Every demonstration in New York matters for Gaza. Your work is so important to the resistance in Gaza, more than ever.” So said Khaled Barakat to his Columbia University audience in March, adding that his “friends and brothers in Hamas” were focused on figuring out how to “defeat Israel.”
On Tuesday, Barakat and his organization, Samidoun, were belatedly designated as terrorist entities in the U.S. and Canada. Barakat, said the Treasury Department, is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s “leadership.” PFLP is a designated terrorist organization with a long history of political violence aimed at Israel and the West.
I would call Barakat’s PFLP affiliation the worst-kept secret of progressive anti-Zionism but it wasn’t really kept secret at all. It was just ignored by those who found it convenient to do so. Samidoun is a PFLP front and was already banned in Germany and Israel. America’s lateness to the game was baffling and was not without consequences.
As Danielle Pletka wrote in the July/August issue of COMMENTARY, Barakat’s wife, Charlotte Kates, is Samidoun’s coordinator, and both have played roles in the spread of PFLP literature and training to campus protesters. At George Washington University, tentifada demonstrators held a “teach-in” using a PFLP training manual as a guide.
Nor is Samidoun some neglected outpost of extremism. As Pletka notes, it raises money through a tax-exempt “charity” called the Alliance for Global Justice, which itself is funded by “a web of George Soros–backed groups and a far-left dark money network, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Because of the Alliance for Global Justice and Samidoun’s overt ties to the PFLP, the group has been blacklisted by PayPal and banned from operating in Germany. Since 2021, Samidoun has been registered as a nonprofit in Canada.”
In other words, all the relevant information about Samidoun was known. That’s why, in fact, Columbia suspended four students associated with the “Resistance 101” event on campus and evicted them from university housing facilities. (They had been warned in advance multiple times not to host the event.)
Samidoun, then, is part of a much larger problem. These types of organizations, whether officially designated as terrorist entities or not, have the same aims and the same general practices and certainly the same worldview—and get cash from the same sources and through the same progressive dark-money-donor clearinghouses. Samidoun itself will get taken off the donee list now (one hopes), but it will be replaced by an identical organization. There’s a whack-a-mole element to the pro-Palestinian cutouts in the West, and it enables groups like the PFLP to stay one step ahead of the very governments that have already banned them but can’t seem to stop them from raising money.
For legal purposes, of course, the terrorism designation means everything. But from the standpoint of basic societal decency, the designation changes nothing. The progressive protest movement and America’s elite universities are full of well-funded extremist groups going on recruiting sprees.
In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.”
Samidoun was but one of those groups—albeit one unconcerned with subtlety. “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” She added that America’s university students and activists must “build an international popular cradle of the resistance.”
Among the other groups helping plan and train the future resistors of America were the national Students for Justice in Palestine, whose individual chapters have been among the most brazenly anti-Semitic and pro-violence participants in the tentifada.
At UCLA’s pro-Hamas encampment, members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine “had organized self-defense teams on the front lines.” One of the affiliated professors compared the current generation of goonish anti-Zionist trainees favorably to his own: “We had a lot of affect and feeling. But there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking.”
The triumph of terrorist front groups in recruiting and training and fund-raising is a success story to some and a cautionary tale to others. American institutions are increasingly treating it as the former.
