Linda Sarsour, executive director of MPower Change, and Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, were among 22 groups and leaders that “couldn’t hold back their emotions and let their pro-terrorism flags fly” after Hamas senior leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed on Wednesday, per a Capital Research Center report.
“The outpouring of emotion for a genocidal mass murderer like Ismail Haniyeh, who himself mourned [Osama] bin Laden as a ‘martyr,’ shows a horrifying, large underbelly of antisemitism and extremism,” report author Ryan Mauro, told JNS.
The report looked at Instagram posts that mourned Haniyeh soon after Iran announced the Hamas “political bureau” chief’s death.
“When Israel slaughtered Ismail Haniyeh’s children, he said: ‘The blood of my children is not more valuable than the blood of the people of Palestine and all the martyrs in Gaza are my children,’” Billoo wrote. “‘Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead—in fact, they are alive! But you do not perceive it.’ Tonight, we mourn Ismail himself but know his martyrdom is not in vain. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
“It’s not being understood that there’s an infrastructure that went into action and mobilized the current anti-Israel movement after the Oct. 7 attacks,” Mauro told JNS. “Almost all of the significant organizations are pro-Hamas and most are anti-American, to the point that they suggest the U.S. is, just like Israel, occupied land and the country has no right to exist.”
Mauro called the coalition of activist groups “a seditionist insurgent movement.”
“‘Anti-Israel’ is too limiting of a term to accurately capture what it is. It’s not ‘far-left,’ or ‘far-right.’ I’ve been calling it the seditionist movement or the seditionist insurgency because their ideologies and objectives are so much more than just wanting a ceasefire in Gaza as they portend,” he added.
The 40-year-old nonprofit Capital Research Center is “fiercely independent” and probes “how foundations, charities and other nonprofits spend money and get involved in politics and advocacy, often in ways that donors never intended and would find abhorrent,” per its website.
