The Extensive Terrorist Connections to America’s Pro-Hamas Campus Protests
How terror groups have joined with Marxists and globalists at the campus protests to destroy Western civilization, beginning with our universities.
Over the past several weeks, Restoration News has produced continuing coverage of the campus protests that devolved into pro-terror riots at colleges and universities across America. The pro-Hamas encampments shared many qualities in disparate locations: similar tents, similar signs, similar tactics, and similar messages.
Restoration News has reported multiple times on the groups running the shows—the radical organizations putting all this together. None of the protests or campus occupations can credibly be called organic, as they share so many organizational factors. The protests have gotten progressively more violent, like the photojournalist assaulted at Portland State recently. This seems like a familiar pattern repeating itself yet again.
On top of radical nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) raising money and using taxpayer grants to fund them, the occupations also share a more sinister trait: connections to America’s adversaries, and even to terrorist groups hell-bent on tearing down the West in favor of an Islamist worldview. Malign forces have used the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement to infiltrate college faculty and administrations with the express intent of spreading anti-Semitic hate. That influence has spread to corporate America as well. This worldview even infests much of the federal government, spreading under the Biden administration.
Radical anti-West organizations, movements, and governments have mainstreamed anti-Israel and pro-terror movements in their efforts to frame the entire world as oppressors versus freedom fighters, colonizers against indigenous people, and white supremacists and Jewish supremacists versus black and brown populations.
In other words, the terrorists, the globalists, and the Marxists work together because they share a common anti-Western world view.
Here we break down how they connect the campus occupations to terrorists. These ties include previously reported outside agitators on college campuses, and their connections to foreign governments, Islamist sympathizers in America, globalists, and designated terror organizations.
Outside Agitators at Campus Protests
The campus protests found fertile ground among woke students, but they could not have sprung up without impetus and strategies provided by outside agitators. These outside agitators consist of professional rioters from off campus—paid rabble rousers. This comes as little surprise, as they reprised the 2020 Summer of Love to create occupied zones on the school greens. As Restoration News reported recently about the occupation at the University of Michigan:
Dusting off their “Occupy” and “CHAZ” playbooks, radicalized students at the University of Michigan have set up the “Liberated Encampment Zone.” This consists of a tent city on campus, anarchist propaganda, and calls for “The Third Intifada” and the defeat of the “liberal-fascist associates” of Zionists. It also means Death to America. They say so at the end of one anarchist pamphlet: “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.”
These tactics go back to the anarchist riots in Seattle in 1999 in response to the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Restoration News reported on support for the occupations from the Tides Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the NFL. According to Politico, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, two organizations leading the occupations, have received funding from Tides, and previously received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Pritzker family.
But wait, there’s more!
The New York Post revealed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), funded by the worst of the radical non-profits, pays for a “community-based fellow” program. Fellows in the campus program can earn between $2,880 and 3,660 for an eight-hour work week organizing campaigns led by “Palestinian organizations.” The program trains fellows to “rise up, to revolution.” The program specifically prohibits support for “reform,” demanding instead, “transformative change.”
Campus protests also received significant support from the U.S. Palestine Activism Program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—the Quaker Church that has agitated for peace for decades. That campus support includes funding and strategic coordination from professional organizers.
The most visible of the on-campus groups has been Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), although they’re far from alone.
In an extensive report, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) followed the corrosive influence of the BDS movement on American college campuses. NAS says the wokeness of modern college campuses allowed BDS to spread:
BDS groups present their cause through a rhetorical framework of anti-colonialism and so-called “anti-racism” that resonates with the broader left-wing political landscape. The deployment of this ideological framework embeds BDS within academia due to the predominance of critical theory, identity politics, and grievance studies in today’s colleges and universities. Groups such as SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) are increasingly effective in martialing broad support for BDS initiatives across student bodies and campus governments.
Embedding BDS within an “anti-imperialist” framework appeals to the Marxian and globalist tendencies among progressive academics. This is no accident; indeed, it is a deliberate attempt at synchronizing the seemingly disparate movements.
BDS maintains extensive ties to terrorism, which we will explore below.
Foreign Influence
Suzan Quitaz, a Swedish reporter of Kurdish descent, reports American college campuses turned into a “second front for Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).” The virulent anti-Semitic chants reveal support for the Muslim Brotherhood, she writes:
We are no longer talking about Neo-Nazi or Islamist thugs but rather a sophisticated well-coordinated campaign of infiltration and persuasion of American academia aimed to pursue the agenda of specific political ideals. One of which is the idea that Israel, “Zionism” personified, is inherently evil and must be eradicated. To the “new respectful antisemitism” belong a group of professors who are suited and booted, like Professor Joseph Massad, who praised and glorified Hamas’s Oct 7 attacks against Israeli civilians, calling it “an awesome, stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
[Prof. Mohamed] Abdou sees Hamas as a “resistance against Israel and the West” and described Hamas terrorists as a “dedicated few” who managed to defeat a “larger enemy” in “stealth mode” on Oct 7.
Quitaz notes that these and other professors have their positions funded, in many cases, with money from NGOs and even from foreign governments. She singled out Qatar for the billions in funding it’s lavished on American universities. The “unchecked foreign investment” in academia has turned American campuses into “incubators of terror,” Quitaz writes.
Qatar has also funded Hamas to the tune of $1.1 billion since 2012, according to Quitaz. Warnings from leaders of Arab states to the United States have fallen on deaf ears.
American colleges continue to enjoy funding from some of America’s leading adversaries, topped by Qatar. This helps to explain the anti-American climate on campus.
CAIR Continues to Enjoy Influence at State and Federal Level
Several national and state-level leaders of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have expressed solidarity with Hamas since the ghastly attacks of Oct. 7.
In Georgia on Oct. 12, CAIR held a rally against Israel’s military response. Edward Mitchell, CAIR’s national deputy director, called Israel’s response “war crimes.” He said the military operation to destroy Hamas amounted to “collective punishment” and continued war crimes and human rights abuses dating back to the 1960s:
“And the way to permanently stop this horrific cycle of violence, to save Israelis, Palestinians, and others is to end the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory,” Mitchell said.
In November, the Triangle Imams Council in North Carolina held a press conference at the CAIR office in Durham, in which they implored the U.S. Congress to address “Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias in this country,” and demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. They used the hashtags #genocide and #EthnicCleansing in their posts on X announcing their demands.
CAIR has a long and sordid history, most famously as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terror financing trial in 2007 and 2008. The FBI referred to CAIR as “a front group for Hamas” and traced interconnected relationship between the two groups in documents released in a FOIA request.
Recycled Obama Radicals in the White House
Despite this, both the Obama and Biden administrations have cozied up to CAIR. The Obama Department of Justice, under Attorney General Eric Holder, killed investigations into and indictments of CAIR in the HLF terrorism funding case.
When Biden took office, CAIR once again gained access to the White House—at least until its director expressed support for the October 7 attacks, forcing the Biden administration to disavow its connections. Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, said he was happy to see Palestinians “break out of Gaza” on Oct. 7.
CAIR’s continued access to the White House should come as no surprise, given the recycled Obama radicals that came along for his third term—in the form of Joe Biden. One such radical came to the public’s attention recently, Maher Bitar. According to the Canary Mission:
Maher Bitar is a senior U.S. intelligence official who spread hatred of Israel and promoted a policy that would result in Israel’s destruction. He was also a leader of the anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Georgetown University (Georgetown) in 2006, where he promoted [p. 119] the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
As of March 3, 2024, Bitar had been serving in the White House as special assistant to the U.S. president and senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council (NSC) since January 2021.
Bitar served in the Obama administration as the NSC’s director for Israeli-Palestinian affairs. PJ Media’s Vodkapundit referred to Bitar as “the jihadi in the White House.” His resume includes working for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRW)—directly linked to Hamas—and serving as Rep. Adam Schiff’s lead counsel in his impeachment of Donald Trump.
And Bitar is far from the only federal official with sympathies for our adversaries:
Biden even submitted a lifetime federal judicial nomination for a guy who funded candidates tied to Hamas.
Perhaps this explains the Biden administration’s advance knowledge of an imminent Hamas attack, prior to Oct. 7.
Ties to Terrorism
The BDS movement began during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s in the Middle East. It represents a deliberate attempt at asymmetric warfare by such coalition members as Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, among other terrorist organizations. The BDS portion of the strategy helped these groups use what the NAS report calls “anti-Israel civil society diplomacy” to build support around the world and undermine support for Israel.
A main organizer of BDS efforts in America is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The American branch, USACBI, works with BDS efforts on campuses all across the nation. PACBI has direct terrorist ties, as NAS details:
PACBI is structurally linked to Palestinian political groups that include terrorist organizations. In 2007, PACBI helped found the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which serves as a coalition of organizations advocating for punitive economic measures against Israel. One of the BNC’s organizational members is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine (PNIF), which itself comprises five different terrorist organizations: Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Popular Front-General Command (PFLP-GC), the Palestinian Liberation Front, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The BNC, of which both PACBI and the PNIF are members, is funded in part by the US-based nonprofit US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). As of 2018, the USCPR had supported 329 different BDS groups along with the BNC. On July 15, 2017, the BNC hosted an anti-Israel webinar with Pink Floyd rock star Roger Waters that was promoted by the USCPR.
The Israeli government has tracked these groups for years. In a 2019 report, Terrorists in Suits, they map out the extensive connections between BDS groups, the BNC, and terrorist groups. In a press release, they said:
. . . Hamas and the PFLP are utilizing a network of NGOs promoting boycotts against Israel as an additional tactic in their ultimate goal of dismantling the State of Israel. These organizations have successfully placed over 30 of their members, 20 of which have served time, including for murder, in senior positions within BDS-promoting NGOs. The report documents how boycott organizations and terrorist designated organizations raise finances together, share the same personnel, and showcases that contrary to popular belief, these officials have not abandoned their support for terrorism, but instead, continue to maintain organizational, financial, and active ties with terrorist groups.
NGOs and Governments Funding Terrorists
They further report the support these groups have received. They show millions of euros in donations from NGOs and grants from several European nations. These groups coordinate and fundraise with known terrorists, such as Leila Khaled and Mustafa Awad.
Awad represents Samidoun, a Canadian NGO that trains BDS activists globally. Samidoun has had a significant presence in the campus encampments this spring. Awad has trained with Hezbollah and the PFLP, both designated terror organizations.
NGO Monitor, an Israel-based think tank, says of Samidoun:
In February 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Defense designated Samidoun a terrorist organization and “a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).” According to the Ministry, Samidoun was founded by “members of the PFLP in 2012,” and Khaled Barakat, identified by the PFLP as “coordinator” of Samidoun, “is involved with establishing militant cells and motivating terrorist activity in Judea & Samaria and abroad.”
Samidoun does not publish its financial information. The Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) serves as fiscal sponsor, lending its 501(c)(3) status to Samidoun and 140 other groups. AFGJ lost its ability to accept credit card donations after an expose on its sponsorship of terror-aligned groups. This begs the question why they still enjoy non-profit status from the IRS as well as in Canada.
Within Our Lifetime (WOL) has an equally murky funding picture. Like Samidoun, WOL has a fiscal sponsor, so they do not publish their financial information. However, they make their extreme views very clear. WOL started as the Columbia University chapter of SJP, but “rebranded” in 2015. Its founders endorse Palestinian resistance “by any means necessary,” and maintain a strict “anti-normalization” policy. WOL organizes frequent demonstrations in New York City, including an annual Nakba Day. Nakba translates as “catastrophe,” the Palestinians describe Israel’s creation in 1948. WOL organized a Day of Rage for Gaza on May 6:
As previously reported by Restoration News, WOL borrows its financial sponsorship from WESPAC Foundation—the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation.
Campus Protests Leading To A New World Order?
The BDS movement of the past couple of decades sowed the seeds of violence and anti-Semitism on college campuses. Marxist revolutionaries, globalists, and those who oppose Western culture have reaped the benefits. Just like they did in the Summer of Love / BLM riots of 2020 and other violent protests. The campus protests supporting Hamas atrocities represent a new escalation and expansion of the war against the West. Funding and support comes from the same places that support terrorist groups in the Middle East.
One thing is clear, if one cares to look: These protests are not merely pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist. They are an aspect of a larger anti-West movement that wishes to usher in an age of global governance.
