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2025-04-19 Fifth Column
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US: Activism of Columbia anti-Israel protest leader undermines efforts to end Gaza war
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[IsraelTimes] NYT reports that memo filed by Marco Rubio says Mohsen Mahdawi also engaged in ‘threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders’
Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian anti-Israel student protest leader arrested on Monday during a citizenship appointment, should be deported because his activism undercuts efforts to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued in a memo.
The argument contained in the memo, written last month and obtained by the New York Times, adds to the rationales offered by Rubio and other Trump administration officials for why they are seeking to deport non-citizen pro-Palestinian activists.
The memo cited the same Cold War-era law that Rubio used to argue that another Columbia pro-Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil, was eligible for deportation because his campus activities were at odds with US foreign policy about antisemitism.
While the Biden administration talked about it, but they never did anything serious to enforce their pretty words. A judge accepted Rubio’s argument after a hearing that Khalil’s lawyers called “charade of due process.”
Mahdawi and Khalil were prominent figures in Columbia’s coalition of anti-Israel protesters, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). The group led protests on campus that included harassment of Jewish students, an unauthorized protest encampment, building takeovers, clashes with police and property damage. CUAD has called for the “eradication of western civilization,” distributed Hamas material on campus, backed calls for violence against “Zionists” and said that “violence is the only path.”
The Mahdawi memo, according to the New York Times report, describes another foreign policy goal that Rubio said the protester was undercutting: ending the war in Gaza.
President Donald Trump has said he wants the war being fought there between Israel and Hamas to end, and he pressed the sides for a ceasefire and hostage release deal shortly after taking office. That ceasefire ended on March 18, a few days after Rubio reportedly filed the Mahdawi memo, and Israeli officials thanked Trump for permitting their return to fighting.
The memo also accused Mahdawi of engaging in “threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders,” according to the report, which said the memo did not offer evidence for the claim.
Mahdawi, who was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, spoke out against antisemitic rhetoric at a Columbia rally in November 2023, the Columbia Spectator student newspaper reported at the time. He also denounced antisemitic speech among pro-Palestinian protesters during a December 2023 appearance on “60 Minutes.”
That’s nice. What did he say in Arabic, and in private protest-organizing sessions? Did he ever object when his fellows in the protest group harassed Jews, Zionists, and the Israel-curious? Jewish and Israeli students told Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, that they experienced Mahdawi as a bridge-builder fostering dialogue between student groups on either side of Columbia’s protest movement.
What was there to discuss? One side thought the other deserved to be horribly killed, the other side wanted to live side by side in peace. And how did Haaretz, which prides itself on being the New York Times of Israel, manage not to find any of the many Columbia University Israelis and Jews who disagreed with the protests? “He talked about Palestinian suffering, but also the importance of understanding Jewish trauma, the Holocaust and the intergenerational toll of violence,” Sahar Bostock, an Israeli doctoral candidate at Columbia, told the newspaper. “He said acknowledge this to have a chance at peace.”
Mahdawi’s lawyers are citing his relationships with both Palestinian and Israeli students in his defense. He also has support from lawmakers in Vermont, where he has been living, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Becca Balint, who are Jewish.
…but both are first creatures of the Left, which means their disapproval of Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel makes them functionally anti-Zionist. Hundreds of members of Jewish Voice for Peace,
…founded by Hamas BDS activist, Hatem Bazian, while its social media managers live in Lebanon, and a large chunk of its funding comes from the Soros foundation… an anti-Zionist group, rallied for the release of Mahdawi and other student activists Monday outside of an ICE office in New York.
His arrest came after far-right
…it should be in scare quotes, not of the Left is not the same as far right… pro-Israel groups lobbied against Mahdawi to authorities. Rubio’s memo is dated just days before Betar, one of the groups, said it had “reason to believe” that Mahdawi was “on the short list of those who will shortly be deported.”
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Posted by trailing wife 2025-04-19 2025-04-19 02:03||
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