New York Times Claims Busted Columbia Activist Who Empathized With Hamas ‘Sought Middle Ground’

“And collect my packages, my bombs / And embrace my gun…”

After their PR campaign for Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal fell through, the media is rallying for more foreign nationals who were terrorizing college campuses.

Next up is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia U anti-Israel activist in his mid-30s, from Israel who is being billed as a “Buddhist” and a “pacifist”.

A Columbia Activist Sought Middle Ground on Gaza. The U.S. Detained Him. – New York Times

About two-thirds of the way through his sympathetic profile, the Times has to reckon with Mahdawi’s views.

The Canary Mission, a hard-line pro-Israel group, compiled an exhaustive online dossier cataloging his activism, with screenshots of his social media pages and selective quotes from his speeches on campus and media interviews. They cite one in which he says, “We were accused by the administration that we are calling for genocide, while the administration itself is ignoring the current genocide that is taking place in Gaza. Shame on you, Columbia!” In another example taken from a newspaper interview, they quote him saying, “Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation.”

The group claims that he wrote a poem in 2013 praising a Palestinian terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, who committed a 1978 attack in Israel. They also cite a mournful social media post in 2024 he wrote about one of his cousins, whom they called a Hamas fighter killed by Israel.

The New York Times doesn’t mention Mahdawi telling 60 Minutes that he empathizes with the Hamas attack on Israel. It doesn’t mention the contents of the poem or what terrorist attack it celebrated.

On February 3, 2013, a Facebook user shared a poem Mahdawi wrote that paid tribute to terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. Mahdawi left comments thanking the poster for sharing the text.

The poem said: “I will breathe home… / And fill my shame / And clean my gun / And collect my packages, my bombs / And embrace my gun…”

Dalal Mughrabi, a member of the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel. She and other terrorists hijacked a bus in an attack that left 38 Israeli civilians dead, including 13 children.

Nor does it mention the post-Oct 7 letter he signed along with other Columbia U anti-Israel activists.

We cannot view the recent actions of Palestinian fighters in isolation. … Finally, we remind Columbia students that the Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land. If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence break out. The international community is quick to affirm Israel’s right to protect itself but does not extend this same right to Palestinians. Israel does not have the right to defend its occupation, its apartheid state or its siege of Gaza.

Can’t you just see all that “middle ground”?

How then does the New York Times spin Mahdawi as holding some sort of “middle ground”?

Mostly the paper relies on David Myers: an anti-Israel academic whom we’ve written about at length in the past.

When the UC Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion released a report warning about campus intolerance by the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish left, Myers joined other anti-Israel leftists in attacking the report. An open letter, signed by Myers, bizarrely claimed that the ADL was, which advocates for Muslim and transgender rights, was a “well-known rightwing group”.

Myers also claimed that, “Many advocates of BDS are decent people seeking a long overdue measure of justice for the Palestinians.”

After the Hezbollah attack on Israel in ’06, he blamed Israel. Myers claimed that “Israelis and many Jews around the world” had reacted with “tribal rage”.

After the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in ’14, Myers ranted that, “it is no longer enough to claim the right to self-defense and then cast blame on the other side for instigating the war. Basic human decency won’t permit it.” His version of “basic human decency” did permit him to insist that Israel lift the blockade on Hamas in Gaza and encourage a unity Hamas government.

A “scholarly” piece by Myers inquires, “Can there be a principled anti-Zionism?” His answer is unsurprising.

The New York Times doesn’t tell any of this to its readers, but instead leaves them with the impression that David N. Myers is a legitimate Jewish figure.

David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, met Mr. Mahdawi at a retreat last summer that brought together activists and scholars trying to achieve a new approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They stayed in touch.

“This is a person who stands for precisely the values we want to raise up at this moment of such starkness and such blindness and such division and polarization,” said Mr. Myers, who formerly led the New Israel Fund, a philanthropic organization for progressive Jewish people. “This person constitutes a bridge, and we’ve torn that bridge down instead of embracing it.”

Professor Myers praised Mr. Mahdawi as a “person of dignity, integrity and courage” and criticized the effort of right-wing Jewish groups to attack him and get him deported.

“If you want to find a way to not only dislike someone, but brand them an antisemite, I’m sure there’s always some way you can do so, but what you’re doing is engaging in an act of moral blindness,” Professor Myers said.

Having David Myers endorse Mahdawi is almost as damning as if Hamas had.