I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Mahmoud Khalil to spare you from it

Did Klein softball the interview to treat Khalil as a polite guest, or did he allow him to weave his own rope of distortions and victimhood to hang himself on?

I know journalists must sit down with everybody. All the time, they interview people with whom they disagree. They interview dictators and despots. With those who may even wish them dead.

But journalists are supposed to be adversaries. We are not supposed to make people feel comfortable, especially someone who has so manipulated who is and what he stands for to the American public for the sake of coming out as some kind of free speech darling.

Most are focusing on his most disturbing and candid thoughts about October 7^th.

Khalil, who is here on a student visa and failed to tell immigration officials that he worked for UNRWA, married to an American citizen, answered Klein that the Palestinians had to commit the atrocities of October 7^th to be seen. That Israel and Saudi Arabia were about to normalize relations and Palestinians had been cut out of any deal, so of course, they had no other choice to act the way they did.

Really?

Palestinians had to announce their presence in the world by wiring young women to trees, gang raping them, then burning them alive?

By putting a baby in an oven and baking it in front of its mother?

By burning entire families alive?

By cutting off kids' heads and playing soccer with them?

In the interview, Klein failed to bring up any of the above gory details, he didn’t press Khalil on what happened on October 7^th, but he did not stop Khalil on expressing just how sad and all the sleep he lost in the “days after October 7^th” even as Israel had barely finished counting the bodies and had not yet fired a shot in Gaza.

I will further dissect Klein’s conversation with Khalil.

On CUAD

Klein began this segment of the podcast asking about the demonstrations and protests at Columbia University.

Regarding the talks between the Columbia administrators and his organization, Columbia University Apartheid and Divest (CUAD), Klien asked Khalil to explain himself and the intentions of his organization and its cohorts.

Klein: “What were you negotiating for?”

Khalil: “Given my relationship with the Columbia administration, and given my experience in diplomacy, the students and faculty approach me to negotiate on their behalf, and also as a Palestinian, like I can relate more to the demands. So I was negotiating with two top administrators at Columbia. However, Columbia did not want to negotiate, they just wanted to buy time …The students submitted proposals to Columbia's Committee on Divestment, and the proposals were rejected.”

Khalil’s idea of diplomacy is flawed. Diplomacy means sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes your proposals get rejected until you come back with a counteroffer and do it peacefully. Khalil then put the onus on Columbia – if only the university had bent to the will of CUAD, there would not have been an escalation.

It’s kind of like how the Palestinians were offered a path to statehood five times, and each time they rejected it, came back with no other counteroffer than violence in the form of the first and second intifada.

But CUAD, like Hamas, in its mission, is not interested in diplomacy or negotiations.

According to the CUAD’s Instagram page, it describes itself as “Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. CUAD stands in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an internationalist one fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people. It rejects every genocidal eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonialized.”

Why didn't Ezra Klein look this up and ask about this?

Instead, Klein let Khalil ramble on:

“You've seen that Palestinians have tried multiple forms of resistance, whether it is armed, unarmed, resistance, peaceful, whatever, but Israel and the propaganda always find like something like that. Like we tried armed resistance, which is again legitimate national law, but again Israel, it is considered terrorism.”

Khalil admitted that organizations like SJP and JVP “stepped up their game” with an escalation to be taken more seriously by Columbia administrators.

What did that “escalation” look like?

According to the ADL’s Report Card on Colleges and Universities, Columbia received a “D” grade in its inability to get control of its campus and to reign in antisemitism.

Here is what the ADL revealed:

· Following October 7 2023, Columbia's Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) led protests on campus that have supported violence against Israel, including one where the group expressed it was “in full solidarity” with Hamas’ “resistance.” Over 100 Columbia faculty members signed a letter supporting student groups like SJP and defending Hamas' attack as “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist.”

· Both SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) led rallies, die-ins, and walkouts during the fall 2023 semester. While the University suspended both SJP and JVP in November 2023, students have continued to organize, call for University divestment from Israel and promote teach-ins, walk-outs, and protests.

· During the fall of 2023, incidents of swastika vandalism, physical assaults, and the posting of stickers reading “Zionist Donors and Trustees Hands Off Our University,” and “Zionism is Terrorism” were reported on campus. Visibly Jewish students have reported being spat on and subjected to antisemitic rhetoric including “F*** the Jews.” In October 2023, an Israeli student was allegedly beaten on his hand with a stick outside of the University library after confronting a perpetrator for ripping down flyers of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

· In mid-April 2024, anti-Israel protestors at Columbia University established an encampment that lasted almost three weeks and set the trend for encampments nationwide.

· A series of incidents were recorded at the encampment and at the campus’ main entrance gates, including a protestor holding a sign saying “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next target” in front of a group of Jewish students holding Israeli flags and a visibly Jewish student being shoved and screamed at by protestors, “you’ve got blood on your hands!” when he attempted to recover an Israeli flag.

· Protestors were also recorded chanting “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!” At the end of April, protestors took over the Hamilton Hall building on campus, breaking windows and ignoring the deadline to dismantle the encampment. They also briefly held a janitor hostage and assaulted him while they were doing it.

Khalil, CUAD’s leader is responsible for all of the above. But Klein did not have any of these incidents in his back pocket to ask of Kahlil. He just let him say that he and his fellow “peaceful student” activists were the victims of a crackdown on free speech on campus.

Khalil: “And that's how the encampment happened. They did not take us seriously at the beginning, but then they took us more seriously, but it was clear that they did not want in any way criticize Israel.”

No, that’s not how the encampment “happened.” It was not spontaneous. It was planned and coordinated, complete with matching tents and professionally made signs, most likely funded with Qatari money.

Klein at one point mentioned that most of the protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall and other buildings had their faces covered and asked why Khalil did not.

Khalil: “I wasn't doing anything wrong to cover my face. That doesn't mean that others were doing something wrong. It means that my calculation is different of what risk is, because the risk is real.”