Six weeks after being released from US federal detention, Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestinian protest leader to be arrested by President Donald Trump’s administration last spring, has defended Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and said concerns about antisemitism at Columbia University reflect a “manufactured hysteria.”

Khalil first made the latter allegation in a jailhouse letter in April, soon after he was detained by immigration authorities over his role in the university’s pro-Palestinian protests, which critics said were fueling antisemitism.

He repeated it in a wide-ranging interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein published on Tuesday. The interview appeared to mark the most extensive public questioning that Khalil has faced about the allegations of antisemitic activity that made him a symbol of the Trump administration’s crackdown on colleges.

In the interview, Klein delved into Khalil’s arrest on March 10, which stemmed from allegations that he had fueled antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus, and subsequent three-month detainment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana. In June, in Khalil’s first interview since he was released from federal detention, he told the New York Times that his detainment “felt like kidnapping.”

During the interview, Klein repeatedly invoked his Jewish identity, but when he brought up his personal experience with antisemitism and allegations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Khalil pushed back.

“Look, I’m Jewish. I don’t take antisemitism lightly. You should see my inbox. And it can be true that Jews can be unsafe, but the idea — it is real that there was antisemitism at Columbia, yet nobody there ended up as unsafe as you did,”........

© The Times of Israel