National political conversation this week has tended to focus on the uncertain fate of a noncitizen and former Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil.
The stock market of late has been on a veritable roller coaster, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to ruffle feathers, Iran marches ever harrowingly closer to a nuclear weapon, and Russia and Ukraine get tantalizingly close to a ceasefire. But the national political conversation this week has curiously tended to focus not on any of that but instead on the uncertain fate of a lone noncitizen and former Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil.
Talk about a misplacement of priorities. Most American media consumers care a great deal about their pocketbooks and retirement accounts. They likely also care about stability on the world stage — a subdued China, a relatively calm Middle East and a long-overdue peace deal to end the bloodshed in Eastern Europe.
By contrast, here is one thing media consumers probably don’t care a lot about: whether a Syrian national and Algerian citizen who was the face of last year’s violent pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. You would never know that, of course, from the media’s incessant focus on the Khalil saga. Is it any wonder that only 31% of Americans told Gallup last fall they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media?
In any event, Khalil is, by any metric, a wildly unsympathetic figure. The New York Times described him as the “public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. He was the spokesman of a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). CUAD has referred to the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that it is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.
