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This week’s media cause célèbre is Mahmoud Khalil, the leader of a New York City protest group calling itself Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). The network newscasts displayed no interest in this group’s public statements and couldn’t connect their messaging with their protest leader.
On October 9, 2024, The New York Times reported CUAD marked the anniversary of Hamas slaughtering over 1,200 Israeli civilians by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for the mass murder: "One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory." The group posted an essay calling the attack a "moral, military and political victory" and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.
This is pro-Hamas. It should not be whitewashed as "pro-Palestinian." But this is what the broadcast networks do. The documented facts that CUAD supports Hamas are downplayed as mere Trump talking points.
PROTESTERS SUPPORTING MAHMOUD KHALIL OCCUPY TRUMP TOWER LOBBY
On ABC's "World News Tonight," reporter Aaron Katersky summarized: "The feds say Khalil was detained in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting antisemitism and because he led activities aligned with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Khalil’s lawyers call it open repression of student activism and political speech."
This is exactly what leftists complain about as "normalizing" extremism when covering Trump. Now, Trump states the fact that Khalil is pro-Hamas, and Khalil’s lawyers rebut with "open repression of political speech." But it’s not just speech. It’s taking over academic buildings and obstructing Jewish students from going to class, and so on.
Some broke into editorializing. On "CBS Evening News Plus," correspondent Lilia Luciano pontificated: "Today was a cold day….it was a cold day because you could feel the chill in the air which really matched the chill in terms of freedom of expression." Luciano claimed the pro-Khalil people feared "repercussions" over their speech, but obviously the lawyers have no fear.
It was common to note Khalil has an American wife who is pregnant. On "NBC Nightly News," reporter Emilie Ikeda opened with this: "Tonight, anger spilling onto New York City sidewalks after federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, who his lawyer says is a legal permanent resident with a green card. Khalil recently finished a master’s [degree] at Columbia and helped lead pro-Palestinian protests on campus. His lawyer adding, he was detained on Saturday in front of his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant."
COLUMBIA ANTI-ISRAEL PROTEST RINGLEADER MAHMOUD KHALIL TO REMAIN DETAINED IN LOUISIANA
NBC couldn’t even observe that Khalil’s supporters in the streets are radical leftists. These networks can never locate anyone who’s an "extremist" or a "radical" on the "far left." That’s probably because they agree with them, or at least ally themselves with them against the horror they find in Team Trump.
FILE – Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil talks to the press during the press briefing organized by Pro-Palestinian protesters who set up a new encampment at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus on Friday evening, in New York City, United States on June 1, 2024. (Getty Images)
Ikeda also related that Khalil told the AP the allegations against him are mostly "social media posts that I had nothing to do with." They’re playing this as guilt by association. A recent video post on X captures Khalil openly justifying Hamas terrorism: "We’ve tried armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law, but Israel calls it terrorism."
PBS was the worst.
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A NewsBusters study of 28 protest stories of "PBS News Hour" coverage in the spring of 2024 found there were 29 uses of "pro-Palestinian" labels and precisely zero uses of "pro-Hamas."
Only two stories mentioned the October 7 massacres, and only one mentioned the "From The River to the Sea" chant threatening ethnic cleansing. None mentioned the call for violent "intifada" against the Jewish state. Canary Mission reports on October 12, 2023, Khalil led a rally at Columbia where activists chanted "From the river to the sea," by which Hamas means ending Israel and the "Zionist project."
This same pattern repeated as the Trump administration took Khalil into custody and planned to deport him.
On X, PBS claimed "Officials have offered no evidence that Khalil broke any laws while at Columbia." On air, PBS host William Brangham read from a Trump message on Truth Social that Khalil is "a radical foreign pro-Hamas student" engaging in "‘pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.’ Now, as I said, the administration has not provided any details alleging that he has said or done any of those things. We simply at this point do not know."
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"PBS News Hour" insists in pop-ups on their website they are "trusted news." They tell everyone they offer "fact-based" news, but in this case they couldn’t locate easily found facts on this extremist. Instead, they touted the leftist pro-Khalil protests inside Trump Tower.
None of these networks are holding Hamas accountable for still holding an American hostage (and four American hostages who are dead). They don’t remind viewers Hamas killed the Bibas children they took hostage, a toddler and a baby. They can’t recall Hamas raped and tortured women and then often killed them. Instead, the only monsters in their rhetorical flourishes are Trump and his deportation team.
