Hamas called force for good at Columbia
Radical anti-Israel activists told Columbia students “there is nothing wrong with being a fighter in Hamas” — weeks before the campus exploded in pro-Palestinian protests.
In a two-hour tirade to the hardest core of anti-Israeli activists at Columbia and sister college Barnard, Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, said, “These are the people who are on the front lines defending Palestine and fighting for its liberation.”
The endorsement of a terrorist organization responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of Israelis on Oct. 7 was made by Kates and husband Khaled Barakat to members of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest Group, in a seminar called “Resistance 101.” The pair urged attendees to ignore the press and keep demonstrating.
For terror attacks
“Every demonstration in New York matters more than all this nonsense that happens in mainstream media,” Barakat told them. “Your work is so important to the resistance in Gaza, more than ever.”
Kates and Barakat represented themselves as speaking on behalf of Samidoun at the meeting.
In reality, Barakat is a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist organization responsible for a string of attacks on Israeli civilians and closely allied with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Among the outrages for which it has claimed responsibility is a 2014 attack on a Jerusalem synagogue in which attackers armed with meat cleavers killed four rabbis, three of them Israeli-Americans. The PFLP took part in the Oct. 7 massacres and previously murdered a 17-year-old Israeli girl while she was on a hike.
Samidoun has campaigned for years for the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, the PFLP leader who oversaw years of murderous attacks, including suicide bombings.
While lecturing the students at the $60,000-a-year Ivy League college on “resistance,” Barakat and Kates did not discuss the reality of life in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas persecuted LGBT Palestinians and killed its enemies without even the pretense of trials.
Barakat also failed to mention he was banned from entering Germany for his antisemitic rants.
“The Israelis and the Nazis are almost identical in terms of the way they look at the victim,” Barakat said in 2013, according to Middle East Media and Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank, a slur followed by the German government’s ban.
Barakat and Kates, an American who now lives in Vancouver, Canada, and has a law degree from Rutgers, have not just appeared virtually at Columbia. In November, Kates was part of a “teach-in” at CUNY in which she praised the Oct. 7 pogrom as a “pivotal” moment for Hamas’ military wing, according to a social media post.