A lawsuit filed this month against National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) offers important insight into how Hamas terrorists are using the campus group to recruit future American leaders into their “terrorist cult,” according to two lawyers involved in the case.
Anat Alon Beck of Case Western Reserve University School of Law and Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center spoke to Fox News Digital about the lawsuit filed on behalf of survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.
The lawsuit alleges that NSJP and the AJP Educational Foundation, also known as the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), act as a “propaganda arm” for Hamas, influencing young Americans who don’t know exactly what they stand for.
“Many times when we talked to students, they didn’t know what ‘River to the Sea’ was or what it meant,” Aron Beck told Fox News Digital. “They didn’t even know what ‘Intifada’ was. They thought it was a salad.”
Major US law firm sues students for supporting Hamas’ “terrorist activities” in Palestine Justice
The slogan “From the river to the sea” has been described as anti-Semitic by US lawmakers and seen as a call to eradicate Israel. The term “intifada” is an Arabic word meaning resistance to oppression and has been used to describe the violent terrorist uprising against Israel.
Goldfeder estimates that 80 percent of students and protesters who take part in anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses “can’t find Israel on a map” or tell us “which river is which sea.”
Students take part in an anti-Israel protest outside the Columbia University campus on November 15, 2023 in New York City. (Spencer Pratt/Getty Images)
“Most of them are just there for the pizza or they’re really just deluded into thinking they’re doing the right thing,” Goldfeder said.
Police arrest at least eight protesters after anti-Israel camp at Wayne State University dismantled
Goldfeder noted that the main aim of the case is to distinguish between people who are being deceived and extremists who are allegedly working towards the same goals as terrorist groups.
“We may actually be able to save a generation of Americans from accidentally walking into a terrorist cult,” he said. “If we say, ‘You didn’t know what you were doing, but these people, these extremists, are not just extremists, they are actually in league with terrorist groups,’ then hopefully 80 percent of them will walk away. They’re going to be our future congressmen, our future senators, and maybe our future presidents.”
A protest by Students for Justice for Palestine took place near the main entrance of the University of California, Santa Cruz campus in Santa Cruz, California on May 20. (Shmuel Tarar/Santa Cruz Sentinel via The Associated Press)
The lawsuit against NSJP and AMP, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, alleges that the groups “use propaganda to intimidate, persuade and recruit ignorant, misguided and impressionable college students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on and off campus.”
The lawsuit, filed by leading U.S. and international law firm Greenberg Traurig, claims that AMP was “formed from the remains of an organization that was dissolved after Hamas officials were found guilty of criminal and civil charges for providing material support to Hamas and other affiliated terrorist groups.”
“There is a legal chasm between independent advocacy and knowingly acting within the United States as the propaganda and recruiting arm of a foreign terrorist organization,” the complaint argues. “AMP and NSJP are the latter.”
Trump tells donors he will stop “radical revolution” on campus and kick anti-Israel agitators “out of the country”
American Muslims who support Palestine dispute this claim.
“AMP operates entirely domestically, raising funds from U.S. donors and spending those funds in the United States to support its mission of educating the American public about Palestine’s rich history and culture,” AMP’s lead attorney Christina Jump told Fox News Digital. “AMP looks forward to demonstrating in any jurisdiction that it is acting in full compliance with U.S. and local legal requirements for nonprofit organizations. AMP remains in good standing and in compliance with Virginia law and all federal agency laws.”
Protesters gathered outside an anti-Israel encampment on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles on May 1. (Keith Birmingham/Media News Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
Jump said AMP “has no corporate relationship whatsoever with NSJP.” The lawsuit alleges that AMP founded NSJP in 2010.
“The lack of basic due diligence by plaintiffs’ counsel is extremely disappointing,” Jump continued. “Plaintiffs have incorrectly listed NSJP’s address as the location of AMP’s offices, yet NSJP is not located at, or does not conduct business at, AMP’s offices.”
Alon Beck said the groups are not just targeting universities with their demands for divestment from Israel, but also publicly traded companies such as Amazon, Google and Raytheon, all of which could have a “ripple effect” on private capital markets and technology innovation.
“We could be facing a liquidity crisis, and we may already be facing one, because many universities have been unable to cope with what has happened on their campuses and many donors have pulled their funding,” Aron Beck said.
Read the lawsuit – App users click here:
Alon Beck and Goldfeder say we should “believe” these groups when they say they want to destroy Israel, and not dismiss them as mere chatter.
Click here to get the FOX News app
“The tagline of this lawsuit is, ‘When someone tells you they’re going to provide material support to terrorists, believe them,'” Goldfeder said. “And we do.”
