May 2: SJP = Hamas, Lawsuit Says

House passes IHRA bill; Biden and the Saudis; Outside agitators at Columbia

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The Big Story

National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) together constitute an ongoing “material support enterprise” for Hamas, a designated foreign terror organization, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday against AJP Educational Foundation (AJP), the parent organization of both groups, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The lawsuit, which seeks damages for nine U.S. and Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attacks, alleges that AMP and NSJP, through their aggressive propaganda and civil disobedience campaign conducted in close coordination with Hamas and the wider Iran-backed Axis of Resistance, have provided “intentional, systematic, and substantial assistance to Hamas’ acts of international terrorism,” in violation of the U.S. Antiterrorism Act and the Alien Tort Statute. 

Readers of The Scroll may be familiar with AMP and NSJP’s connections with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch), but it is worth reviewing the facts as laid out in the lawsuit. NSJP has no formal organizational structure of its own; donations to the organization are routed through a fiscal sponsor, the WESPAC Foundation, but NSJP is nothing other than the “campus brand” of AMP, which maintains full “organizational and management control” of NSJP. AMP is in turn a subsidiary of its fiscal sponsor (and the defendant in the lawsuit), AJP, which has no independent existence from AMP except for an on-paper distinction for corporate registration and tax purposes. The hybrid corporate structure, the lawsuit claims, allows AMP to claim that it is exclusively funded by domestic donations since all donations are first routed through AJP and therefore come from another “domestic” organization. 

AMP, in turn, is a substantial continuation of the material support for terrorism enterprise that was dismantled during the U.S. government’s prosecutions of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), and the American Muslim Society (AMS), which were outgrowths of the “Palestine Committee,” founded by Muslim Brotherhood activists in 1988 to act as the U.S. fundraising and propaganda arm of Hamas. IAP, for instance, was founded at the direction of Khaled Meshal—who served as the chairman of Hamas’ Politburo from 2004 to 2017 and now serves as its head of diaspora affairs—to act as the “public voice of Hamas” in the United States, and it was heavily financed by Mousa Abu Marzook, who is now a senior Hamas official living in Qatar and was then a Hamas operative living and working in the United States. HLF was named a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2001, and five of its leaders were convicted of providing material support to Hamas in 2008. IAP was found civilly and criminally liable for providing material support to Hamas and disbanded in 2004. Related charities in the HLF-IAP network, such as KindHearts, were also disbanded for material support to Hamas. 

As we’ve emphasized here before, AMP and NSJP emerged directly from the HLF-IAP nexus. As the lawsuit explains, “six members of AMP’s core leadership were IAP board members or active in HLF and/or IAP, two are family members of IAP board members, and one was a frequent collaborator and fundraiser for IAP and KindHearts.” The founder of both AMP and NSJP, Hatem Bazian, fundraised for KindHearts and was a veteran of two Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated student organizations, including the Muslim Students Association (of which Abdullah Akl of Within Our Lifetime and MPower Change is also a member), creating NSJP in their image.

Not mentioned in the lawsuit, but relevant for our purposes: One of AMP’s board members, and the director of AJP, is Salah Sarsour, a former HLF fundraiser who spent eight months in prison in Israel for Hamas activity in the 1990s (he now owns a furniture store in Wisconsin). Salah Sarsour has frequently appeared in Facebook photos with Linda Sarsour, including multiple photos with captions referring to “family,” although Salah and Linda’s precise relationship is unclear. 

Much of the rest of the lawsuit concerns AMP and NSJP’s propagandizing and organizing on behalf of Hamas and the Axis of Resistance since Oct. 7—much of it was in apparent coordination with Hamas, and seemingly with some advance knowledge of Hamas’ operation. On Oct. 8, for instance, NSJP distributed to all of its local chapters a manifesto, the NSJP Toolkit, that provided ideological justification for the attacks (claiming that “settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law”), urged local chapters to “join [Hamas’ Oct. 7] call for mass mobilization,” and identified the “Palestinian student movement” in the United States as “PART of” the Hamas-led “Unity Intifada,” and not merely “in solidarity with it.” The lawsuit also notes that the NSJP Toolkit, distributed within a day of the attack, included “Day of Resistance” image templates featuring paragliders—which had never been used in a Palestinian terrorist attack prior to Oct. 7. Not mentioned, but also suspicious in this regard, is the following graphic from Columbia SJP, which states “We are back!” and features “Revolution until victory!” scrawled in Arabic over a map of “Palestine.” It was posted on Oct. 6, the day before the attack. 

There is as yet no smoking gun demonstrating AMP and NSJP communication with Hamas or foreknowledge of the attacks—merely a set of suspicious circumstances. We hope that the lawsuit will be allowed to proceed to discovery, as we feel confident that there is a lot for the American public to learn. 

Read the press release from law firm Greenberg Traurig, with a link to the court filing, here: https://www.gtlaw.com/en/news/2024/05/press-releases/greenberg-traurig-national-jewish-advocacy-center-schoen-law-firm-and-holtzman-vogel-represent-american-and-israeli-victims-of-hamas 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith on America’s plan to save Hamas

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The Rest

→The House of Representatives voted 320-91 on Wednesday to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism for the purposes of enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII. The IHRA defines as antisemitism not only Holocaust denial and “stereotypical” or “dehumanizing” statements about Jews as a collective, but also various statements about the state of Israel, including applying a “double standard” to Israeli behavior, claiming that Israel is inherently racist, comparing Israel’s actions to those of Nazi Germany, or using “symbols and images associated with classical antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” Cue the deliberate misinterpretations from sections of the right, alleging that that final clause makes “the Bible illegal”:

Two things can be true at once. The first, here, is that much of the “criticism” of Israel we’ve seen over the past seven months is indeed antisemitic—especially the increasingly open claims, common on both left and right, that “Zionist” donors and “neocon” intellectuals are responsible for “suppressing” the “speech” of anti-Israel protesters. In reality, of course, those protesters are furthering an establishment op with establishment funding and support and against the will of ordinary Americans.

The second thing is: there is no law against hate speech in America. Furthermore, the back-door criminalization of speech through the federal civil-rights bureaucracy is an assault on our civil liberties, and carving out a special Israeli exception for the increasingly pervasive anti-white and anti-American discourse that pervades American elite culture will merely exacerbate the paranoia and conspiracism that already surrounds U.S.-Israeli relations in this country, while doing nothing to address their root—which is not the speech of ordinary Americans, but the policy aims and propaganda of the country’s ruling faction. As former Scroll editor Jacob Siegel put it on X:

→Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel will invade Rafah if Hamas does not agree to the cease-fire deal currently on the table—prompting Blinken to reply that a Rafah invasion would scuttle a Saudi normalization deal. But weren’t the Saudis perfectly happy to move forward with normalization under Trump’s Abraham Accords framework, which bracketed the Palestinian issue altogether? Tablet’s geopolitical analyst weighed in on the current U.S.-Saudi-Israeli dance:

What we’re seeing is the Saudis buying into the Democratic Party foreign policy portfolio, the (correct) premise being that America no longer has a foreign policy—allies and policies now belong to political parties. So the Saudis get whatever package of goodies short of a treaty in exchange for “coming inside the tent” on Iran and putting the Palestinians at the center of their official blather. The point there is that Biden can then turn around and say “Bibi blew his chance at a historic peace deal with the Saudis!,” which the White House imagines can be a talking point for Benny Gantz against Netanyahu. In turn, the Saudis are told that while they are now “inside the tent,” which means they don’t get Khashoggi’d, the formal defense treaty they really want with the United States will have to wait until a visionary Israeli leader accepts what are now the “Saudi parameters” for peace—allowing Biden to pretend that it’s not the United States putting the Palestinians at the center of everything again, but the Saudis. 

So, the Saudis get one-third of a loaf in return for being permanently pissed on by Iran and pissing on the Israelis—the function of “the Palestinians” in all cases being as a blocking device. 

In the Saudis’ defense, it’s a dangerous neighborhood and they don’t have an army.

→Nearly half the protesters—134 of 282—arrested at Columbia and the City University of New York on Tuesday had “zero affiliation” with either school, according to the NYPD. In other breaking news, the pope is Catholic and Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still dead. 

→In a speech on Thursday, Biden offered his most forceful condemnation of the campus protests to date, stating “violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is.” The president condemned “vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations,” as well as “threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear,” and the like. When it came to condemning antisemitism, however, Biden offered what has become the familiar formula of his administration:

There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

Wouldn’t want to upset the unindicted co-conspirators from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, after all. 

→In a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump repeated his familiar criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and also seemed to declare that he had lost faith in the two-state solution. “There was a time when I thought two states could work. Now I think two states is going to be very, very tough,” the former president said. “I think it’s going to be much tougher to get. I also think you have fewer people that liked the idea. You had a lot of people that liked the idea four years ago. Today, you have far fewer people that like that idea.” However, he also added, “There may not be another idea.”

Whether any of that means anything … well, we may find out next January, assuming the “students” don’t proclaim a caliphate first. 

Read the interview here: https://time.com/6972022/donald-trump-transcript-2024-election/ 

→The campus protest movement, helpfully condensed into one video:

That, from UCLA, shows a Black man filming the protests being accosted by a masked man in a hoodie, who appears to be concealing a gun or knife in his pocket, shouting “What you wanna do, nigga?” over chants of “peaceful protest” in the background. 

What’s that noise we hear in the distance? It’s Joseph Rosenbaum calling from beyond the grave, asking for his ghetto anarchist shtick back.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Normal Kids Get F*cked, by Ani Wilcenski

Elite universities went to war against fraternities and fun while indulging Hamas-admiring collectives, and the students have noticed

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Saving Hamas

The Palestinian terror organization refuses to release hostages while clinging to its last stronghold in Rafah. So why is the Biden administration throwing the full weight of the U.S. government at Israel to prevent it from routing Hamas?

By Lee Smith

Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction. Bizarrely, the White House’s statements and actions show that Hamas’ survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army’s tunnels.

Why? As the money and prestige that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate, the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.

A day after the massacre, before Israel’s campaign against Hamas even began, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that he was encouraging the Turkish government’s “advocacy for a cease-fire.” It makes no difference that the tweet has since been deleted, since the White House has produced no shortage of evidence since that its top priority is to deter Israel from defeating Hamas, by increasing Israel’s vulnerabilities at every turn, and conditioning aid on Israel adopting a purely defensive posture.

The Biden administration has stopped Israel from entering Rafah by demanding it produce plans to protect the civilian population, piously insisting that “even one civilian death is too many.” That would be a hard task in any military scenario, but given that Hamas hides among noncombatants, the White House’s policy openly reinforces the terror group’s political and military strategy.

The president abdicated America’s historical role of vetoing anti-Israel activity at the U.N. Instead, the U.S. delegation abstained from a key Security Council resolution in March demanding an immediate cease-fire—thereby putting America’s diplomatic weight behind Hamas’ demand that it should be allowed to keep its hostages and continue ruling Gaza. The White House then sanctioned Israeli civilians on the West Bank for crimes dreamed up by left-wing pro-Palestinian organizations, while ignoring a Palestinian terror wave aimed at murdering Jewish civilians who were guilty of crimes like stopping at a red light, buying gas, and herding sheep. Much of the false reporting supporting the pro-Hamas offensive is channeled through U.S. Army Gen. Michael Fenzel. The U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority are spending taxpayer resources to build a Palestinian terror army on the West Bank that may soon be repurposed for Gaza, too.

By compelling Jerusalem to “surge” food aid and energy to Gaza, the White House broke Israel’s siege, and demanded an ally resupply its adversary at wartime. Whenever Israel goes on the offensive, Biden and aides publicly threaten to stop resupplying arms. After Iran’s massive missile and drone attack last month, administration officials let on that if Israeli retaliatory strikes exceeded meager U.S. limits, the White House would hobble Israel’s air defense systems. Thus, the Israelis were forced to adopt the battle-tested American military strategy of bombing sand.

The White House has used CIA Director William Burns as one of its main instruments of diplomatic deterrence. He’s traveled to Egypt, Qatar, and elsewhere for endless hostage negotiations with the Palestinian terrorist organization. That none of these negotiations has gone anywhere is the point. Burns’ jawboning is designed to stall Israel’s war while legitimizing the act of hostage-taking, even as it’s become increasingly clear that many of the hostages whose release he is supposedly negotiating for are dead.

To emphasize its evenhandedness in the conflict between a key U.S. military ally and a designated foreign terrorist organization, the White House has amplified Hamas propaganda that has repeatedly been shown to be false. The president himself and the secretary of state enthusiastically repeated accusations that Israel intentionally murdered World Central Kitchen aid workers. Without evidence to support USAID head Samantha Power’s claims of rampant famine in Gaza, the administration and its validators began calling it a “reported famine.”

To fight the mythical famine, Biden is sending thousands of U.S. troops to build a $320 million pier to resupply Hamas—an arrangement that will turn American forces into human shields to deter Israeli military operations against the terror organization. By leaking fake news, most recently an internal State Department memo alleging Israeli war crimes, that Israel was hindering aid to starve Gazans, the administration laid the groundwork for arrest warrants likely to be issued by the International Criminal Court. While the warrants reportedly target Netanyahu and other members of Israel’s war cabinet, the action is likely to set a precedent broad enough to justify arresting any Israeli who served in the Gaza campaign.

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It’s useful to remember that what distinguishes the Palestinians from other ethno-national groups born of the breakup of the multiethnic empires of Europe and the Levant after World War I is that their claim on the world’s attention issues largely from their willingness to hire themselves out as terrorist mercenaries.

During the Cold War, the Palestinians were used by the Soviets against the U.S. and American interests and allies. Regional powers like Nasser’s Egypt, Assad’s Syria, Saddam’s Iraq, and Ghaddafi’s Libya used the Palestinians to advance their own interests, against the superpowers and/or each other. Not infrequently, Palestinian factions fought each other on behalf of their Arab patrons.

It was through this nonstop violence that the Palestinian cause flourished. The Palestinians won a place in regional and then international forums not because of a world-historical injustice done to an ad hoc confederacy of minor Levantine bloodlines. Rather, it was because if you didn’t employ a mercenary gang of Palestinians against your enemies, you would be exposed to a terror campaign waged by a rival band of Palestinians, sponsored by your rivals.

What Middle East watchers call the “Palestinian veto” refers to the ability of Palestinian terrorists to destabilize any given regional order that doesn’t suit the ambitions of whoever their dominant patron happens to be. For instance, the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty came about only because Egyptian President Anwar Sadat insisted on keeping the Palestinians out. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Sadat didn’t care about a comprehensive peace in the Holy Land with the Palestinians front and center—he knew that giving the Palestinians a seat would give the Soviets and their Arab allies an opening to derail an agreement he needed to advance Egyptian interests.

On whose behalf were the Palestinians acting when they destabilized the region with their gruesome Oct. 7 attack? Iran—but also the Biden administration. The two share an interest in collapsing the traditional U.S.-led order of the Middle East that Donald Trump had restored, after Barack Obama began the process of dismantling it.

Up until Obama, the pillars of America’s security architecture were the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, and, in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel and Egypt. Early in his first term Obama signaled he intended to undo that order when he gave a speech in Cairo and invited officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, existential enemies of the military regime then led by Hosni Mubarak. Within two years, the White House withdrew its support for Mubarak during the Arab Spring revolutions and ushered in a Muslim Brotherhood government. Egypt became the first pillar of the old U.S. security order to fall.

Obama’s aides made it clear that his second term would be devoted to securing a nuclear deal with Iran. The purpose of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was not to prevent an Iranian bomb—in fact, the agreement legalizes the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program. Rather it was to realign U.S. interests with Tehran while stiffing traditional U.S. partners, especially Riyadh and Jerusalem, the other regional pillars of the American order. To cap off his eight years of dismantling the instruments of U.S. policy in the Middle East, Obama’s final foreign affairs initiative was to push a U.N. Security Council resolution adopting the Palestinian position that Israel was in violation of international law by occupying, among other places, historic Jewish holy sites.

Then came Donald Trump, who not only reversed Obama’s realignment but reinforced Washington’s traditional security architecture. Trump’s first official trip was to Saudi Arabia. He explained that the U.S.-Saudi alliance was good for the U.S. because it meant affordable oil, investment in America, and American jobs. Trump defended the Saudis when retired U.S. spies, The Washington Post, Obama operatives, and foreign intelligence services joined in an information operation to isolate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder of former Saudi intelligence official Jamal Khashoggi.

That was only the beginning, as step by step Trump erased Obama’s legacy in the Middle East, and restored the pillars of the American-led regional security order. He backed the military regime in Cairo, and moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He acknowledged Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, and large parts of the West Bank. The Trump-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and other regional states, known as the Abraham Accords, reaffirmed the U.S.-led regional order by binding our allies to each other—and thus to America.

Crucially, the Abraham Accords also ignored the Palestinians. After all, the Palestinians could never normalize relations without forfeiting their ability to project power and demand tribute. Like Sadat, Trump and his diplomats understood that peace could only be made by sidelining the Palestinians and whoever was sponsoring them, in this case Iran.

Naturally, the Abraham Accords were repugnant to the Obama faction. The normalization deals undid Obama’s balance of power project—i.e., strengthen U.S. adversaries at the expense of allies—and pushed the left’s longtime darlings, the Palestinians and the Islamic Republic to the margins. Accordingly, the Biden administration unfroze money to fill Iran’s war chest and undermined regional normalization under cover of expanding it to Saudi Arabia. Any direct talks between Israel and Saudi, the steward of Islam’s holy shrines, would, if only for the sake of protocol, have to involve the Palestinian cause. Thus, the Biden administration put the Palestinians at the center of the region again.

That’s how we got to Oct. 7. Contrary to the Biden administration’s talking points, the Iranians didn’t see Saudi-Israeli normalization talks as an existential threat; rather, they correctly saw it, and other Biden moves, as an invitation to disrupt and destabilize the regional order that Trump had rebuilt. Subsequently, in traditional regional fashion, the Iranians mobilized their Palestinian proxy.

And yet for many good-faith observers, it remains a mystery why Obama and then Biden sought to undo the U.S. order of the Middle East, an arrangement that has kept a volatile and strategically vital region relatively stable. Is it ego alone that requires Obama and his party must be proven right, and that Trump’s successes must be transformed into failures at America’s expense—and at the additional price of destroying the prospects of a relatively hopeful future for Middle Easterners?

The key fact is this: The regional order that Trump restored has long been part of the formula that ensures continued U.S. domestic peace and prosperity. To put it another way, the moves made by Obama and now Biden are not primarily about destabilizing the Middle East. Rather, they are designed to destabilize the United States.

The Biden team’s moves to shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis, and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order. The current regime has weaponized the security state, labeled its opponents “domestic terrorists,” and waged a third-world-style campaign against the opposition candidate because it’s a revisionist faction. Its political and cultural manifesto is a program for remaking America, whether through social pressure, or censorship, or bureaucratic fiat, or threats of violence, or actual violence. Among other devices to transform America, the Biden administration has opened the border to at least 7 million illegal aliens (and counting), many from places in the Middle East where Hamas is revered, and for whom political violence means steady, well-paid work.

It's not the traditional U.S.-led order in the Middle East that the revisionist faction, Obama’s faction, is most determined to dismantle but rather the existing order in the U.S. And it’s not Israel that it’s most keen to grind into dust, but America. For the party that Obama remade in his image to triumph at home, the Palestinians must win.