Another Pro-Hamas Student Faces Deportation

The story of the Trump administration’s detention of Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national at Georgetown University, for having ties to the terror group Hamas can be found here: “US seeks to deport pro-Palestinian Georgetown University student,” Reuters, March 20, 2025:

US President Donald Trump’s administration has detained an Indian man studying at Washington’s Georgetown University and is seeking to deport him after deeming him a harm to US foreign policy, the student’s lawyer said on Wednesday.

The US Department of Homeland Security accused Badar Khan Suri of ties to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and said he had spread Hamas propaganda and antisemitism on social media, according to a statement it shared with Fox News….

After the Trump administration arrested Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for his ties to terrorism, Muslims and far-left activists accused it of violating Khalil’s free speech rights. But free speech had nothing to do with it. Khalil was arrested for supporting the aims of Hamas, a terrorist group. He led chanting mobs on the campus, who surrounded and held captive some Jewish students, screaming in their faces, while happily harassing and roughing up others. These Jewish students testified that as a result of such violence, they lived “in fear.” At a deportation hearing for Mahmoud Khalil, the administration will have an opportunity to prove its case, presenting the evidence it has amassed on Khalil’s support for Hamas and its stated aim of obliterating the state of Israel. In the end, despite the noisy protests in his favor by an alliance of far-left and Muslim activists, I think he will indeed be deported. The only question is where? He was born in Syria, and no doubt the new jihadist regime would be willing to take him in. Or, if he wants to live more luxuriously, he could ask to be sent to Qatar which, like Mahmoud Khalil himself, is a devout supporter of Hamas. Mahmoud Khalil’s links to Hamas consist of his parroting Hamas propaganda, both orally, as he led assembled mobs of protesters chanting anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans, including “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” and “Intifada Now” around the Columbia campus, and in writing, with the antisemitic leaflets his group wrote and left around the campus, including flinging them into a classroom where an Israeli professor was trying to teach.

The latest candidate for deportation is Badar Khan Suri:

Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the university’s School of Foreign Service. His arrest was first reported by Politico….

The Saudi-funded Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was founded by John Esposito — the name of its greatest benefactor, Alwaleed Bin Talal, was added later — who is an energetic defender and promoter of Islam. The Center is devoted to persuading Christians that they have nothing to fear either from Muslims or from the faith of Islam, and Christians are encouraged to believe that Islam and Christianity are compatible, whereas Judaism remains worrisome for both.

Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a US citizen, said his lawyer. Saleh is from Gaza, according to the Georgetown University website, which said she has written for Al Jazeera and Palestinian media outlets and worked with the foreign ministry in Gaza. Saleh has not been arrested, the lawyer added.

Suri’s wife writes for Al Jazeera, the pro-Hamas news channel funded entirely by the government of Qatar. Qatar has provided refuge to several of the top Hamas leaders, including Khaled Meshaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh, and given huge financial support to Hamas as well, some $1.8 billion to date. Saleh has not been detained, or threatened with deportation, as yet; she enjoys a higher degree of protection, against deportation, as a U.S. citizen, than her husband.

Pro-Palestinian protesters are antisemitic if they call for the destruction of the only Jewish state, and the expulsion or killing of all of its Jewish inhabitants, so that it can be replaced by a 23rd Arab state. They are antisemitic if they surround and hold captive, however briefly, Jewish students, while screaming such slogans as “Intifada Now” at Jewish — not Israeli but Jewish — students. They are antisemitic if they harass and even pummel Jewish students who simply had the misfortune to be walking across the campus while a protest was going on.

Now one protester has self-deported back to India. Ranjani Srinivasan, a 37-year-old Indian student in a doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia University, self-deported after her visa was revoked by the US Department of State on March 5. The State Department cited security concerns related to her involvement in alleged activities “supporting Hamas” and was a “terrorist sympathizer.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a post on X, called Srinivasan a “terrorist sympathizer,” saying that those who “advocate terrorism and violence” must not stay in the US.Now she’s gone for good, well aware that the evidence that would have been presented in a deportation hearing would be damning, and once on the public record, could end her chances of future employment, both in the U.S. and in her native India. She could, of course, always find work in Qatar, where support for Hamas is considered a distinct plus.

These deportation efforts ought to scare the wits out of those students — and non-students who ever since October 8, 2023 have found their way onto various campuses to join in the anti-Israel and antisemitic fun — who have had a high old time of it during the last year on their campuses, harassing Jewish students, calling for Israel’s destruction, demanding “Intifada Now” all over the world, invading and vandalizing campus buildings by scrawling antisemitic slogans on the walls, and praising what they call the “resistance” by Hamas on October 7. Now they are entering a world of woe, entirely of their own making. After a half-dozen of these deportations are successfully carried out, we’ll see just how quiet our campuses can become.