Friday’s edition of the PBS show Amanpour & Co. celebrated Mahmoud Khalil, who led an extreme anti-Israel protest group at Columbia University, then spent months in ICE custody for, according to the Trump administration, leading activities “aligned with Hamas,” or as Amanpour insisted, being part of “Trump's crackdown on free speech, immigration, and elite universities.”
Khalil was at protests that distributed Hamas and Hezbollah literature, which the United States considers terrorist organizations. There's no First Amendment right to support violence and terror, and no right for green card holders to stay in the country if they violate American policy.
Amanpour opened the show with hyperbole: "The activist and Columbia graduate, the first to be jailed under Trump's crackdown on free speech, immigration, and elite universities. My conversation with Mahmoud Khalil.…."
Her introduction to the interview sounded the same hysteric notes.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: This war has divided communities and raised fury all over the world, particularly fraught in the United States, where you can even end up behind bars for your views. One example, Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil. He played an integral role in the anti-war campus protests last year, and it made him a target in Trump's battle with universities, free speech, immigration, all in the name of combating anti-Semitism.
His story has outraged many. And I spoke to him, asking how it felt to be in the middle of Trump's crackdown.
Amanpour allowed Khalil to showcase his defiant political prisoner routine as if he was Martin Luther King Jr., not a graduate student who abused his host country’s hospitality by harassing its Jewish citizens.
After asking him if he was beaten or harmed in custody (Khalil claimed his leg swelled up due to being shackled) Amanpour invited him to “talk about the accusations” from Trump, including calling him “a radical foreign pro-Hamas student” on Truth Social.
Khalil responded by insisting “The protests were peaceful.” But the forcible occupation of campus buildings was not “peaceful,” and led to the expulsion of several Columbia students. The rhetoric of ‘From the River to the Sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” wasn’t peaceful either.
Amanpour didn’t challenge Khalil’s false recall. Amanpour, voluble with her praise, was hesitant and halting when offering critical questions.
AMANPOUR: When you came out, and I'm asking you this because people will ask you, you did actually, you know, walk around with a bunch of people, protesters who were chanting 'from the river to the sea,' that whole thing that seems to just drive people mad, even though the Israeli government says it as well....Why do you keep using it? What's the point and the value of that slogan anymore, since both sides use it?
His answer was ridiculously evasive.
KHALIL: ....And, and from the river to the sea is, is a call for justice, for freedom, for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Unfortunately, the pro-Israel camp in, in this country and around the world, they, they would rather deliberately misrepresent this, this slogan. Because for them, to cancel speech is easier than actually engaging and reflecting on, on this speech. And I even would go, like, further with a globalized intifada that now the whole, the whole country is, is mad about. A globalized intifada is, we have to take it within its context, because a globalized intifada is a call to globalized solidarity in the world. The intifada is simply a word for uprising….
This was damning: Offered an easy opportunity in a sympathetic venue, Khalil could simply not bring himself to condemn Hamas. Amanpour could have clearly looked up at the pro-Hamas, pro-"armed resistance" postings from Khalil's group.
AMANPOUR: You know, there are -- there are people who are going to ask you, do you condemn, and I'm going to ask you, what Hamas did on October 7th?
KHALIL: I, I condemn targeting and violence against all civilians....I also condemn the selective outrage on such circumstances because I also condemn the 75-year of dispossession, of ethnic cleansing, of killing of Palestinians….
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