Michael Moore speaks out for Mahmoud Khalil

JVL Introduction

American campaigner and film maker Michael Moore has taken up the cudgels in defence of Mahmoud Khalil, threatened with deportation for being a leading voice for Gazans in the anti-genocide campus protests at Columbia University last year. Moore expresses his outrage through a moving story, about Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla, whose parents settled in a Syrian-American community in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan.

Seven years ago Noor made a powerful graduation speech saying how grateful she was to have escaped war in Syria for a country where “I am safe to speak my mind whenever I feel it necessary. I’m safe to converse with my professors and have passionate talks about things that I love. And I’m safe to dream big.”

Now, Moore says, following the abduction of her husband by a bunch of white thugs who refused to identify themselves. “she is not safe to speak her mind on college campuses — and neither is anyone else.” He adds: “the nation’s institutes of higher learning have turned on their students and have … put on full display the intellectual weakness of the intellectual “thinking” class.”

The article below includes video filmed by Noor at the time of Khalil’s arrest.

Here is a segment from another US progressive, John Oliver, lampooning Khalil’s treatment.

NWI

This article was originally published by michaelmore.com on Tue 18 Mar 2025. Read the original here.