Columbia Anti-Israel Group Reactivated Instagram Account Just Before Oct. 7 Attack, Lawsuit Says

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) reactivated its Instagram account just minutes before the terrorist group Hamas began slaughtering innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, a new lawsuit alleges.

Israeli Columbia students and family members of the victims of the October 7 attack are suing numerous anti-Israel groups and individual members, accusing them of “aiding and abetting” the terrorist group Hamas. The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court, names Mahmoud Khalil and others, seeking to hold them accountable for Hamas’ terrorism.

“Defendants in this case are Hamas’ propaganda arm in New York City and on the Columbia University campus,” the lawsuit states in its introduction. “We know this because they advertise themselves as such. Their self-described acts in furtherance of their goals to assist Hamas have included terrorizing and assaulting Jewish students, unlawfully taking over and damaging public and university property on Columbia’s campus, and physically assaulting Columbia University employees.”

The most explosive claim in the lawsuit alleges that the SJP reactived its dormant Instagram account just three minutes before the deadly October 7 attacks began, and included a screenshot of the organization saying, “We are back!” on October 6, 2023. The October 7 attacks began around midnight eastern time. This, the lawsuit alleges, means that the defendants “had prior knowledge of the October 7 attack.”

The 79-page complaint includes a lengthy explanation of how the various campus organization interact, beginning with a 2010 National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) Convention organized by American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). The convention brought together the SJP chapters operating across American colleges and universities and created the NSJP to “control the management, financing, and messaging of SJP Chapters across the country,” according to the lawsuit.

Another group included in the lawsuit is Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which purports to be run by Jewish persons who support the Palestinians and the boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The lawsuit alleges that SJP and JVP created Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) in 2016 to gain support from various student groups for the BDS movement.

Within Our Lifetime (WOL), another organization being sued, allegedly “serves as AMP/NSJP’s chief operating partner and ally throughout New York City as a whole,” according to the lawsuit. People associated with the groups, including Nerdeen Kiswani, Cameron Jones, and Mahmoud Khalil, are also named in the lawsuit. Jones became Internet famous after standing behind a protester who demanded “humanitarian aid” for violent anti-Israel protesters who took over a campus building last spring, and Khalil is being deported for supporting and promoting the protesters’ violent tactics. Kiswani runs WOL.

About half of the lawsuit contains allegations of activities the plaintiffs claim are pro-Hamas, including the organizations’ “Day of Resistance” and “Day of Rage,” promotion of which includes materials created by AMP/NSJP “and even Hamas itself,” the lawsuit says. The threat from these demonstrations closed Jewish schools and other Jewish institutions for fear of attacks.

It also includes examples of the organizations following Hamas’ orders. For example, when Hamas and other terrorist groups called for the “masses of our people throughout occupied Palestine to escalate all forms of resistance and struggle against the Zionist enemy, targeting its soldiers and settlers,” the NJSP put out a statement the next day saying it would hold a “Week of Action for Gaza.”

The organizations also invited terrorists and their supporters to speak on campus, terrorized Jewish students and prevented them from accessing places on campus unless they publicly disavowed Israel, and set up a “well-supplied” encampment “with identical tents, toiletries, food, and professional signage,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit also goes into detail about the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the livestreams of destruction, including one captioned “Student Intifada at Columbia where students have occupied Hamilton Hall.”

The lawsuit alleges that these and other examples are not simply “individuals and organizations independently exercising their free speech rights to support whatever cause they wish—no matter how abhorrent.” Instead, the lawsuit says, they are organizations and leaders “knowingly providing substantial assistance—in the form of propaganda and recruiting services—to, and in coordination with, a designated foreign terrorist organization, Hamas.”

As such, the lawsuit alleges that the named organizations and individuals should be held liable for Hamas’ terrorism, though such a claim likely has little legal standing.

New York and its universities have allowed anti-Israel activities to go largely unpunished, and the state has anti-SLAPP laws that could strike down the lawsuit quickly if a court determines it was filed to silence criticism of Israel through a baseless legal proceeding. Whether the court would be legally correct in its determination may be up for debate, given the bias of New York judges.