The MRC vs. Students
Following the Trump Regime Media template, the Media Research Center baselessly smears college students who expressed support for Palestine as "pro-Hamas."
On the heels of its dishonest coverage of deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Media Research Center found another disfavored person — this time, a student protester — to smear, starting with a March 11 post by Jorge Bonilla:
The networks had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into coverage of the virulent antisemitic protests at major universities across the United States, beginning with those at Columbia University in New York. The protesters’ worst excesses were often left off of reporting, lest people get the idea that they were materially supportive both of Hamas and of the atrocities they committed on October 7th, 2023. But there is, at long last, an angle worthy of thorough media coverage.
Judging by the level of concern displayed by the media, Mahmoud Khalil emerges as their truest, purest victim of the still-ongoing student protests. The worst network coverage comes via CBS Evening News Plus, a streaming product that is intended to complement the beleaguered Evening News.
Watch as correspondent Lilia Luciano describes the arrest as having a chilling effect on free speech:
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This report led off the Evening News Plus, and it was two-minutes plus of Luciano advocating for the protesters generally and Khalil specifically. She argued against detention and represented Khalil to viewers as a pacifying figure. Luciano also threw out the “criminality” misdirection, suggesting that Khalil has to be found guilty of a crime before being deported.
That simply isn’t the case. Khalil is reported to have been lead negotiator for a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has openly and brazenly supported Hamas in its war against Israel. That alone is sufficient cause for deportation according to a basic reading of the plain text of the statute. But that part of Khalil’s biography (like his UNRWA internship until a month after the 10/7 terror attack) gets suppressed from coverage- just like the violent persecution of Jewish students by the pro-jihadi protestors.
But Bonilla offers no proof of this — all he has is an attempt at guilt by association, claiming only what he has “reported” to have done, with no facts to back it up. Indeed, it appears there is no there there regarding Khalil. In April, the federal government laid out its rationale for targeting him, admitting he committed no crime but vaguely insisting that his activities “undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States” despite offering no evidence he has engaged in anything anti-Semitic (protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza is not anti-Semitism).
This complete lack of evidence did not stop Alex Christy from pushing the narrative later that day:
As Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil faces deportation for his part in pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic protests, PBS News Hour would have its viewers believe that he is just a victim of a presidential administration that doesn’t like having its opinions challenged. On Monday’s episode, William Brangham falsely claimed there’s no proof to support the allegations against him.
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Back in the real world, Columbia sent Khalil a letter warning him he may be in violation of the university’s anti-harassment policy. Khalil was also very much involved in the recent takeover of school buildings where October 7 was praised and Hezbollah leaders lionized. He was also the leader of a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divestment, which is so radical that “radical” seems insufficient.
Christy offered no proof that Khalil has ever been explicitly “pro-Hamas,” or why it’s somehow beyond “radical” for someone to call for disvestment.
Tim Graham repeated much of this in his March 12 column, which bizarrely began with whining that violent Capitol rioters were described as insurrectionists:
It would have been a dangerous drinking game during the Biden presidency to chug every time the media broadly described January 6 protesters as “insurrectionists.” It didn’t matter whether the protesters were violent or vocally supported overthrowing the government. That was the automatic journalistic assumption for every protester on the scene.
Graham failed to explain why any of that doesn’t rise to insurrectionist behavior. But then it was time to whine about Khalil:
So it’s remarkable when you consider the case of radical leftist Mahmoud Khalil and the group he led, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). On March 10, the network evening news shows didn’t find an “insurrectionist.” They came rushing to his defense.
The Trump administration pulled Khalil’s green card for his support for Hamas terrorism. Everything Trump does is reflexively opposed as unjust.
Perhaps because Trump does a lot of unjust things? Graham doesn’t prove otherwise, nor does he prove that Khalil ever supported “Hamas terrorism.” After obsessing for a while about Khalil’s alleged link to the pro-divestment group and suggesting that it was somehow nefarious that “he was “videos and photographs posted on X depict him holding a bullhorn near the library entrance and engaged in discussion with school administrators,” Graham concluded by ranting:
Reasonable people can debate whether it is fair and reasonable to pull Khalil’s green card and send him packing. But reasonable people should admit the reality that Khalil is an “insurrectionist.” He is a “radical,” and an “extremist.” He embraces the murder of innocent civilians in the pursuit of “liberation.” He’s not a kinder, gentler protester.
Graham is a right-wing activist, which means his definition of “reasonable” is highly skewed. And he never explains why Khalil is more insurrection-y than violent Capitol rioters.
Bonilla returned to whine in a March 12 post that non-right-wing networks aren’t pushing the MRC’s narrative on Khalil, whom he has now weirdly declared to be “terrorism-adjacent”:
ABC World News Tonight continues to champion the cause of radical campus protesters at Columbia University and elsewhere. Tonight’s report on detained green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was the continuance of an ongoing exercise in gaslighting and propaganda.
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The report, filed today by Aaron Katersly, follows a familiar multi-pronged pattern with regard to network news coverage of Khalil. On the one hand, there is the willful downplaying of the facts of the case, the omissions of the breadth and scope of Khalil’s activities, and intentional misrepresentation of the law.
On the other hand, there is the ongoing attempt to render Khalil a sympathetic figure. Did you know he has an American wife that is 8 months pregnant? How could you not?
Bonilla then argued that Khalil deserves to be kicked out of the country simply because the Trump administration decided he should:
At the heart of the Khalil question is whether the United States has the legal right to denaturalize and deport individuals whose conduct threatens either the government or natural security of the United States. It can be reasonably argued that Khalil qualifies for denaturalization and removal by virtue of his role in the protests, the groups with which he affiliates, and the aid and comfort to terrorists that his actions provide. Here, for example, is the Supreme Leader of Iran praising the pro-Hamas protests:
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To continue down the path of falsely casting Khalil as a free speech martyr is to advance the idea of color revolution within the United States. That the media continue to enable these ops raises questions of their own. Many of them.
It can be argued that Khalil is becoming a “free speech martyr” because right-wingers like Bonilla have made him one. He has yet to identify anything Khalil has actually said that warrants his deportation. He is not going to admit that his boss, Brent Bozell, arguably offered aid and comfort to terrorists by endorsing the Capitol riot and allowing his son to take part.
The baseless attacks on Khalil continued in a March 13 post by Christy:
NBC’s Late Night and CBS’s The Late Show hosts Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert were greatly displeased on their Wednesday shows that the Trump Administration is seeking to deport pro-Hamas Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil. As they tell it, Khalil is not the leader of an illegal protest movement that occupied school property and distributed pro-terrorist literature but a victim of Trump’s “naked authoritarianism” and East German-like desire to eliminate dissent.
Christy offered no evidence Kahlil is “pro-Hamas,” though he did claim that he was “pass[ing] out pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah propaganda at illegal occupations of university property.” But the New York Post article he cited to back up the claim never asserted that Khalil personally passed out that “propaganda,” only that they were allegedly given out during a protest he attended.
Christy called Khalil “pro-Hamas” again in a post the next day, again insisting that “Khalil was involved in demonstrations that occupied school property that distributed Hamas propaganda” while citing the same inconclusive New York Post article. This pattern continued:
A March 15 post by Christy touted how Khalil “faces deportation for his role in pro-Hamas demonstrations at Columbia University,” asserting he was facing “consequences for illegal behavior, such as the occupation of school property or harassing others.”
Jeffrey Lord called Khalil a “pro-Hamas agitator” in his March 15 column.
Bonilla claimed in a March 16 post that “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan was “absolutely wrecked” by secretary of state Marco Rubio for allegedly “pretending that Khalil’s detention and denaturalization process is about viewpoint censorship,” with Rubio insisting that Khalil is a “Hamas sympathizer.”
Graham declared in his March 17 podcast that Khalil is a “pro-Hamas protest leader,” whining how “the media pretend he’s not a radical Islamist who supports killing all the Jews, starting with Israel” and insisting that Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which Khalil is allegedly a member of, is “Columbia University Apartheid Divest .” Graham did not back up those claims.
Christy came back for a March 18 post to baselessly suggest that Khalil is a liar:
HBO’s John Oliver thinks Republicans are racists, and the fact that Republicans would vehemently reject the label doesn’t matter to him. However, on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, Oliver tried to claim that former Columbia University student and pro-Hamas protest leader Mahmoud Khalil isn’t anti-Semitic because Khalil claims he’s not and therefore the efforts to deport him are an attempt by the Trump Administration to silence opinions they do not like.
Oliver declared that, “Clearly, you shouldn’t be deporting green card holders for their views. And for what it’s worth: Regardless of what others may’ve said or done during those protests, Khalil himself explicitly said, ‘anti-Semitism, and any other form of racism, has no place on this campus and in this movement.’”
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Blood libel and applying double standards to Israel are absolutely forms of anti-Semitism, and the fact that some self-identified Jews defend people like Khalil means nothing.
Again, Christy offered no proof that Khalil did any of that. Instead, he whined yet again that “Khalil led an organization and was present at an unauthorized occupation of school property that distributed pro-Hamas literature.”
Christy whined further in an April 5 post:
MSNBC is still trying to turn Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation case into something where they frame themselves as Pastor Martin Niemoller warning that the Trump Administration won’t stop with anti-Israel activists. On Saturday’s Velshi, guest host Melissa Murray welcomed Khalil’s attorney, Raher Azmy, to warn, “They will” go after others.
Murray falsely claim, “So, regardless of where you fall on the Gaza question, this is really concerning just generally for the rule of law. This is someone who is exercising First Amendment rights and has been detained and hasn’t had an opportunity to exercise his due process rights to challenge his deportation, his detention.”
The entire reason Azmy is on the show is because Khalil is challenging his deportation, but such basic details aside, Murray then asked, “What does this mean for ordinary citizens, lawful green card holders, and all of us generally?”
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Khalil’s beliefs are clearly a threat to the U.S. and its values. It is not as if he is simply disagreeing with the wisdom of parts of U.S. foreign policy that are unique to Trump.
Christy did not explain how, exactly, the beliefs he baselessly ascribes to Khalil are “clearly a threat to the U.S. and its values” — which suggests that he and the MRC want Khalil deported for his speech, something they usually oppose.
An April 12 post by Christy referred to “anti-Semitic Hamas supporter Mahmoud Khalil” but offered no evidence to back that claim up.
Rumeysa Ozturk
The Trump administration’s deporting and rendition of migrants is one area in which the MRC is sticking to the approved Trump Regime Media narrative. Christy wrote in a March 29 post:
Guest host Alicia Menendez then turned to former Obama State Department official and managing editor of Time magazine Rick Stengel, “None of it ends at Columbia. I think, Rick, about watching the video that we’ve now all seen of Rumeysa Ozturk sort of being confronted on the street, the fact that there is not a stated crime, the fact that there is not a stated crime in the case of Mahmoud Khalil—like, I think to Alex’s point, I think some people look at this and they say, ‘Well, we don’t know that lack of transparency is by design on the part of this administration.’”
So far, we know that Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed that repeated blood libel claims of genocide against Israel and demanded Tufts University divest from Israel.
But the article Christy supplied as proof that Ozturk “repeated blood libel claims of genocide” made no such assertion, and it’s not a crime to call for a university to divest from Israel.
Geoffrey Dickens whined in an April 1 post:
On March 27 the Trump administration scored a big win with the Virginia arrest of a top MS-13 leader. The day before (March 26) alleged Hamas-supporter and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was picked up by ICE agents.
So which arrest did the leftist news outlets care more about? The arrest of the Turkish student Ozturk.
From March 26 (when the cables first started reporting on Ozturk’s arrest) through March 27 ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC devoted a total of 119 minutes, 18 seconds to the Ozturk case, but just 11 minutes, 42 seconds to the MS-13 leader capture.
That’s ten times more coverage to Ozturk than the capture of MS-13 leader Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos.
Dickens did not explain why the arrest of Santos deserved more coverage than that of Ozturk. Meanwhile, it has since been revealed that the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence of terrorist links or anti-Semitic activity by Ozturk.
Bidar Khan Suri
Bonilla served up his employer’s bogus student-bashing narrative on another student in a March 21 post:
The media continue to fall over themselves in order to protect the reputations of suspected jihadists on our college campuses, as they face deportation pursuant to current immigration law. And once again, they continue to raise the free speech straw man as they attempt to create sympathies for these detainees.
Watch NBC’s report on Georgetown academic Bidar Khan Suri in its entirety[:] […]
Once again, a terror-adjacent foreign national with a legal right to work and live in the United States is the beneficiary of the media’s deployment of a straw man defense. Whether it’s this Georgetown academic, or Mahmoud Khalil, or the Hezbollah doctor that was recently deported, the media’s defense of choice is free speech.
No one is looking to strip anyone’s free speech rights, and people are free to say what they want. In this case, though, there is some of that free speech that gets weighed against national security risks pursuant to federal law- which may lead to deportation of the individual that exercised that free speech. And no one is exempt from that.
Given that Suri has only been accused of supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel on social media — something that is not illegal — it is very much a free speech issue, and it’s obvious to everyone but Bonilla that the Trump administration is trying to strip Suri’s free speech rights and Suri is not free to say what he wants; indeed, Bonilla can’t be bothered to prove that Suri said anything that caused a “national security risk.” While Suri’s wife’s father had once served as an adviser to a Hamas leader, there’s no evidence that Suri took part in protests, the Department of Homeland Security has not provided evidence to back up its claim of his “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism,” and it has offered no evidence Suri has broken any laws.
Despite all that, Bonilla concluded by huffing: “By advocating for this academic with literal familial ties to Hamas, the medieval savages that executed the barbaric attacks on October 7th, the media remain stuck in their pattern of usefully idiotic terror apologia.” Seems like Bonilla is the real useful idiot here — he’s reflexively willing to smear people as terrorists whom he refuses to prove have ever committed a crime.