Michael Goodwin: Dems defending Columbia anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil is yet another example of how they, elite schools failed Jewish students
Watching Democrats try on different arguments to thwart Donald Trump, I’m reminded of a story involving the late Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight.After John Feinstein wrote an unflattering portrait of Knight, he responded by attacking the author mercilessly.In one barrage, Knight called him both “a whore and a pimp,” leading Feinstein to quip: “I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”So it is with Democrats as they search desperately for a way to rally the public against Trump.Their only guiding light — to be against whatever he is for — is creating confusing contradictions and leading them ever deeper into political parody.Consider that the same members of Congress who refused to stand as Trump honored a child with cancer and families who lost loved ones to murderous illegal immigrants are now defending an Arab immigrant who is a leader of a group that sympathizes with terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah and calls for the “end of Western civilization.”Defending him is a strange hill to die on, but the Dems have become a very strange party.The decision to embrace Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian green-card holder who had been a Columbia University grad student, is especially bizarre given the charges against him.As White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it Tuesday, “This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda flyers with the logo of Hamas.”Yet Dems are rushing to his defense, with the X account for senators on the Judiciary Committee carrying a picture of him and a one-line post that reads: “Free Mahmoud Khalil.”The suggestion that he’s a political prisoner led an astonished GOP senator, Tom Cotton, to respond by asking if it’s true “that Dems are fighting for a pro-Hamas foreigner who has made life hell for Jews on c...