ABC News Rushes to Give Mahmoud Khalil His Prime-Time Tongue Bath

Jorge Bonilla
June 24th, 2025 1:40 AM

Text to Speech

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A federal judge ordered the release of Columbia student agitator and protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil from ICE detention. Naturally, it was a matter of time before the legacy media fell over themselves to score that exclusive interview. ABC News ended up scoring the interview, and it was as disgusting as you’d expect.

The interview, conducted by 2024 presidential debate co-moderator Linsey Davis, proves yet again that the media will grab onto anyone that can stand in as Resistance. This was not a hard-hitting news interview, but celebrity fluff.

The tell that this was a celebrity interview was its opening with a “feelings” question, wherein Khalil was asked to describe the moment he saw his wife and son. 

And it dawned on me, as I posted the video clip to X, that the tone of the interview is that of an interview of a released hostage. The focus on emotions, reunion with family, details of the arrest, it’s all there. Right on cue, the next question is about his feelings while reuniting with his son. 

This emotional initial framing was followed by questions about the actual detention. After being asked about the actual arrest, Davis asks Khalil whether there was any truth to allegations of material omissions on his green card application, which he quickly denied:

Rather than following up or probing further into the allegations, Davis wraps them up with a bow and allows Khalil to cast himself as a Resistance figurehead:

It is at this point that Davis tries to give Khalil an opportunity to make a clean disavowal of antisemitism and denounce violence. Instead, he blames such violence on U.S. support for Israel:

When Davis takes a second pass, Khalil somewhat disavows antisemitism by tying it to "anti-Blackness", as if the Columbia protests were against campus segregation. And in the Deep South of the 1950s. Davis pivots to asking Khalil whether he's be deterred from continuing with his activism. Again, this is Softball City:

After another softball about whether he is concerned for his safety, Khalil is presented with a celebrity reading of a letter he penned to his newborn son while in detention, which essentially closes out the interview:

The interview, although terrible on its face, might have been passably tolerable were it actual celebrity fluff as opposed to what is supposed to be a "hard news" interview of someone who is accused of acting in support of Hamas, a designated terror organization. However, the number of material omissions of fact move the item from terrible to incandescently awful and perhaps, as reasonable people might conclude, terror propaganda.

October 7th is only mentioned in passing as a historical point of reference for the campus protests instigated by Khalil, among others. But there is no mention of the barbaric, medieval attack that happened on that date- planned and executed by Hamas.

With regard to the campus protests, there is no mention of the disruption to the learning environment or the property damage they caused. More egregiously, there is no mention of the fear felt by many Jewish students on campus other than a quote of Secretary of State Marco Rubio alluding to Khalil creating an "environment of harassment".

Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of Khalil's return to Columbia protests. So much for changing poopy diapers!

There is no doubt that Khalil's release triggered a rush among the networks to see who'd score the big Resistance exclusive. ABC's final product proves that the race for an exclusive turned out to be a race to the bottom.

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