Who is behind the group leading student encampments? SJP, explained

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In the early hours of October 7, the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) switchboards lit up across America, coordinating a lightning PR response to Hamas’s invasion of Israel.

The group’s “Day of Resistance Toolkit” distributed to its chapters called the slaughter “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.” The toolkit contained information for walkouts on campuses across the U.S. and Canada and templates for a graphic featuring a hang glider, a novel weapon used by Hamas fighters penetrating the Israeli border on the day of the invasion.

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The day of the attack, Bears for Palestine, the resident SJP chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, released the Towfan Al-Aqsa statement — the codename Hamas gave to the attack (since deleted online) — honouring 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.”

Two days later, George Mason University’s resident SJP urged protesters to “call for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea, and support all forms of resistance which helps the Palestinian people inch closer to that reality.” The following day, neighbouring George Washington University’s SJP chapter affirmed, “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,” the group said. “A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.”

Since that day of terror in October, SJP has emerged as the most prominent anti-Israel group on the continent, recently gaining international attention for mobilizing encampments on college campuses.

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The SJP is part of a network of groups that sprung up across the U.S. over the past four decades to support a then embryonic Islamic movement flowering in the Palestinian territories.

That movement became Hamas.

Early efforts to uproot Hamas’s terror network in America after 9/11 — closing the Holy Land Foundation in 2001 and the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP) three years later — simply amounted to cutting off a diseased branch rather than tearing out the roots of an infected tree, recent lawsuits argue, alleging that senior leaders of both groups reconstituted themselves under the banner of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

AMP, in turn, is the largest sponsor of SJP.

SJP was co-founded by Hatem Bazian at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. An Islamic scholar and lecturer at the university, Bazian spent much of his early life on West Coast quads as a grad student and worked for a decade to cement SJP’s foothold across California. From the beginning, SJP and Bazian opposed speaking with people who believed in a two-state solution, a belief that the ideal solution would be a Jewish and Palestinian state living peacefully side-by-side.

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“Take a look at the type of names on the buildings around campus — Haas, Zellerbach — and decide who controls this university,” Bazian told a rally of early SJP followers at Berkeley in 2002. The group was demanding the school divest from Israel, and SJP planned the protest to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day.

More often, Bazian skirted such overt displays of antisemitism and injected an air of intellectualism and polish, embracing an academic vocabulary that made SJP sound like a disgruntled socialist student group fighting the tired enemies of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. The linguistic overhaul became Bazian’s greatest accomplishment, helping bring young college activists under the same roof as America’s conservative Muslim community leadership.

“Bazian is an interesting character because he has one foot in the Hamas-adjacent world,” said Lorenzo Vidino, a terror finance expert at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “I’m choosing my words carefully,” he continued, “and one foot in the more, let’s say, left-leaning, pro-Palestinian, SJP, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) kind of world. He does both. He’s sort of the bridge between the two worlds at a very senior level.”

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Bazian’s extracurricular activism paired well with his climb up the rungs of academic life as he became an Islamophobia and decolonization expert at Berkeley. In 2006, he co-founded and became the national chairman of AMP, an advocacy nonprofit based in Illinois.

Under Bazian’s leadership at AMP, his brainchild, SJP, was designated a “signature project” and charged with leading anti-Israel activism across North American campuses.

In 2010, AMP established the National SJP umbrella group to coordinate messaging and strategy across its previously loose network of 200-plus chapters in the U.S. and Canada. The move turned the student group into a cohesive organizing force, said Dan Diker, a researcher at the Jerusalem-based think tank JCPA and an expert on the student group.

“Before 2010, SJP operated with individual campus chapters and little cross-campus cooperation,” Diker wrote in his seminal research brief. “It was not until 2010 that a national effort to unite SJP campus branches emerged.”

Though AMP is not shy about its foundational role behind SJP, it downplays the connection. Back in 2011, Kristen Szremski, AMP’s media relations director, explained to Al Jazeera amid allegations of direct collaboration that “the student groups are not part of AMP. We offer SJPs the same help we offer others planning events about Palestine: free materials, speakers and training.”

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Such statements are difficult to square with AMP’s public boasting about its partnership with SJP.

Last March, an AMP blog by Taher Herzallah, the organization’s student liaison, called the group “the pride of our movement.” Herzallah touted AMP’s role at a recent national conference featuring hundreds of students “from UC Berkeley to Harvard to the University of Minnesota to Butler, with the intent to contribute to the future generation leading the path towards liberation.”

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The blog photos show students at an annual gala, many wearing keffiyehs, a traditional Palestinian scarf, giving military salutes.

Blurring the lines between militarism and advocacy is a recurring issue for SJP. In November 2014, AMP vice president Munjed Ahmad lectured SJP activists about navigating “the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.”

That year, AMP gave $100,000 to SJP to finance campus activities and held a ceremony in 2016 highlighting similar financial support.

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The symbiotic relationship between the two was on full display throughout AMP’s annual conference in November 2023, featuring a “Youth Program” tailored for pre-college kids and an “SJP Workshop.” The convention held a separate “Campus Activism Track” aimed at strengthening “solidarity between SJP chapters.”

Nearly a dozen SJP leaders, past and present, shared the stage during the two-day conference in Chicago. One student panellist, DePaul University SJP leader Jinan Chehade, had recently lost her job for praising the October 7 attacks.

“No more academic theory, no more liberal decolonial takes, no more historical and political analysis, no more,” she wrote the day after the atrocities on Instagram. “Just liberation. If you don’t know where you stand on what’s happening in Palestine, know that you never stood with Palestine to begin with,” the SJP leader wrote alongside a series of images featuring a Hamas bulldozer breaking through Israel’s border fence.

Chehade says her new employer, a law firm, wrongly equated her support for Palestinians with an endorsement of terrorism. She has filed a discrimination complaint based on her nationality and religion.

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Today, AMP remains SJP’s staunch supporter, providing grants, sponsored trips and educational conferences to student activists.

“AMP is arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine,” Jonathan Schanzer, a former U.S. Treasury Department investigator and terror finance expert, told Congress in 2016.

One of the strongest predictors of perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews is the presence of an active SJP group on campus

In his testimony to Congress, Schanzer connected the dots between AMP and IAP, the U.S. group that shut down in 2004 after a lawsuit unearthed its ties to Hamas.

“There is significant overlap between former employees of IAP, on the one hand, and current employees and board members of AMP, on the other. This is quite plain to see,” Schanzer told the Post by email.

IAP was started with seed money from Mousa Abu Marzouk, a soft-spoken senior member of Hamas who was born in a refugee camp in Gaza and educated in America. From an early age, Marzouk distinguished himself academically, becoming a protégé of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchaired-bound, white-robed intellectual who later became the spiritual force behind Hamas.

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Marzouk spent his early years in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, then under Egyptian occupation before leaving for Cairo, with Yassin’s blessing, to study engineering in the mid-’70s. After graduating, he relocated to the United Arab Emirates and opened the country’s first Muslim Brotherhood chapter.

And then the lure of America came calling.

Flush with cash and caught in the fervour of the Cold War, America in the ‘80s was a fundraising haven for Islamic fundamentalists. Al-Qaida leaders dispatched members on a multi-city tour with pit stops at dozens of mosques seeking support for the mujahideen fighting the USSR.

Hamas made a similar bet in sending Marzouk, who crisscrossed the country, travelling from Colorado to Louisiana, Virginia to New York, quietly building the terror group’s fundraising and advocacy infrastructure. He’d come to the U.S. for grad school, but colleagues at Louisiana Tech, where Marzouk pursued an engineering Ph.D., remembered a man constantly in motion, often missing deadlines and classes. “He was not a bright student,” one former academic adviser told the Washington Post years later. “He always travelled,” another reflected.

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In 1981, at the behest of Khaled Mashal, the future chairman of Hamas, Marzouk founded IAP, which described itself as a nonprofit “dedicated to advancing a just … and eternal solution to the cause of Palestine.” But the association’s primary function, according to terror finance expert Matthew Levitt, “was to serve as the public voice of Hamas in the United States.”

It is that voice — reverberating first through IAP, then AMP and finally SJP — that is now dominating North American campuses since October 7.

In his book, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, Levitt says IAP oversaw the distribution of Filastin al-Muslima, the Hamas-run magazine, across America, as well as flyers and appeals for funds. “The only way to liberate Palestine, all of Palestine, is the path of Jihad,” a December 1989 message distributed by IAP implored.

IAP supporters were asked to donate to something called the Holy Land Foundation, which eventually became the largest Muslim charity in America.

Aided by $150,000 in seed money from Marzouk, the Holy Land Foundation served as “the financial arm” of Hamas in America, according to Vidino, the terror finance expert at George Washington University, in a report published in October 2023.

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Holy Land obscured its terror finance operation behind a smokescreen of humanitarian projects in wartorn countries from Chechnya to Yugoslavia. However, a chart obtained by U.S. federal investigators showed a hierarchy, with Marzouk, appointed Hamas politburo head in 1992, at the pyramid’s apex overseeing Holy Land and IAP activities in America.

Holy Land operated by funnelling money through charitable organizations and institutions under the thumb of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories. The admission was captured by FBI agents who wiretapped a meeting of Hamas’s leadership in America a month before the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn.

The men were taped speaking freely behind closed doors about their support for terrorism, the ultimate goal of destroying Israel, and how best to send money to Hamas.

“The main organization, which is known to belong to us, is Islamic University in the Gaza Sector,”  Muin Shabib, a member of the network (known as the Palestine Committee), clarified at the meeting according to FBI transcripts. Shabib further disclosed that “the Ramallah Zakat Committee is ours, including its management and officers.”

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Indeed, much of the patchwork of Palestinian civil society was controlled by Hamas.

The Islamic Charitable Society of Hebron, they boasted, is “ours.” Local religious organizations in Nablus, Tulkarem, and Jenin — large Palestinian cities — were supposedly captured, too. A hospital being constructed in Jenin, Shabib says, “is really ours, for the Islamists either in management or the teams working in it.”

“We give the Islamists $100,000,” said Shukri Abu Baker, one of the meeting’s leaders, referring to Hamas. “And we give others,” meaning legitimate charitable groups, “$5,000.” Baker implored participants to avoid speaking of the terror group openly. “Please don’t mention the name Samah in an explicit manner,” referring to Hamas spelled backward. “We agree on saying it as ‘sister Samah.’”

The Bush administration eventually deemed the Holy Land Foundation a “Specially Designated Terrorist” organization and shut it down in 2001, with federal authorities alleging the group sent roughly $12.4 million “with the intent to willfully contribute funds, goods, and services to Hamas.”

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“Certainly, any steps that you can make toward disrupting a terrorist organization, those are accomplishments,” Lara Burns, a former FBI special agent who worked on the case, told the Post. “But, in reality, what I knew, was that this infrastructure 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.”

Burns remains skeptical that their path-breaking work uprooting Hamas’s network in America was completely done in the early 2000s.

“There were a lot of people that were involved in that process beginning in 1988 and, leading up until the present time. Only five of them were actually prosecuted,” she recounted, referring to members of Holy Land who were convicted of helping Hamas.

If you are an academic, if you are an activist, if they call you (an antisemite) wear that as a sign of distinction

Hamas’s “members and supporters didn’t cease their support for that organization because five people went to jail. I would opine that there are individuals and organizations actively operating in the U.S. still pursuing the same goals.”

IAP’s demise came three years later.

An American couple sued the group and several Chicago-area nonprofits after their 17-year-old son, David Boim, was shot and killed by Hamas operatives while waiting for a bus outside of Jerusalem in 1996. Relying on the Anti-Terrorism Act, the parents won a $156-million judgment in 2004, but IAP quickly dissolved, leaving the grieving parents empty-handed.

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As IAP cratered following the Boims’ landmark ruling, Bazian was on the ground floor seeking to resurrect a new organization to fill its place. In 2005, he participated in a Yahoo! online discussion board entitled, “AMP_Transition,” where he told others, “we stay away from the IAP and not get them involved in this effort.”

The Boims’ lawyer, Daniel Schlessinger, said he believes this admission amounts to a “smoking gun,” demonstrating that AMP’s early leaders sought to obscure “the connection to IAP to avoid the consequences.” During his deposition, Bazian flipped the allegation on its head, pointing to the statement as proof that AMP’s future leaders genuinely strove to distance themselves from IAP’s incriminating past.

Schlessinger said he believes that in the wake of “a huge judgment for supporting Hamas terrorism” and seeking to avoid payment, senior leaders of the IAP quickly reconstituted themselves under the banner of AMP.

In 2017, the parents filed a subsequent lawsuit against AMP, alleging the group was an “alter ego” of IAP comprised of its former leaders and continuing their old business model under a different name.

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“If that assertion proves true on the merits, the necessary consequence is that American Muslims for Palestine is the same organization that provided material support to Hamas in connection with David Boim’s death — meaning it is directly liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act,” the legal filing reads.

Out of the ashes of IAP, at least four senior members joined AMP, three of whom lead its national board: Hatem Bazian, Osama Abuirshaid and Salah Sarsour. A similar handful came from Holy Land.

Bazian became a reliable IAP keynoter, lecturing at least five separate times to the association before it was closed in 2004. His participation coincided with IAP running articles on its turn-of-the-millennium webpage about “The Legitimacy of Palestinian Resistance: An Islamist Perspective” and “Zionists: God’s Lying People.”

Rafeeq Jaber, IAP’s president, prepared the tax forms of AMP’s fiscal sponsor, the AJP Educational Fund. Abdelbasset Hamayel, previously IAP’s secretary general, remains an active member of AMP’s chapter in Chicago and acknowledged during a deposition that he was brought in to “help the organization (AMP) start functioning.”

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Osama Abuirshaid, the long-time editor of IAP’s bi-weekly Arabic newspaper Al-Zaitonah became a founding board member of AMP and now serves as its national executive director. During the recent campus flare-ups, Abuirshaid was spotted leading SJP protests at Columbia and George Washington University.

“What we’re trying to show is, even without a transfer of tangible assets, that AMP has succeeded IAP’s work by having essentially the same operations, the same leadership, the same donors, speakers, and conventions. They don’t have a factory, but they basically have everything else,” Schlessinger told the Post.

Christina Jump, a lawyer who represents AMP, dismissed the allegations, telling the Post in an email that they “add up to little more than inflammatory rhetoric.” Moreover, the claim suffers from “a lack of facts.”

“They’ve been litigating that case against AMP for seven years now,” she said, “and have yet to actually prove any of those allegations.”

Jump, an executive with the Muslim Legal Fund of America, said a judgment in the Boims’ favour would have far-reaching consequences that few truly appreciate.

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“If the Northern District of Illinois ever were to hold AMP responsible for the debt from a different lawsuit against different defendants just because both entities do work in the United States related to Palestinians, then no business in Chicago should consider itself safe from needing to pay off debts that aren’t its debts,” Jump said in an email. “These plaintiffs and their attorney are effectively trying to make it too expensive for any Palestinian nonprofit to ever exist again in the United States.”

Schlessinger called Jump’s language “just silly” and said his team has accumulated considerable evidence “recognizing that AMP is the alter ego of IAP,” which helps “establish that a terror-supporting organization cannot evade liability simply by changing its name and moving its office down the street.”

If the Boims win their case, that means nearly a dozen people with direct ties to Hamas-linked groups built the organization that is now the leading sponsor of SJP. The lawsuit may expose what many terror-finance experts have long suspected: Hamas’s network in America remains alive and well.

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AMP succeeded in revamping IAP’s earlier anti-Israel thrust, repackaging its views of Jews, Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust in the language of decolonization and anti-oppression, which flowed directly to SJP saplings sprouting across the continent.

SJP activists took a certain glee in the moral judo of turning Jews into Nazis, a theme perfected by IAP and Bazian. In 2017, Bazian retweeted a meme of a beardless Orthodox Jew with comical payot captioned: “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.”  Bazian issued an apology four months later, though he never deleted the post.

Neither Bazian nor the National SJP responded to multiple requests for comment from the National Post.

In 2013, a slideshow from San Diego State’s SJP chapter compared Zionists with Nazis, “a KKK clansman” and “a supporter of apartheid South Africa.” Five years later, at Stony Brook University in New York, the resident SJP chapter demanded the expulsion of Hillel, the Jewish student group,  from campus by asking: “if there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to accepted and respected? Then why would we respect the views of Zionists?”

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Another tactic perfected during these years involved appropriating moments of Jewish suffering for the Palestinian cause. After 11 Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, SJP — alongside its long-standing ally Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) — planned a vigil tying the antisemitic attack to a violent outburst in the Middle East.

“From Pittsburgh to Gaza, we condemn violence in the name of white supremacy,” the poster proclaimed.

To drown out the din of antisemitism, Shahid Alam, the faculty adviser of Northeastern University’s SJP, counselled students to “laugh away accusations of antisemitism.”

“If you are an academic, if you are an activist, if they call you (an antisemite) wear that as a sign of distinction.”

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Across Canadian campuses SJP offshoots, mostly under slightly different names, deployed similar practices.

In 2016, a guest lecturer invited by the University of Toronto repeatedly referred to Jews as “Ashke-Nazis” during her talk without intervention from the SJP organizers. Later that year, Jewish students proposing a Holocaust Education Week motion at what was then Ryerson University were sabotaged when union president and SJP leader Obaid Ullah initiated a walkout to postpone the vote.

Text messages obtained by the student newspaper in the wake of the incident show Ullah instructing executives to “lose quorum,” while others identified the Jewish student introducing the motion. “Next person in line is Zionist…i have her on facebook and she’s really problematic.”

In 2017, McGill student leader and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) activist Igor Sadikov tweeted his desire to “punch a Zionist today.” The following year, McMaster University was forced to conduct an internal investigation when Canary Mission — an antisemitism watchdog — posted screenshots and detailed profiles of tweets by 39 former and current students affiliated with the college’s SPHR. The tweets included “Death to Israel and all Zionists” and “Hitler should have took you all.”

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SJP’s presence is so consistently associated with undermining Jewish student safety on campus that a 2016 landmark paper by Brandeis University academics examining the “hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility” came to a simple conclusion: “One of the strongest predictors of perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews is the presence of an active SJP group on campus.”

The synchronicity between Hamas’s actions on October 7 and its subsequent calls for “mass mobilization” and “resistance abroad” inspired a group of American victims of October 7 to file a lawsuit in Virginia drawing a direct line from Hamas to AMP and SJP. The lawsuit alleges that the latter two “work in the United States as collaborators and propagandists for Hamas.”

The lawsuit argues that SJP chapters responded to Hamas’s calls for public mobilization in the West and timed their “Day of Resistance” on Oct. 12 to coincide with the terror group’s “Day of Rage” for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The suit, filed on May 1, asserts Hamas has even adopted SJP’s framing and language of the war and is now mirroring its use of terms such as “resistance” and justifying the targeting of civilians because they are “settlers.”

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When served the latest lawsuit, Jump, the lawyer for AMP, told the Post that the allegations “are more of the same with little to no basis in fact.” AMP, Jump said, was “formed domestically and operating in compliance with all U.S. laws, for its entirely legal purpose of educating American Muslims and the American public about the rich history and culture of Palestine.”

Jump expressed her sympathy for the plaintiffs, many of whom personally survived the October 7 attacks, but noted that while she “recognize(s) they are hurting…they do not have a right to go after any legal nonprofit in America that they choose, simply because they don’t like or don’t agree with its message.”

Bazian denounced the lawsuit as well, telling the Washington Post it is “an Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism” that “resorts to defamation to deflect from the live-streamed genocide in Gaza.”

AMP’s legal woes are coming from all directions these days.

In October 2023, Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares opened an investigation into AMP, alleging it violated the state’s charity laws to support terrorist organizations.

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The Muslim Legal Fund of America said in a statement at the time that it was confident that AMP would be able to show it is a wholly U.S. nonprofit “operating for a legal purpose.”

Paul Moore, a former chief investigative counsel with the U.S. Department of Education (whose commentary is referenced in the May lawsuit), said that 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.”

Reed Rubinstein, a former deputy associate attorney general who served alongside Moore, agreed. “This suit, targeting key nodes in the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood U.S. network, is frankly long overdue,” he said in an email. “The close connections between these defendants and Hamas, PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), and other designated foreign terrorist organizations are no secret. For years, SJP and AMP have bragged about supporting Hamas. And in many respects, these groups are the tip of a very dirty iceberg.”

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