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The transformation of Mahmoud Khalil into a liberal icon is happening before our eyes.

It’s a manipulation, politically motivated by twin progressive obsessions: hatred of Israel and Trump. I fear it’s a turning point from which Democratic support for Jews may never recover.🧵 

Khalil led a group that took over a building & blocked access, harassed Jews, assaulted a staffer leading to hospitalization, and distributed material in support of Hamas and Hezbollah. These are crimes, not speech, and support of a terrorist organization is a deportable offense. 

Khalil will get his due process. He doesn’t need a mass movement to ensure that, it was already happening. I’m quite sure the mass movement begun on his behalf is masterminded by political operatives hostile to Israel, cleverly manipulating hostility to Trump. They know this will 

also translate to greater sympathy for campus jihadism, and erode the rights - and the voices - of Jews everywhere. This includes Jews who join their side out of a misguided commitment to legalism and abhorrence of Trump overreach. But it is really another step in the exclusion 

of Jews and Zionism from liberal spaces and public life.

I’m not sure how this will play out. But I see my liberal friends - incl Jewish liberal friends - jumping on the Khalil bandwagon. This scares me as much as anything that’s happened in America in the last 18 months. 

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