Detained anti-Israel protester Mahmoud Khalil seethed with hatred for the Jewish state, according to a former classmate who told The Post he was an “insidious” presence at Columbia University.
The female graduate student, who is Jewish, said she even dropped a class they took together last fall at the Ivy’s famed School of International and Public Affairs because he made her feel so “uncomfortable” — and her formal complaints to the college fell on deaf ears.
“It would almost be easier if he were some terrifying looking man who threatened to punch people in the face, but he wasn’t,” she said.
“He was very soft-spoken and careful with his words, which almost made him seem more insidious, because it was so intentional – he was never being hyperbolic, he was very clear. He was never joking.”
“You know, he wears polos,” she continued. “It’s not like you meet him and are scared that he’s going to beat you up. To me, it was scary how he was so clearly extreme and so unshakeable in his worldview, which is a very scary worldview, in my opinion.”
Khalil’s laptop especially freaked her out.
It strategically sported one sticker – a map of Israel and Palestine with the Jewish state completely blacked out as if it was wiped off the face of the Earth, she recalled.
“It was just so clear that the thing driving him most in life is destroying Israel and everyone within it and anyone who supports it, and probably all Jews … That to me was scary, that something could consume you like that,” the first-year student said.
Khalil, 30, also routinely boasted in class that he headed the Students for Justice in Palestine movement at Columbia and “didn’t love Jews.”
He was a frequent no-show to class, which centered on Israeli politics, the student recalled. And when he did attend lectures, he disrespectfully interrupted his professor, who is Israeli.
“Everything about Israel was illegitimate; everything about Zionism was illegitimate because, in his mind, it’s like a farce and a fallacy to think otherwise,” she said.
And Khalil routinely “targeted” Jewish students in a WhatsApp group chat the class shared, she added.
“Once or twice a week, he would just go in [the group chat] and basically instigate crazy claims that were just very antisemitic and really inflammatory, and would get into fights with people,” she said.
Reading directly from the chat, she recounted, “One day a Jewish student had said, ‘I’m disturbed by the normalization of the insane amount of antisemitism spewed in this chat in the last few months. Disappointed and shameful.’ To that, Mahmoud said, ‘Thank you. This is exactly what some are trying to do so hard in this conversation: Conflate Judaism and Zionism, so it’s easier for them to shut down any criticism of the colonial, genocidal state of Israel.’
The student said it was such erratic behavior that drove her to drop the class — although she didn’t dare confront him.
“I just didn’t want to become a target of his,” she said.
The student, however, anonymously filed two Title VI complaints with Columbia administrators about his antisemitic rants within the group chat — but nothing ever came of them, she said.
Following the bloodshed and the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Khalil became a driving force behind many of the anti-Israel protests, organizing takeovers and building encampments that plagued Columbia for more than a year, and he is now the poster boy for President Donald Trump’s crackdown on antisemitic college protesters.
Khalil was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents March 8 at his Columbia-owned apartment building and later transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he faces deportation.
The student said that after she learned the news of his detention it “literally felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders.”
“All week, I have felt safer on campus and like I have a pep in my step,” she said. “I used to feel so much anxiety, but I literally feel safer now.
“I really do think this country is probably safer without him here, like I don’t know how he got a green card,” she said. “He seems very much like he hates America and everything it stands for, and I think he’s done a lot to cause harm and violence here, and I could see him doing more.”
She also believes the university should have held Khalil accountable for his Jew-hating ways.
“There have been so many reports filed against him,” she claimed. “He was not in compliance with academic standards. They bent over backwards to not expel him, and I think if they would have followed their own rules, we would not be here now.”
Khalil — a Syrian-born Palestinian who is also a citizen of Algeria — fled to Lebanon at 18 after a civil war broke out in Syria to pursue an undergraduate degree in computer science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
Before becoming a student leader of last spring’s riotous campus protests at Columbia, Khalil worked for the controversial United Nations Relief and Work Agency.
From June through November of 2023, he was a political affairs officer with UNRWA, which has extensive ties to Hamas. A damning Israeli dossier compiled through interrogations of Hamas terrorists and documents found in Gaza estimated roughly 1,200 of UNRWA’s staffers were linked to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The group last year fired 10 staffers involved in the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack.
And UNRWA, which gets millions in US aid, previously come under fire from US House Republicans for aiding Hamas with “food, fuel and supplies.”
Khalil’s also held a senior position at the UK office for Syria in Lebanon — a diplomatic mission within the UK embassy in Beirut — for four years, according to multiple reports. He worked in a support role that helped inform British foreign policy on Syria given his knowledge of the region, as well as his Arabic skills.
The role would have required a thorough background check and “rigorous security clearance,” Andrew Waller, one of Khalil’s former co-workers there, told The Guardian.
After rising up the ranks, Khalil decided to pursue a master’s degree in public administration at Columbia and moved to the US on a student visa in December 2022.
Khalil became a permanent US resident after marrying his wife, Noor Abdalla — a 28-year-old US citizen and dentist — in the Big Apple in 2023.
The couple, who are expecting their first child in late April, live in an off-campus apartment, where federal immigration agents grabbed him last week.
His lawyers are currently battling it out in court to prevent his deportation — arguing that ICE detained him illegally.
In the meantime, Khalil’s detainment has become a lightning rod for hateful anti-Israel protestors — who have vandalized the home of Columbia University‘s current interim president Katrina Armstrong, crowded the dining area of Trump Tower, and rallied outside Federal Plaza Immigration Court this week, all while calling for Khalil’s freedom and spewing antisemitic hatred.
The Trump administration has argued it can legally boot Khalil given his role in the anti-Israel campus protests.
Officials have said that while Khalil isn’t accused of or charged with a crime, his actions are “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”
The Columbia graduate student said that the majority of her peers have worn keffiyehs to class to show their support this week — a move that has left her “unsettled.”
Khalil’s detainment “has really fanned the flames and mobilized students on campus — it’s really wild and scary,” she said.
