Asaf Romirowsky
Newsweek, May 12, 2025
“Mahdawi’s social media accounts are also thick with blatant and vile antisemitic incitement.”
Two weeks ago, a judge ordered the release of a 34-year-old named Mohsen Mahdawi, a graduate student detained weeks earlier by Department of Homeland Security agents in Vermont. The usual suspects, including pundits, professors, and our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, celebrated Mahdawi’s newfound freedom, arguing that detaining him—during his naturalization interview, no less—was an egregious overreach and that the Trump administration had no good case to make against Mahdawi. It was such a perfect storm of virtue signaling, complete with Mahdawi himself delivering a defiant speech from the courthouse steps, that the facts, as they usually do in such cases, were drowned out by the sound and fury.
Who, then, is Mahdawi, and should he be granted that greatest of privileges, an American citizenship? Thanks to the work of journalist David Collier and others, we now have a much better idea of the truth, which, it turns out, wasn’t all that hard to find. While The New York Times, for example, portrayed Mahdawi as just two clicks beneath the late Pope Francis on the sainthood scale, Collier did something much less breathless and much more old-fashioned: he listened to what Mahdawi was saying and then simply checked the facts.
As anyone who has seen Mahdawi tell his life story, on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, knows, his activism began when he was 10 years old, when his best friend was shot and killed in front of him at the al-Fara refugee camp, not far from Nablus. It’s a heartbreaking story; it’s also one that is very easy to corroborate, as a plethora of Palestinian and international human rights organizations provide detailed accounts of Palestinian civilian casualties. And so, anyone interested in doing what historians, scholars, and journalists were all trained to do is free to consult with these records and check the relevant year for any children shot and killed by the Israeli army. ...SOURCE