{"id":1575,"date":"2025-05-12T20:03:28","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2025-05-13T13:42:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T13:42:40","slug":"mahmoud-khalil-writes-to-infant-son-my-absence-is-not-unique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/12\/mahmoud-khalil-writes-to-infant-son-my-absence-is-not-unique\/","title":{"rendered":"Mahmoud Khalil writes to infant son: ‘My absence is not unique’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who has been<\/a> detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement<\/a> (ICE), wrote to his infant son in an opinion piece for The Guardian published Sunday, saying his \u201cabsence is not unique.”<\/p>\n

\u201cMy heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper,\u201d Khalil said in the piece<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI am sorry that I was not there to hold your mother\u2019s hand or to recite the adhan, or call to prayer, in your ear. But my absence is not unique. Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Khalil was recently denied permission<\/a> to go to his first child\u2019s birth, and his wife said she welcomed the boy into the world by herself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer,\u201d Noor Abdalla, Khalil\u2019s wife, said in a previous statement.<\/p>\n

In his opinion piece for his child, Khalil said late last month that he \u201cwaited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line,\u201d he added. \u201cDuring your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khalil had a notable role<\/a> in recent Columbia protests, backing Palestinians and opposing Israel. In an opinion piece for a Columbia student newspaper last month, he said the school<\/a> \u201claid the groundwork for my abduction\u201d and pushed for the school\u2019s students to \u201cnot abdicate their responsibility to resist repression.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia\u2019s repression playbook concerning Palestine,\u201d Khalil said in an April opinion piece for the Columbia Daily Spectator. \u201cIn the 18 months since the genocidal campaign in Gaza began, Columbia has not only refused to acknowledge the lives of Palestinians sacrificed for Zionist settler colonialism, but it has actively reproduced the language used to justify this killing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who has been detained by Immigration and Customs…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1577,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1576,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions\/1576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}