Note from Juan Cole: I used to write letters to totalitarian governments on behalf of Amnesty International complaining about their detention of political prisoners for mere thought crimes. One of the worst offenders was Communist Czechoslovakia, which did not even bother to reply. I could not have imagined in 1987 that in 2025 people in […]
Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil completed his M.A.work at Columbia University in December, 2024 and earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Lebanese American University in Beirut. As a graduate student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at the time of the 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus occupations, he was active in the student protest movement. He is an Algerian citizen with permanent residency in the U.S. under the green card program. Khalil was born in a refugee camp in Damascus, Syria in 1995 to Palestinian refugees from Tiberias. He and his family fled to Lebanon in 2012 after the onset of the Syrian civil war.