America’s openness frees Mahmoud Khalil to abuse our freedoms

It’s a shame we’re still debating whether Mahmoud Khalil should be kicked out of the United States, because this hateful zealot should never have been allowed to step foot on American soil in the first place.

Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student who became a poster boy for critics of President Donald Trump’s deportation policies, is back in the headlines this week for all the wrong reasons.

In a high-profile interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Khalil made a mockery of those who have insisted he’s a well-intentioned humanitarian without animus toward anyone.

“It felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle,” he said of Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack on innocent Israeli civilians.

Klein asked the gentlest possible follow-up: “What do you mean we had to reach this moment?”

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t avoid such a moment,” Khalil repeated.

In a manner that would have been comical were it not for the horrific subject matter, Klein — ever so eager to vindicate his vile guest — afforded Khalil one more chance to describe the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust in a way that didn’t make it out to be a vital but tedious chore.

But Khalil tripled down.

It was, he said, a necessary evil to “break the cycle” and “tell the world that Palestinians are here,” you see.

This came just weeks after Khalil refused not once, not twice, but three times to condemn Hamas when he appeared on CNN.

“I simply asked and protested the war in Palestine,” he said of the antisemitic uprising he helped lead on Columbia’s campus.  

“That’s my duty as a Palestinian, as a human being right now, is to ask for the stop of the killing in my home country.”

Critics exploded with righteous anger.

“Mahmoud Khalil has not been shy about his support for Hamas — a brutal terrorist organization that violently attacks innocent men, women, and children,” observed White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

“Calling the massacre of Israeli civilians a ‘desperate attempt’ is not political speech — it’s moral depravity,” submitted NY state Assemblyman Ari Brown of Nassau County.

‘Mahmoud Khalil must be immediately deported,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) declared. “He is a chief pro-Hamas terrorist agitator.”

The Trump administration has already tried.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched deportation proceedings against Khalil in March, he did so by claiming the then-student’s anti-Israel protests on Columbia’s campus “undermine US policy to combat antisemitism around the world and in the United States.”

Yet even many of Khalil’s critics chafed at the federal government targeting a legal resident and green card holder for offensive speech — and a New Jersey court forced his release.

The First Amendment is, after all, among Americans’ most cherished inheritances.

Many free-speech champions expressed reasonable concern that removing Khalil might open the door to a slippery slope of censorship.

That concern, though, elides the all-important threshold question: Why was Khalil ever allowed into the United States at all?

There are legal, prudential and philosophical arguments for granting all legal residents the powerful protections of the First Amendment.

But there’s nothing in the Constitution — nor embedded in our longstanding American values — that compels this country to admit hateful ideologues.

Khalil is a 30-year-old man harboring palpable bigotries (“Having lived in the Middle East most of my life, unfortunately, the only Jew you hear about is the one who’s trying to kill you,” he explained to Klein), and a tribal loyalty that blinds him to the basic moral principles underpinning American life.

Not to mention his unfriendly feelings toward the United States itself.

“I had my own reservations about the impact of America on me,” he told Klein smugly. “As a Palestinian or as a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, America’s influence in the Middle East was very negative.”

The United States is an open-minded, benevolent nation predisposed to accepting people of myriad cultures from across the globe.

That’s an honorable instinct, and most of the time it’s the right one.

But a line has to be drawn to protect the national interest.

And if that line is so weak and vague as to permit the entry of someone unable to condemn kidnapping, torture, murder and rape for political purposes, it’s no line at all.

It’s “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as Emma Lazarus put it.

Not “Give me your bigots, your knaves / Your privileged yearning to drive Jews into the sea.”

Now that he’s here, Khalil has the right to promote his hateful, anti-American worldview in as many “progressive” media outlets as are willing to amplify it.

But he does so as a living testament to both the virtues of America — and the failures of its immigration system.

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.