Dear Mahmoud

My name is Ellen Simon, and I am an American, Jewish mother.

Dear Mahmoud Khalil,

My name is Ellen Simon, and I am an American, Jewish mother. I am writing an open letter in response to your March 18, 2025 missive from your well-earned Louisiana prison cell.

Your letter indicates that you do not fully understand your own role in the piteous situation in which you find yourself. It is riddled with logical fallacies and factual inaccuracies. As you yourself approach fatherhood for the first time, I will speak to you from the perspective of a parent. You will soon come to understand how your own actions affect not just yourself but your entire family.

Be fair. You are the chief architect of your current plight.

You ask, “who has the right to have rights?”

Now be specific, Mahmoud. A green card holder does not possess the same rights as an American citizen. As a green card holder, you were well aware that you could be deported for violating U.S. law and, in particular, supporting a U.S. designated terrorist entity. You were so well aware of that fact, that you brought in a speaker to discuss with your fellow miscreants in Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) who should be involved in which activities based on the risks presented by their immigration status. You knew quite well that you risked deportation based on your green card status and your decision to break American law. You played the game, you rolled the dice, and you lost.

But it is an interesting question, isn’t it? Who, indeed, has the right to have rights? Certainly you did not believe that Jewish students had the right to access campus buildings and greens. You did not believe that Jewish students had the right to their own civil rights. You did not believe that janitors working for Columbia had the right to remain unmolested.

You spent precious little time ruminating over who has rights as you shouted for intifada and led rioters in chants promoting martyrdom.

Your preoccupation now with your own rights indicates a remarkable lack of self awareness of the numerous ways in which you violated the rights of your fellow Columbia University community members for a year-and-a-half. They are the victims, victims of your violation of their rights. No amount of inversion of fact can change that reality.

Your second fallacy derives from your claim that, “[m]y arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech…” As a soon-to-be father, you will face many moments in which you must teach your child to take responsibility for his own actions. When he errs, you will be the one to help him learn to own his mistakes.

Mahmoud, your arrest was a direct consequence of you breaking the law. Over and over and over again. I can see how it would be shocking to suddenly face the consequences of harassing fellow students, vandalizing property, trespassing, violating others’ civil rights, inciting violence, and promoting terrorism after a year-and-a-half of getting off scott free. Nonetheless, you are facing the consequences of your own, repeated, concerted actions in breaching the law of this land.

No one forced you to take over buildings and destroy them. No one made you harass and discriminate against Jewish students. You continue to claim these actions as within the bounds of your rights, but they are not. Not even American citizens should be able to take these actions without repercussion.

Your third fallacy arises from your claim that your “unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months…” Not only is your detention based squarely on your violation of U.S. law, but it takes true chutzpah to claim that the past 16 months have been marked by anti-Palestinian racism to which you have been subject.

You have made it your unofficial, part-time job to engage in loud and proud anti-Jewish racism for 16 months. You have led an organization whose members openly declared that Zionists deserve to die. You shoved Jewish students off of university property. You stood at the helm of an organization that made it its mission to make Columbia so unsafe for Jewish people that the administration told them to go home.

A Jewish ex-classmate of yours described to the New York Post the depths of hatred for Jews that drove you. She so feared you that she dropped a class to avoid being near you and your antisemitic rants, although her complaints to Columbia went characteristically ignored. You told her you “didn’t love Jews.” In her words, “It was just so clear that the thing driving him most in life is destroying Israel and everyone within it and anyone who supports it, and probably all Jews … That to me was scary, that something could consume you like that.”¹ You violated that student’s Title VI rights and those of countless others at Columbia through your racist endeavors.

It takes a great deal of nerve to claim you are being subjected to racism after spending 16 months at the helm of Columbia’s raging antisemitism problem. The fact that so many fools are ready to jump blindly onto that bandwagon only demonstrates how dehumanized Jews have become in the eyes of the world thanks to people like you.

Your fourth fallacy is your claim that Columbia is responsible for your arrest and current predicament. Please refer back to Fallacy 2 - you did this to yourself. Furthermore, Columbia has allowed you to trespass on its property, trample the rights of its other students, violate its policies with impunity, and even awarded you a degree as you shredded its culture and community through your hate-fueled movement.

Columbia is probably the best thing that ever happened to you, and you flushed it down the drain. You took an opportunity for a new life and a new beginning and you did what Palestinian leaders have been doing for generations - you wasted it. Your Wonka Bar contained the Golden Ticket, and you dropped it in the shredder.

And anyone paying attention to Columbia these days knows how laughable it is to give its administration credit for accomplishing anything. You accuse Columbia of enabling your targeting and being responsible for your arrest, but Columbia’s leaders cannot even manage to control their own campus, much less what federal authorities and investigators are doing.

Your fifth fallacy lies in your claim that your “detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation.” Your detention sounds the death knell of a hateful student movement. It is a testament to the shifting of public opinion away from tolerating Islamism run amok on our campuses and in our country. Hopefully, it is just the beginning of what will be a long, arduous process to weed out Islamist infiltrators of our educational system and a return to sanity and quality, intellectual pursuit.

Oh, but Mahmoud, you got one point right. “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.” You have struggled fiendishly for 16 months to deny the fundamental civil liberties of law abiding, American citizens. You and your CUAD mates left much damage in your wake. Your removal from the streets of New York City and American shores will send a message to all those who feel emboldened to violate the civil liberties of American Jews:

Not in MY country.

1. “Detained Columbia anti-Israel protester Mahmoud Khalil seethed with hatred for Jewish state, ex-classmate says,” Susan Edelman, Georgia Worrell, and Rich Calder. New York Post. March 15, 2025 at https://nypost.com/2025/03/15/us-news/columbia-anti-israel-protester-mahmoud-khalil-had-hatred-for-jewish-state-ex-classmate/.