Speakers at a conference for Palestine in Michigan over the weekend validated Hamas, urged activists to disrupt US weapon supply chains, called to “neutralize” opponents, and vowed to work toward Israel’s demise.
The second annual People’s Conference for Palestine took place over the Labor Day weekend at the Huntington Place Convention Center in Detroit and brought together an array of far-left and pro-Palestinian activist groups and speakers.
At the conference’s opening session, the mayor of Richmond, California, Eduardo Martinez, compared the Hamas terror group to his childhood self fighting back against schoolyard bullies.
“After so much torture, I couldn’t help but lash out. I was filled with frustration and it came out with the ferocity of retaliation. When the teachers came to break up the fight, the bullies claimed to be the victim,” he said.
“If Palestine were a schoolyard playground, I would be Palestinian, and that part of me that couldn’t endure the abuse any more would be Hamas,” he said, drawing cheers from the hundreds in attendance.
The conference brought together prominent public figures and activists from across North America. Speakers framed Gaza as the center of a global struggle against imperialism and white supremacy, combining anti-Israel activism with far-left socialist positions. The tagline for the conference was, “Gaza is the compass.”
Speakers included US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, popular online personality Hasan Piker, former UFC champion Belal Muhammad, politician Jill Stein, activist Linda Sarsour, founder of Students for Justice in Palestine Hatem Bazian, and representatives of the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace and student activists at Columbia University.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University activist made famous by his arrest by Donald Trump’s administration, called for an end to Israel.
“Zionism only depends [on] portraying Israel as a normal state, it’s an ordinary state, but our work is to strip that facade until Israel stands exposed as a pariah state, until the Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on collapse completely,” he said.
Nidal Jboor, an activist with Doctors Against Genocide, said: “It is time for us to pay back and stop the criminals, the perpetrators, the child murderers.”
“We all know who they are, whether they are in Israel, in Tel Aviv, in Washington, in Germany, in Europe,” he said. “They need to be locked up, they need to be taken out, they need to be neutralized.”
Other speakers instructed the audience to disrupt the supply chain for the US F-35 program and praised the so-called Holy Land Five, who were convicted of funneling funds to Hamas.
Panelist Sachin Peddada said: “We have to destroy the idea of America in our heads, in our neighbors’ heads, in our comrades’ heads, in everybody’s heads in this country.”
“We live in an evil country,” he said, to applause.
The conference was live-streamed online and clips were collated by Stu Smith, an analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank based in New York City.
The event was led by a dozen activist groups, including the People’s Forum, a socialist group in New York City, and the Palestinian Youth Movement.
The conference highlighted the alliance between the far left and Arab-led groups, a partnership that stretches back decades and is partly rooted in Soviet messaging.
The groups involved are also linked by funding. The People’s Forum, for example, is part of a financial network linked to the Chinese Communist Party and to pro-China propaganda. The event was streamed by BreakThrough News, a digital media outlet that has received funding from the People’s Forum, operates out of the same building and shares some of the same staff.
The Palestinian Youth Movement received $1 million from the low-profile New York nonprofit WESPAC in 2023-2024, according to recently released financial disclosures. WESPAC also donated $62,000 to the Progress Unity Fund, the fiscal sponsor of the ANSWER Coalition, part of the socialist network and a sponsor of the conference, and $83,000 to Al-Awda, another activist group that backed the conference.