Tabloid war over Khalil

New York’s tabloid newspapers faced off on Monday with dueling front pages screaming opposite angles on the day’s big news: The arrest of Columbia University Israel-bashing provocateur of campus antisemitism Mahmoud Khalil.

The New York Post’s cover delighted in the seizure by ICE of Khalil, with similarly-toned coverage inside.

The Daily News, on the other hand, focused on “outrage” among pro-Hamas protestors and others who claim for Khalil — a Syrian-born Palestinian who in 2024 became a permanent US resident with a green card after having entered on a student visa two years earlier  — the right to make trouble unhindered.

“Columbia University and its sister school Barnard College did an exceedingly poor job handling nasty anti-Israel campus protests, which too often bled into even nastier antisemitism,” the Daily News conceded in an editorial in Monday’s paper, “but the federal government, restricted by the First Amendment, cannot use its tremendous powers and unlimited resources to crack down on institutions and people based on solely on speech.”

In its editorial, the NY Post cheered “the reported arrest and likely deportation of Mahmoud Khalil.”

“ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” said the Post, which pointed out that the post-Oct. 7 anti-Israel movement, personified by disruptions at Columbia and Barnard, “sought to intimidate America with passion and force — occupying campus quads, blockading and/or rampaging through libraries, harassing and assaulting visible Jews.”

While the News said “we are pretty sure that a permanent resident status can’t be canceled like that [and Khalil] bundled onto a plane to Louisiana,” the Post countered that “this is both a defense of decency and a push against the perversion of privilege, and we look forward to seeing a lot more of it.”

In the same editorials, the newspapers opined about Trump’s cancelling of $400 million in federal grants and contracts that had been commited to Columbia, with the promise that other colleges which fail to crack down on antisemitism will likewise be penalized.

“Far too many campus authorities have done as little as possible to stop it, hiding behind “free speech” concerns that plainly don’t cover this behavior,” the Post said.

“To be clear: Even protests that do qualify as free speech have an obviously hateful agenda — why else single out Israel?”

But Columbia doesn’t have an explicit antisemitic policy, or at least since not the anti-Jewish admission quotas were dropped decades ago,” complained the Daily News, “but there are many Jews (students, faculty and staff) who have been negatively impacted by the anti-Israel protests that sprang up after the Hamas Oct. 7 attack and the school’s feeble response to the explosion of hatred aimed at Israel and Jews.

“Still, cancelling a government research grant because of speech is something that the government cannot do. If there is unlawful discrimination against Jews, a protected religious group, there may be grounds for federal action to rescind contracts and grants, however, it would have to follow certain procedures, not a Truth Social posting from President Trump.”

“Jews, like everyone else, must be protected, but the feds must follow the law and the rules,” the News said, referring to ICE’s seizure of Khalil as “a Keystone Kops moment.”

“Columbia’s decisions on campus speech and behavior (which they badly botched) were theirs to make as a private institution,” the News concluded. “The federal government’s authority on what it can and can’t do, including even the president, regarding speech is limited by the Constitution.”