Mahmoud Khalil compared Columbia University’s administration to Nazi collaborators in an incendiary op-ed published by the school newspaper. The graduate student’s commentary was dictated from ICE custody in Louisiana, the New York Post reported. In the piece, he accused Columbia of laying the “groundwork for my abduction” and also alleged that the Morningside Heights institution suppressed “student dissent under the auspices of combating antisemitism.”’
“The situation is oddly reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon,” Khalil said in the letter published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. He explicitly slammed University President Minouche Shafik, former interim University President Katrina Armstrong, and the deans of the school for cooperating with the federal government.
“Last year, Columbia turned over student disciplinary records to Congress and created the Task Force on Antisemitism that broadly categorized anti-Israel sentiment as hate speech to condemn protests,” Khalil wrote.
“Since my abduction on March 8, the intimidation and kidnapping of international students who stand for Palestine has only accelerated,” he added, while listing Leqaa Kordia, Dr. Badar Khan Suri, and Rumeysa Ozturk as other political prisoners.
‘Who can still pretend this is an educational institution and not the “Vichy on the Hudson”?’
Khalil also blasted his Columbia students, saying the fear his protests have sparked among Jewish Columbia students were “manufactured.” “In a cruel irony, the students who publicize manufactured safety concerns regarding antisemitism are the same ones who repeatedly show up at your events looking for provocation, leaving only disappointed,” he wrote of his Jewish peers.
“I can’t help but think that if I were in Palestine, some of these students would be the ones stopping me at checkpoints, raiding my university, piloting the drones surveilling my community, or killing my neighbors in their homes,” Khalil added.
In the op-ed, Khalil also compared the leadership of Columbia to World War II Nazi collaborators. “Who can still pretend this is an educational institution and not the “Vichy on the Hudson”?”he wrote, referring to the Vichy French leaders who worked with Hitler.
Khalil was taken into custody on the night of March 8 in the lobby of his apartment building. His student visa had previously been revoked by the Trump administration. The 30-year-old Syrian of Palestinian descent, a citizen of Algeria, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after he fuelled anti-Israel protests at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College.
