The Long Reach of Islamist Terror Funding in North America

"We reject the distinction between 'civilian' and 'militant'. We reject the distinction between 'settler' and 'soldier'."

"Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms."

"A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches."

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

 

"Certainly, any steps that you can make toward disrupting a terrorist organization, those are accomplishments."

"But, in reality, what I knew, was that this infrastructure [the Holy Land Foundation] had been operating since 1988. That's a long time."

"The roots that this infrastructure had planted throughout the U.S. were deep and vast."

Lara Burns, former FBI special agent

 

"[The court filing should trigger greater interest among America's intelligence agencies about the possible] ties between Hamas and some of the so-called student groups now leading antisemitic violence and intimidation on our campuses."

Paul Moore, former chief investigative counsel, U.S. Department of Education

 

On the very day of the Hamas incursion into southern Israel to carry out a bloodbath -- replete with mass rape, torture, the burning of farming villages and kidnapping of Israeli civilians young and old -- across the United States, National Students for Justice in Palestine sprang into action to co-ordinate a swift 'public relations' campaign feeding off the terrorist action. They issued guidelines on campus walkouts across both the United States and Canada, along with graphic templates as critical propaganda tools.

A Towfan Al Aqsa statement (code for the name Hamas labelled its attack) was issued by the SJP chapter at University of California, Berkeley to honour the "Palestinians who are working on the ground on several axes of the so-called 'Gaza envelope' alongside our comrades in blood and arms, and what is coming is greater. Victory or martyrdom". George Washington University's SJP chapter caught up two days later with its own declaration. 

Students for Justice in Palestine is now recognized as the most prominent anti-Israel group operating throughout North America, where it has gained international attention in its mobilization of college campus encampments. It has taken fully four decades since the seed for such a widespread network of unified placeholders to act in support of Islamist terrorism in the Palestinian Territories, culminating in the primacy of Hamas in Gaza.

 

In 2001, U.S. government efforts based on intelligence of foreign terrorist networks' infiltration into the United States led to the closing down of the Holy Land Foundation, and the Islamic Association of Palestine following several years later. By then it was too late; the two fundraising arms of Islamist 'charities' benefiting terrorism were cut off, but more than ample arms remained, deeply integrated and quietly doing their work in support of Hamas and what it represents.

 

Senior leaders of both outlawed groups simply reorganized and became American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) which is the largest sponsor of Students for Justice in Palestine, totally invested in demanding that American universities divest from Israel. Initially, overt antisemitism was averted in favour of a civil exterior which the left found much in common with and suddenly young college left-leaning activists and the conservative Muslim community leadership began acting in support of one another.  

National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has gained global attention for mobilizing encampments on university campuses including Montreal’s McGill University, above. Photo by Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press

 

AMP established the umbrella group National SJP with a view to co-ordinating messaging and strategy among its 200-plus chapters in the U.S. and Canada; a network of growing influence. "Before 2010, SJP operated with individual campus chapters and little cross-campus co-ordination. It was not until 2010 that a national effort to unite SJP campus branches emerged". explained Dan Diker, researcher at think tank JCPA in Jerusalem. 

In the 1980s, the U.S. became a fundraising bonanza for Islamic fundamentalists where al-Qaeda leaders sent members on tour, stopping at dozens of mosques to promote funding for the mujahideen then fighting the USSR in Afghanistan. In later years, Hamas leaders emulated the success of the earlier al-Qaeda fundraising ventures to their own advantage. And Hamas's fundraising and advocacy infrastructure was slowly established in the U.S. and Canada.

 

American Muslims for Palestine strategically engineered a slander program that found acceptability in polite society, among academia and the union landscape, packaging raw antisemitism as recognition of Jews, Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust in linkage to decolonization and anti-oppression, quickly taken up as effective verbal tools that found credibility across the continent, where groups of Israel bashers took to Israel as a colonizing occupier while asserting there was nothing antisemitic in their focus on the Jewish state. 

Zionists have been compared to Nazis, to the KKK, and enthusiastic apartheid racists. "If there were Nazis, white nationalists and KKK members on campus, would their identity have been accepted and respected? Then why would we respect the view of Zionists?", the SJP chapter at Stony Brook University in New York posted on social media, demanding the expulsion of Jewish student group Hillel from campus. 

"This [law]suit, targeting key nodes in the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood U.S. network, is frankly long overdue. The close connections between these defendants and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other designated foreign terrorist organizations are no secret."

"For years, SJP and AMP [American Muslims for Palestine] have bragged about supporting Hamas."

"And in many respects, these groups are the tip of a very dirty iceberg."

Reed Rubenstein, former deputy associate attorney general, U.S. Department of Education 

A woman walks between the tents in an anti-Israel encampment at the University of Toronto campus, May 26, 2024. Photo by Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press