Jesse Kline: How terrorists took over academia

The anti-Israel movement on campus is a co-ordinated effort to build support for Iran’s global terror network among western youth and those responsible for educating future generations

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Published Jun 23, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read

The anti-Israel encampment at the University of Toronto. Photo by Jesse Kline/National Post

The bodies of Israeli civilians who were slaughtered by Hamas were still warm when celebrations broke out on the streets of Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa on October 7. Almost immediately, National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an umbrella group that co-ordinates its chapters at universities throughout North America, sprung into action, issuing a toolkit that parroted Hamas propaganda and featured images of Palestinians standing atop an Israeli tank next to the Gazan border and an illustration of a hang glider, which the terrorists were using to invade Israel.

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This has always begged the question: did these groups have foreknowledge that a terror attack was imminent? Over eight months later, we’re starting to understand who has been organizing and funding the anti-Israel campaigns on university campuses. The picture being painted is not of a grassroots, student-led movement to support the Palestinian cause, but of an intentional, co-ordinated effort to build support for Iran’s global terror network among western youth and those responsible for educating future generations.

On June 15, the Post ran an illuminating feature on the history of the campus anti-Israel movement written by intrepid reporter Ari Blaff. As the piece details, SJP was started in 1993 by UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian. This was a time of great optimism for the prospects of peace in the Middle East, with the Oslo I Accord signed in September of that year. But Bazian explicitly rejected a two-state solution, and instead bought into the nascent Hamas movement’s call for the total destruction of the Jewish state. He also skilfully adopted the language of the progressive left, framing jihadist goals in Marxist and social-justice terms designed to gain support within academia.

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Bazian also raised significant funds for KindHearts, a now defunct non-profit that had its assets frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department over allegations that it had been fundraising for Hamas. His efforts were aided by Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas operative who spent the 1980s building a vast fundraising and advocacy network for the terrorist group in the United States, which included the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), an organization that Bazian was also involved with.

IAP closed down in 2004, after a lawsuit exposed its links to Hamas. But there is considerable evidence that IAP’s leadership, many of whom have alleged Hamas ties, simply set up another group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which worked to hide IAP’s blatant antisemitism under the veneer of “anti-Zionism” and grew to become the largest supporter of SJP, providing it with financial and other resources. The board and executive directors of AMP, which was co-founded by Bazian, include people who worked on behalf of IAP and the Holy Land Foundation, a “charity” that was shut down by the U.S. government after it was found to have funnelled US$12 million to Hamas.

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Research conducted by the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) — which, over more than a decade, has uncovered “billions of dollars of unreported funds” transferred from the Middle East to anti-Israel student groups in the U.S. — found that American non-profits have been funding SJP chapters to the tune of US$3 million a year. ISGAP also showed that AMP has been a key source of funds for Jewish Voice for Peace, a rabid anti-Zionist organization active in Canada and the U.S. that purports to represent Jews, but which Bazian has been accused of playing a key role in.

The student protests have also received considerable funds from the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Canadian non-profit that’s closely associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a listed terrorist entity in Canada with ties to Hamas, and has organized many of the vile anti-Israel protests on Canadian streets. Samidoun was classified as a terrorist organization by Israel in 2021 and banned in Germany late last year, but has been allowed to operate freely here in Canada.

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Its international co-ordinator, Charlotte Kates, trained students participating in the pro-Hamas rallies at Columbia University and was photographed in the encampment at the University of British Columbia. She was arrested after praising the October 7 massacre as “heroic and brave” at a protest in Vancouver, but was quickly released pending a court date in the fall. Her husband, Khaled Barakat, is considered by Israel to be a terrorist due to his association with the PFLP and has been banned from entering Germany, but continues to support anti-Israel protesters at universities throughout the West from his perch here in Canada.

According to a recent article in Commentary magazine, citing data from the Anti-Defamation League, Samidoun gets much of its funds through the Alliance for Global Justice, an American non-profit funded by “a web of George Soros-backed groups and a far-left dark money network.”

There is now a wealth of evidence that the groups leading the student protests have ties with Hamas and other jihadi organizations that form Iran’s “resistance front.” As we speak, the encampment at McGill University is hosting a “revolutionary youth summer program” to indoctrinate young people in terrorist propaganda. Last month, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wrote a letter praising western university students, who he says have “now formed a branch of the resistance front” against the “Zionist regime” and the “global Zionist elite.”

It’s high time the Canadian government launched a formal investigation into whether these groups are running afoul of anti-terrorism laws and take steps to prevent terrorist-supporting non-profits like Samidoun from raising money here at home.

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