Columbia Jewish Alumni Assoc.

America already went through long periods of imported sectarian violence. The Orange and Green riots, Haymarket, the anarchist wave around McKinley’s assassination, which produced the Immigration Act of 1903 barring anarchists. The country has historically drawn a line at foreign-born political violence and its enablers, and that line has held across aisles for most of its existence. NYMag doesn’t grasp how deeply wrong this article is because it’s trapped in its own ideological bubble, one that treats pro-Palestine campus activism as inherently righteous “resistance,” frames any immigration enforcement under Trump as authoritarian persecution, and systematically downplays or denies the antisemitism, disruption, and foreign policy problems tied to these protests. While Khalil waxes poetic about the life he misses, the piece never lays out his role as the lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest during the 2024-2025 encampments and Hamilton Hall occupation. These weren’t peaceful “anti-war” vigils. Columbia University’s own Antisemitism Task Force documented widespread harassment. Jewish students faced spitting, slurs, ostracism, exclusion from spaces, and an intense climate of intimidation and violent confrontation. Khalil was filmed ranting aggressively at pro-Israel tables, with more incidents reported by eyewitnesses than caught on camera. His activist network was steeped in extreme rhetoric calling to “globalize the intifada,” “in our lifetime,” “from the river to the sea,” and to “eradicate” Western civilization. They distributed materials aligned with Hamas and other designated terror organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation for Palestine, and refused to condemn Hamas or terrorism. Khalil downplayed campus antisemitism as “manufactured” and justified October 7 in ways that tacitly when not overtly promoted terrorism. NYMag like much of the liberal legacy media has persistently covered these protests sympathetically while treating Jewish student complaints and post-Oct. 7 antisemitism spikes with perfunctory hedging raked over the coals of overblown “Zionist” pushback narratives. They’d never run a similar sob-story essay from an extremist leading anti-LGBTQ or anti-Black protests with comparable disruption. Here the cause of a foreign-born agitator advocating violence against protected groups in a manner that is wholly corrosive to the American project is sanctified, and Khalil is pitched in the horrifying register of Hamas’s ideological frame, as a martyr, as someone who just misses their old New York life. It does not occur to them that the Bibas children are not here to essay about the lives they miss, or how grotesque it is that what he misses is the sense of security American freedoms he abused gave him to harass and disrupt the lives of American minorities. It is a moral failure, so genuine and complete, that we see in these outlets that it marks an indelible cleavage in American society. There are those who will not, and cannot understand the words that I write here. And then there are those who cannot stomach the words and epidemic mindset of these media outlets and their subjects. In the minds of either side, there is no room to question who is right and who is wrong. One advocates for moral clarity, the other advocates for moral relativism, with both set firmly on a confrontational course that appears increasingly unavoidable. For me Oct. 7 was barbarism, “globalize the intifada” is incitement, harassment of Jews is antisemitism regardless of the dressing, and non-citizens, even green-card holders, do not get a free pass to import foreign conflicts that undermine the national interest. The other side embraces moral relativism, for them context excuses everything, “resistance” is elastic enough to include terror apologetics, and enforcement against it is the real threat. Never the twain shall meet; that flag is planted where it rightfully belongs.