What happens when you kidnap a Jew? Apparently, nothing.

Jewish pain has never been trendy. Just ask Edan Alexander.

Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza (photo: Foley Foundation)

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Mahmoud Khalil is a household name. Edan Alexander is not.

Why is that?

Khalil, a Syrian Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University and “terrorist groupie,”¹ has become something of a campus celebrity. His name echoes through protest chants, shows up in breathless Instagram stories, and headlines articles in mainstream outlets that frame him as a “victim of political persecution.”

He’s been detained — not for his identity, not for his Palestinian-ness, not for being “brown,” but for his documented role in aggressive, disruptive protests that included glorifying terrorism, vandalizing property, and intimidating Jewish students. In a world with fewer double standards, this would be grounds for expulsion. At Columbia University, it’s apparently a career launchpad.

Meanwhile, Edan Alexander (a 19-year-old American-Israeli) was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th. Taken from near the Gaza border, he was dragged into a tunnel network run by a U.S.-designated terrorist group. He was held in unknown conditions. Likely tortured. Possibly dead. Definitely disappeared.

And unless you’re reading Jewish media or following hostage updates on Israeli news sites, you probably have no idea who he is.

So let’s ask the question plainly: Why is Mahmoud Khalil a household name, and Edan Alexander a footnote?

The answer is a Rorschach test of our era. A cocktail of moral confusion, media opportunism, academic cowardice, and cultural double standards. And at the bottom of that murky cocktail glass sits a bitter truth: In 2025, Jewish suffering is not fashionable. Jewish resilience is even less so. And Jewish victims? They don’t fit the narrative.

Let me be clear. I’m not here to romanticize Israel or Israelis. Israelis are not magical unicorns of virtue. They are normal people in a normal, messy country — loud, argumentative, occasionally brilliant, frequently infuriating. The buses are late. The politics are chaotic. The customer service is nonexistent. Everyone thinks they know better than everyone else.

But what Israel is not (and this matters) is a theocratic death cult. It is not, as an Iraqi once described his former country, a place where you end up “pasta sauce” if you say the wrong thing about the regime.

There is no regime in Israel. There are elections. Protests. Petitions. Lawsuits. Late-night comedy shows mocking the government. And yes, real soul-searching when things go wrong.

You can burn the flag and still get served your hummus. You can scream “Free Palestine” while serving in the IDF. You can call your prime minister a war criminal in front of a camera and nobody will knock on your door at 2 in the morning. You can, as Israelis often do, fight for the soul of the country without getting disappeared in the process.

That’s the country Edan Alexander comes from.

And for that — for living in a flawed but free democracy — his name gets buried.

In contrast, Mahmoud Khalil is lifted high. Not despite his flirtation with extremism, but because of it. He didn’t go viral for organizing an interfaith dialogue. He wasn’t profiled in “The Nation” because he wrote a thoughtful critique of U.S. foreign policy.

Not because he’s promoting peace or dialogue or coexistence. But because he makes himself useful to a cause, a cause that treats Jewish lives as expendable and Jewish voices as illegitimate.

This isn’t about Palestine. It’s about performative outrage. It’s about a moral algorithm that says: “Jew with power = oppressor, Palestinian with a Molotov cocktail = misunderstood freedom fighter.”

Khalil made his name shutting down a campus, waving the flags of organizations that put Jews in body bags, and shouting down dissent in the name of liberation.

This is the modern alchemy of moral relativism: Reframe aggression as bravery, replace facts with vibes, and cast Jewish pain as political inconvenience. It’s not new. It just feels newer because the language has changed. The script has been updated.

In 1929, Jews were massacred in Hebron — not by “settlers” or “occupiers,” but by neighbors who had lived beside them for generations. The pretext? False rumors that Jews were planning to take over the Temple Mount. The blood libel, recycled and modernized.

In the 1930s, there were Jews who thought that if they looked and sounded “normal enough,” the mob would spare them. In Weimar Germany, assimilation was the ticket to survival — until it wasn’t. In Soviet Russia, the “Zionist question” was code for any Jew with a spine. In the Arab world, Jews were once doctors, judges, and lawmakers — until Islamism turned into pogroms overnight.

In the 1940s, Jewish refugees fled Europe for Mandatory Palestine — only to be branded by the British as “illegal immigrants.” Boats carrying Holocaust survivors were turned away or sent to internment camps in Cyprus. The world, having just witnessed the crematoria of Auschwitz, still couldn’t stomach the idea of armed Jews defending themselves.

In 1967, when Arab armies massed at Israel’s borders with genocidal intent, the world watched, unconcerned. Only after Israel won — and took control of the West Bank and Gaza in a defensive war — did the criticism begin. Not because Israel existed, but because it survived. Loudly.

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The world paused. And then moved on. Most countries refused to support Israel’s retaliation. Golda Meir had to order the Mossad to hunt the killers down, quietly, unapologetically, because no one else would.

This is not about Edan Alexander as a person. It’s about the pattern.

Whenever Jews suffer quietly, they are pitied. Whenever Jews suffer loudly — or worse, fight back — they are condemned. Whenever Jews die, it’s a “tragedy.” Whenever Jews defend themselves, it’s a “controversy.”

Jewish history is full of examples where our visibility was tolerated right up until it wasn’t. What’s different now is that the intellectual elite — the professors, the journalists, the DEI departments — are no longer passive observers of that dynamic. They’re active participants. They are the ones deciding whose humanity is trending this week.

They’ll protest the bombing of a hospital in Gaza (sometimes even when it turns out Hamas did it themselves). But they won’t say the name of the 19-year-old hostage who was dragged away at gunpoint. He is inconvenient. He disrupts the narrative. He is ... too Jewish.

Let’s be honest: If a Jewish student had done what Khalil is accused of — disrupted campuses, glorified terror groups, and made Black or LGBTQ students feel unsafe — he would be expelled, dragged across social media, and disavowed by every synagogue on the Upper West Side before his next bagel order.

And yet Khalil gets defenders. Professors praise his “bravery.” Student organizations raise money for his legal fund. Celebrities post black-and-white portraits with the caption “Free Mahmoud.”

But no one is posting about Edan.

The story of Edan Alexander should haunt us. It should be a rallying cry. It should be the kind of story that triggers candlelight vigils, Human Rights Watch reports, and A-list op-eds. Instead, it barely registers.

Why?

Because Edan challenges the accepted “oppressor versus oppressed” binary. He reminds people that the region’s only liberal democracy is under siege. That Hamas isn’t some ragtag militia; it’s a well-funded, well-armed, theocratic regime that kidnaps teenagers and livestreams war crimes. That maybe, just maybe, the Israel story is more complicated than people want it to be.

We don’t need to canonize Israel. We don’t need to demonize Mahmoud Khalil. But we do need to tell the truth about the double standards.

It is possible to advocate for Palestinian dignity without lionizing those who glorify murder. And it is long past time to stop treating Jewish victims as political inconveniences.

Because, if a culture that claims to care about human rights can’t even say the name “Edan Alexander” — but will scream “Free Mahmoud Khalil” like a Spotify song on repeat — then what we’re dealing with isn’t justice.

It’s propaganda. It’s hypocrisy. It’s cowardice in a keffiyeh.

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1. American Jewish actor Michael Rapaport’s words