Lawyer for Radical Columbia Grad Student Repped Al Qaeda Members—Including ‘Close Associate’ of Bin Laden

By Alana Goodman

When Hamas-supporting Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil appeared in court on Wednesday, he was represented by, among others, Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer perhaps best known for defending al Qaeda terrorists.

The Syrian-born Khalil had his green card revoked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the weekend as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign nationals involved in pro-terrorist demonstrations at universities.

Kassem has represented terrorists including Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda member convicted in 2017 for the bombing of a French oil tanker, as well as several other Guantanamo Bay detainees, including a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden. He went on to serve as an immigration policy adviser to former president Joe Biden as a member of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

Like his new client, Kassem was also involved in anti-Israel activism as a student at Columbia, where he lobbied to rename a sandwich called the “Israeli wrap” in the student dining hall, claiming the terminology was offensive to Muslims. He attended Columbia Law School on a fellowship funded by Paul Soros, the elder brother of Democratic megadonor George Soros.

His client, Khalil, who graduated from a Columbia graduate program in December, was a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which backed Hamas’s “armed resistance” against Israel. He served as a lead negotiator for student activists’ illegal anti-Israel encampment last spring and vowed that the group would “remain in this encampment until we achieve all of our demands,” which included a boycott of Israel.

Columbia briefly suspended Khalil for his role in the encampment, but he continued to back the demonstrations on campus, which turned violent in the spring, when students stormed and occupied campus building.

“What we will see [is] the students will continue their activism, will continue doing what they’ve done in conventional and unconventional ways,” Khalil told The Hill in August. “So not only protests, not only encampments, kind of any—any available means necessary to push Columbia to divest from Israel.”

“And we’ve been working all this summer on our plans, on what’s next to pressure Columbia to listen to the students and to decide to be on the right side of history,” Khalil went on.

Since then, pro-Hamas activists at Columbia have disrupted classes to distribute anti-Semitic flyers, violently seized campus buildings, and physically assaulted university employees. The chaos led the Trump administration last week to cut off $400 million in federal grants to the university, citing the school’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

President Donald Trump said Khalil’s green card revocation was the first “of many to come.”

Khalil is expected to remain in the country after a federal judge, Jesse Furman, intervened on Wednesday to block his immediate deportation. Furman, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is a prolific Democratic donor who once threw out a terrorism lawsuit against the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Furman, who has served as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York since he was nominated in 2011 by President Barack Obama, has a long history of involvement with liberal political causes. The brother of Obama’s former economic advisor Jason Furman, Jesse Furman has donated over $20,000 to Democrats, including Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee.

Furman also served as the treasurer of his family’s charity, the Furman Foundation, which has donated to Media Matters, the Alliance for Justice, and People for the American Way, according to his Senate confirmation questionnaire.

The Khalil ruling isn’t the first time Furman has staked out a controversial position on a case involving Israel. In 2018, Furman dismissed a terrorism lawsuit against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, citing a lack of jurisdiction.

The lawsuit was filed by the family of Ari Fuld, an American-Israeli citizen who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist outside an Israeli shopping center in 2018. The plaintiffs argued that the PLO and Palestinian Authority were liable in Fuld’s murder under the Anti-Terrorism Act, because the Palestinian government paid the terrorist’s family following the attack. Critics say this payment system, known as the “pay-to-slay” program, incentivizes terrorism.

Furman tossed the suit, arguing that the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. But Fuld’s family and other victims of Palestinian terrorism have appealed the issue, and the Supreme Court agreed to take up the question of jurisdiction in December.

In Khalil’s case, the government is challenging the Southern District’s jurisdiction over the case, arguing that Khalil’s lawyers should have filed it in either New Jersey or Louisiana, where Khalil was detained at the time.

Ted Frank, the director of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon that there is a strong argument for challenging the jurisdiction and that he would be “surprised if the motion isn’t granted.”

Khalil’s lawyers countered that there is legal standing to file his case in the place where he was arrested, if there is evidence that the government transferred him to prevent him from speaking with legal counsel.

“There is a two-track process here: habeas corpus (in federal court) and deportation (before an immigration judge),” Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor in the Southern District and columnist for National Review, told the Free Beacon. “The issue in the habeas case is whether Khalil’s arrest and detention violate the Constitution.”