‘A cry to be heard’ – Columbia protest leader justifies Oct. 7

On a New York Times podcast, progressive darling Mahmoud Khalil justified the rape and slaughter of Israelis as an act of resistance.

By World Israel News Staff

A former Columbia University graduate student who led mass anti-Israel protests on campus downplayed the October 7th Hamas massacres in a recent podcast interview, describing the rape, butchery, and slaughter of Israeli civilians as a cry for help from Gazans.

Mahmoud Khalil, who was born in Syria to parents of Palestinian descent, was arrested in March by immigration officials, at the behest of the Trump administration, for violating the terms of his student visa by expressing support for the Hamas terror group.

Khalil, who became a progressive cause célèbre during three months of detention in an immigration facility, was released on bond in June while his case remains pending.

Speaking on The Ezra Klein Show, a podcast affiliated with The New York Times, Khalil portrayed the October 7th attacks as an act of resistance by a downtrodden group.

“To me, it’s a desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here, that Palestinians are part of the equation,” he said.

Rather than viewing the barbaric murders as a genocidal attack on Jews, Khalil said October 7th was a way for Gazans to “break the cycle” and assert that “Palestinians are not being heard.”

He also referenced the political context of the terror attack, saying, “It was clear that the Saudi-Israel deal [was] very imminent, and Palestinians wouldn’t have any path to statehood and self-determination.”

Khalil did admit that “targeting civilians is wrong,” but said that according to Hamas’ calculations, “they had to do that.”

Later in the interview, Khalil argued that criticism of Palestinian terrorism against Israel was unjust.

“We cannot ask Palestinians to be perfect victims after 75 years of dispossession,” he said, citing Israeli checkpoints in Judea and Samaria and what he described as a lack of Palestinian dignity.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in on Khalil’s case after his arrest, defending the government’s right to revoke visas for terror supporters.

“If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” Rubio said in March. “And if you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.”