A foreign Marxist group behind decades of terrorist attacks has quietly embedded itself in American activism, an academic report finds.
The Iran-funded terrorists now have protest-organizing groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, U.S. Palestinian Community Network, Within Our Lifetime, and the Palestinian Youth Movement tethered to their political movement, GW extremism researchers found, citing the groups’ public statements. “What has manifested in the U.S. is a support network where Islamist-aligned, secular-left, student, prisoner-solidarity, and community actors appear in the same campaigns driving the same pro-terror, anti-imperialist, anti-Western narratives,” the report concluded.
The four American organizations did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
U.S. Palestinian Community Network, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Palestinian Youth Movement each showed support for former Israeli prisoner Rasmea Odeh after she was convicted in Israel for being involved in fatal PFLP bombings, the report noted. The Jewish group even invited Odeh to speak at a 2017 membership meeting as a “Palestinian organizer,” researchers found.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Odeh in 2017 for fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship while concealing the criminal convictions, which linked her to two deaths. The U.S. activists portray her as a political prisoner mistreated by Israeli interrogators, the GW report found. The activist network has used similar narratives to legitimize PFLP leader Ahmad Sa’adat, whom Israel is holding in prison for leading the terrorist group and for his ties to an Israeli official’s 2001 assassination, according to the researchers.
Much of the pro-Palestinian movement’s coziness with PFLP comes from collaboration with Samidoun, a “Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network” that the Treasury Department sanctioned in October 2024 as a fundraising front for the Marxist terrorists, the report said. Samidoun called the sanctions “an attempt to repress political organizing in support of the Palestinian people’s struggle against genocide, colonialism and occupation, and the more than 10.000 Palestinian political prisoners that are being tortured and killed by the Zionist entity.”
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Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani also spoke in an online Samidoun event alongside PFLP leader Khaled Barakat to encourage 2024 Columbia University protests, the report noted. Barakat told their audience about his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the [Popular Front]” at the event, titled “Resistance 101.”
“Far from being a relic of the 1970s, the [PFLP] adapted by shifting emphasis from spectacular terrorist attacks to influence operations built around propaganda, prisoner campaigns, activist alliances, and transnational support networks,” GW researchers wrote.
