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Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #192 (3/15/2025): MAHMOUD KHALIL

This Rabbinical Reflection first aired March 15, 2025 the Dave’s Gone By video podcast. 

Rabbi Sol’s Rabbinical Reflections are heard on the long-running Dave’s Gone By radio/video podcast program (davesgoneby.com) and then archived as text and audio on the Rebbe’s blog, Shalomdammit.com, where a transcript of this Reflection may be read. 

Rabbi Sol is also the creator of the stage show, “Shalom Dammit! An Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon,” which played in NYC in Nov. 2011 and Aug. 2012.

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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com 

 More on Rabbi Sol: shalomdammit.com

TRANSCRIPT:

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for mid-March 2025. 

Let me tell you about a man who’s having all sorts of trouble…because he made all sorts of trouble. It’s a fella named Mahmoud Khalil, a foreign-born graduate of Columbia University now facing deportation even though he has a green card. Why would he be taken from his home, without arrest, and threatened with expulsion from this great country? Why would our power-mad president focus on this individual and make an example of him, even though he has seemingly committed no crime?

I’ll tell you why. Because this Khalil snake, that the left wing—including Jews — have embraced to the point of calling him chummily by his first name, Mahmoud, like he’s their innocent little brother, this Khalil got himself involved in protests at Columbia that did break laws, that did threaten people, that knowingly disrupted access to college life on campus. 

Understand something about this Khalil character — one reason he’s here is because when he was a kid, his family to had escape their homeland of Syria. Yes, Israel is such a violent and terrible oppressor of the Arab world; meanwhile, 580 million harmonious, Koran-loving Syrians slaughtered each other in their own Civil War. Where were all the campus protests about that little party, I wonder?

Anyhoo, Khalil comes to the US on a student visa and starts working on his master’s degree, yet somehow he has time to get involved in all these anti-Israel demonstrations. In fact, he was suspended from Columbia when police swooped down on one of the protests that occupied and vandalized buildings. Khalil says he was just there to negotiate between the students and the admins, but why was he tangled up with these yahoos in the first place?

Which goes to why this is more than just a case of a harmless imbecile engaging in free speech. Or even hateful speech. Khalil can rant all he wants about Zionist oppression and Israeli “apartheid,” but if you are leading a group that creates unsafe conditions and then refuses to pack up its tents and go when the police say, “pack up your tents and go,” your green card hits a red light. 

Khalil says he spent the last two years deliberately threading the needle—not getting too close to the lawbreaking, not spending his nights on the lawns or blocking pathways to school buildings. How prudent of him. And yet, despite keeping one foot on the sidelines, he still provided aid and comfort to our lawbreaking enemies. So you Jews who are defending this piece of rancid hummus in the name of free speech, wake up. The Khalil case is about unlawful assembly, intimidation, and destruction of property. It’s just icing on the cake that he supports virulent anti-Israel rhetoric from radicals who champion a race of people who frequently cut off heads in the name of religion—the religion of peace, no less.

So grant Mahmoud Kha-loser his due process. Give him a fair trial and allow him to plead his case: “Your honor, I’m a social justice warrior whose weapon is merely words. If I say `Israel should be pushed into the sea and all the Jews drowned with it,’ well, who’m I really harming? So please let me stay in America so I can raise my son” [yes, Khalil’s wife is eight months pregnant and ready to spawn] “so I can raise my son to despise the Yids as much as I do. God bless America. Hartley Hall Akbar.”

Should Mahmoud Khalil legally prove himself, fair enough, he stays. And he can wish Israel all the injury he pleases. But free speech works both ways. I can wish him a thousand kinds of cancer, and pray for his baby son to be torn to pieces and devoured by raccoons, who then defecate the baby’s remains into a felafel that Mahmoud and his wife are forced to eat at gunpoint. Before they’re shot anyway.

What? Offensive? Hate speech? But…but…it’s just words. Sure hope they don’t deport me from Great Neck back to…Brooklyn. This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.