Mohsen Mahdawi praised Hamas, honored dead terrorists, and boasted that Palestinians “have the capacity and conviction to resist, to kill and to wound"

 

Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian Columbia student fighting deportation over his role in the school’s anti-Israel protest movement previously pledged to “annihilate the Jews,” our Adam Kredo reports.

 

A 100-page investigation by the British journalists David Collier and Rachel Feldman unearthed statements in which Mahdawi praised Hamas, honored dead terrorists, and boasted that Palestinians “have the capacity and conviction to resist, to kill and to wound.” The findings challenge Mahdawi’s portrayal of himself—and his portrayal in sympathetic media outlets—as a peaceful activist targeted by the Trump administration.

 

“His violence-tinged postings, some of which were published as recently as 2024 while Mahdawi was on U.S. soil, tout ‘armed resistance in the West Bank or Gaza,’” Kredo writes. “They directly challenge the student provocateur’s portrayal of himself as a reformed and now peaceful activist who long rejected the type of violence commonly endorsed by students who protested alongside Mahdawi at Columbia.”

 

“This is not a report about something Mahdawi said when he was young and later repudiated. The significance lies in the continuity to the current day,” Collier and Feldman wrote in a press release. Their report, they added, “raises serious concerns about how someone with such an extensive history of supporting armed violence was able to obtain a U.S visa in the first place.”

 

Mahdawi’s deportation case has received extensive media attention. The New York Times, for example, published a glowing profile last year claiming he left Columbia’s protest movement “because he wanted to engage in dialogue with supporters of Israel” and had grown uncomfortable with other protesters’ calls for violence.

 

But Mahdawi was still defending “armed resistance” in a friends-only Facebook video in December 2024. And in a 2013 video, he declared that “every young man” has “the ability, the capacity and the conviction to resist, to advance, to kill and to wound.” After arriving in the United States the following year, he praised the “lions” of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

 

By 2015, Vermont police were investigating Mahdawi after he applied for a job at a gun shop. The shop owner told police that Mahdawi claimed experience with modified submachine guns “to kill Jews while he was in Palestine” and later allegedly said, “I like to kill Jews,” according to records reviewed by Collier and Feldman. Mahdawi denied making the latter statement, and federal agents ultimately closed the investigation. 

 

Washington Free Bacon