The Volokh Conspiracy
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Potential Deportee Mohsen Madawi: I Like to Kill Jews [Allegation]
Whatever one thinks of the relevant legal and constitutional issues regarding the Trump administration's campaign to revoke visas from and deport students it deems antisemitic and supportive of terrorism, one should be clear on exactly what views and backgrounds some of these people have. You often won't find out from mainstream media sources.
A case in point is Columbia [edit: undergrad]* student Mohsen Madawi, who won a habeas petition yesterday. Judge Geoffrey Crawford bought the portrayal of Madawi's as a peace-loving conciliator hook, line, and sinker. This despite a rather significant detail buried in the opinion:
In its response, the Government directs the court's attention to an incident in summer 2015 when a gun shop owner told Windsor, Vermont police officers that Mr. Mahdawi had visited his store twice, expressing an interest in learning more about firearms and buying a sniper rifle and an automatic weapon and that he "had considerable firearm experience and used to build modified 9mm submachine guns to kill Jews while he was in Palestine." (Doc. 42-2.) The store owner stated that Mr. Mahdawi took photos of the store and its merchandise. (Id.) The store owner gave the police the name of a fellow gun enthusiast who stated that he had a similar conversation with Mr. Mahdawi at the "Precision Museum" in Windsor where the enthusiast served as a volunteer tour leader. During that conversation, Mr. Mahdawi allegedly told the gun enthusiast, "I like to kill Jews." (Id.)
Mahdawi denies the allegation, and his lawyers told the court that the FBI agent who investigated "was satisfied with his explanation and closed the investigation." The government acknowledged that the investigation ended without charges, but it was not "closed" in any official way.
Judge Crawford concludes:
The court has considered the allegations made by the gunsmith in 2015. If true, they are highly damaging to Mr. Mahdawi's chances of release and of having any future in the United States at all. In 2015, the FBI conducted a thorough investigation of the allegations and found no basis to act. Had the statements attributed to Mr. Mahdawi been true, they would have resulted in some official response. In a case of the dog that did not bark, the FBI concluded its investigation without taking action. That decision gives rise to a reasonable inference that the agency charged with the protection of the public from crime found no basis for proceeding against Mr. Mahdawi in any venue.
I don't know why the FBI did not refer Mahdawi's case to ICE, especially given the background of 9/11 in which suspicious statements by students who turned out to be hijackers were ignored, but I do know why the FBI didn't charge him criminally; even if the FBI had found the allegations to be 100% true, it's not a crime in the US to have participated in criminal activity in Israel. Nor is it a crime to muse about how one likes to kill Jews. So Judge Crawford has no basis for suggesting that the FBI's failure to charge Mahdawi amounts to a finding that the incidents never happened. (As an aside, my friend Ilya Somin seems to think that musing about killing Jews at a gun shop shouldn't make an alien deportable or even ineligible for an initial visa so long as the statement is deemed protected by the First Amendment for citizens. I think that's nuts.)
To my utter lack of surprise, the story on the case in the New York Times today makes no mention of Mahdawi's apparent history of wanting to kill Jews. The Times also gave Mahdawi a laudatory profile a while back, with the headline, "He Wanted Peace in the Middle East. ICE Wants to Deport Him." No mention that he wrote a poem circulated on Facebook in 2013 celebrating a terrorist responsible for the notorious Coastal massacre in Israel in 1978, which left 38 Israelis dead, including many children.
More recently, here he is on 60 Minutes, while stating he is not "justifying" Hamas's 10/7 massacre, he also notably declines an open invitation to criticize it, stating that he can empathize with the sentiments that in his view led to it: "To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me the path moving forward." Call me crazy, but I'm thinking that someone who is really the peace-loving humanitarian portrayed by the Times wouldn't hesitate to condemn the massacre, torture, rape, and kidnapping of thousands of innocents by a terrorist theocracy. I might especially be inclined to do so if I had been previously investigated by the FBI for talking about killing Jews while perusing weapons in a gun store.
And here he is at Columbia in November 2023, leading chants of "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free." I listened to the whole speech so you don't have to, and it also includes a couple of subtle antisemitic allusions. He tells his audience that their voices are more important that the "money" that Columbia is paying attention to. I would let that one pass, except that he later says that he and his audience are in "the belly of the beast, the Big Apple" but won't be silenced. Why is New York City the Belly of the Beast? Who is trying to silence them with their money? I think we know.
Mahdawi should have been deported in 2015, assuming the statements of the gun store owner were deemed credible. And for these purposes, talking about being involved in killing Jews and enjoying killing Jews is quite sufficient to me to justify deporting him now. As for the habeas petition, he doesn't strike me as an immediate threat nor as much of a flight risk, so I'm not sure why he was arrested to begin with, as opposed to just receiving notice that his lawful status was revoked.
- *Added: Contrary to my original post stating that he is a grad student, Mahdawi is an 34 year old undergraduate student at Columbia's School of General Studies. This is a program for "nontraditional," often foreign, students who generally would not have the credentials to get into Columbia College. This raises some interesting questions. He's been here since 2015 but is still pursuing an undergraduate degree? Even though he already has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Birzeit University in the West Bank, and previously studied at Lehigh University? According to the Judge Crawford's decision, his permanent address is in Vermont. But he's pursuing a degree at Columbia in New York City? He was married to a US citizen for several years, but now is divorced. If he has employment, the judge didn't mention it in discussing why he's not a flight risk. How is he sustaining himself? Judge Crawford didn't seem to be interested in these questions, but they are certainly worth asking.
