Being academics or ex-academics, we have quite a few friends who were there in Chicago in 1968, protesting the war in Vietnam in front of the Democratic National Convention. We’ve heard stories of Jerry Rubin, the famed Yippie mischief-maker, attempting to nominate a pig (“Pigasus”) as president, and of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg leading a mass march amid chants of “peace now.” Though we don’t share our friends’ political convictions, we are enamored of such stories of youthful activism and conviction—of dedicated men and women taking risks to rescue their country from what they believed was a disastrous course of action.
Don’t expect these inspiring scenes to repeat later this month, when the 2024 DNC reconvenes in Chicago. This time, the protesters huddled outside are not going to be Clean for Gene—the catchy slogan coined by antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy’s supporters—but rather tainted by affiliations with terror groups. To understand why, consider events of last month in Washington, D.C.
When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in town to deliver a special speech to both houses of Congress, a throng of activists sprung to action. First, they promised to conduct a “citizen’s arrest” of the Israeli leader; security, thankfully, foiled their attempts, but about 200 of the protesters were nevertheless arrested in Cannon Rotunda. Outside Union Station, rioters defaced a replica of the Liberty Bell with the slogan “F--- Israel,” and ominously sprayed “Hamas is Coming” on a nearby monument to Christopher Columbus, before wreaking havoc on the train station itself. And if any of these actions were too subtle, a few raised the Palestinian flag on a nearby flagpole, while burning an effigy with the American flag wrapped around it. Inside the Watergate Hotel, which housed Netanyahu and his delegation, protesters released a swarm of maggots and other insects and constantly set off the fire alarms, “to ensure,” they said, “that there will be no rest” for Netanyahu before his address.
It’s a far cry from the playful antics of Pigasus and his pals, and it raises an urgent question: Who were these violent, motivated, and well-organized hooligans?
Asra Nomani, a Muslim American journalist who had worked with Daniel Pearl for the Wall Street Journal and writes frequently about the perils of Islamism, covered some of these protests, and observed that many of those arrested were bused into town by an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
The group, currently under investigation by Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares for allegedly funneling funds to Hamas, is no stranger to controversy. It was founded in 2005, and, according to one recent lawsuit, employs more than half a dozen former associates of now-defunct organizations—including the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)—that had been disbanded after members were convicted for materially supporting Hamas.
The lawsuit against AMP was brought by Stanley and Joyce Boim, whose 17-year-old son, David, was murdered by Hamas outside Jerusalem in 1996. Seeking justice, the Boims sued a host of American nonprofits that they argued were merely fronts for Hamas and were awarded $156 million in damages in 2004. Rather than pay up, however, the groups in question closed down. A trove of documents based on evidence from the case, presented last year before the House Ways and Means Committee, shows the extraordinary overlap between said groups and AMP. For example, Rafeeq Jaber, the IAP’s former president, prepared the tax documents needed to launch AMP, while IAP’s former secretary general, Abdelbaset Hamayel, appeared on these documents as the person “who possesses the organization’s books and records.” AMP’s founder, Hatem Bazian, also collaborated with IAP and was a popular speaker at their events. In 2017, the Boims filed a new lawsuit claiming, in the presiding judge’s words, that “these new defendants are alter egos of the now-defunct nonprofit organizations and therefore liable for the remainder of the $156 million judgement.”
Bazian is also the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group suspended by several universities for its members’ anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish activities.
Another outfit, National Students for Justice in Palestine, is being sued by victims of Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack for serving “as collaborators and propagandists” for the terror group. NSJP is sponsored by an organization called the Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation (WESPAC), which also sponsors a group called the Palestinian Youth Movement, whose members are behind several of last month’s violent protests in D.C.
We understand that following a thicket of tax shelters and straw groups isn’t the average person’s idea of fun. But the torrent of antisemitic incidents—and the stunning similarities between them—suggests that we’re looking at an orchestrated campaign designed to terrorize Americans, paid for and organized by groups repeatedly shown to be, at the very least, Hamas-adjacent. We saw, for example, coordinated demonstrations nationwide on July 4—in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere—each of which featured the same ritualistic burning of the Stars and Stripes that we saw in D.C. Add to that the July statement of Avril Haines, President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, that the Iranian government—a chief Hamas supporter—is also funding and participating in at least some of these protests, and we’re looking at what, increasingly, seems less like another chapter in the rocky but revered history of American dissent and more like a major threat to national security. Soon, that threat will be unleashed on Chicago and the DNC.
Pro-Palestinian activists are already promising that the Windy City will be flooded with “tens of thousands” of protesters urging the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, to sanction the Jewish state. The march’s lead organizer, Hatem Abudayyeh—who refers to President Biden as “Genocide Joe” and to Harris as “Killer Kamala”—is similarly tied to questionable groups and individuals. In 2018, he was the keynote speaker at the SJP’s national conference at UCLA. He was also reportedly a prominent defender of Rasmea Odeh, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist convicted by Israeli courts for killing two civilians in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing and later deported from the United States after being convicted of immigration fraud for failing to disclose her arrest and conviction. In 2009, Abudayyeh wrote an article applauding Hamas—designated as a terror group by the State Department in 1997—and other terrorist organizations for defeating what he described as an effort to “impose an acceptance of Israeli apartheid and occupation on the Palestinian people.” In a 2009 interview, he described Hamas as a “resistance organization” and said that “the real terrorists are the governments and military forces of the U.S. and Israel.”
It’s crucial that we keep all that in mind as we watch the scenes unfold in Chicago. It’s also crucial that we reflect on how different this convention is from its famed 1968 ancestor. Back then, most of the demonstrators were passionate about changing America for the better, which is why so many observers were moved by their cause. Now, the protesters are passionate about burning America to the ground, as they’ve made clear by violently denigrating its symbols and enthusiastically supporting a terror group that still holds eight Americans hostage in Gaza. Here’s hoping that most Americans, Democrat and Republican, reject these bigots and their wicked ideology.
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