For the last year, Jews and non-Jews alike have been rightfully appalled by the blatantly antisemitic, terrorist-glorifying currents within pro-Palestine protests. On American streets – not to mention Qatar-funded universities – the most extreme activists have praised Hamas and its October 7 attacks while leaders have simply wagged their fingers or looked away.
However, a joint US-Canada terrorist designation announced on October 15 may mark a much-needed shift in the right direction. This targets a group called Samidoun for its role as “a sham charity” for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
The PFLP was founded in 1967 as a Marxist-Leninist organization by George Habash, the mastermind of the group’s 1970 hijacking of four airliners. More recently, the PFLP “has been active in the Israel-Hamas conflict” and took part in the October 7 attacks, per the US Treasury.
Its resume is in many ways beside the point, however. The PFLP of today is essentially a miniature Hamas with a hammer and sickle painted on. As such, Samidoun functions as a Trojan horse, using the PFLP’s leftist veneer to inject Iran and its proxies’ agenda into Western activist communities.
Founded in 2011, Samidoun is unabashed in its stance that the October 7 massacre was justified, that Israel must be wiped out, and that violence is the only path to victory.
Samidoun maintains offices throughout Europe, America, and the Middle East, including Iran. As SITE reported, its international coordinator, Charlotte Kates, even headed to Tehran this past August to receive a human rights award – as absurd as that sounds.
A pernicious influence
SAMIDOUN’S INFLUENCE swelled after Hamas’ October 7 attacks against Israel. In the past year, SITE has reported on a wide range of protests and events organized, coordinated, or promoted by Samidoun across cities such as Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Seattle in the United States, as well as others across France, Canada, Spain, Belgium, and elsewhere.
Worse, Samidoun’s influence has likewise grown within educational institutions, including Columbia University, City University of New York (CUNY), Princeton, and Rutgers, where it aims to indoctrinate students to embrace armed struggle against Israel, support Hamas, and other FTOs, and reject any form of normalization.
Telegram channels for university student groups across North America and Europe – some with thousands of subscribers– likewise give shout-outs for Samidoun events off-campus.
Samidoun/PFLP imagery has been repeatedly seen on college campuses. For example, a footage of a demonstration at Rutgers University, shared on social media this past spring, shows students chanting “Israel must fall” while a Samidoun-branded poster of PFLP Secretary-General Ahmad Sa’adat is held in the background.
Behind the scenes, Samidoun’s activities are even more disturbing. In a webinar, titled, “Re-sistance 101,” both Kates and Samidoun leader Khaled Barakat spoke with activists from New York City universities. In footage of the webinar shared online, Kates tells student acti-vists at Columbia University that October 7 was justified and that “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas.”
Kates also places Samidoun’s agenda within that of Iran’s. She asserts, “This isn’t just a battle taking place in Gaza…This is a battle for the entire region…we’re also talking about Iran as a nation on the side of the Palestinian people intervening and building a movement of resistance [not just] to free… Palestine from Zionism, but to free the region from US imperialism.”
Barakat likewise emphasizes Palestinians’ leadership in this decades-long struggle, even framing the hijacking of planes as “one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in,” claiming that “not one single person was injured or killed in all of these operations.”
Sitting among the Columbia students listening was Nerdeen Kiswani, CUNY School of Law alumni and leader of Within Our Lifetime (WOL); and Sean Eren, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
“I was on National SJP, and I was actually kicked out for being too radical. And now I’m sitting in Columbia University next to a representative from NSJP today,” Kiswani states, nodding to Eren.
Kiswani, who has attended campus protests, embraces slogans such as “Long live the Intifada.” Just and her group, WOL, praised killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “martyr.”
The webinar gives a revealing glimpse into the extreme, blatantly terrorist-supporting agendas pushed onto impressionable students. As Eren himself told The New Yorker last year, SJP aims to “appeal to people who know nothing.”
This campaign continued throughout the summer break and into the fall. As SITE reported, Samidoun’s New York/New Jersey chapter held a series of study events in Brooklyn over the summer to examine PFLP’s 1969 manifesto.
It is through these extremist stances that Samidoun has helped generate support for the October 7 massacre, dubbed “Operation al-Aqsa Flood.”
An October 8 series of tweets by Samidoun Toronto declared, “LONG LIVE OCT 7TH,” and detailed an event to celebrate its anniversary, which it had announced previously, as SITE reported.
Kates was reportedly arrested in Vancouver after giving a speech praising October 7. In response, Samidoun released a statement praising her, accompanied by an image declaring in Arabic and English, “Long Live October 7th.”
UNTIL NOW, Samidoun had faced virtually no barriers to its blatantly terrorist-supporting activities. Now, however, with its US-Canada terrorist designation, very material legal deterrents exist to stop it. Those who promote Samidoun, associate with it, host it, or attend its events now run real risks of consequences.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, said as much: “Samidoun is now toxic to the touch… individuals and other organizations are now on notice that you cannot do business in any way, shape, or form with them.”
I am well aware of the impacts of such designations. In my book Terrorist Hunter, I document the years before 9/11 that I spent doing undercover investigations into Hamas front groups like Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), and how my findings helped inform the government’s eventual designations against them.
In those years and in many that have passed since then, I’ve seen the impunity terrorist recruiters and fundraisers act within the absence of legal deterrents – and how drastically their operations are weakened when well-crafted designations are finally put in place. That is why, in the aforementioned webinar with Columbia students, Kates stresses that it is important “to popularize campaigns to scrap the US Terror list entirely” or get aligned groups “off” of it.
In either case, groups such as Samidoun are not just dangerous to Israelis or Jews in general. They’re also detriments to the Palestinians they purport to support.
They exist solely to advance the interests of terrorist groups and their backers, with little mind paid to the mass suffering events like October 7 give cause – or the ways their antisemitic hate drowns out good-faith advocacy for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
The writer is the executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group and has written two books on extremism: Saints and Soldiers (Columbia University Press, 2022) and Terrorist Hunter (Harper Collins, 2003).