Meet Columbia Encampment Radical Khymani James's Lawyer, Who Compared Hamas Terrorists to WWII 'French Resistance' Fighters

Khymani James, the Columbia University encampment organizer who fantasized about "murdering Zionists," has responded defiantly to his suspension from the Ivy League school, filing lawsuits against Columbia and his critics in Congress. Spearheading the legal action is an activist attorney who has repeatedly defended Hamas terrorists, including by comparing them to World War II-era "French Resistance" fighters whom "we collectively adore."

The attorney, Harvard Law School graduate Jonathan Wallace, cofounded the Parachute Project, a group of self-described "movement attorneys," to represent "pro-Palestine students, faculty, & staff at campuses nationwide" in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. That includes James: Wallace is representing the anti-Semitic activist in his suit against Columbia—which alleges that the school discriminated against James for his anti-Israel views—as well as in his suit against Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the former House Education Committee chair who revealed that Columbia promised to expel James but never did so.

Wallace's defense of James fits neatly within his broader activism. Wallace regularly publishes anti-Israel screeds on his blog, "The Ethical Spectacle." One post published weeks after Oct. 7 compared the Hamas terrorists who carried out the attack to those working to "kill Nazis and blow stuff up" during World War II and praised their "cleverness" for hiding among Gaza's civilian population.

"As a thought experiment, remember the iconic violent resistance fighters we collectively adore, the French resistance: they too sheltered among the civilian population, looking just like them, then surging out to kill Nazis and blow stuff up," Wallace wrote in the post.

"Like so many Ontologies, this settles down to a question of whether we hate or love the cause and the people carrying it out; Resistance fighters are objectively indistinguishable from terrorists, except that we thought the Nazis Had It Coming," he continued. "We laud their cleverness in hiding in plain sight until the opportune moment, but hate Hamas for doing the same."

In another post, Wallace accused Israel of indiscriminately murdering Palestinians "like dogs." In January 2026, he wrote that the Israeli soccer fans who were hunted down by anti-Semitic mobs following a match in Amsterdam had "started the violence." And in 2015, he wrote that he was considering "converting from Jewish atheism to some other brand, maybe Unitarian" out of a desire to "disassociate" from Israel.

The posts provide a window into the legal apparatus that has worked to keep radical activists like James in good standing with their schools. Wallace claims to have represented at least 400 students and 100 faculty members in the year following the Oct. 7 attack, and he's partnered with leading anti-Israel organizations and attorneys to do so.

Last year, for example, Wallace joined the Council on American-Islamic Relations—whose leader, Nihad Awad, said he "was happy to see" Gazans "break the siege" on Oct. 7—to represent James's fellow Columbia encampment leader Mahmoud Khalil in a lawsuit meant to block Columbia from turning over protest-related records to Congress. Khalil, an Algerian national, led negotiations with the school as the encampment unfolded, demanding divestment from Israel. The Department of Homeland Security has said it plans to deport Khalil for misrepresenting his campus activism on his immigration forms.

Wallace also represented Momodou Taal, the Cornell University student who saw his visa revoked after calling for the destruction of the United States and celebrating Oct. 7, in his lawsuit against the Trump administration. For that case, Wallace teamed up with attorney Eric Lee, whose clients include the family of the anti-Semitic Boulder, Colo., firebomber and Helyeh Doutaghi, a Yale Law School researcher who moonlighted as a member of the sanctioned terror financier Samidoun.

Wallace and Lee argued in Taal's complaint that the Trump administration's executive order calling to expel pro-Hamas student visa holders forced Taal—a Gambian and British dual national—to withdraw from "public engagement" and thus "deprived" his American friends of their First Amendment "rights to listen" to Taal's "ideas and suggestions." Taal dropped the suit and opted to self-deport after a federal court rejected his request for a protection order in a separate case.

Wallace also represented Mohamed Abdou, a Columbia professor who said he was "with Hamas" shortly before joining the Ivy League school. Abdou sued the university in August 2024, accusing it of racial discrimination after then-president Minouche Shafik told the House Education Committee that Abdou would "never work at Columbia again." Wallace was the sole attorney listed on Abdou's complaint, which referred to the committee as the "House Un-American Activities Committee" and to the Washington Free Beacon—which first reported Abdou's pro-Hamas remark—as "a right wing anti-Palestinian and Islamaphobic [sic] publication."

"The nation is seeing the advent of a new form of McCarthyism," Wallace wrote in the complaint, "in which accusations of antisemitism are substituted for the insinuations of Communist leanings which were the tool of oppression in the late 1950s."

Wallace, who did not respond to a request for comment, has suffered setbacks in the Khalil case—a federal judge denied Khalil's motions for discovery in December. The case remains active, as do Abdou's and James's suits against Columbia. The last court appearance in those cases came in July 2025, when a New York judge heard oral arguments regarding Columbia's motions to dismiss, according to court filings.

James's suit against Foxx, the Republican congresswoman, is more recent. The complaint, filed last week, argues that Foxx "abused her role and authority as Chairperson and member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce" by "naming James and demanding that the University throw them out." Foxx's doing so "breach[es] normal standards of decency, shock[s] the conscience, serve[s] no valid legislative purpose, and constitute[s] intentional attempts to pressure Columbia into terminating its contract to provide an education to James," according to the complaint.

Wallace filed a request to serve Foxx with a summons on Saturday. He had to resubmit the request on Tuesday because his original filing was "deficient," court records show.

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