The pro-Hamas activist revealed his strong anti-Israel and anti-American stance in a letter he dictated from his holding facility.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The anti-Israel student protest leader from Columbia University who was arrested for his support of Hamas called himself a “political prisoner” Wednesday as a U.S. judge ordered that his deportation hearing be moved to New Jersey, effectively delaying implementation of the deportation orders.
Mahmoud Khalil dictated a long letter from his holding facility in Louisiana in which he excoriated the federal justice system for his arrest.
He said that it was indicative of “decades” of “anti-Palestinian racism” which, he argued, “has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”
Spouting Hamas propaganda, he charged Israel with torturing Palestinian prisoners and both the current and previous administrations with helping to kill innocent Gazans due to their supply of military aid to their ally.
Khalil labeled himself a “political prisoner” who was “born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” which is what Israel’s foes call the country’s War of Independence.
The 30-year-old activist, who worked in the UK prior to coming the Columbia for UNRWA, the Palestinian aid agency that has been discredited by Israel as a Hamas colluder in Gaza, called his arrest “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
Israel has said that the claim of genocide is spurious, as fully a third of all those killed in Gaza were Hamas fighters, a two-to-one civilian-to-combatant ratio that is acceptable to all militaries in the world.
Khalil also accused the university’s administration of “surrender” to “federal pressure” and wanting to “silence” him.
“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” he additionally charged. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
In contrast, President Trump described Khalil as one who had engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activities.”
After his arrest in New York on March 9, Khalil was taken to Louisiana, with an eye to holding his deportation case there “hoping for better odds in court,” charged his lawyers, who were provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
They appealed to either release him entirely or at least to transfer him back to New York, to be close to his eight-month-pregnant wife.
Prosecutors had a win in that Judge Jesse Furman did not accept the case’s outright dismissal, and that he ordered that the court to hear all the motions surrounding it should be in New Jersey, agreeing with the Trump-backed lawyers that this correct because the prisoner had been in that state rather than New York when his lawyers challenged his detention.
Furman would not allow an immediate deportation, however, which is what the prosecution really desired, insisting that Khalil had the right to a full hearing first in an American court.