Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of a pro-Hamas group at Columbia University who has so far avoided being repatriated to his country of origin by the Trump administration, derided concerns about campus antisemitism as “manufactured” during an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday.

Khalil uttered the remark in response to being asked by Times contributor Ezra Klein whether antisemitism poses a significant threat to Jewish students.

“I wouldn’t say there was none,” Khalil told Klein, who is Jewish. “I would say there is manufactured hysteria about antisemitism at Columbia because of the protests.”

Khalil acted as an organizer for a group which called itself “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” (CUAD). Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CUAD has perpetrated illegal building occupations and severe infrastructure sabotage. The acts stunned Columbia’s campus, prompting fears of imminent revolutionary-style violence on campus even as Jewish students and faculty received antisemitic hate mail and death threats.

However, Khalil dismissed the notion that pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activists have been fostering a hostile environment for Jews on campus.

“Because Proud Boys were at the doors of Columbia, the very right-wing group. And there are incidents here and there. But it’s not like antisemitism is happening at Columbia because of the Palestine movement,” he said. “This is why I always push back. I have a strong belief that antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism rise together because the same groups are perpetrating that in different ways.”

Khalil then went on to assert some of the very claims prompting accusations of antisemitism in the anti-Israel movement, accusing the Jewish state of “genocide” while arguing that the accusation is aimed at making pro- Israel supporters “uncomfortable” and defending the terrorist-led Palestinian intifadas.

“I don’t want to sanitize history,” Khalil continued. “Like I told you, the second intifada involved violent acts, but overwhelmingly, they were peaceful.”

Over 1,000 Israelis were killed in the early 2000s during the second intifada, when Palestinian terrorists ramped up violence targeting Israelis that included suicide bombings, shootings, and stabbings.

For his part, Klein alleged that the public imposes unequal standards of speech on Jews and Palestinians, saying, “I agree with you that there is a broad effort to demand that Palestinians speak perfectly that is not demanded of Jewish people.”

Jewish students have complained on campuses across the US that sharing their beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict elicits verbal abuse, social alienation, and poor marks from their professors. In one extreme case, anti-Zionists expelled a Jewish student at the State University of New York, New Paltz from a sexual assault survivor’s group after she shared a pro-Israel post on social media.

The interview comes amid new harrowing FBI statistics which reveal the extent to which violent antisemitism has become a pervasive occurrence in American life.

While hate crimes against other demographic groups declined overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups noted that this surge, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population. Additionally, a striking 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes that were reported to the FBI in 2024 targeted Jews, with 2,041 out of 2,942 total such incidents being antisemitic in nature. Muslims were victims in 256 offenses, or about 9 percent of the total.

Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, colleges across the US erupted with effusions of antisemitic activity, which included calling for the destruction of Israel, cheering Hamas’s sexual assaulting of women as an instrument of war, and several incidents of assault and harassment targeting Jews on campus.

At Khalil’s own school, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, pro-Hamas activists produced several indelible examples of campus antisemitism, including a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself, brutal gang-assaults on Jewish students, and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.

Columbia University is taking steps towards moving on from this turbulent era. In July, it agreed to pay over $200 million to settle claims that it exposed Jewish students, faculty, and staff to antisemitic discrimination and harassment — a deal which secured the release of billions of dollars the Trump administration impounded to pressure the institution to address the issue.

As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to restructure its Middle East curriculum to include a wider range of views, “discipline student offenders for severe disruptions of campus operations” and “eliminate race preferences from their hiring and mission practicers, and [diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI] programs that distribute benefits and advantages based on race” — which, if true, could mark the opening of a new era in American higher education.

“Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to retain the confidence of the American public by renting their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,” US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement commenting on the deal. “I believe they will ripple across the higher education sector and change the course of campus culture for years to come.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.