Mahmoud Khalil Rebukes Columbia For Concentrating on Dissent With ‘Repression Playbook’

Columbia College graduate Mahmoud Khalil rebuked what he referred to as the college’s “repression playbook” that has opened the gates for increased training and the federal authorities to focus on dissent on campus and abduct college students like him for his or her pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Khalil, a inexperienced card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was taken by federal immigration brokers on March 8 for his position in serving to lead final yr’s antiwar protests on Columbia’s campus. Whereas his court docket case performs out in New Jersey, Khalil stays held with out cost in a Louisiana detention heart — the place he dictated to his lawyer a searing op-ed for the Columbia Spectator that revealed Friday.

“The situation is oddly reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon,” he mentioned. “The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook concerning Palestine.”

Khalil accused the college of suppressing student-led dissent underneath the guise of combating antisemitism — together with by giving Congress pupil disciplinary data, launching a job drive that equates criticism of the state of Israel with hate speech, and creating an workplace that’s meant to overview discrimination stories however “became a mechanism to persecute pro-Palestinian students with no due process.”

Columbia confronted public backlash after deciding to acquiesce to the Trump administration, which threatened to withdraw a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in funding if universities didn’t implement its restrictive calls for which were extensively labeled as a crackdown on tutorial freedom, pupil dissent and free speech.

After interim President Katrina Armstrong resigned from the college, Khalil mentioned the board of trustees “opted to set fire to the institution they’re entrusted with” by appointing one in every of their very own to the place meant to be held by tutorial management.

“To members of Columbia’s faculty who pat themselves on the back for their progressive leanings but are content to limit their participation to performative statements: What will it take for you to resist the destruction of your university?” Khalil mentioned. “Are your positions worth more than the lives of your students and the integrity of your work?”

Since Khalil’s abduction, a number of extra worldwide college students who assist Palestinian freedom have both been kidnapped or are preventing threats of deportation. Khalil named Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Leqaa Kordia, Badar Khan Suri and Rümeysa Öztürk — a few of whom had been college students at different universities.

“The movement for Palestinian freedom and justice at Columbia and across the United States has always centered community care,” Khalil mentioned. “Together you organized mutual aid for families in Gaza through bake sales and funding campaigns. You created study spaces, reading circles, and cross-movement solidarity. This movement has always been grassroots. It was led by students — many younger than me — who risked their careers, their degrees and their futures to demand divestment.”

The detained activist confused in his letter that college students should maintain preventing the federal authorities’s efforts to make use of universities as devices of state violence, even when they don’t have any private stake in Palestinian freedom.

“To the students who remain apathetic to Columbia’s disregard for human life and its willingness to discard student safety: As pressure from the federal government intensifies, know that your neutrality on Palestine will not protect you. When the time comes for the federal government to target other causes, it will be your names that Columbia will offer on a silver platter, it will be your pleas that fall on deaf ears, it will be your just causes that are stonewalled.”

“The student movement will continue to carry the mantle of a free Palestine,” he continued. “History will redeem us, while those who were content to wait on the sidelines will be forever remembered for their silence.”