Seth Mandel: Hamas’s American Mouthpieces
The Internet is abuzz today over a lawsuit filed against several anti-Semitic organizations. The suit alleges, with a fair amount of evidence, that these groups aren’t merely pro-Hamas in outlook but that they coordinate their messaging and actions with Hamas and other terror groups.The Rise of Civil Terrorism
The complaint is thorough and damning, and can be read in full here. But this is yet another case in which the legal implications serve to highlight the absolute depravity, and in some cases, inherently evil character of these so-called pro-Palestinian organizations. The defendants and their supporters will argue that these groups’ actions are permitted under the law. But there is no legitimate argument that these groups possess a single morally redeemable attribute.
Let’s start with the basics. In 1988, the complaint notes, Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, created the Palestine Committee to be its American support network. One of the groups in that committee was the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), founded by Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal. After an IAP affiliate was found liable for Hamas fundraising, it dissolved and its core formed American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). Students for Justice in Palestine and its post-university counterpart Within Our Lifetime grew out of that effort, as did the organization currently at the center of several anti-Semitism scandals: Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
This background is important to establish the following: The groups conducting anti-Zionist marches, riots, and encampments all grew from the original initiative of the terrorist organization that massacred 1,200 innocents on 10/7, took hundreds hostage, and subjected 10/7 victims and captives to sexual torture.
The complaint itself includes several eyebrow-raising allegations that should make apologists for these groups stop in their tracks.
First up: “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, Columbia SJP’s account had been dormant for months.”
Groups named in the suit also echoed Hamas’s public pronouncements. For example, they echoed Hamas’s call for a Day of Rage (though one of the groups used the phrase Day of Resistance) on the same day. “The advertisements for these events included clear references to many materials produced and provided by AMP/NSJP and even Hamas itself.” The days of rage on behalf of Hamas caused the closure of Jewish schools and other institutions in New York as well as Columbia’s campus, all out of security concerns. “Jewish students at Columbia University and Barnard College were advised to lock their doors and remain inside for their own safety.”
These marches took place in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, well before Israel’s counteroffensive ground incursion in Gaza began. Columbia’s march prominently featured Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born U.S. permanent resident that the Trump administration is trying to deport for omitting certain past affiliations on his official application. At that point, not even a week had passed since the Hamas attacks. These organizations—again, which grew out of a coalition founded by a current Hamas leader—were essentially gloating in lockstep with Hamas.
Last week, a North Dakota court ordered the environmental organization Greenpeace to pay $667 million in damages for libel, vandalism, and acts of violent obstruction aimed at halting the construction of an oil pipeline. The ruling sets an important precedent: coordinated forms of disruptive protest that go far beyond anything that might be characterized as speech will be punished. (Greenpeace, by the way, has also accused Israel of genocide.)Melanie Phillips: The appeasement of Iran
Greenpeace’s actions seem to fit the description of what Tal Fortgang calls “civil terrorism,” and aren’t so different from the tactics employed recently by anti-Israel groups. Fortgang explains what addreses the problem these tactics pose as one of criminal law:
Masked criminals attacked several Citibank locations in New York City one night last September. They brandished no guns and demanded no cash. Instead, they squeezed epoxy and cemented stickers on debit-card readers, damaged door locks, and vandalized windows with profanities and threats of future violence. Rather than keep their identities hidden, the marauders filmed their work and posted it to their enterprise’s Instagram page.
Over the last few years, but especially since Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, this type of organized criminal mayhem has increasingly become part of American life. The criminal bands that have arisen act for ideological reasons. They operate where they believe that they have the most latitude: on college campuses and in Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. And their beliefs are overwhelmingly leftwing: radically environmentalist (“Just Stop Oil”), anarcho-socialist (Antifa), and, most often, anti-Israel.
Fortgang notes that the movement employing these tactics
includes groups that openly support, and likely coordinate with, foreign terror organizations and hostile regimes. . . . In July 2024, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines confirmed that Iran is encouraging and funding some of these demonstrations.
Because civil terrorism utilizes illegal activity, the beginning of a policy agenda to fight it must start with enforcing existing laws—and investigating reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing.
A criminal case in America that’s just ended has directed a spotlight onto Britain’s lackadaisical attitude to Iranian terrorism. Two men were found guilty of what the US Department of Justice called a “brazen plot” to murder a female Iranian dissident on American soil.
The Iranian regime has been trying to silence this dissident, Masih Alinejad, for years. Alinejad, a journalist, author and activist who has lived permanently in America since 2014 and has consistently drawn attention to Iran’s human rights abuses, has suffered harassment, intimidation and previous attempts on her life.
In 2020, Iranian intelligence officials and assets plotted to kidnap her from the US for rendition to Iran. In the case that finished last week, two members of an eastern European organised crime gang had been hired by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to murder her in New York.
The court heard that a hitman with an AK-47 had camped outside her Brooklyn home to kill her. She had spotted one of the plotters behaving suspiciously while she was gathering tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden.
After the convictions of her would-be assassins, Alinejad — who has nine million Instagram followers, especially among young Iranian women in revolt against the regime’s brutal enforcement of the hijab to cover their hair — noted the silence about the convictions by left-wingers who had “called me an Islamophobe” as well as by “the campus protesters chanting ‘I am Hamas’.”
The same left-wing “feminists,” of course, who have ignored or tried to deny the rape, mutilation, torture and burning alive of young Israeli women during the atrocities of October 7 2023. The same liberal world that demonises Israel and the west while sanitising and appeasing their Islamist attackers. And the west’s resolute refusal in particular to deal with the Iranian regime that is pledged to destroy it is beyond perplexing.
