In a recent post, I documented how American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) ejected me from its annual conference Thanksgiving weekend because it was afraid I would provide negative coverage. For background on the harassing treatment I received, see Fearing Negative Coverage, ‘American Muslims for Palestine’ Conference Ejects Legal Insurrection Reporter.
Now we know why AMP wanted to cleanse the audience of media who could report accurately on what was going on: The AMP conference was an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hatefest, and the keynote speaker was Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, who has worked with the group on many occasions.
AMP – Key Anti-Israel Connector
American Muslims for Palestine is a key connector of anti-Israel Islamist and radical leftist groups, including fringe anti-Zionist Jews who provide cover.
Though it has a long history of opaque funding, staff overlap with now-shuttered ‘charities’ found to be connected to terrorist groups, and persistently disseminating classic anti-Semitism, AMP managed to maintain its connections with ‘intersectional’ social justice activists by hijacking the language of human rights and claiming to fight for “oppressed peoples everywhere” (in the words of AMP speaker Linda Sarsour).
[Screenshot from AMPs Palestine Convention Facebook page, November 2019.]
You can read more about AMP and the groups it works with in some of my earlier posts:
- Investigation: Anti-Israel groups plan disruption of Christians United for Israel Annual Summit
- Anti-Israel groups lock down planning for disruption inside Christians United For Israel Summit
- VIDEO: Anti-Israel Protesters Surround and Try To Intimidate Journalist Outside CUFI Summit
- Investigation: Anti- ICE “Never Again Action” Not The Spontaneous Grassroots Group It Claims To Be
- Investigation: ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ Locked Down Its Annual Conference, What Was It Hiding?
- Anti-Zionist Jews ban ‘Jewish Pride’ flag but embrace Palestinian flag in name of “intersectionality”
AMP’s Annual Anti-Israel Hatefest
As in the past, AMP’s 2019 Palestine Conference was chock full of historical falsehoods and thinly veiled anti-Semitism. This is shocking to precisely nobody; this year’s speakers’ roster featured some of the most noxious anti-Israel agitators active today, including ‘intersectional’ activists:
- CodePink national co-director Ariel Gold, freshly returned from yet another of CodePink’s mullah-enabling tours of Iran (see Code Pink sells out women and exploits Jews on propaganda tour of Iran)
- Ex-CNN correspondent Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired after repeating Hamas’ favorite adage—”From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—during a speech at the UN (see CNN Fires Marc Lamont Hill After Calling for Israel’s Destruction in UN Speech)
- Students for Justice in Palestine founder and UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, who has called for an intifada in the U.S. and is well-known for infusing lessons with anti-Israel propaganda
- Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, who infamously wrote an article for Al Jazeera in which he charged that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating non-Zionist Jews during World War II
- Friends of Sabeel North America director Tarek Abuata, who recently forced security to carry him bodily from the Christians United for Israel conference after he began shrieking exhortations for the “people of God” to “wake up” to the claim that “Zionism is racism” right in the middle of the event (see Investigation: How anti-Israel groups tried to turn failure at CUFI Summit into social media success)
Despite the behavior of her fellow AMP speakers, when Rep Tlaib took the stage at the annual Palestine Conference, she gushed about her pride in being invited to keynote, saying:
I’m incredibly proud to be here. The incredible work that all of you have done have opened doors for myself, somebody like me to serve in the United States Congress.
As Rep. Tlaib continued, she demonstrated a favorite rhetorical trick of the ‘intersectional’ far-left: “movement hijacking“—the appropriation and exploitation of unrelated social justice causes (frequently by BDS supporters) in order to subsume those causes within a broader left-wing movement in which anti-Israel activists are then revered as leaders.
I would remember the history here in this country…still, the oppression of our black brothers and sisters. Every time I saw the different color license plates, the dehumanization at the checkpoints, everything. So interconnected…So when you think about the border, you gotta understand how interconnected it is with the oppression, of what’s happening in Falastine, the oppression that’s happening to our people. When I see…like, the police going after, killing innocent people, innocent, treating African American brothers and sisters like they’re disposable, I think of Filastine and what happens to our brothers and sisters in the occupation.
Tlaib’s remarks echoed longstanding efforts by anti-Israel activists to stoke racial tension against Israel by falsely accusing it of being responsible for local police shootings of blacks in the U.S. As we documented, that campaign went into overdrive during the Ferguson riots, after the Michael Brown shooting in the summer of 2014.
You can watch Rep Tlaib’s entire AMP speech here and below.
