Victims of the Oct. 7 attacks are suing a radical US Muslim group that admits funding antisemitic student protests around the country — claiming it is a “recruiting wing” for Hamas.
The group of nine, who include survivors and bereaved relatives of the massacre, slapped National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and its parent body American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) with a lawsuit for unspecified damages accusing it of spreading and even inspiring Hamas propaganda.
Their suit turns the spotlight on SJP, which has set up chapters in 250 campuses in the US and Canada. AMP quietly admitted this week to sending the campus groups money for the wave of protests which have engulfed American colleges since Oct. 7.
Leaders of SJP chapters were among those arrested Tuesday night at Columbia University, in Manhattan, after the NYPD smashed into their occupation of Hamilton Hall, and at UCLA Thursday, where California State Troopers used smoke bombs to clear out an encampment.
Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 21-year-old daughter, Isra Hirsi, who was suspended by Barnard College last month for anti-Israel activity, is also an SJP leader.
And two of Columbia’s SJP leaders invited a senior member of a designated Palestinian terror group, Khaled Barakat, to address a seminar called “Resistance 101,” where the man’s wife said, “there is nothing wrong with being a Hamas fighter.”
Pro-terror protesters at campuses across the country have used images of terrorists riding on paragliders in their campaigns on social media, chanted “f–k the police” and “globalize the intifada,” and been accused of a strong of antisemitic outrages.
Stanford, in California, sent the FBI a photo of one masked protester wearing a Hamas headband over a keffiyeh.
AMP is already under investigation by the attorney-general of Virginia over allegations of support for Hamas — while its boss, Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian has been riling up anti-Israel crowds on campuses in California and leading chants of “Free Palestine.”
Now the nine Oct. 7 victims, seven of them US citizens, have accused SJP and AMP of providing “continuous, systematic, and substantial assistance to Hamas’s acts of international terrorism” in a lawsuit which could put the groups out of business by bankrupting them.
The nine say AMP and SJP’s work to spread anti-Israel protests and pro-terror messages is an ongoing source of trauma.
The suit, filed in US District Court in Virginia Wednesday, alleges that AMP, a Falls Church, VA-based non-profit, and the national group representing 250 campus chapters of SJP, “do not merely assist Hamas’s ongoing terror campaign abroad—they perpetuate it in the United States.”
it alleges that after the terrorist strikes in Israel, the US-based radical groups released a “toolkit” to students groups to “justify the terrorism of Hamas and its affiliates in Gaza.”
“The next day [Oct. 8], NSJP released its Day of Resistance Toolkit (“NSJP Toolkit”) across more than 300 American college campuses,” the suit alleges.
“As of the filing of this Complaint, AMP and NSJP are—among other things—coordinating the occupation of dozens of college campuses across the country to “force” the American government and academia to bend to Hamas’s will,” it alleges.
Among those suing is Israel-based US citizen Maya Parizer, who fled the Nova festival with her boyfriend on Oct. 7, “dodging Hamas gunfire as they weaved through dead bodies on the road,” the lawsuit says.
Filmmaker Yoni Diller, another American survivor, witnessed the massacre of four of his close friends, court records say,
BOTTOM ROW FROM LEFT: Natalie Sanandaji, Yoni Diller, Lior Bar, David Bromberg Linkedin(2), Getty Images(2), soldiers.save.lives/Instagram, Tamara Beckwith/NY Post, liorbaror/Instagram, David Bromberg via People
And Lior Bar Or, another US plaintiff, survived a barrage of gunfire and grenades as well as a fire set by Hamas terrorists to the shelter where he took cover, legal papers say, while four of his friends were murdered.
Jason Torchinsky, of law firm Holtzman Vogel, who is one of the lawyers bringing the suit, said, “Chaos we are seeing at American colleges and universities has been well planned and organized, and National SJP’s work to support the end goals of Hamas needs to be exposed and stopped.”
AMP and National SJP did not respond to requests for comment by The Post.
AMP has previously denied allegations that they provided material support to Hamas when Virginia AG Jason Miyares launched an investigation into the claims last year. The group called it a ” defamatory smear.”
But its attorney, Christina Jump, on Tuesday acknowledged funneling cash to the campus groups in recent months.
She told the Daily Mail that AMP had doled out grants of up to $2,000 each to cover the cost of food, photocopying and other incidentals to individual SJP chapters.
Jump, who provides legal advice to protestors through the Texas-based Muslim Legal Fund of America, did not return requests for comment by The Post.
AMP’s CEO, Bazian, founded the first chapter of SJP at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001, according to a study released this week by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
Bazian this week ranted anti-Israeli screeds to crowds of protesters “occupying” part of the ultra-liberal campus and to crowds at San Francisco State University. He did not respond to a request for comment.
The report, “National Students for Justice in Palestine: Antisemitism, Anti-Americanism, Violent Extremism and the Threat to North American Universities,” accuses SJP of being a front for open antisemitism. SJP has not responded to the allegation.
Last month, SJP put out a call to action on social media to chapters across the country to “take back our institutions.”
“We will seize control of our universities, campus by campus, until Palestine is free,” said the group’s mission statement titled “Popular University for Gaza,” cited by the ISGAP report.
The call was followed by the first tent encampment at Columbia, which was copycatted nationwide.
SJP regularly takes in more than $3 million a year in funding from other US-based non-profits, including AMP.
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SJP also gets cash funneled through “fiscal sponsors” including the WESPAC Foundation and Tides Foundation, according to the ISGAP report. Neither responded to a request for comment.
Fiscal sponsors are non-profits that manage funds for other groups that do not have tax-exempt status from the IRS.
AMP, which took in more than $1.5 million in donations in 2022, also does business as Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation Inc., according to public documents.
Members of AMP’s board have doled out thousands in campaign contributions to Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and members of her progressive “Squad,” according to public filings.
Additional Reporting by Jon Levine
