Spanberger Faces Tough Questions on Deportation of Pro-Palestinian Activist

On March 10, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a tweet on X stating, simply: “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” 

Khalil, a green card holder, is one of the organizers of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. For two academic years those protests have terrorized Jewish students, occupied buildings, destroyed property, and injured campus employees. The Trump Administration has arrested Khalil and initiated deportation proceedings. 

Virginia’s campuses have been wracked by similar protests. On October 12, 2023, only five days after Hamas’s invasion of Israel and mass murder of Jews, student protesters at George Mason University chanted “Long Live Palestine!”

They carried images celebrating the hang gliders used to invade Israel and butcher Israeli civilians.   

More recently, on February 23, the University of Virginia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a notorious campus group that praised the October 7 attacks and has fomented violent campus protests nationwide, held “An Evening for Gaza” to benefit the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. One guest speaker was Hani Almadhoun, their Senior Director of Philanthropy. 

This U.N. agency was designed to support “the relief and development of Palestinian refugees.” However, it has ended up supporting terrorism. As a reminder, employees of the agency participated in the October 7 attacks and the Trump Administration has since cut off all their funding. 

Only three days prior to University of Virginia’s Evening for Gaza, Hamas returned the bodies of Ariel, Kfir, and Shiri Bibas, the redheaded toddlers and their mother who Hamas kidnapped alive on October 7. Hamas delivered the coffins in a grotesque spectacle, parading them onstage before a cheering throng of Gazan civilians. 

Questions Virginia Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Abigal Spanberger Must Answer 

All this raises questions Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia this year, must answer: 

Does she agree with her former congressional Democratic colleagues that the United States should “free Mahmoud Khalil” and not deport him? 

Does she support deportation of non-citizens responsible for creating a hostile environment for Jewish students on Virginia’s campuses? 

Jewish Virginians—indeed all Virginians—deserve an answer. Spanberger’s record on the war Hamas launched on October 7 is not promising, making the need for her to respond all the more important. 

In December 2023, only two months after Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel, Rep. Spanberger and several of her colleagues wrote President Joe Biden to say: 

We are deeply concerned by PM Netanyahu’s current military strategy in Gaza. The mounting civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis are unacceptable and not in line with American interests; nor do they advance the cause of security for our ally Israel. 

Spanberger Knew Better

Spanberger, a former CIA officer, surely knew that the source of the “civilian death toll” was the Gaza Ministry of Health, i.e., Hamas, and was wholly unreliable. She must have known that any humanitarian crisis was the result of Hamas’s building military infrastructure in and under civilian areas. Yet she repeated anti-Israel progressive talking points only two months into Israel’s post-October 7 counterattack.

Cloaking her criticism of Israel by referencing Prime Minister Netanyahu, a hate object of the progressive Left, was a transparent attempt to satiate anti-Israel progressive mobs without upsetting pro-Israel Democrats.  

In April 2024, after Israel’s inadvertent bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza, Spanberger posted this on Facebook: 

Palestinian civilians in Gaza are in desperate need of food and aid. Monday’s horrific attack on workers from World Central Kitchen is further evidence of the dire crisis on the ground. Humanitarian assistance must be an essential priority—and aid workers must be protected. 

Spanberger’s immediate criticism and demand that aid workers be protected fueled the narrative that Israel deliberately targeted the kitchen’s convoy. I doubt Spanberger thought the incident was anything other than a tragic accident. Certainly, she knew Israel had facilitated tons of aid deliveries into Gaza by April 2024. The only people starving in Gaza were (and are) the Israeli hostages. Spanberger nevertheless leveraged the World Central Kitchen incident to score cheap points with the anti-Israel progressive left. 

Spanberger’s waffling for the benefit of anti-Israel progressive Democrats makes her answer to the questions I have posed critical. Whoever Virginians elect as their governor in 2025 must be committed to supporting the expulsion and deportation of non-citizens violating federal and state laws and making life intolerable for Jewish students and others on Virginia’s campuses. 

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