WhatsappThe elevation of Israel-hater Mohsen Mahdawi to a hero of free speech, coupled with the spread of lies about conditions in Gaza, is endangering American Jews.
(May 7, 2025 / JNS)
The unprecedented surge of antisemitism throughout the United States since the Hamas-led Palestinian terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has created a new reality for American Jews, especially Jewish students on college campuses. But perhaps the most sinister aspect of what has unfolded in the last 19 months is not just the way elite universities were transformed into hostile environments for Jews.
The scariest part of this tragic saga is the way that antisemitic organizations and activists, actively assisted by some of the most prestigious and powerful media outlets in the country, have been gaslighting Jews. They’ve been doing everything they can to convince the victims of this hateful campaign that the people who have been targeting them are actually against antisemitism while promoting propaganda aimed at depicting Israel and the Jews as evil oppressors.
While this has been the game plan all along for those cheering on Hamas terrorists since Oct. 7, it became even more obvious in the past week as the liberal press engaged in an effort to portray Mohsen Mahdawi, a leader of the mobs harassing Jews at Columbia University, as not only a martyr to free speech but someone who stands against antisemitism. These same outlets have been resurrecting an already debunked canard about Israel causing a famine in Gaza.
The press, led by legacy media companies like The New York Times, CBS News and the cable-news station MSNBC, has gone from tacit support for the post-Oct. 7 demonization of Israel and Jews to active participants. In doing so, they have demonstrated once again that they’ve discarded journalism and what was left of their credibility for left-wing activism.
The impact of their coverage of the agitation on college campuses and the war against Hamas in Gaza, which the groups behind the hate surge use as justification for their efforts, transcends the question of the decline of trust in the media. Their journalistic malpractice has become the primary engine driving the intimidation and vilification of Jews.
Lionizing a mob leader
Mahdawi became just the latest example of the liberal media’s infatuation with people arrested by the Trump administration. A Palestinian Arab who holds a green card, he was detained while undergoing an interview for his application for American citizenship as part of the government’s efforts to crack down on those foreign nationals involved in the pro-Hamas mobs targeting Jewish students at Columbia.
The U.S. Department of Justice informed the federal court in Vermont, where Mahdawi had been arrested, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was revoking his green card because the “activities and presence of Mahdawi in the United States undermine U.S. policy to combat antisemitism.” It also noted that efforts to disrupt university life that Mahdawi led at Columbia “potentially undermine the peace process underway in the Middle East.” Both points are legitimate reasons to deport Mahdawi, but a sympathetic judge has released him pending further legal proceedings.
Since being freed, he has become the toast of the corporate media, authoring an op-ed in The New York Times and being the subject of a fawning profile on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program, in which he was allowed to pose as both a martyr to free speech and an advocate for peace. This narrative, depicting him as the subject of persecution by the administration, was further amplified by coverage in outlets such as NPR. That story actually claimed that he was the victim of ill treatment by supporters of Israel because they were chanting for the release of the abused hostages taken by Hamas while Mahdawi was ranting about Gaza with a bullhorn on campus. Mahdawi’s claims that he opposes antisemitism and wants peace went unchallenged. Meanwhile, other left-wing outlets like New York Magazine cheered him as a hero of the anti-Trump and anti-Israel “resistance.”
Contrary to the way that he has been portrayed in these accounts, Mahdawi is no advocate for peace. A leader of the pro-Hamas illegal encampments and building takeovers at Columbia, he supported the murderous Hamas assault on civilians in the Jewish state and repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction, an outcome that could only be obtained by the genocide of its population. As a more accurate article in The Free Press noted, he was personally involved in several incidents in which he harassed Jewish students, including one where he blared a siren at them. While Columbia gave Mahdawi a pass for his law-breaking activities, a Jewish student was subjected to disciplinary action for calling the terrorism backer a “Nazi.”
Moreover, he has a record of antisemitic utterances and support for terrorism going back to 2015, when he said, “I like to kill Jews,” as he was seeking to acquire a sniper rifle. Mahdawi has close family ties to convicted Palestinian terrorists he has praised as heroes and martyrs, rather than disassociating himself from their actions as someone who was a peace advocate would do.
As for his claim to be an advocate for peace, or, as he did in one video, argue that the genocidal chant of “from the river to the sea” doesn’t mean Jewish genocide, that is nothing but gaslighting. Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks the only way that peace can be achieved is the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, shouldn’t be taken seriously as anything but a rabid antisemite.
Opposing Trump
None of this matters to those who have elevated him to the status of a “free speech” martyr.
Part of the reason for this is partisan politics. Many on the left are prepared to lionize anyone targeted for deportation by the Trump administration as victims who have been abducted by the government, rather than lawbreakers and threats to public safety. Just as Democrats rallied to the cause of MS13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia, so, too, did Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) when he visited Mahdawi in jail, and then echoed lies about the agitator seeking peace and making common cause with Jews.
Sadly, the same motivation is behind the decision of 500 Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis to sign a letter opposing President Donald Trump’s efforts to force institutions of higher learning to take action against antisemitism on their campuses as well as to drop the woke leftist ideologies that are fueling the hate against Jews.
What’s happening here is not merely a wave of sympathy for those threatened by deportation by the administration. These attempts to treat terror supporters who have organized and taken part in thuggish efforts at intimidating Jewish students and even faculty members as victims are linked to similarly dishonest media coverage of the post-Oct. 7 war that Israel is waging to eradicate Hamas.
Indeed, many in the mainstream liberal press have been acting as Hamas’s stenographers since Oct. 7—accepting flagrantly false statistics about civilian casualties as truthful, downplaying or denying the Islamist group’s genocidal goals, and falsely alleging that the Israel Defense Forces have been committing war crimes when, in fact, they take greater care to avoid civilian loses than any other modern army.
The famine myth
Currently, the main anti-Israel media talking point is an effort to revive the myth that there is a famine going on in Gaza. The drumbeat of accusations lobbed at Israeli forces of deliberately starving Palestinians has been going on since the war began, even though the United Nations, which is profoundly hostile to the Jewish state, admitted it wasn’t true.
But with Hamas refusing to release the remaining Israeli hostages it still holds, and also showing itself unwilling to lay down its arms and give up control of the Strip, Israel has stopped the flow of aid into areas the terror group controls. It also plans on taking control of the distribution of food and fuel in the coastal enclave to prevent Hamas from continuing to steal most of it.
Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from Hamas’s continuation of the war it began on Oct. 7, but there remains no evidence of famine or anything close to it. Yet newspapers like the Times ignore these facts in order to keep pushing a narrative about Israelis oppressing Palestinians. The responsibility for this situation belongs to the terrorists, not the nation they attacked. Nevertheless, claims of a humanitarian catastrophe are largely part of an effort to allow the Islamist group to retain control, something that will ensure that the Jewish state will suffer more barbaric atrocities like those that began this struggle. The only way to alleviate the situation is not to lift the siege of Hamas but to force its surrender.
Meanwhile, the inflammatory coverage of Gaza is doing more than harming Israel’s image while largely giving the Palestinians a pass for their continued efforts to slaughter Jews. The myths about “genocide” or “famine” going on are also putting wind in the sails of Hamas’s supporters in the United States and their campaign against Jews. Without the widespread publication and broadcast of falsehoods about Israeli actions of self-defense, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for people like Mahdawi to get away with their bigoted thuggery. Nor would he be treated as a hero if not for the fact that liberal outlets give credence to the deceptive narrative about Israeli actions to ultimately exonerate those responsible for Oct. 7, as well as those, like Mahdawi and other Palestinians, who continue to applaud such barbaric crimes.
The media’s embrace of stories about a fake famine and fake martyrs among those slated for deportation has legitimized a mindset among many Americans who see Jewish rights and Jewish lives as unworthy of respect or protection. It’s bad enough that Mahdawi is allowed to get away with misinformation about his criminal actions and toxic beliefs about Israel, and that news organizations absolve Hamas for the impact of the war it launched. However, it is the acceptance of the Hamas narrative about Gaza and schools like Columbia that have been key to the rise in Jew-hatred.
To “so-called” progressives steeped in ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism, the delegitimization of American Jews is the inevitable corollary to their attacks on the Jewish state. Despite the lip service paid to condemnations of Jew-hatred, defeating antisemitism will be impossible so long as major journalistic outlets continue to bolster this mendacious campaign.
