Hey Mohsen,

I’ll be honest. I almost wrote this as an article directed at the American public, titled “Hey America – You’re Being Played!” But in the end, I realised that if I am going to speak plainly, it is better to address you directly. So here it is:

My starting point would be this, Mohsen: if you really want to convince people that Mohsen Mahdawi is not an antisemite, it was probably not advisable to jump straight into an antisemitic conspiracy rabbit hole on social media when our research exposed your extremism. Instead of owning up to it, or even denying it (which would be a little silly as we have all the receipts), you actually chose to claim that “Israeli Mossad” broke into your Facebook:

Do you realise how stupid that looks, Mohsen? I am pretty certain that even for some of your staunchest supporters, that was a head-in-hands moment. Every sane person on the planet knows the Israeli Mossad did not do a thing. Nobody “broke into your Facebook,” and nothing was “fabricated.”

Get out of your antisemitic rabbit hole, and let me explain it to you.

Last April, a couple of independent Jewish journalists decided to test your back-story and found that things did not add up.

Take, for example, the story you tell about your uncle visiting you by the grave of your “best friend,” who you claim had recently been shot. We checked the chronology. Your uncle died in September 2001. The only child from your camp who was killed during the Second Intifada died in 2002 (more on that in a moment). Unless your uncle Thaer was a ghost, that creates a rather impossible scenario.

Why would you lie? Who knows. Perhaps you wanted people to feel sorry for you. Maybe it was an attempt to create legitimacy. Whatever the reason, that story – which you have repeated hundreds of times – simply never happened the way you tell it.

So it got us thinking. What else were you telling people that was not true?

It did not take long to discover that the only child in your camp who was killed died from gas inhalation – not a bullet. Which meant your entire redemption story – of seeing your best friend shot in the chest by an Israeli soldier and holding his blood-soaked body in your arms – had collapsed before our eyes in a matter of minutes.

But enough of that for now.

Let me introduce myself. Hey Mohsen, I’m David.

I was not born yesterday, Mohsen, and I know genuine Palestinian peacemakers. During the Oslo years, I spent a lot of time in towns such as Nablus and Jenin, and was one of those working to build REAL bridges between the communities. I published a newspaper that was printed at the Al-Ayyam publishing house in Ramallah, and I made many friends there. In those years, Ramallah was my favourite city in the region.

So I do not come at this as one of those uninformed students who are so easily duped. I understand Palestinian factionalism and most importantly, I speak the language of this conflict fluently.

Which is why I see through these key phrases you use. Take one of your favourites – “restorative justice” – it sounds wonderful, Mohsen, until you ask the only question that matters: whose idea of justice, and what exactly are they trying to restore?

America has been there before, Mohsen. The white mobs that lynched Black men believed there had been wrongs committed, believed their community was the victim, and believed that by taking matters into their own hands they were restoring justice. Their premises were racist, their accusations were often false, and their “justice” was barbaric.

That is the problem with dressing an ideology up in morally reassuring language. If your starting point is rotten, what you call “justice” can be nothing more than persecution with a virtuous name.

And Mohsen, this applies directly to you. You hide your goals behind false accusations such as “genocide” and “apartheid.” You smear the Jewish state with lies – call to wipe it out – and then pretend you speak in the name of justice. This is the logic of the lynch mob – seeking brutal vengeance – for crimes that were never committed.

And yes, because your target is the only Jewish state in the world, your ideology is deeply antisemitic – no matter how many progressive communities or left-wing Jews you managed to fool otherwise along the way.

And speaking of Jews you try to dupe, let me give you just one more example of your linguistic acrobatics:

I saw footage of you standing alongside crowds that chanted for an “intifada.” Then I watched as you sat in a classroom at Columbia University and tried to persuade Jewish students that “intifada” has some altogether different, peaceful and “universalist” meaning.

That is poppycock, Mohsen. Absolute poppycock. And you know it.

We know what an intifada means in Palestinian political usage – and people do not have to take my word for that, Mohsen, they can take yours.

Years before you began explaining “intifada” to American students, you wrote in Arabic about “the coming intifada or war.” You explicitly compared this future intifada with the First Intifada and the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

And what did you discuss?

Intelligence gathering. Israeli surveillance and reconnaissance. Operational and security preparation.

You were not describing a universal peace movement, Mohsen. You were discussing the operational realities of another violent Palestinian confrontation with Israel.

Your own writing shows that long before you began reassuring Jewish students about the word, you understood perfectly well that in Palestinian political usage an intifada meant violent confrontation.

So when Jews hear crowds chanting “Globalise the Intifada” and understand it through the history of violent Palestinian intifadas they are not misunderstanding the terminology; they are understanding it exactly as you once did.

So why did you tell them they were wrong?

Before moving on to the extremism found in your posting history, Mohsen, I have another point to make. You continually draw on Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, as if you somehow walk in their path. I am actually not sure how you can look at yourself in the mirror; you are the furthest thing from any of them.

For all their enormous differences, those men understood something fundamental about leadership: you do not simply tell the other side what it wants to hear. You have to face your own people, challenge them and sometimes tell them things they do not want to hear.

And this, to me, is one of the greatest tells in your entire story. Why does all your supposed bridgebuilding face outwards?

Where is the Palestinian constituency you have built for compromise? You call yourself a “great organiser.” So where is the organisation you created to challenge Palestinian maximalism? Where are the Arabic speeches telling Palestinians that armed “resistance” is wrong, that Jews have legitimate rights too, or that peace will require painful concessions from both sides?

Because when you face Jews, you ask them to trust you. You speak about dialogue, shared humanity and peace. Yet when we look at the political organisations you actually helped build – CUAD and the Palestine Student Union – we only find maximalist demands, chants of intifada and alignment with the language of armed resistance.

Empty gestures are easy, Mohsen. Leadership leaves footprints. Yet the only Arabic videos we found show you doing precisely the opposite: aligning yourself with the armed resistance in Gaza and the West Bank, and singing “from the waters to the waters, Palestine is Arab.” So where are the footprints of the Palestinian peacemaker? They simply do not seem to exist.

Which brings me back to what our research discovered did exist in abundance, Mohsen: antisemitism, support for violence and a timeline of support for terrorist activity.

To be honest, I was unsure how to cover this final section, but then I read your “MOSSAD” post again. In the text that accompanied your Instagram post, you actually suggested that people should “judge” you by your “words and actions,” telling them that is what they should “trust.” And I realised that is exactly what they should do.

Although, for someone so keen to be judged by his words, it is rather strange that you appear to have deleted some of them since we exposed them. The 2014 post where you referred to terrorist factions as “lions,” for example – has simply been removed. How odd!

Thankfully, we kept copies, Mohsen. So, as you are so desperate for people to see “your words and actions,” I laid them out in the table below. Perhaps you would think about sharing them on your social media channels:

That’s it – hope you liked it.

Shana Tova,

David

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