EXCLUSIVE — The pro-Palestinian protests and encampments that wreaked havoc over universities across the country this spring are connected to professional activism networks and terrorist organizations, according to a new report.
The report from Restoration News, a project of conservative Restoration of America PAC, connected the dots between encampments, national organizations pushing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, sympathetic faculty, and designated terrorist organizations.
“The astroturf movements have their roots in Big Philanthropy, the same leftist organizations that have funded anti-free speech demonstrations, incoherent riots in our cities, and cancel culture that attempts to remove ‘Wrongthink’ from our society in the form of sponsor boycotts and protests at people’s homes and places of business,” the organization said in the report, obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Many of the same groups behind other major disruptions, such as the 2020 riots following George Floyd’s death and 2011’s Occupy Wall Street movement, were also backing the encampments, the report said, with report author Jeffrey Reynolds calling them “anything but grassroots.”
“I found many organizers of the campus protests that had gone to places like Cuba, Lebanon, and China to train in anti-American rhetoric and resistance tactics. Some are nonviolent, but many include violence and societal disruption,” Reynolds, senior investigative researcher for Restoration News, told the Washington Examiner. “America’s adversaries have taken their fight to our streets. They’re here to create fractures in American society. They’re taking their cues from actual terrorist organizations in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East.”
One such protester, Lisa Fithian, who has worked as a “protest consultant” since the 1970s, according to the report, was seen aiding the protests at Columbia University, largely considered the beginning of the nationwide encampments.
According to an investigation from ADN America, students at Columbia stormed Hamilton Hall and seized control of it after being incited by radical activist Manolo De Los Santos, who is tied to the Cuban communists. De Los Santos posted to X a picture of himself meeting with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, and De Los Santos said he “spent 10 days learning” with the Cuban people and that “young people in the U.S. have great tasks ahead of them.”
Other organizing groups included the Young Democratic Socialists of America, which coordinated encampments at New York University, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Northeastern, Emerson, and the University of Oregon, according to the report.
Major donors backed the agitators, including by purchasing tents and paying protesters, as well as providing strategies for protest, according to the report. Some of the groups included George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and others.
Reynolds also cited Washington Examiner reporting showing the Tides Foundation, another major left-wing donor, funding Alliance for Global Justice, which has ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations. Tides also funds the Westchester People’s Action Coalition, or WESPAC, which is the parent organization of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the main campus agitators. Citing another report from the Washington Examiner, Reynolds noted that Tides had received at least $81 million in federal funding since 2006.
Aside from Tides and WESPAC, SJP is also funded by Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Citing another report from the National Association of Scholars, Reynolds wrote that the BDS movement grounds itself in a similar framework as some of the hard-left ideologies promulgated by academics and popular on college campuses, such as its adoption of the “anti-racist” and “anti-colonialism” labels.
That fits well in academia, as the language is closely aligned with themes such as critical race theory, social justice, identity politics, and oppression-oppressor frameworks, Reynolds’s report stated. Groups such as SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, two of the most prominent organizers of the encampments, then use that language to garner support from college students.
“Many of the college students don’t realize what they’ve committed to supporting. But many of them do realize it, and they get material assistance from organizations inside and outside the United States that wish to see our nation torn down,” Reynolds wrote. “Embedding BDS within an ‘anti-imperialist’ framework appeals to the Marxian and globalist tendencies among progressive academics. Far from an accident, it’s a deliberate attempt at synchronizing the apparently unrelated movements.”
According to the report, one of the chief BDS supporters in the United States is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, with its American branch the USACBI. The group helps proliferate BDS sentiment across American university campuses. Citing the NAS report again, Reynolds noted that the group is linked to Palestinian political groups, including terrorist organizations.
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The group helped found the Palestinian BDS National Committee, which is a coalition of similarly minded organizations. According to the NAS report, one of the members is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, which is made up of five terrorist organizations, including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front-General Command, the Palestinian Liberation Front, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The national committee is partially funded by the American nonprofit U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the report stated.
The USCPR has a fellowship program that pays between $2,880 and $3,660 for eight hours of organizing work on behalf of “Palestinian organizations,” training to “rise up, to revolution,” according to the report.