Momodou Taal - praise for the "armed resistance in Palestine"

Momodou Taal, a foreign graduate student at Cornell (from the UK), has been banned from the Cornell campus because he has violated conduct rules for students. He is one of the leaders of an umbrella group called the Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation, which organized the pro-Palestinian encampment at Cornell in the spring. Cornell initially decided to suspend him, which could have resulted in his losing the visa that permitted him to stay in the US, but Cornell then backed down.

I was just reading an article from the Cornell Sun from February 3, 2024, reporting on a rally that occurred the day before. Taal made some disturbing and inflammatory remarks praising the "armed resistance in Palestine."

About 70 demonstrators gathered outside of Day Hall on Friday afternoon to protest the Student Assembly’s 16-4 rejection of Resolution 51, which called on Cornell to end partnerships with and suspected investments in arms companies — such as Boeing and Raytheon — that provide weapons to Israel.

“We don’t take our cue from some bullsh*t Student Assembly at Cornell,” said Momodou Taal, grad, who led chants throughout the event. “We take our cue from the armed resistance in Palestine. We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea,” he continued, garnering some cheers from the crowd.

At time of publication, Taal did not respond to repeated requests to elaborate on his remarks. Taal has previously described himself as the liaison representative for Cornell’s Coalition for Mutual Liberation, an activist collective that organized Friday’s protest.

Taal’s statement was not the only apparent praise of militant groups at the event. At one point, the crowd chanted, “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud. Turn another ship around.” Yemen’s Houthi rebels, a group the Biden administration recently labeled a terrorist organization, have fired at Red Sea ships, including commercial vessels and a U.S. warship.

In an online discussion on November 10, 2023, Too Black of the Black Myths Podcast sat down with Taal (also host of the Malcolm Effect podcast) "to discuss the current repression on college campuses against Pro-Palestinian students."

In his introduction, Taal said that he was the representative for intercampus organization for the Coalition for Mutual Liberation, which was formed in the fall. He said that, "We kind of realized that if we're going to be effective against the Zionist machine on campus that we have to be organized in our numbers, so we're trying to bring as many organizations together as possible. The Zionist lobby on campus is extremely well-funded and extremely well-organized and they have institutional backing, and so we thought let's bring an umbrella organization together which is Cornell's Coalition for Mutual Liberation and we're trying to - yes - in our thousands and our millions we are all Palestinians."