March 25: Columbia Activists Coordinated With Hamas, Lawsuit Alleges

Mike Waltz safe; No more housing for migrants; Palestinian "journalists" killed

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The Big Story

A lawsuit filed Monday in New York Southern District Court by both the American family members of Oct. 7 victims and Israeli Columbia students against several pro-Palestinian student activist groups contains some bombshell allegations. The lawsuit alleges that these groups and their representatives were aware about the Oct. 7 massacre before it ever happened, and functioned as the public relations arm of Hamas during the war.

The groups and representatives named as defendants in the suit are Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and its leader, Nerdeen Kiswani; Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and representative Maryam Alwan; Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace and representative Cameron Jones; and Columbia University Apartheid and Divest and its representative Mahmoud Khalil, according to The Jerusalem Post.

What the plaintiffs are trying to show is a too-conveniently-timed publicity effort by the accused.

The X user daniela_127, for instance, located something particularly interesting within the documents of the lawsuit about the timing of Columbia SJP’s response to the events of Oct. 7: “Three minutes before Hamas began its attack on October 7, Columbia SJP posted on Instagram: ‘We are back!’ and announced its first meeting of the semester would be announced and that viewers should ‘Stay tuned.’ Before the post, the account had been dormant for months.”

It gets stranger from there. Eighty-three SJP chapters, including Columbia’s, signed and put out a document in support of Hamas on midnight at the end of the day of Oct. 7, 2023, and the suit implies that these documents must have been written, edited, and signed well before the attacks transpired, meaning that these groups indeed were aware that the slaughter was going down. The Bears for Palestine solidarity statement, shared on Oct. 8, 2023, as part of a national SJP toolkit, honored Hamas terrorists’ actions as a “revolutionary moment” in Palestinian resistance. The Day of Resistance Toolkit included Oct. 7-themed graphics, one of which Kiswani published on Instagram on Oct. 7, a day before the toolkit was released. The creators of that toolkit argued that Israelis killed during the massacre couldn’t be civilians because they were “occupiers.”

The suit also includes testimony by one of its plaintiffs, Shlomi Ziv, a former hostage held by Hamas for 246 days, who alleged that his Hamas captors bragged about having operatives all over American college campuses.

The defendants, the suit alleges, have acted as the PR wing of Hamas, supported through shell operations created by leaders of the terrorist organization. In his 2024 article “The People Setting America on Fire,” The Scroll’s editor Park MacDougald identified the financial backing of most of the groups alleged to have coordinated the Oct. 7 PR strategy in this lawsuit.

On WOL:

Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly “mainstream” elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour.

On JVP:

The “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation

On SJP:

SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement).

The ramifications of the lawsuit could prove significant when it comes to other related cases, including Khalil’s deportation proceedings. Tablet’s senior policy analyst believes that this lawsuit can help shutter the idea that cases like Khalil’s are merely to do with “free speech,”—because if Khalil was indeed working beneath the orders of Hamas, then he was working beneath a listed terror organization, which is illegal:

Hamas is listed by the Treasury Department as a terror organization. You might think that they don’t deserve to be listed as a terror organization or you might see them as persecuted freedom fighters, but you have to take that up with the Treasury Department. The law is clear: If you advance the messaging of a legally classified terror organization, then you are in violation of the law. If this lawsuit proves that Khalil indeed was aware of the events of Oct. 7 before they happened and that he knowingly advanced the messaging of Hamas, then he violated the law, and the administration’s deportation case against him just got a lot easier to make.

—Adam Lehrer

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The Rest

→Yesterday, we reported that members of the Trump administration added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat discussing details of the strikes on the Houthis in Yemen last week. Today, it appears Trump is unfazed by the leaks. Trump told Fox News today that he had no plans to fire National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who seems to have taken the brunt of the blame, saying that Waltz made a mistake, and despite it, the strikes were still a success. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt released a statement Tuesday downplaying the relevance of Goldberg’s leak, saying the editor was “well known for his sensationalist spin” and pointing out that no war plans were discussed, no classified materials were sent to the thread, and the White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on a number of platforms for the president’s top officials to communicate “as safely and efficiently as possible.”

→Justice Department officials told a federal judge Monday that the Trump administration is invoking state secrets privilege to avoid providing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg with more information about the deportation flights to El Salvador earlier this month, CNN says. Boasberg declined to lift a restraining order he implemented on March 15 barring the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to continue expediting the deportation of Venezuelans suspected to be affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, according to The Hill. The judge is seeking more information about these deportations to determine if the administration violated his restraining orders. Included in the Monday filing were declarations from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who said that continuing to provide information to the judge would harm national security. “It is critical to bear in mind that removal operations can be (as they are here) counterterrorism operations,” said Rubio. “If foreign partners believed that any relevant details could be revealed to third parties, those foreign partners would be less likely to work with the United States in the future.”

→You might have read that two Palestinian “journalists,” Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour, were killed Monday in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s military operations. What these accounts fail to point out, Adam Kredo writes in The Washington Free Beacon, is that both men had documented affiliations with terror organizations. Al Jazeera reporter Shabat was identified by the IDF as a Hamas sniper in an intelligence operation; declassified documents located in the Gaza Strip revealed that Shabat and five other Al Jazeera writers had connections to both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Palestine Today correspondent Mansour worked for a PIJ network, Israeli intelligence revealed months ago. Palestine Today is part of that network, regularly broadcasting incitements to violence and calls to commit acts of terror against Israel. Israel raided the network’s West Bank headquarters in 2016, but it has continued broadcasting in Gaza.

Read the rest here: https://freebeacon.com/media/fox-news-accuses-israel-of-killing-two-palestinian-journalists-both-have-terror-affiliations/

→The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Homeland Security released a joint statement Monday announcing the American Housing Programs for American Citizens Memorandum of Understanding to crack down on “the exploitation of housing programs” by illegal migrants, according to Fox News. As part of the MOU, HUD will provide a full-time staff member at the Incident Command Center to establish an interagency partnership that will ensure tax-funded housing programs aren’t being used to benefit or harbor illegal immigrants. President Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 19 to have government departments identify which federally funded programs are providing financial services to illegal immigrants.

→ Sum of the Day: $21 billion

That’s the amount of money that President Trump’s threat of tariffs has secured in investment from South Korean conglomerate Hyundai, according to CNBC. That figure also includes a $5.8 billion steel factory in Louisiana that will hire 1,400 employees to produce next-generation steel to manufacture electric vehicles at Hyundai’s two auto plants, in Georgia and Alabama. The investment was announced yesterday in a joint press conference between Trump, Hyundai Chairman Euisun Chung, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, as major corporations are racing to avoid the ramifications of Trump’s tariffs policy. Hyundai’s CEO José Muñoz told Axios that the best way to avoid tariffs is to “increase localization.”

→Step aside, Jussie Smollett! Allentown, Pennsylvania, city worker Latarsha Brown was charged yesterday with fabricating physical evidence and making a false police report after telling cops that a noose was planted on her work desk in January, according to the New York Post. Police found that DNA evidence on the noose in question belonged to Brown all along. After a communist protest broke out over the “hate crime,” all Allentown city employees were required to submit their DNA to cross-reference that which was found on the noose. Police found it suspicious when Brown refused to do so herself before requesting that the investigation be halted, all while allegedly offering “misleading” and “evasive” answers to detectives’ questions throughout the ordeal.

→Video of the Day

In a particularly tragic scene, this video shows a high-speed chase between former UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez and another vehicle containing a man who allegedly sexually abused Velasquez’s son as well as other people. Velasquez was sentenced to five years in prison yesterday for firing his gun on the vehicle he pursued, missing his intended target, and wounding another person in the vehicle, according to CNN. Velasquez pleaded no contest to attempted murder, felony assault, and gun-related charges. His intended target, Harry Goularte, is awaiting trial on child molestation charges for a crime he was arrested for merely a week before the high-speed chase. Suspected to have molested another four-year-old at the day-care facility owned by his family, Goularte was released on bail a few days later.

“We cannot put the law in our own hands,” Velasquez said on Kyle Kingsbury’s podcast. “I know what I did, and I know what I did was very dangerous to other people, you know?”

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