“I Miss My Old Life,” says the headline of this week’s New York Magazine cover, written by pro-Hamas activist Mahmoud Khalil, who, as of this writing, still walks around free on the streets of New York. “One year after my abduction by ICE,” the subhead goes, “I still watch my back every day.”
Let’s be clear: ICE did not abduct Mahmoud Kahlil. They detained him because, according to a memo prepared by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he was organizing “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities” at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student. They argued that his continued presence in the United States was detrimental to national security.
Then the courts found the charges baseless. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other people who ICE has detained during the second Trump administration, the government let Kahlil go. Now he’s free to continue his activism. Apparently, as Tom Wolfe used to, he also writes cover stories for New York Magazine, which has gone from exposing “Radical Chic” to embodying its essence.
Well, I, too, miss my old life. I miss a life where hang-gliding terrorists didn’t massacre hundreds of beautiful Israeli youth at a music festival. And I miss a life where, rather than decrying the massacre, millions of people all over the world didn’t take to the streets in support of the terrorists, but instead took to the streets accusing their victims of “genocide.” That was a better life.
I miss a life where people didn’t stab or otherwise attack Jews in Chasidic neighborhoods in London, Los Angeles, and New York. Or a life where men didn’t drive cars into pedestrians or stab a security guard at a synagogue during Yom Kippur in Manchester. A gunman shot two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., last summer. An attacker stabbed a man at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Someone doused a Jewish couple’s apartment in Paris with gasoline because there was a mezuzah on the door and lit it on fire. Swastikas and the word “Hitler” were painted on the Jewish cemetery in Vienna, and someone set a fire in the ceremonial hall. I miss a life where that stuff didn’t happen.
You know what else I miss? A life when Jewish students could go to college and not have to worry about being Jewish. Since October 7, masked men attacked two students demonstrating in support of Israel at DePaul University, someone set a Jewish student’s door on fire at Drexel University, someone smeared swastikas made of feces on the residence hall of a University of California, San Diego bathroom, and the office of a Jewish regent at the University of Michigan was specifically targeted and vandalized with pro-Palestinian graffiti.
A large group of protesters surrounded a Jewish-owned falafel shop in Philadelphia, accusing the owners of “genocide.” Someone defaced the Wiener Holocaust Library in London with graffiti. How about the firebombing of Jewish protesters in Boulder, the West Bloomfield, Michigan, synagogue attack, or, most horribly of all, the Bondi Beach Massacre in Sydney? I sure miss my life before all that happened.
Also, I miss a life where the president of Colombia didn’t call Israelis “Nazis,” and where U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib didn’t unapologetically use the phrase “from the river to the sea” in public statements. It was better, I think, when the mayor of New York City didn’t accuse the Israeli government of “apartheid” and when his wife didn’t provide illustrations for a book edited by a Palestinian-American author who’s described Zionists as “parasitic filth.” I miss a life that didn’t platform Hasan Piker, and where Jewish writers didn’t sign open letters condemning Israel while remaining silent about an unprecedented wave of attacks on their own people, or feature Susan Sarandon saying that American Jews are “getting a taste of what it feels like to be Muslim in this country.”
Most of all, I miss a life where people who want me and everyone like me dead didn’t receive glowing, sentimental press coverage in the mainstream press. But I realize it’s a big ask — because that life is gone.
***
Neal Pollack is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time Jeopardy! champion.
.png)
.png)
