Victims of the Oct. 7 attack are suing a U.S. Islamic extremist group that has admitted to funding anti-Semitic student protests across the country, saying the group is a Hamas “recruiter.” It claims to be a department.
A group of nine people, including survivors and bereaved families of the massacre, accused the National Students for Palestine Justice (SJP) and its parent group, American Muslims for Palestine, of perpetuating the massacre and even inspiring Hamas. (AMP) with a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages. Advertisement.
Their lawsuit has drawn attention to SJP, which has established chapters on 250 campuses in the United States and Canada. AMP quietly admitted this week that it had sent funds to campus groups in response to the wave of protests that have engulfed American universities since October 7.
Among those arrested at Columbia University in Manhattan on Tuesday night after NYPD took over Hamilton Hall and at UCLA on Thursday when California State Police used smoke bombs to clear the encampment. This included leaders of the SJP branch.
Isra Hirsi, the 21-year-old daughter of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was suspended from Barnard College last month for anti-Israel activities, is also a leader in SJP.
Two Colombian SJP leaders also invited Khaled Barakat, a senior member of a designated Palestinian terrorist organization, to speak at a seminar called “Resistance 101,” where the man’s wife told him that he was a “Hamas fighter. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Pro-terrorism protesters at universities across the country have used images of terrorists on paragliders in social media campaigns, chanting “fuck the police” and “globalize the intifada.” has been accused of violent anti-Semitic acts.
Stanford University in California sent the FBI a photo of a masked protester wearing a Hamas headband over a keffiyeh.
AMP is already under investigation by the Virginia attorney general for allegedly supporting Hamas, but its boss, Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, incited anti-Israel crowds on its California campus and chanted “Palestinian liberation” chants. is leading the way.
The nine victims of October 7th, seven of them Americans, are currently suing SJP and AMP for providing “continuous, systematic and substantial support for Hamas’ acts of international terrorism.” He has filed a lawsuit against the company, which could force the group into bankruptcy and out of business. .
Nine said AMP and SJP’s anti-Israel protests and efforts to spread pro-terrorism messages caused ongoing trauma.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Virginia, alleges that AMP, a nonprofit organization based in Falls Church, Va., and a national group representing 250 SJP campus chapters are “confronting Hamas’s ongoing efforts abroad. “They are not just supporting terrorist activities.” Make it permanent in the US. ”
The paper claims that after the terrorist attack in Israel, the US-based extremist group distributed a “toolkit” to student groups to “legitimize Hamas and its affiliates’ terrorism in Gaza.” There is.
“the next day [Oct. 8]NSJP released the Day of Resistance Toolkit (the “NSJP Toolkit”) across more than 300 American college campuses,” the complaint alleges.
“As of the filing of this complaint, AMP and NSJP are, among other things, coordinating the occupation of dozens of university campuses across the United States in order to ‘force’ the U.S. government and academic community to bend to Hamas’ will.” are doing.
Among those filing the lawsuit is Maya Pariser, a U.S. national based in Israel, who fled the Nova Festival with her boyfriend on October 7th and said she was “on the road.” He reportedly escaped by “weaving through bodies and avoiding Hamas gunfire.”
Another American survivor, film director Yoni Diller, witnessed the massacre of four of his closest friends, court records say.
And Lior Bar-Or, another US plaintiff, survived a barrage of gunfire, grenades, and a fire that Hamas terrorists set on the shelter he took refuge in, but four of his friends were killed. legal documents state.
Jason Torchinsky of Holzman Vogel, one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, said, “The chaos we are seeing at American universities is carefully planned and orchestrated, and the ultimate goal of Hamas’s needs.” The activities of the National SJP in support of this will be exposed and stopped.”
AMP and National SJP did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
AMP has previously denied allegations that it provided material support to Hamas when Jason Miyares of Virginia launched an investigation into the allegations last year. The group called it a “defamatory slander.”
But the school’s attorney, Christina Jump, acknowledged Tuesday that it funneled cash to groups on campus in recent months.
she told the Daily Mail AMP provided grants of up to $2,000 each to each SJP chapter to cover food, photocopying and other incidental costs, the report said.
Jump, who is providing legal advice to protesters through the Texas-based American Islamic Law Fund, did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Bazian, AMP’s CEO, founded the first chapter of SJP at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, according to a study released this week by the Global Institute on Antisemitism and Policy.
This week, Mr. Bazian unleashed an anti-Israel tirade against a crowd of protesters who were “occupying” parts of the ultra-liberal campus and at San Francisco State University. He did not respond to requests for comment.
The report, “National Students for Justice in Palestine: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Americanism, Violent Extremism and the Threat to North American Universities,” accuses SJP of being at the vanguard of open anti-Semitism. . SJP has not responded to the allegations.
Last month, SJP issued a call on social media for chapters across the country to take action to “take back our organization.”
The group’s mission statement, titled “Gaza’s Favorite Universities,” cited in the ISGAP report reads, “We will take control of universities campus by campus until Palestine is liberated.”
This call was followed by the first tent encampment in Colombia, which was imitated across the country.
SJP regularly receives more than $3 million in funding annually from other U.S.-based nonprofit organizations, including AMP.
Alison Dinner/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
According to the ISGAP report, SJP also receives funding from “financial sponsors” such as the WESPAC Foundation and the Tides Foundation. Neither person responded to requests for comment.
Fiscal sponsors are nonprofit organizations that manage funds for other groups that do not have tax-exempt status with the IRS.
AMP, which raised more than $1.5 million in donations in 2022, also operates as Americans for Justice at the Palestine Education Foundation, according to public documents.
Public documents show that AMP board members have provided thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and members of her progressive “squad.”
Additional reporting by Jon Levine
