A couple weeks ago Ezra Klein interviewed Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. As I described in great detail here, it was extremely disappointing. Khalil spent the entire interview dodging and denying he supported violence while simultaneously claiming the 10/7 attack on Israel and the murder of civilians was inevitable. But that wasn’t the disappointing part. I expected Khalil to be dishonest about his beliefs. What I did not expect is that Ezra Klein would let him tap dance around the topic so easily. There was, until the end of the interview, almost no attempt to connect him with the explicit support for Hamas that CUAD, the group he led at Columbia, had demonstrated on numerous occasions. Klein just completely dropped the ball.
I wasn’t the only person who had problems with the interview. A few days later the NY Post ran this cover referencing it.
Today’s cover: Mahmoud Khalil ripped over attempt to ‘justify’ Oct. 7 attack in Ezra Klein, NYT interview: ‘Must be immediately deported’ https://t.co/4a47SXIUgH pic.twitter.com/qvGRRjQvzH
— New York Post (@nypost) August 8, 2025
Here’s a bit of what they said about it:
New York and national officials condemned Khalil for his statements seemingly sympathizing with Hamas’ rationale for the cowardly assault on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage in Gaza.
“Mahmoud Khalil must be immediately deported,” Upstate New York Rep. Elise Stefanik told The Post…
“He is a chief pro-Hamas terrorist agitator who contributed to the antisemitic encampments at Columbia, the rioting and violent takeover of Hamilton Hall, and the harassment and physical assault of Jewish students,” she said…
“Mahmoud Khalil has not been shy about his support for Hamas – a brutal terrorist organization that violently attacks innocent men, women, and children,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to The Post.
“And no matter how much Khalil may try to justify the horrific October 7 terror attack perpetrated by Hamas, there is no justification. Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization, full stop.”
Today, Klein’s column at the NY Times is devoted to an “ask me anything” which is really just his own producer filtering questions and criticisms of the Khalil interview.
Claire Gordon: …The first bunch of questions are really synthesized from a ton of responses we got from the last few episodes, which really flooded our inbox.
Klein: These are the Mahmoud Khalil and Philippe Sands episodes.
Gordon: That’s right… definitely the winner in terms of volume of response was Mahmoud Khalil’s — not only in our inbox, but it got a lot of response out in the world. In a first for the show, there was a whole New York Post cover story in response to the interview, with a big headline: “Deport Him!”
So my first question is: Were you surprised that it got that reaction?
Klein: I find it unbelievably saddening that all these people who, two years ago, were styling themselves as great defenders of free speech, listened to an interview with somebody, listened to them speak, and the response is not disagreement, it’s: “Deport him!”
As a way of revealing how unbelievably hollow and cynical that moment in politics is, the number of people who I understand built much of their political careers on being defenders of free speech, who again responded by saying: This person, who has a green card, is married to a U.S. citizen and has a child born here, should be deported — whatever you think of what he said, it means that your commitment to that idea of free speech is so paper thin.
So I found that depressing. Not in a way that was shocking — I’ve always been fairly cynical about what a lot of that politics was built on — but I found that revealing of how little pretense, in the Trump era, has gone into maintaining any kind of consistency with that form of politics.
He’s responding to Rep. Stefanik’s comment in the NY Post about deporting Khalil but if you look closely he’s not really responding to what she said beyond her suggestion he should be doported. Here’s the rest of what she said once again, “He is a chief pro-Hamas terrorist agitator who contributed to the antisemitic encampments at Columbia, the rioting and violent takeover of Hamilton Hall, and the harassment and physical assault of Jewish students.”
Klein doesn’t respond to any of that. In fact, those are all the things that Klein never pressed Khalil about during his interview. Is Khalil pro-Hamas and pro-violence? He denied it in the interview but Klein never asked him to explain why the group he led invited a pro-Hamas speaker to lead a teach-in or why they praised Yahya Sinwar or why they handed out Hamas-written proganda at protests. Klein just ignored all of those obvious contradictions during the interview and ignored them all again today in his response.
What he’s doing here is the same game that Tucker Carlson plays when he interview Vladimir Putin or Andrew Tate and makes no effort to press them on anything controversial at all. I believe in free speech, that’s why I spoke to these people. Anyone who says I shouldn’t interview them is against free speech.
It’s possible to be for free speech and also be for a real interview instead of an embarrassing whitewash. If you’re going to interview Andrew Tate and let him deny any wrongdoing, at least ask him where he got all his money. If you’re going to interview Putin and let him make himself out a victim rather than an invader, at least ask him something about his attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, or the attempted murder of Navalny, or the attempted coup by Prigozhin. In short, do something besides being a useful idiot.
This is where Klein failed as well. Today he offered this lame defense, saying he only wanted to hear Khalil’s story not press him on his views about Israel or student politics.
Klein: My intention with that episode was: Here was somebody whom the U.S. government had, in a very profound way, tried to silence for his speech, moved him around to different detention centers and made a very public example of him, in a way meant to chill, not his speech specifically — the idea that Mahmoud Khalil, this grad student at Columbia, is in any way a threat to U.S. foreign policy is an absurdity, and I think everybody knows it. But you can make an example of Mahmoud Khalil as a way of making other people afraid to speak.
So I wanted to hear his story. If you go to that interview, I’m in many ways more interested in what happened to him. I didn’t bring him on specifically, in my view, as an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m interested in his thoughts, but the show has not primarily rooted its coverage there, in college activists — not because they don’t have things to say that are worth hearing, but because I just don’t think it would be the most sensible way to go about it….
So when I heard Khalil speak, if you listen to Palestinians, which a lot of people in this conversation don’t — the range of acceptable and well-heard opinion tends to come from people with differing levels of commitment to Israel and Zionism — he didn’t say anything that sounded surprising to me.
So yes, I understand why it’s hard to hear, but I also think that how hard it is to hear reflects to some degree how seldom Palestinians are heard in our conversation. Because to them, what is often hard to hear is the explaining away, the normalization of what they understand as, now, decades and decades of continuous Israeli violence against them and their lives and their existence.
And again, it’s not how I see it and not how I see Hamas, but part of my project on the show has always been to accept that there are very different narratives of this conflict, of this moment — not just two, but many, many, many — existing alongside each other. And there’s no capacity to see it in any way clearly if you’re only willing to listen to one of them.
Again, no one is saying we can’t allow Khalil to speak. I’m all for it in fact. The question is this: Are you going to acknowledge that Khalil was the leader of a radical, pro-terrorist group that had been speaking openly about supporting Hamas for more than a year? When it comes to Klein’s interview, the answer was mostly no.
Ezra Klein is a smart guy. He knows what CUAD has said and done at Columbia. The fact that he decided to leave all of that out of his conversation with Khalil is not the result of ignorance. He made a choice. The only way he can portray Khalil as an innocent victim of the Trump administration instead of a pro-terrorist extremist is to minimize all of that previous, inconvenient speech. That’s the interview Klein wanted and it’s the interview he tried to deliver.
The interview got negative backlash anyway because, despite Klein’s best efforts, some of Khalil’s extremism was still evident, i.e. saying the 10/7 attack was inevitable. Klein did his best to put lipstick on this pig and, sadly for him, it still wasn’t very pretty.
