Who Is Mahmoud Khalil? | Power Line

I am not easily surprised these days, but I confess to having been taken aback by the outpouring of support for Mahmoud Khalil, the notorious anti-Semite, vandal and pro-Hamas agitator. Who, after all, is not being imprisoned, but merely sent back to where he came from.

But where, exactly, is that? Khalil is always referred to as a Columbia student, but in fact he is 29 or 30 years old. There is a story here, about both Khalil and his supporters, that has not been widely told. Liel Lebovitz and Asaf Romirowsky supply some of the missing details:

Who, exactly, is Mahmoud Khalil? According to the Guardian, he was born in Syria in 1995 to Palestinian refugees, then fled at 18 to settle in Lebanon. After his detention, however, the U.S. government reported that he was a citizen of Algeria. How did he end up there?

His professional history is equally convoluted. The Guardian claims he worked for various international NGOs, then landed a job with Britain’s Foreign Office, where he helped administer the prestigious Chevening Scholarship program. (The Telegraph, to make an intricate story even more complicated, reported that Khalil worked for the embassy, not the Foreign Office per se). Then it was on to the UN, where Khalil interned for UNRWA—the organization’s agency for Arab Palestinian refugees that, as a recent lawsuit claims, is a major source of staffing and funding for Hamas. How did a Syrian refugee end up in these positions?

Maybe the influencers who gave him these jobs are the same ones who leapt to his defense. Immediately after his arrest, Khalil’s case was taken on by no fewer than 19 lawyers.

See original for links.

Heading Khalil’s legal defense team is Ramzi Kassem, professor of law at the City University of New York, with a panoply of connections. Himself a Syrian immigrant, Kassem is a fellow of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which helped fund his legal education at Columbia University. At CUNY, Kassem founded Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), which, among other areas of interest, focused on challenging the Trump administration’s treatment of Muslims on the No Fly List. CLEAR has received major gifts from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Jeff Bezos’s former wife, MacKenzie Scott.

Ex-wives have become a major source of funding for the Democratic Party and the Left generally.

Kassem’s previous clients include a few members of al Qaeda, including Ahmed al-Darbi, a terrorist convicted in 2017 for bombing a French oil tanker, as well as another close associate of Osama Bin Laden’s. In 2022, the Biden administration nevertheless tapped Kassem to serve as a senior policy advisor.

One wonders: in what area of policy did Joe Biden find an advocate for al Qaeda to be a valuable advisor?

How did Khalil’s predicament come to Kassem’s attention? It’s worth noting that while still a student at Columbia, Kassem was himself a leader of anti-Israeli agitation.

So was another of Khalil’s lawyers, CLEAR’s Shezza Abboushi Dallal. In a recently surfaced video of an online training of anti-Israel activists, Dallal acknowledges that statements in support of Hamas may implicate a non-citizen’s legal status—the very assertion that she and Khalil’s other lawyers are now denying—and advises her charges to remain silent rather than frame themselves.

The purpose of this nefarious cabal is to destroy America:

[T]he Khalil case points at a concerted, long-term effort to capture American institutions, change them from within, and push policies and ideas that lie far outside the social consensus and, arguably, the boundaries permissible by law.

Ramzi Kassem is typical. He is committed to a long list of radical causes, from defanging law enforcement to defending America’s sworn enemies. Nonetheless, he has enjoyed heavy support from progressive philanthropists, accreditation from America’s finest schools, and eventually made his way to Washington to help reshape policy.

The plot against America has friends–participants–in high places:

Shadowy activists subverting the will of the American people and then seeking protection from a bubble of big-money NGOs and ideologically aligned government officials isn’t a safeguard protecting our democracy; it’s a clear and direct threat to our national security and interests.