words become weaponized, the extent to which violent action must be proven is reduced. While it may be true that Khalil himself never committed a violent crime of the sort that might inter a U.S. citizen, he certainly was complicit. As President Trump says, “If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent, men, women and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here.”
Much of the fear surrounding the revoking of student visas has to do with rhetoric, with the Jewish students who chained themselves to the Columbia gates for Khalil demanding “transparency.” The government should be transparent about its grounds for revoking student visas. Still, if international students believe that they can be less than transparent about the extent to which they support terrorist organizations while advocating for Palestine, then they engage in a double standard, and must be removed before they succeed in their attempts to deceive the American student populace.
It is time we are transparent with ourselves and recognize the true danger of allowing Hamas mouthpieces to roam the United States unabated. Maybe when we recognize and interrupt their calls to violence, true peace will follow.
Follow Benjamin Dorfman on X.
Image: Mahmoud Khalil NYC detention protest by SWinxy on Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
