Early last week, entirely by accident, I came across a group of 50 or so Arab and Muslim activists hosting a press conference just a few steps away from New York City Hall. At the conference, most of which I videotaped with my iPhone, I saw something I’ve seen at anti-Israel, pro-Islamist rallies all the time—people demanding rights for themselves that they deny to Jews.
These activists include supporters of Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a group that has called for the destruction of Israel. Astonishingly enough, they enlisted support from members of Jewish Voice for Peace, one of whom affirmed their agenda by portraying Diaspora Jews as serving as “human shields” against criticism of Israel, which he falsely accused of perpetrating “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza.
The press conference on March 30 was organized by the New York Chapter of Muslim American Society (MAS) to publicize the March 26 arrest of Alexander Heilfer, a 26-year-old Jew from Hoboken, N.J., charged with the unlawful manufacture and possession of firearms by the FBI. The New York Times reported that Heilfer allegedly intended to use Molotov cocktails to attack Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of WOL, a group that has also legitimized the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 251 others, many of them held captive for months in Gaza tunnels.
The Jewish Community Relations Council in New York condemned Heilfer’s alleged plot in unequivocal terms, declaring on X that while it “adamantly” disagrees with Kiswani’s “inflammatory rhetoric and her organization’s tactics,” it condemns “in the strongest possible terms the reported plot against her.” The Times of Israel reported that Shai Davidai, a prominent Jewish activist and a former professor at Columbia University in New York City, said: “I despise everything that [Kiswani] stands for,” though added, “at the same time, violence is not the answer. This is completely unacceptable.”
On X, Brad Hoylman Sigal, who, according to The Forward, is “the Jewish Manhattan borough president,” praised the New York City Police Department for stopping the assassination,” saying “political violence, against anyone, for any reason, has no place in our city.”
The response of these Jewish leaders to Heilfer’s alleged crimes stands in marked contrast to the response of Muslim organizations to Islamist-perpetrated violence.
For example, getting Muslim organizations in the United States to respond critically to the atrocities of Oct. 7, which included torture and rape, for an article I wrote for Focus on Western Islamism in late 2003, was like pulling teeth. Umar Lee, a Muslim convert I had interviewed previously, unequivocally condemned the massacre, as did the anonymous person who answered the phone at a mosque in Illinois. The response from mainstream Muslim organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the United States Council of Muslim Organizations was frankly celebratory.
The conference began with MAS staffer Abudllah Akl describing Kiswani as “a well-known community member and organizer.” He continued, saying “we come together today to stand alongside her to let her know that her fight is not a fight that she is fighting alone.” Akl declared that Kiswani’s “plight” against Zionism is one that MAS will stand alongside.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, WOL, which Kiswani founded in 2015, “has hosted or co-sponsored some 100 anti-Israel rallies, many of which included explicit support for violence against Israeli civilians by U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations—Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hezbollah, the Houthis and affiliated individuals, such as Leila Khaled and Hamas’s military wing spokesperson, Abu Obaida.”
At one WOL-organized rally, the ADL reports, a protester displayed a sign declaring, “Zionists are not Jews & not humans.”
WOL even went so far as to protest a June 2024 exhibit commemorating the murders of concert-goers at an exhibit in Manhattan commemorating the women—many in their teens and 20s—killed at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, declaring that the event “was a rave next to a concentration camp.” The action drew a sharp rebuke from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Christopher Godschall-Bennett, a partner at Lee and Godschall-Bennett, the law firm representing Kiswani in her lawsuit against Jewish organizations accused of harassing her, said that the threats directed at his client were “really personal” to him as a Jew.
Declaring that he spoke not only as one of Kiswani’s attorneys but as a proud product of New York’s Palestine activist community, Godshall-Bennett said as a young Jew, he was “told a story about a country [Israel]” to which he had a birthright, even though his father was Christian and came from a family that had no relationship to the land. Godshall-Bennett lamented that in order to maintain this birthright, he was forced to “abandon any sense of morality.” A refusal to do so, he said, would result in the forfeiture of this “supposed birthright” and the “expulsion from the Jewish community in the United States.”
Portraying Jewish extremists accused of harassing Kiswani as being at the “center of Zionism” itself, Godshall-Bennett, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, declared his rejection of a movement that “murders children and then uses Jews around the world as an ideological human shield to evade accountability.” He also falsely accused Israel of “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza, an allegation used to incite hostility toward Jews worldwide. (Similar statements and allegations were made later in the press conference by another JVP member, Morgan Bassichis.)
Another one of Kiswani’s lawyers, Jonathan Abady of the law firm Emery Celli Abady Brinckerhoff Ward & Maazel LLP, said his client had “every right under the law to advocate vigorously for the Palestinian people.” He called on law enforcement to arrest and prosecute anyone involved with the plot against his client, saying they “must be held accountable if we live in a free and open society.”
Abady expressed horror that someone would be intent on killing Kiswani for her “heartfelt political beliefs” and efforts to “stand up for the Palestinian people.”
Here’s the conundrum. Kiswani’s “heartfelt political beliefs” include support for Hamas, an organization that has no intent of letting Jews live in peace or of turning a future state of Palestine into “a free and open society.”
Yes, the allegations against Heilfer are shocking and serious, and must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But portraying Kiswani as “advocating vigorously for the Palestinian people” is beyond the pale.
She has made outrageous public statements about the Oct. 7 massacre, the ADL reports. Describing the massacre as a “prison break,” she called reports of Hamas atrocities “lies” and blamed Israeli deaths on the IDF. “[T]hey’re willing to kill their own people over there so that they can bomb us relentlessly for the next year,” the ADL quotes Kiswani as saying. “They’re willing to kill and hurt their own people here too to shut down this movement.”
Eric Lee, a partner at Lee and Godschall-Bennett, also spoke on Kiswani’s behalf, declaring that the planned firebombing of his client “in the dark of the night, was the method of the Ku Klux Klan.” Yes, that’s true, but it’s also the method used by Hamas, the genocidal terrorist group Kiswani has been running interference for since 2015.
After the lawyers spoke, the Muslim women took to the podium. It’s a strategy I’ve seen a lot. When Islamist and Islamist-adjacent groups want to distract their audiences from violence perpetrated by male jihadis while at the same time portraying Arabs and Muslims (women especially) as victims of Western oppression, they give the hijab brigade (who they self-describe as “hijabis”) the megaphone—or in this case, the podium. Standing above all, they portray themselves as victims of terrible mistreatment in American society, even as they align themselves with activists like Kiswani who defend the actions of Hamas.
Along these lines, Marwa Janini, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, demanded that Muslim women enjoy the right to free speech and to be safe in the United States, insisting that the government prosecute and those who violate these rights. The irony is palpable because she’s making these demands on behalf of Kiswani, who has run interference for Hamas, which murdered, kidnapped and raped its way across southern Israel just a few years back. Nevertheless, she could still say with a straight face: “We stand in solidarity with Nerdeen and with everyone who has been targeted by hate and violence.”
Just not Israeli Jews, she neglected to say.
Amani al-Khatahtbeh, an internet influencer and author, took a similar approach, declaring that Muslim women are “the canaries in the coal mine” in American society. With language like this, al-Khatahtbeh would have her listeners believe that she’s in the same predicament as Yazidis and Christians in Iraq and Libya murdered by ISIS. To anyone paying attention, it just doesn’t wash. No one came to the defense of the victims of ISIS violence, while both the FBI and the NYPD moved to protect Kiswani.
The incongruity between claiming status as a victim while running interference for Hamas became profoundly evident when Kiswani herself took to the podium, where she complained of how she and many other Palestinian activists have been targets of harassment, threats, dehumanization and violence. “When we talk about Zionism,” she said, “we’re talking about a political ideology that in its practices has been used to justify the dispossession of and dehumanization of Palestinians” in the Middle East. She went on to declare that this dehumanization has migrated to the United States.
Let’s get real. The Oct. 7 massacre prompted a wave of antisemitism that has had a profoundly negative impact on the Jewish condition in Western democracies in the years since. Kiswani herself helped stoke this wave in cities throughout the United States, helping to cause chaos and disruption. Students, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t attend classes, go to the library or reach the cafeteria without being harassed, and in some instances assaulted, by pro-Hamas activists associated with groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement and WOL, the group Kiswani founded.
In the end, the press conference functioned less as a universal condemnation of political violence than as a platform for advancing a one-sided narrative—one that emphasized victimhood, legitimized dishonest critiques of Israel, and dismissed or ignored the broader context of the conflict. The contrast with the JCRC’s statement—condemning the alleged plot while maintaining clear moral boundaries—underscored the absence of a similarly consistent standard among the rally’s organizers and participants.
If Kiswani’s supporters were truly intent on establishing the credibility of their cause by promoting intercommunal peace in American society, a legitimate goal, they would at least offer a passing admission that her rhetoric is beyond the pale, even if it is protected speech. By ignoring her rhetoric and support for the Hamas terrorist agenda, they are helping to advance the cause of Islamism, an ideology of Muslim male supremacism that has made life worse for millions of people in the Middle East and is degrading the public life in Western democracies.
