A Columbia University student who led anti-Israel encampments on campus and declared “Zionists don’t deserve to live” bizarrely blames North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx for his ouster from the school.
Khymani James — who was suspended from Columbia in April 2024 for a year before the university refused his attempt to re-enroll — accused Republican Foxx of violating his First Amendment rights when she demanded he be kicked out.
Foxx, 82, allegedly “abused her role and authority as Chairperson and member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce” in 2024 when she called out Columbia for failing to boot the Boston native, he said in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit.
Columbia leadership told Foxx that James had been booted “for his antisemitic rhetoric,” she posted on X in September.
“He was not expelled. Nothing was done. @Columbia, you have failed again, again, and again,” she wrote.
James, 22, who also once said he “hate[d] white people,” claimed Foxx directly interfered with his education.
Her committee “undertook to re-enact the McCarthy era role of the House Un-American Activities Committee,” he claimed in court papers.
She violated “the First Amendment rights of students, professors and universities by conducting an inquisition, which resulted in suspension and expulsion of students, the termination of professors, and the bludgeoning of universities by funding cut-offs and other sanctions,” he continued.
James insisted he “is not an antisemite” in the filing.
But James stood by his hateful remarks in 2024.
“I will not allow anyone to shame me for my politics,” he tweeted. “Anything I said, I meant it.”
Foxx and her committee “deliberately and officially conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” James contended.
James is seeking unspecified damages and a court order barring Foxx from interfering with his First Amendment rights.
“This lawsuit’s lack of credibility and factual basis speaks for itself,” Foxx responded. “I stand behind the Committee’s antisemitism investigation and won’t be deterred from my fight to protect Jewish students from discrimination on campuses across the nation.”
