Mahmoud Khalil, Oday Al Rabay and Double Standards

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Hamza Howidy is a Palestinian who managed to escape from Hamas’ rule in Gaza where, as a dissident, he had been imprisoned and tortured by the terror group. He wonders why so much attention is being given worldwide to Mahmoud Khalil, who faces nothing more threatening than possible deportation for supporting Hamas, while Oday Nasser Al Rabay, who was tortured and then murdered by Hamas, is passed over in silence.

More on the pro-Palestinian activists who don’t care to discuss Oday Al Rabay can be found here: “Anti-Hamas protests erupt in Gaza. Where are our pro-Palestine ‘allies’ now? | Opinion,” by Hamza Howidy, USA Today, April 4, 2025:

…Last week’s protests were a watershed moment for Gazans, when so many in Gaza finally understood the true meaning of fake solidarity ‒ that to the Western “pro-Palestine” movement, Palestinians are not seen as real people with real struggles but as tools to be used in their ideological battles.

Not only were the protests ignored by “allies” in the West, but so were the lives of the protesters and all they represent.

Hamas wasted no time in going after the leaders of the protests, threatening, torturing and even killing them. The family of Oday Nasser Al Rabay, 22, says the protester was tortured to death by Hamas simply for demanding a free Gaza ‒ free from Hamas and free from war.

At the same time, another half-dozen dissidents in Gaza were similarly picked up by Hamas and murdered, but they have received even less attention than Oday Al Rabay. That is: none.

Where was the outrage from the “pro-Palestine movement” activists? Where were the protests in Western capitals for Oday? Nowhere. Because he did not fit into their ideological framework because his killing was not useful and too inconvenient to their narrative.

Meanwhile, when a protester with a distinctly different profile ‒ Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student ‒ finds himself detained in the United States, the pro-Palestinian activists who claim to advocate for the oppressed wasted no time in flooding Western streets with protests calling for his release. His arrest became an emblem of resistance, sparking global campaigns to bring him home.

But what about the young Palestinian from Gaza who, without the protection of international institutions, was tortured to death for his dissent? Oday was left to rot in obscurity, his brutal murder by Hamas nothing more than an inconvenient fact for the same movement that fervently defended Mahmoud.

This stark contrast is not only a failure of solidarity ‒ it’s also an indictment of the hollow, opportunistic nature of the so-called pro-Palestine movement. Mahmoud, a student in the West, was elevated to the status of martyr. Oday, a young man from Gaza, was left to die at the hands of the very regime that Western allies refuse to confront. The hypocrisy is staggering.

It is not just that those “Western allies” of the Gazans marching on campuses all over the Western world refuse to confront Hamas. It’s far worse: they actively support Hamas, the terror group that has brought mass atrocities to the Israelis and devastating immiseration to the Gazans. Mahmoud Khalil is not bravely standing up for the Gazans against their true tormentors, the Hamas operatives, but cravenly praising the members of that terror group.

If this is the solidarity these “allies” offer, then it is an insult to the struggle for justice, an empty gesture that does nothing to advance the cause of true liberation.

This de profundis cry by Hamza Howidy comes from a long way down. Howidy wants those privileged marchers in the Western world, screaming mindlessly about “genocide” and “intifada forever” and “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” as a way to show that their hearts are in the right place, to instead call, as hundreds of brave Gazans did recently in Beit Lahiya, for “Hamas, out, out.”