
Columbia University scheduled a September 11 symposium called "The Forever War's Long Shadow." Among the featured participants was Mohsen Mahdawi, a graduate student the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has described as a "terrorist sympathizer and national security threat who does not belong in this country." He was slated to appear on September 9 and 10 — the days immediately preceding the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
Then people noticed. And Mahdawi quietly dropped out.
The event was organized by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, led by Jameel Jaffer. The institute's listing identified Mahdawi as a "Palestinian human rights advocate." That's one way to describe him. DHS had a different description. According to the department, Mahdawi had "considerable firearm experience" and had expressed a desire to "kill Jews while he was in Palestine." In July 2014, Mahdawi posted content on Facebook supporting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — both designated terrorist organizations.
The Washington Free Beacon first reported Mahdawi's presence on the speaker list for the symposium. The event's own framing told you everything about where it was headed: the program description stated that "First Amendment freedoms came under stress from the moment President George W. Bush declared a 'War on Terror.'" The 9/11-adjacent timing wasn't coincidental. It was the point.
Michael McDonald of the Catholic League didn't buy the "oversight" explanation. "I might have been born at night, but it was not last night," McDonald said. "You do not accidentally invite someone who made common cause with radical Islamist terrorists on the same week as the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history — one in which nearly 3,000 innocent Americans were killed by radical Islamist terrorists. That is not an oversight. That is a deliberate message."
McDonald also noted that Mahdawi "led a protest that harassed, abused, and, in some instances, physically hurt Americans" — a reference to the campus occupations that turned Columbia into the national symbol of pro-Hamas activism on American campuses.
The Trump administration detained Mahdawi in 2025. An appeals court panel overruled the initial custody decision in July, and the case became a rallying point for the academic left. Columbia's Knight Institute took up his cause. Jaffer's organization framed the entire matter as a free speech issue, which is a creative way to categorize a man DHS flagged as someone who wanted to kill Jews.
"Clearly, Columbia is doing this now because they think they can get away with it," McDonald said.
Mahdawi's withdrawal from the event doesn't change what the invitation revealed. Columbia's institutional machinery — the Knight First Amendment Institute, the symposium organizers, the approval chain that greenlighted the speaker list — looked at a man the federal government called a terrorist sympathizer and a national security threat, and decided he belonged at a 9/11 commemoration.
The only thing that changed their mind was sunlight.


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