The State Department Relied on Columbia University’s Mischaracterization of Protests to Arrest Mohsen Mahdawi
Columbia University refused to retract its statement calling pro-Palestine protests “intimidation.” Now, the Trump administration is using it against Mohsen Mahdawi.
On November 9, 2023, a little over a month into Israel’s war in Gaza, two student groups at Columbia University, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), held a protest on campus. Now, seventeen months later, the protest and its aftermath are the subject of national scrutiny as the Trump administration goes after pro-Palestine demonstrators with little pushback from the university itself. In fact, the Trump administration drew on Columbia University’s own mischaracterization of the protest in its effort to arrest and potentially deport U.S. legal resident Mohsen Mahdawi—a characterization that former university President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik privately acknowledged was inaccurate, according to audio obtained by Drop Site News.
Mahdawi, a green card holder since 2015, was arrested in Vermont on Monday after being called in by immigration authorities for what he thought was a naturalization interview as part of the process to gain U.S. citizenship. He is the third green-card holder at Columbia that the Trump administration is moving to deport under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that alleges their activism has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”—after Palestinian and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and fellow demonstrator Yunseo Chung.
On top of that, the State Department added another pretext for Mahdawi’s detention. A memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reviewed and reported on by the New York Times, stated that one of the reasons for acting against Mahdawi was that he had “engaged in threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders.” The claim has been denied by Mahdawi and his lawyer.
That phrase appears to have been lifted verbatim from a statement put out by Columbia University responding to a November 2023 protest. At the time, Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg announced that the university was suspending its chapters of SJP and JVP for “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” at the unauthorized protest.
The student groups pushed the university administration, and Rosberg specifically, to recant his statement. SJP and JVP wrote to Rosberg in December 2023, copying multiple university administrators on the email, including university President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik. “Columbia was once upheld as a bastion of not just free speech, but critical thinking, debate, and academic rigor. This has changed in recent months,” they wrote, responding to Columbia suspending them and mischaracterizing their demonstration as intimidation. “Delivering speeches was the only way in which we could make our voices heard.”
Mahdawi spoke about the protest at length during an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, published in early December 2023. He said, “This was at a walkout on November 9. A person who is not affiliated with Columbia—we’ve never seen him, we don’t know who this guy is—comes down the stairs yelling ‘Death to Jews.’ I was shocked, and I walked directly to the person and I told him, ‘You don’t represent us, because this is not something that we agree with.’”
A student journalist, who did not wish to be named due to fear of retribution, had covered the 2023 protest. They told Drop Site that, during the protest, a man who was not part of the group of protesters came near the group and began shouting antisemitic insults. The journalist remembers that Mahdawi and another protester approached the man. “Mohsen and another guy went up to him and clearly confronted him. They were telling him to stop ,and after that, Mohsen took up the megaphone and basically said that this man ‘doesn't represent us,’ that ‘he's not one of us.’”
Mahdawi continued: ”Directly, what I did was that I took the megaphone, and I gave a speech and said, ‘We here are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong, and what this guy has said is wrong. What this guy has said is clearly antisemitic, against Jews. To be antisemitic is unjust, and the fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’”
In the months since, high-ranking officials at Columbia University, including then-President of the university, Shafik, have acknowledged in conversations with university stakeholders that Columbia had been wrong to characterize the event by the two student groups as including “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”
In May 2024, in a conversation with faculty members, Shafik said that the university had erred in its use of the phrase to describe the student groups. Drop Site News obtained a recording of the meeting.
“Contrary to the perception out there,” Shafik said at the faculty meeting, “the reason SJP and JVP were suspended in the autumn had nothing to do with their speech. And no one at Columbia has been punished for anything to do with speech—again—contrary to the perception. What it was, is that they repeatedly kept holding events, demonstrations, without going through any kind of process.”
When pressed about why the university had chosen to use the phrase “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” in their announcement of the suspensions, Shafik replied, “So when that release first went out, there was, indeed, someone who was around the demonstration who did have threatening and intimidating rhetoric. Later, we found out that that person wasn't actually a member of SJP. So, I'm happy to clarify that.”
Rosberg made similar remarks, according to university documents. A Columbia University Senate report on the campus protests noted that Rosberg had changed his position on the “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” phrase at a Senate Plenary. The report by the Senate said, “Importantly, in his statement announcing the suspension of these groups on November 10, 2023, Senior Executive Vice President and Chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety Gerald Rosberg stated that the groups used ‘threatening rhetoric and intimidation,’ which he later retracted in a University Senate Plenary on November 17, 2023.”
JVP and SJP directly asked Rosberg to publicly recant his statement in their December 2023 letter. “If you, Mr. Rosberg, representing the Committee, can admit at a University Senate Plenary that you all ‘may have gotten that wrong’ with regards to the administration overstepping its bounds, you all should similarly publicly acknowledge wrongdoing,” they wrote. “If you believe that we ‘mischaracterized’ what you said in a meeting on November 30th, why not clarify in writing now?”
Importantly, despite these private acknowledgements, Columbia did not issue a public statement about the matter. Neither did the university publish a retraction of the inaccurate characterization, nor did it update the initial announcement where the phrase “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” had been used.
In July of last year, Shafik had announced that Rosberg was retiring, and in August, she stepped down from her position as university president. Columbia University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Craven cowards all! Thanks for this important update on that disgraceful statement that gives cover to an administration who would do the same regardless. That Columbia would provide the fuel to bolster this effort is beyond ignominy.
Shameful.