Allan Appel Photo
Stanley Heller, Shelly Altman, Martha Hennessy, and Mark Colville.
A local peace organization convened at the downtown library Monday afternoon to hand out its inaugural Dorothy Day award to a pro-Palestinian protest leader who — without clear legal charges or due process — is currently imprisoned far from home.
Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP) awarded that honor to Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil to draw attention to his plight, as well as to acknowledge Khalil’s courage and humanity, six weeks after his arrest and detention.
An immigration judge in Louisiana ruled on Friday that there are grounds to deport Khalil simply for the beliefs he expressed leading pro-Gaza protests.
The ceremony was part of a Monday morning press conference convened in the board room of the New Haven Free Public Library and chaired by PEP’s administrator, Stanley Heller.
Journalist and Roman Catholic pacifist and reform advocate Dorothy Day received the group’s Gandhi Peace Award back in 1975 for her lifetime achievement, said Heller.
For a while now the group has wanted to create another award/acknowledgement, he reported. Only this one would be for a younger person, for someone in prison for their beliefs, or in grave danger.
And Khalil qualifies on all three fronts, he added.
The inaugural award, named after Day, who many times was arrested for her principled activism, was given to Khalil, who remains in federal detention but at a private prison and incommunicado in Louisiana, said another of the event’s speakers, Shelly Altman, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace New Haven.
Heller said the group has tried to reach out to Khalil through his lawyers and via family members, but they have not heard back from anyone, and decided to proceed with the event, which also carries a thousand dollar cash stipend.
Another of the speakers, Martha Hennessy, a granddaughter of Day who herself has spent months in prison for her anti-nuclear activism, said Khalil’s arrest, which speaker after speaker termed an abduction or kidnapping, throws harsh light on how “we use the law in a way that ends up sacrificing justice, and snatching a man from his wife, who is pregnant with his child.”
“He’s an example of how we should conduct our lives. He’s suffering but he also brings us hope,” she added.
Long time local activist and founder of the Amistad Catholic Worker in the Hill, Mark Colville was at pains to point out other similarities.
“We’ve come to see the same roots of oppression in the struggle for Palestinians” as in city policies toward the homeless and unhoused: “the criminalization of the very right to exist,” said Colville. “It was an abduction, a kidnapping. There [in Israel] they call it administrative detention.
“The local oppression needs to be linked up with what’s happening in Palestine,” said Colville. “And Dorothy Day is very much in solidarity with Khalil.” That is, would be — she died in 1980.
Altman said, “Mahmoud Khalil refused to be silenced, and so we must not be.”
He quoted previous remarks of Khalil, both in interviews with CNN and in letters from jail, specifically, that “the liberation of Palestinian people and the liberation of the Jewish people are one.”
Altman said, paraphrasing Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, that to accept the “abasing” being required of universities by the Trump administration to prove their practices are not antisemitic is not protecting Jews at all but rather fomenting more antisemitism.
Click here to read Altman’s full remarks.
“This administration is trying to find out if they can do this without due process, and they want to see how much push-back there will be,” said Colville. “That’s why this award is so important.
He said the hope is, some day, to be able to present the inaugural Dorothy Day Award to Mahmoud Khalil in person.
Dorothy Day granddaughter Martha Hennessy at the Promoting Enduring Peace press conference