Two years after they attacked the University of Michigan administration and regents, eight members of the Ann Arbor “Student Intifada” have finally been indicted on various conspiracy and property destruction charges. They face hefty fines and years in prison.
Predictably, most of the media is siding with them.
During the spring 2024 semester, students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, set up an “encampment” at the so-called Diag—a nickname for the diagonal intersections at the heart of the campus. Like other students across the country, they called themselves the “Student Intifada,” and the area they briefly controlled was dubbed the “Gaza Free University.” As the academic year ended, university president Santa Ono ordered the encampment cleared on May 21, 2024.
This much is well known. But until recently, few knew about how the University of Michigan’s Student Intifada group viciously and personally struck back. On June 10, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against eight students who were the ringleaders of the group and led its violent campaign.
The media is coming to their rescue.
Hundreds of outlets have published articles that misrepresent the perpetrators, the charges against them and the victims of their alleged crimes. Most were aping The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The Post struck first on June 10, 2026, with an article by Katie Mettler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel titled, “DOJ charges pro-Palestinian activists with threatening U. of Michigan officials.” Then came the Times’ June 13 article by Mitch Smith titled, “Threats, Free Speech and the Case Against U. of Michigan Activists.”
National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP)—the leader of the nationwide “Student Intifada"—went further in its promotion of the defendants. Whenever SJP types get caught, arrested or suspended, NSJP jumps to their defense, dubbing them the “Stanford 11,” the “Swarthmore 9” and, in the case of the eight mentioned above, the “Michigan 8” or just the “MU8.”
NSJP wrote on its Instagram page that the MU8 indictment is nothing more than “a case of targeting Palestine activism” and proof of rampant “repression against Palestine activism.” It promises, “We will not be apologetic for our actions to protest genocide.”
Much of the media and the entire intifada group portray the kind of “resistance” that got the MU8 into trouble as “pro-Palestinian.” In fact, as I wrote in 2023, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about the post-Oct. 7 protest phenomenon. These protesters do not want a “two-state solution” any more than Hamas does. They want a single state Arab state “from the river to the sea.”
Like Hamas, the “Student Intifada” longs for intimidated, captive, and ultimately, dead Jews, both in “48” (as they sometimes call Israel) and throughout the world, which is what their slogan “Globalize the Intifada” means.
Nevertheless, the Post writers (it required two of them) soft-pedaled both the intentions and the violence of the defendants, characterizing them as mere “pro-Palestinian activism.” The Times refers to the defendants as “activists” in the title and “pro-Palestinian activists” in the subtitle. He repeats the misnomer five times in the article.
To understand the bad faith of such a description, it’s worth looking into the targets of the defendants’ “activism.”
The 63-page criminal indictment lists six victims, describing them without naming them.
Victims 1 and 2 (“V-1” and “V-2” as they are referred to in the indictment) are members of the University of Michigan Board of Regents. “V-3” is the Chief Investment Officer at the university. “V-4” is Santa Ono, the aforementioned president of the university from 2022-2025. “V-5” is a member of the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety Services (DPSS). The last victim, “V-6,” is a student whom the defendants feared would “snitch” on them and was thus threatened into silence.
Many of the individual victims were not only intimidated and harassed, but their homes and, in some cases, their businesses were also targeted.
After the Michigan headquarters of Rolls-Royce Solutions America, Inc. was vandalized because of its alleged role in “colonial genocide” on June 30, 2024, the Student Intifada boasted in a social media post: “As beneficiaries of this imperial system, our duty to Palestine is to damage, disrupt and destroy the colonizers’ operations by any means necessary.”
The defendants also vandalized the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit’s Max M. Fisher Building on Oct. 7, 2024. Targeting a Jewish center proves that the defendants’ “anti-Zionism” was mere cover for their antisemitism.
Like NSJP, the Times and the Post portrayed the indicted students as free-speech warriors. The papers further deflected attention away from the students’ crimes via cheap anti-Trump bromides.
The Post stated, “The Trump administration has taken a hard line against pro-Palestinian protesters on campuses,” adding that “Wednesday’s federal charges amounted to an escalation of that campaign.”
The Times concurred, claiming that the decision to indict “reflected an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism.” It even repeated a defense lawyer’s description of his clients as “high-achieving students with no criminal records,” who were not accused of “physically hurting anyone.”
The Times called defendant Jonathan Zou “an award-winning engineering student.” He doesn’t mention that Zou is alleged to have thrown glass jars filled with butyric acid through the windows of the provost’s house.
The paper further describes defendant Zainab Hakim as “a National Merit Scholar.” There are dozens of stories from 2023 and 2024 featuring photos of her protesting and hectoring passing students with her megaphone. It’s a wonder she found time to study.
Defendant Colin Weger, who looks like the first runner-up in a Hunter S. Thompson look-alike contest, apparently isn’t a National Merit Scholar. The Times notes only that Weger “had a job and was planning to resume his studies at a community college in the fall.”
Of all the defendants, Paige Feyock is the star of the indictment. She was seemingly in on all the “autonomous actions” and the author of some very quotable lines. Unfortunately, the Times and the Post weren’t all that interested in quoting her.
The Times wrote that Feyock “worked as a doula” and “was planning to move to Illinois for medical school.” It is true that, as a 2022 graduate of Wellesley College (with a double major in sociology and Africana studies), Feyock worked at something called the Mother Lab. Her bio pages indicate her intent to go to medical school and specialize in obstetrics and gynecology.
Feyock and her alleged co-conspirators communicated with each other over encrypted platforms like Signal and CryptPad.fr to plan illegal activities. They posted photos of their vandalism on websites like Unity of Fields (a.k.a. “Pal Action”), Unsalted Counter Info and the Tahrir Coalition.
The messages quoted in the indictment make for some chilling reading.
Feyock’s future patients might be interested to know about her message that President Ono has “gotta die” and his “entire family is now on my hit list.” They might also want to know about her May 21, 2024 chat with defendant Ahmet Korkaya, who was in medical school at the time. As Korkaya and Feyock discussed killing Ono, UM Regent V-2, and the Chief Investment Officer V-3, Feyock suddenly interjected, “Let’s get [Ono’s] kids bruh and [V-2’s] too.”
Korkaya responded, “Wallah [by Allah] I’m gonna be the dirtiest f**king doctor ever, I’m gonna be [V-1’s] doctor, poison her ass slowly.” Feyock remarked, “We need people following [V-1], get into that house, then burn it down.”
The defendants allegedly spread nails on the driveway of the university’s Chief Investment Officer’s home and threw butyric acid through the windows of its president and provost.
The New York Times and The Washington Post would have their readers believe that this case is about “free speech,” when it is clearly about violence and threats of violence.
It is also about vandalism. The defendants are accused of spray-painting profanities on private homes and businesses. They were especially fond of the f-word, leaving messages like “F**k Maersk,” “F**k RR [Rolls Royce],” “F**k the IDF,” “F**k DPSS” and, of course, “F**k Israel.”
Freedom to swear is one thing, but the First Amendment doesn’t permit one to paint messages on other people’s property. Among those messages were many inverted red triangles, which are a Hamas symbol, and red handprints, which represent a symbol of terrorist violence.
In addition to the spray-painted messages, the defendants allegedly spread nails on the driveway at the home of the university’s chief investment officer, and as mentioned, threw mason jars filled with butyric acid through the windows of the university’s president and provost. None of this comes close to First Amendment-protected speech.
Despite all the mainstream media blathering about free speech, the defendants seemed to acknowledge their guilt. The indictment cites Paige Feyock telling Zainab Hakim on July 16, 2024, that she worried the student “snitch” (V-6) was “going to send us to federal prison.” On Oct. 9, 2024, as Feyock and Hakim discussed the problems they would face if discovered, Feyock assured Hakim not to worry because law enforcement “was not smart enough” to catch them.
On Nov. 21, 2024, Feyock changed her tune, telling Hakim that she had, in fact, been identified: “It’s definitely over for me in the future tho bc [V-5] and [another UMDPSS officer] got a very good look at me were arguing with me while I was in the building.”
These are not the comments of people exercising free speech.
Curiously, neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times writers questioned why these “pro-Palestine activists” were so obsessed with hurting people and damaging property thousands of miles away from “Palestine.”
The two most important news sources in the nation either do not understand the dangers posed by the Student Intifada or they are actively working to assist it by portraying its violent activity as free speech. I lean towards the latter explanation.
I expect that, whatever the motives, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as their followers throughout the media, will continue misrepresenting the “Student Intifada,” its violence, the victims of that violence and the perpetrators of that violence on every level.
Originally published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
