The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17 and the 2015 Ferguson, Missouri riots. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago.
Back in 2015 in “Connecting the Dots Between Jerusalem and Ferguson” we explained that the then-recent spate of savage attacks against civilians in Israel and the serial outbreaks of civil disorder and attacks on police officers in America may seem disconnected, but they are not. Each has its roots, and funding, in the radical anti-Western anti-democratic forces that hope to overthrow constitutional government in America and destroy the Jewish state.
And each has been aided and abetted and is indeed sustained by the radical-Left in the Western media who have made heroes (and in some cases millionaires) of the cop-killing thugs of the “Black Lives Matter” movement in America and “victims” of the savage Palestinians who murder innocent Israeli women and children.
Consider the 2015 media coverage of the Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens.
As Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal observed at the time:
If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”
Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.
Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back.
Other Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.
Nowhere in the left-leaning Western media is it explained that these attacks are not random, nor are they without connections in the riots on American college campuses and elsewhere around the world.
Subsequent to the Ferguson riots over than 1,100 Black activists, artists, scholars, students and organizations signed a statement that calls for “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as well as a boycott of private prison company G4S and other corporations profiting from Israeli occupation."
“Mutual expressions of solidarity have helped to generate a vigorous political kinship linking black organizers, scholars, cultural workers and political prisoners in the U.S. with Palestinian activists, academics, political prisoners, and artists,” explained accused African-American terrorist and admitted communist Angela Davis, who is featured in the video.
According to reporting by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the idea for the video came to Palestinian scholar and organizer Noura Erakat in the summer of 2014 while fighting was going on in Gaza at the same time that the Ferguson uprising was sparked by the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
“Palestinians used social media to share their advice [with Ferguson rioters] on how to deal with tear gas and rubber bullets, and protesters chanted ‘From Ferguson to Gaza, we will be free,’” explained Erakat.
Now this same script is being played again by many of the same actors in advance of the 2024 election.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
These groups, Shideler says, typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as [Lisa] Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies. “If you look at Fithian,” he says, “she has consulted with hundreds of groups on how to do these things: how to organize, how to protest, how to make sure your people don’t go to jail, how to help them once they’re in jail.”
There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning. Shideler cites the matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, ‘They all have the same tent!’” he says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So, they all went out and bought the same tent.”
To get the full picture of how these “affinity” groups work and are funded please go to Park MacDougald’s must-read article for Tablet Magazine.
We will close by pulling one more paragraph from Mr. MacDougald’s must-read article that explains the depth of the connections between Hamas and today’s campus unrest:
SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. 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). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF [Holy Land Foundation].
Far from being organic responses to current events these campus riots have deep roots in the Islamist penetration of America and “Red-Green Axis” that powers it and the Democrat dark money network that funds it.
Hamas protests
2020 George Floyd protests
Leftist organization
Ferguson riots
George Soros
anti-Semitism
Black Lives Matter
Oct 7 Hamas attack
media bias
media anti-Israel bias
suicide bombings
Angela Davis
Michael Brown
Momentum Strategies
Professional protesters
American Muslims for Palestine