Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to become the next mayor of New York has made front-page news, capturing public attention both locally and nationally with its surrounding controversy. While some critics of Mamdani are simply Islamophobic, others have raised valid concerns about aspects of his past.
Most notably, it has been widely reported that Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College prior to his graduation in 2014. Yesterday’s university students are tomorrow’s national leaders, yet current debates about Mamdani largely overlook his ties to SJP. Understanding what lies behind the curtain of SJP matters — not just today, but for decades to come.
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SJP is not a student advocacy group devoted to promoting a peaceful two-state solution in the Middle East. It is an organization with a documented history of anti-Israel, antisemitic rhetoric and latent ties to Hamas. Antisemitism has long existed in America, but the global tragedy of Oct. 7, 2023, despite occurring thousands of miles from the United States, has fueled its fiery rise here. U.S.-based Hamas advocates, such as SJP, have helped fan these flames.
Hamas, designated by the U.S. in 1997 as a foreign terrorist organization, committed one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks this century when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. On that day, Hamas murdered approximately 1,200 innocent people and kidnapped 251 others. Almost 21 months later, 50 hostages, both alive and dead, remain in Hamas captivity, including the bodies of two young American men.
What most Americans likely do not realize is that, within a day of the news of this horrific attack, SJP announced its support for the terrorist attack and declared Oct. 12 a national “Day of Resistance.” On Oct. 8, SJP provided a “toolkit” to over 200 of its chapters on campuses across the U.S., guiding them on how to support “the resistance” and carry out protests and demonstrations at U.S. universities.
The SJP toolkit distributed to young, impressionable students at hundreds of U.S. universities reads, “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the façade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. As the Palestinian student movement, we have an unshakable responsibility to join the call for mass mobilization. National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.”
Thus began the rise of anti-Israel, antisemitic campus extremism in the U.S. that resulted in protests, demonstrations, vandalism, violence, encampments, and building occupations on campuses from California to New York. Even today, we still see remnants of this activity at major U.S. universities, such as Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, just to name a few.
Numerous experts have provided congressional testimony identifying SJP as a student-led organization that denies the right of Jewish self-determination — in other words, the existence of Israel. There are over 120 Christian-majority countries and over 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world, but there is only one Jewish-majority country. Criticizing the policies or leaders of the Israeli government is not antisemitic. However, SJP’s ideology of delegitimizing Israel and essentially calling for its destruction falls under the widely accepted definition of antisemitism that has been adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Shortly after the Muslim Brotherhood created Hamas in the late 1980s to fight Israel, the Palestine Committee was created in the U.S. to provide financial, political, and propaganda support to Hamas, via three affiliated organizations operating domestically. When two of those organizations ceased operations under U.S. government pressure and the third was disrupted by the FBI in the 2000s, American Muslims for Palestine was allegedly created to continue advancing the same pro-Hamas objectives. SJP was established by one of AMP’s co-founders.
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During the height of the campus protests in the U.S., both Hamas and Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, publicly praised demonstrations organized by SJP. When a terrorist organization and a radical Islamist regime publicly thank American students for promoting anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda within the U.S., it should serve as a wake-up call for America.
America will soon be led by today’s generation of university students, and we are presently seeing early evidence of this in New York City. If left unchecked, the flames of antisemitism, fanned by U.S.-based student groups with ties to a terrorist organization, could have far-reaching negative consequences for the future of our great nation.