In the article “Leftist Jews Protest Deportation of Hamas Supporter Who Terrorized Columbia,” I discussed the outpouring of support for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia U pro-terror campus organizer from Syria, from Democrats including the Senate Judiciary Committee, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and the rest of the Squad, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Mayoral candidate Brad Lander.
Now there’s a letter signed by Reps. Tlaib, Omar, and the rest of the Squad, along with 11 other members of Congress, including Rep. Al Green, and a few other Congressional Black Caucus members, hailing the pro-Hamas riots at Columbia and accusing Israel of “oppression” and a “brutal assault” and describing Khalil as a “political prisoner”.
Who is all this for?
The pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia University which resulted in riots, violent assaults, vandalism, pro-terrorist propaganda and harassment of Jews on campus operated as part of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition. Khalil served as a negotiator for the group during its occupation. CUAD’s members included Students for Justice in Palestine or SJP whose current tagline is “Long live the student intifada & glory to our martyrs.”
Here Khalil reportedly states, “We’ve tried armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law, but Israel calls it terrorism”.
Even the New York Times covered the fact that CUAD endorsed terrorism.
The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war is becoming more hard-line in its rhetoric, openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.
The group marked the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for it: “One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory,” it read, over a picture of Hamas fighters breaching the security fence to Israel. And the group posted an essay calling the attack a “moral, military and political victory” and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.
“The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation and it is our duty to meet them there,” the group wrote on Oct. 7 on Telegram. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom!”
CAUD’s pro-Hamas sympathies were never in doubt.
On March 24, 2024, CUAD co-organized a pro-terror event that hosted Khaled Barakat, a leader of a foreign terror organization. The event was titled: “Palestinian Resistance 101.”
This was only a symptom of how extreme Khalil’s group was.
As Ryan Mauro notes, CUAD declared that it was “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization” and admitted that in the Global South.”
Hamas leaders have repeatedly rallied and given instructions to what they called the “student flood” named after the Al-Aqsa Flood which was the Hamas name for Oct 7.
Mauro also documents CUAD’s posts stating that “the only way to respond to state repression” is to storm prisons & release prisoners and burn down prisons, government offices and state vehicles (like police cars).
It describes itself as part of an insurgency in the U.S. “until the empire crumbles”.
This is what Democrats at the highest levels of power are hailing and defending.