Columbia student who praised Mahmoud Khalil arrest in WSJ op-ed received death threats: ‘These people are ridiculous’
A Columbia University freshman who wrote an article praising the arrest and possible deportation of campus agitator Mahmoud Khalil was almost immediately besieged with unhinged messages from fellow students calling him “Zionist scum” and urging him to kill himself.
Lucca Ruggieri’s March 18 commentary in the Wall Street Journal voiced full-throated support for President Trump’s efforts to oust troublemakers like Khalil from campus — while questioning how someone who “harbors hostilities” toward American values was even admitted to the prestigious school in the first place.
“It’s like little kids. You say one thing that hurts their feelings, and they have a temper tantrum,” Ruggieri told The Post Thursday. “This is not the sort of person that one of our top institutions should be admitting.”
Ruggieri, 19, an economics major from Pennsylvania who eyed elite institutions like Yale and Harvard before deciding on Columbia, said he did so because it’s “an Ivy League school basically in the center of the universe” — despite its reputation as a “politically controversial place.”
Within hours of the article’s publication, Ruggieri said the rage started flooding in on Sidechat — an anonymous messaging app for Ivy League schools, which requires a student email address to use.
“Someone said, ‘Can we please end this Zionist scum,’ ‘We need to place a fatwa on him.’ Other people sent me messages saying to kill myself, those sort of things,” he said.
A fatwa is a formal ruling issued under Islamic law which, in some cases, is a call for a death sentence.
Someone even took the time to Photoshop his head onto a Nazi SS officer’s body.
The invective Ruggieri received contained numerous jabs at his Italian American heritage, including a wild rumor that he was a descendant of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
“These people claim to be so woke, but they were making a lot of anti-Italian comments,” he said, blasting the anonymous keyboard warriors as hypocrites.
“These people cry anytime you say anything about Palestine but when it comes to being hateful towards Italians or Europeans, they have no problem with it.”
Ruggieri said the tone and tenor of the hate messages he received because of his article were reflective of his experience at school navigating the feelings minefield of his sensitive classmates.
“I just see such hypocrisy on campus. You say the most uncontroversial, slightly right-wing opinion, and people would be all over you,” he said.
He said he reported some of the threats he received to the school but hasn’t heard anything back, although he noted the school is on spring break, which could account for the delayed response.
“A lot of it was anonymous, but I think the administration tends to be pretty lax when it comes to these sort of issues, so I’m not expecting much,” Ruggieri said.
A Columbia official told The Post that upon learning of the situation, the university is following up with the student to provide support.
When asked what he hopes the outcome will be, Ruggieri said he wants the school to “stop admitting the sorts of people who make these threats.”
He revealed that although the anti-Israel voices tend to be the loudest, he’s far from alone in his opinions, pointing to a climate of fear permeating the staunchly left-leaning campus which tends to stifle voices of dissent.
“I know a lot of people at CU agree with me but they’re petrified to say anything because you get this mob of people who will go after you and call for a fatwa to be placed against you. I think these people are ridiculous, they’re nasty individuals and you need to root them out of these institutions,” he said.
“If you don’t have students speaking out against them, everybody stays quiet because they’re afraid.”
Although he was well aware that his article was throwing a rock at the hornet’s nest, given the politically charged climate at Columbia, Ruggieri said he has no regrets.
“When you get these people reacting like this you know you did something right,” he said. “So if I have a bunch of jihadists coming out and saying that I need to be eliminated or something, I take that as a point of pride.”
Despite the threats and continuing campus unrest, Ruggieri is hunkering down at the Ivy League.
“It’s critical that we don’t abandon our elite institutions to subversives that hate everything our country stands for.”
