Mahmoud Khalil is facing deportation after serving as a spokesperson for a Columbia University group that barred Jewish students from entering their anti-Israel tent encampment amid chants of “Go back to Poland” and “10,000 October 7th.”
Khalil’s group describes the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which resulted in the slaughter of 1,200 and the kidnapping of 251 others, as a “moral, military and political victory.” He praises slain Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar as a “hero of the revolution.”
Yet he was a welcome guest at San Francisco State University (SFSU), hosted by a student group that is part of a terrorist organization.
The General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) is an official branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Congress first designated as a terrorist organization when it passed the Anti-Terrorism Act in 1987. The act makes it unlawful for the PLO or any of its constituents, such as GUPS, to maintain an office in the United States.
In 1988, presidents—and later, secretaries of state—began issuing waivers allowing the PLO to maintain its Washington mission for the purpose of peace negotiations. These bore fruit in 1993 with the Oslo Accords.
However, in 2017, the federal government stopped issuing waivers due to the PLO’s refusal to make use of the office to engage in “direct and meaningful negations on achieving a comprehensive peace settlement.” The U.S. State Department closed PLO’s mission in 2018. And no waiver has been issued since.
Yet GUPS remains active at SFSU.
Like other anti-Israel groups on campus, GUPS justified Oct. 7, stating “These historic events, catapulted by the Al-Aqsa Flood, are the natural result of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.” GUPS also participated in building encampments that prevented those it branded as Zionists from entering “liberated zones” on campus.
But GUPS also helped pioneer virulent campus antisemitism early on.
In 1994, it erected a 10-foot mural of a yellow Star of David with dollar signs, and a skull and crossbones, with the words “African blood,” alluding to defamatory accusations that Jews dominated the slave trade. In 2002, SFSU suspended GUPS for surrounding 50 Jewish students holding a peace rally, shoving them against a wall, and screaming “Get out, or we will kill you” and “Hitler did not finish the job.” Police eventually escorted the Jewish students to safety.
For more than a decade, GUPS and its longtime faculty adviser, Rabab Abdulhadi, have teamed up to connect SFSU students with PLO armed factions, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In 2014, Abdulhadi organized a student/faculty trip to meet with Israeli Arab Sheikh Raed Salah, an Islamist sentenced to two years in prison by an Israeli court for funding Hamas. The group also met the PFLP plane hijacker and terrorist role model Leila Khaled.
The GUPS student president at the time, Mohammad Hammad, wrote of the trip: “The thing that has me fan-girling and going crazy is that as long as I can take care of some border/transportation issues, I WILL GET TO MEET LEILA KHALID.”
Since members of government-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations cannot enter the United States, Abdulhadi has organized (and GUPS has advocated for) virtual events to platform radical propaganda. Terrorists featured include Salah Salah; PFLP leader Marwan Abdel El-Al; members Yacoub Odeh and Wisam Rafeedi; and Shorouq Dwayyat, convicted by an Israeli court for stabbing a Jewish man in Jerusalem.
A webinar commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with PIJ leader Sami Al-Arian and others justified the attack as “a manifestation of U.S. empire and the racism that undergirds it.”
Even more worrisome are Abdulhadi’s and GUPS’s efforts to organize student exchanges with Al-Najah University in the West Bank, a known recruitment center for Hamas, PFLP and PIJ. In 2019, SFSU shuttered a study-abroad program for its students at Al-Najah, citing safety concerns. However, SFSU has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Al-Najah, so future cooperation remains possible.
GUPS SFSU should be shut down, particularly because the PLO convened a conference in the United States in 2022 with representatives from across the country to discuss how to strengthen GUPS’s presence on American campuses.
SFSU can bar GUPS or any registered student organization that violates federal law. But the university has failed to enforce its own rules in dealing with GUPS.
These organizations are prohibited from “willful, material and substantial disruption or obstruction of university operations, university-related activities or on-campus activities.” Yet when GUPS chanted “Get the f**k off our campus” for 45 minutes, disrupting a talk by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat, SFSU took no disciplinary action.
Registered student organizations are also prohibited from defacing and damaging university property. Yet GUPS faced no punishment after it graffitied a university building. SFSU responded to its 2024 encampments that excluded “Zionists” by capitulating to protesters’ demands to divest from weapons manufacturers.
Now it’s up to the federal government to enforce the Anti-Terrorism Act and end the spread of extremist infiltration before further radicalization leads to tragedy at home or abroad.
