Mohsen Mahdawi Calls His Detention ‘a Kind of Death Sentence’

According to NPR, Mohsen Mahdawi, just detained by agents of ICE, is a “Palestinian” who did nothing more than “speak up for his people.” He had been “snatched” by Gestapo-like ICE agents who “grabbed” him when he appeared for what he thought would be the last step In his naturalization process at a government office in Colchester, Vermont. And now the predictable outrage has begun, the posters with his photograph on it are already being held up by protesters bedecked in their keffiyehs. Mahdawi , like his friend Mahmoud Khalil, is being hailed as a “martyr” to free speech. But it’s not his exercise of “free speech” that has gotten him into trouble. It is his repeated harassing and threatening of Jewish students on the Columbia campus, his antisemitic rhetoric, his genocidal call for Israel’s destruction and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state, which is the real meaning of “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free.” More on Mohsen Mahdawi can be found here: “Detained Columbia protester Mohsen Mahdawi threatened and intimidated Jewish students, State Department says,” by Jennie Taer and Chris Nesi, New York Post, April 15, 2025:

…The State Department source said screenshots of Mahdawi’s social media activity that show his virulent anti-Israel views only tell part of the story.

“Mahdawi played an active role in fall 2024 student protests at Columbia University, instructing protesters to physically push a small group of pro-Israel students, events that university officials later acknowledged as threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” the source said.

The source also said Mahdawi was behind “antisemitic rhetoric” during the protests, including referring to Israel Defense Forces soldiers as terrorists and “shouting through a megaphone” at Jewish bystanders and supporters of Israel.

Mahdawi, however, denied accusations that the Columbia protests were antisemitic in an interview with CBS Evening News the night before he was nabbed by ICE agents.

“The accusation that the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia was antisemitic is a false accusation and it is an unjust accusation,” he said Sunday.

He also maintained that his compassion was not limited to Palestinians in the interview that aired Tuesday.

“My compassion is also for the Jewish people, and for the Israelis, as well,” Mahdawi told CBS journalist Lilia Luciano, emphasizing that he wanted people to understand that about himself if he were to be detained.

But Mahdawi was shown in video footage speaking into a microphone during a campus protest while standing in front of a banner reading “By any means necessary” in a profile on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in December 2023.

He also said he could “empathize” with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack against the Jewish state in which 1,200 men, women and children were brutally slaughtered, and called Israel’s response to the massacre “a genocide” in the interview.

“I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done, I said I can empathize. To empathize is to understand the root cause and not look at any event or situation in a vacuum.”…

Mahdawi has been living in the United States for ten years and knows English perfectly adequately, certainly well enough to know that “empathize” does not mean “understand.” It means, rather, to put yourself in another’s shoes, to see, and to some degree share, their point of view. Only a moral monster could “empathize” with the Hamas killers who tied families together and then set them on fire, who beheaded babies, who mass-raped girls in front of their families, who slit the breasts off women and cut the genitalia off men, who gouged out the eyes of both before killing them. Mahdawi has no trouble, he told 60 Minutes, to “empathize” with such people. What would you say about someone who said he “empathized” with the 19 hijackers on 9/11? Or that he “empathized” with the terrorist Kouachi brothers — who were enraged by a caricature of Mohammed and in response murdered a dozen cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo?

Families of hostages still held by Hamas after the terror attack filed a lawsuit last month that alleged SJP had advance knowledge of Hamas’ bloody plans, accusing it of being “Hamas’ American propaganda arm” and pointing to an Instagram post by the group proclaiming “we are back!!” that it said was published minutes before the attack….

One hopes that this lawsuit will expand to include, as defendants, leading members of SJP, including the leaders of their Columbia branch, Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. How splendid it would be to ensnare them in a world of woe, including the financial coils of a civil suit.

Mahdawi called his detention “kind of a death sentence,” according to the Intercept.

Mahdawi is quite the drama queen. He’s being held in a jail in bucolic Vermont, provided with a bed and three squares. He has droves of people calling for him to be freed. He has a raft of lawyers, paid for by others, ready to defend him both in court, and in the court of public opinion. He has spoken to at least one of his many lawyers. How does any of this amount to “a kind of death sentence”?

Mahdawi, who was friends with detained anti-Israel Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil, anticipated becoming a target of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort and went into hiding, asking the university for help finding shelter, according to the Intercept.

His exaggerated sense of entitlement is quite something: Mahdawi wanted Columbia, whose rules he violated with such impunity, to find him a place to stay where he could hide from the feds, thus asking the university to implicate itself in aiding and abetting someone whom the federal authorities have every right to detain, given his history. Fortunately, the university did not oblige.

Mahdawi “was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” his attorney, Luna Droubi, told the Intercept.

“He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech,” she added.

Luna Droubi wants us to believe that Mahdawi is being punished only “for such speech.” What speech? Speech about the horrors inflicted by the cruel Israelis on his people, the Palestinians. But that, of course, is not why he is being detained. He is now detained because, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he has physically threatened and harassed Jewish students. He has introduced antisemitic rhetoric into the SJP-organized protests at Columbia. He has defended Hamas — designated as a terrorist group by the American government — claiming that he “empathizes” with the very people who, 6,000 strong, on October 7, 2023, smashed into Israel where they proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder men, women, and children.

Of course, Mahdawi has his supporters in Washington. No need to round up the usual suspects; they’ve already rounded themselves up. Both Vermont Senators, Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, and Vermont Representative Becca Balint joined in demanding the immediate release of Mohsen Mahdawi from detention, calling his treatment “immoral, inhumane, and illegal.”

That’s the story so far of Mohsen Mahdawi, another “Palestinian martyr to free speech.” I hope there will be many more.