Columbia Activists Coordinated With Hamas
Adam Lehrer, The Daily Scroll Substack
A lawsuit filed Monday in New York Southern District Court by both the American family members of Oct. 7 victims and Israeli Columbia students against several pro-Palestinian student activist groups contains some bombshell allegations. The lawsuit alleges that these groups and their representatives were aware about the Oct. 7 massacre before it ever happened, and functioned as the public relations arm of Hamas during the war.
The groups and representatives named as defendants in the suit are Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and its leader, Nerdeen Kiswani; Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and representative Maryam Alwan; Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace and representative Cameron Jones; and Columbia University Apartheid and Divest and its representative Mahmoud Khalil, according to The Jerusalem Post.
What the plaintiffs are trying to show is a too-conveniently-timed publicity effort by the accused.
The X user daniela_127, for instance, located something particularly interesting within the documents of the lawsuit about the timing of Columbia SJP’s response to the events of Oct. 7: “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, the account had been dormant for months.”
It gets stranger from there. Eighty-three SJP chapters, including Columbia’s, signed and put out a document in support of Hamas on midnight at the end of the day of Oct. 7, 2023, and the suit implies that these documents must have been written, edited, and signed well before the attacks transpired, meaning that these groups indeed were aware that the slaughter was going down. The Bears for Palestine solidarity statement, shared on Oct. 8, 2023, as part of a national SJP toolkit, honored Hamas terrorists’ actions as a “revolutionary moment” in Palestinian resistance. The Day of Resistance Toolkit included Oct. 7-themed graphics, one of which Kiswani published on Instagram on Oct. 7, a day before the toolkit was released. The creators of that toolkit argued that Israelis killed during the massacre couldn’t be civilians because they were “occupiers.”
The suit also includes testimony by one of its plaintiffs, Shlomi Ziv, a former hostage held by Hamas for 246 days, who alleged that his Hamas captors bragged about having operatives all over American college campuses. The defendants, the suit alleges, have acted as the PR wing of Hamas, supported through shell operations created by leaders of the terrorist organization. In his 2024 article “The People Setting America on Fire,” The Scroll’s editor Park MacDougald identified the financial backing of most of the groups alleged to have coordinated the Oct. 7 PR strategy in this lawsuit.
On WOL:
Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly “mainstream” elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour.
On JVP:
The “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation
On SJP:
SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement).
The ramifications of the lawsuit could prove significant when it comes to other related cases, including Khalil’s deportation proceedings. Tablet’s senior policy analyst believes that this lawsuit can help shutter the idea that cases like Khalil’s are merely to do with “free speech,”—because if Khalil was indeed working beneath the orders of Hamas, then he was working beneath a listed terror organization, which is illegal:
Hamas is listed by the Treasury Department as a terror organization. You might think that they don’t deserve to be listed as a terror organization or you might see them as persecuted freedom fighters, but you have to take that up with the Treasury Department. The law is clear: If you advance the messaging of a legally classified terror organization, then you are in violation of the law. If this lawsuit proves that Khalil indeed was aware of the events of Oct. 7 before they happened and that he knowingly advanced the messaging of Hamas, then he violated the law, and the administration’s deportation case against him just got a lot easier to make.
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