Education Secretary Miguel Cardona met with a longtime anti-Israel activist who has come under fire from a watchdog for supporting violence against the Jewish state, as well as praising the terrorist factions Hamas and Hezbollah.
Cardona and top Biden administration officials held a discussion on Nov. 15 that featured 13 “national Muslim, Arab, and Sikh organization leaders” and focused on strategies “to counter the alarming uptick in instances of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and hate-fueled threats and violence more broadly, in schools and college campuses,” the Education Department said. Lina Assi, an advocacy manager for Palestine Legal and a participant in the meeting, has a history of celebrating terrorist leaders, and she once declared that “Hezbollah and Iran’s role in resisting imperialism” in the Middle East “is important and crucial,” according to since-deleted social media posts archived by the Canary Mission watchdog group.
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“Cardona should find a better representative of the Arab American community to work with on issues concerning discrimination and prejudice,” Cliff Smith, the Washington project director for the Middle East Forum, a group tracking terrorism, told the Washington Examiner. Assi “has demonstrated that neither herself, nor Palestine Legal, is interested in diminishing discrimination in America, and is only interested in pushing her radical political views,” he added.
The Biden administration’s decision to associate with Assi comes as Palestine Legal continues to work on behalf of Students for Justice in Palestine, including after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel that killed more than 1,200 people. SJP has chapters across the United States and was behind the projection of pro-Hamas messages on George Washington University’s library in late October, prompting the school to suspend the group. Columbia University also suspended SJP, and Brandeis University said in a statement that SJP “openly supports Hamas” upon banning the campus chapter in early November.
On its website, Palestine Legal says Assi has for years “been focused on developing political education materials” and “conducting oral history narrative interviews of Palestinian community members,” among other work. What the group doesn’t mention, however, is her repeated heaping of praise on terrorists and her use of antisemitic rhetoric.
Assi has said “it’s important to give credit” to Hezbollah, Syria, North Korea, and Iran for “providing material support, military training and safe havens” for organizing by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, according to Canary Mission. The anti-Israel activist helped promote an event with the Palestinian Youth Movement that honored the late PFLP terrorist Ghassan Kanafani in October 2020, a Facebook post shows.
She has called Fatima Bernawi, the late Palestinian terrorist who served 10 years in prison in connection with an attempted bombing in Jerusalem, “one of the first Palestinian women to engage in armed resistance for national liberation.”
Moreover, Assi has expressed support for intifada violence against Israel and, in 2014, wrote on Twitter (the social media platform now known as X) that “Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs” in Arabic, Canary Mission found, noting that in 2015, Assi apparently dressed up for Halloween as Leila Khaled — a convicted PFLP terrorist.
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In addition to Assi, one participant in the November discussion with Cardona was Johaer Jilani of the Muslim Students Association, a student who, in July 2020, asserted that he “wouldn’t be surprised if Israel is behind [Jeffrey] Epstein’s pedophilia ring,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The Education Department and Palestine Legal did not return requests for comment.
