American Muslims for Palestine (AMP)

Key Points

• American Muslims for Palestine is at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.
• AMP’s leadership frequently engages in rhetoric that promotes antisemitic tropes and support for violence against Israel, such as praising Hamas for the October 7, 2023 attack which marked the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
• A current board member of AMP was implicated in Hamas activity in the 1990s, according to an FBI memorandum.
• AMP has called for a boycott of mainstream Jewish organizations such as Jewish Federations and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC).
• AMP and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have a long-standing association and partner for rallies and other events.

Introduction

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States. Established in 2006 by University of California, Berkeley, lecturer (and current AMP National Board Chairman) Hatem Bazian, AMP is based in Chicago and has at least eight active chapters nationwide.

Throughout its nearly 20-year history, AMP’s national leaders, chapter leaders and individual activists have promulgated antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the government and expressed admiration for U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Its leaders have also vilified Zionism and called for the ostracization of Zionists from public life. As most Jews consider Zionism – or support for Israel’s existence in its ancestral homeland– to be an aspect of their Jewish identities, such rhetoric is effectively an attack on the Jewish community.

The organization has been an active sponsor of the anti-Israel protest movement and has avidly sought to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state through various campaigns and organized actions over the years.

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre, AMP has helped organize and co-sponsor numerous anti-Israel protests, rallies and marches. Some AMP-sponsored anti-Israel rallies have featured flags of terrorist groups and the glorification of individual terrorists, such as Hamas spokesman Abu Obaida; speeches and posters that contained antisemitic conspiracy theories about Zionist control of the U.S. government; and incidents of harassment towards Jewish people.

AMP's organizational roots lie with the now-defunct Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), a group once described by the U.S. government as having “disseminated information/propaganda” for Hamas. Though IAP officially dissolved in 2004, many of its leaders have continued their activism with AMP, including Osama Abuirshaid, AMP’s current executive director, Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Rafeeq Jaber, a former president of IAP who has spoken at AMP events, former AMP Executive Director Abdelbaset Hamayel who also previously served as IAP executive director and secretary general, Kifah Mustafa, formerly with IAP in Illinois and Raeed Tayeh, a former IAP member in Chicago.

The Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)’s website listed their Board of Directors which included AMP-affiliated individuals: Rafeeq Jaber, Abdelhast Hamayel and Kifah Mustafa. (Image sources: Facebook and Instagram)

History and Ideology

AMP was initially founded as a volunteer activist organization that provides anti-Zionist training and education to students and Muslim community organizations in the country. It later registered a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization through which to draw tax-deductible donations under the name Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP) Educational Foundation Inc., which acts as AMP’s fiscal sponsor.

AMP focused much of its early years on student outreach at universities and colleges nationwide and has a long association with anti-Zionist campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which Bazian also helped establish in the 1990s.

AMP promotes extreme anti-Israel and anti-Zionist views and offers educational events that are open to the public, media and activism guidebooks, factsheets and reports on a variety of issues related to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

It has at times provided a platform for antisemitism under the guise of a stated primary goal to “educate the public and media about Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” For example, a brochure still available on AMP’s website directs readers to the website of If Americans Knew, an antisemitic group led by Alison Weir.

In 2021, AMP’s New Jersey chapter held a protest that hosted Rich Siegel, a leader with the anti-Israel group Deir Yassin Remembered which has been marred by antisemitic rhetoric including the promotion of Holocaust denial. Siegel has a history of problematic rhetoric and actions including a protest outside a synagogue in Teaneck, NJ in May 2021.

For at least a decade, AMP has expressed a position that Israel is an apartheid state and a “settler-colonial” venture that should be boycotted. Its programs also often promote the view that Zionism is an inherently discriminatory ideology that must be opposed. The group does not take a position on a two-state solution to the conflict and strongly supports and promotes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Over the years, AMP has grown its influence. In 2015, it launched its first-ever Palestine Advocacy Days, during which members spent several days in advocacy training and meetings with members of Congress, a sign of the group’s increasing organizing capabilities.

AMP events also periodically feature political leaders, including members of Congress such as U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Betty McCollum and Rep. Andre Carson.

In 2021, AMP set up an affiliate 501(c)(4) organization, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action), to take over the Palestine Advocacy Days events, and further expand its lobbying capabilities and political pull.

AMP and SJP

Through Bazian’s involvement in setting up both SJP and AMP, the two organizations have long-standing links. Starting in 2006 when AMP was founded, the organization placed a heavy emphasis on supporting and helping coordinate the activities of SJP, assisting in its development as one of the primary organizers of anti-Israel campaigns and events on campus over the years.

AMP described SJP as part of a “signature project” to “organize and unify the work for Palestine on campuses in the United States,” according to a 2010 brochure.

AMP leaders worked very closely with the organization, frequently advising and training students on anti-Israel activism and organizing.  In October 2011, AMP supported SJP’s inaugural National Conference at Columbia University, drawing the participation of over 350 students from more than 100 schools. Sessions focused on how to strengthen anti-Israel activism on campus and how to “combat the myths of Zionism.” AMP’s former media director Kristin Szremski conducted training at the conference as well.

AMP has advocated for SJP and other anti-Israel student groups to refrain from collaborating with Jewish or pro-Israel groups on campus initiatives, keeping in line with AMP’s “anti-normalization” policies with groups they view as “Zionist.” In practice, this has meant a boycott of mainstream Jewish campus and national organizations. For example, AMP released a report in 2021 encouraging people to distance themselves from “Zionist institutions,” listing student organizations such as Hillel (the premier Jewish college student organization in the U.S.) as well as community organizations such as JCRC, Jewish Federations and the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

Over the years, National SJP and its chapters have grown much more independent, though AMP’s support likely contributed to SJP’s rise to prominence. In 2024, SJP was a central organizing node for the student encampments and anti-Israel rallies that proliferated across American universities and colleges in the spring and summer, amid a surge in antisemitic activity and sentiment on U.S. college campuses.

Since October 7, Bazian has appeared at multiple encampments on college campuses in the U.S. and abroad, offering words of encouragement to student activists’ disruptive tactics.

There are also some financial links. In an April 2024 statement to the Daily Mail, AMP lawyer Christina Jump confirmed that the organization gives money to on-campus groups like SJP and fellow anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), between $500 and $2,000 for “tangible expenses for specified events, such as food or copying costs for specifically identified gatherings.”

National AMP Leaders Repeatedly Express Support for Terror, Antisemitic Themes

On both social media and at public events, AMP’s leaders have articulated anti-Zionist and anti-Israel views that have repeatedly crossed into offensive antisemitic tropes, as well as rhetoric sympathetic to Hamas.

AMP Executive Director Dr. Osama Abuirshaid gave a speech at a protest on December 1, 2023 at the Israeli Embassy in D.C. in which he denied the tragedies of October 7, including the mass killings and documented sexual assaults. “Most of the civilians were killed by their own army... They killed their own civilians... There were no rapes, that's what they told us. And they still lie to us, why?” said Abuirshaid, an academic and activist who has appeared on news shows and written for several publications on Mideast issues. He also previously served as the editor of al-Zaytouna, a bi-weekly publication distributed by IAP, the now-dissolved group that disseminated Hamas propaganda.

On a separate occasion, Abuirshaid claimed that Israeli civilians were taken hostage “by mistake” during the October 7 invasion by Hamas terrorists, during which over 250 were abducted including an infant and elderly people.

AMP's Osama Abuirshaid speaking at AMP’s 2023 Palestine Convention. (Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

Abuirshaid has a history of espousing language that plays into age-old antisemitic tropes of dehumanization, Jewish duplicitousness, and power.

In September 2024, at an AMP Press Conference, he accused Israel of sending “their embassies across the world, including the Israeli Embassy in Washington to reach out to Jewish organizations, American Jewish organizations, to apply pressure into members of Congress to go after free speech in America.”

Three years prior, in September 2021, Abuirshaid gave an interview to Jordan’s Yarmouk TV in which he stated that “Israel today is a case of a parasite living off the American body.” In 2016, during a MAS-ICNA (Muslim American Society – Islamic Circle of North America) Convention speech, Abuirshaid referred to “…the Zionist figures who hold an American passport and American citizenship but who suffer from a syndrome called double loyalty, where they put the Israeli agenda, the Israeli interests ahead of the American agenda.”

The AMP executive director has also promulgated the antisemitic Khazar conspiracy theory which falsely posits that modern-day Jews are not descendants of the ancient Israelites -- rather they're descendants of the Khazars, a group of non-Jewish Eastern Europeans who converted to Judaism in the 8th century -- and therefore do not have a historical, indigenous connection to the Land of Israel.

In a February 2018 lecture at the Islamic Center of South Florida, Abuirshaid claimed, “Zionism falsified history to invent what is called Israeli people today, based on religion” and that the “overwhelming majority” of “Jewish people today are not the descendants of the ancient Israelites. They’re from the Jews of Khazaria, south of Russia”

At that same conference, he attacked Zionism as a “forged ideology...that hijacked a religion, an ideology that politicized the religion, an ideology that injected racism into a religion” and claimed, “our issue is not with Judaism.” In a May 2016 tweet, he claimed that “Zionism is a form of ‘anti-Semitism’ as it claims the ‘Jews against the rest.’”

Abuirshaid has also strongly implied support for the strategies and tactics of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. At the AMP annual conference in 2023, not long after the October 7 attack, he appeared to equivocate about the U.S.-designated terror organization, stating that it did not matter whether "the U.S. rightly or wrongly designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.”

AMP's Osama Abuirshaid (center) speaks at an AMP press conference in Washington, D.C. on September 24, 2024.  From left to right: Sana Wazwaz, AMP Minnesota, Abuirshaid, Ayah Ziyadeh, former AMP director of advocacy. (Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

In a December 2014 Facebook post, Abuirshaid appeared to praise Hamas on its 27^th anniversary, writing that it has “rejuvenated itself by adhering to its principles based on liberation” while the rival Fatah party led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had “grown old after deviating from the doctrine of liberation and resistance on which it was founded.”

“A distinction is made... between those who form an army for liberation, and those who prepare battalions of agents [for Israel]... a difference between those who avenge the blood of their martyrs, and those who pour [that blood] into Israeli wine glasses," he wrote, accusing Fatah and the PA of collaborating with Israel.

AMP founder and Board Chairman Hatem Bazian also has a long history of engaging in antisemitic conspiracy theories, sanitizing terrorism and promulgating myths of Jewish power in the U.S. government. In addition to his roles as founder of AMP, chairman of its board and having helped establish SJP, Bazian is a lecturer in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, where he is an assistant professor. Bazian has appeared on news channels such as Al Jazeera as well as the Iranian-state-controlled Press TV, which was sanctioned by the U.S. in September 2023.

AMP's Hatem Bazian gives a speech at the National Rally and March at the 2024 DNC in Chicago, on August 21, 2024. (Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

In November 2024, Bazian took to X (formerly Twitter) to denigrate “interfaith dialogue” or what he terms “faith washing” and accuse any Muslim organizations or individuals participating in such events with mainstream Jewish organizations of "getting funding & suckling on the metaphorical philanthropic golden goose of Jewish and Zionist institutions,” playing into antisemitic tropes of Jewish money and power. In the long X post, he also alleged that mainstream Jewish organizations have “taken hold” of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives to “center Zionism and Israel.”

Hatem Bazian appeared on Press TV’s Palestine Declassified alongside antisemitic British academic David Miller, who veered into conspiracy theories about Chabad, June 2024. (Source: Rumble)

Over the past decade, he has made or shared several posts with antisemitic elements:

• In July 2017, Bazian re-tweeted an antisemitic meme – for which he later apologized -- depicting an Orthodox Jewish man raising his hands in the air with text reading: “Mom, look! I is chosen! I can now kill, rape, smuggle organs & steal the land of Palestinians yay #Ashke-Nazi.”
• In July 2015, Bazian compared the situation in Gaza to the Holocaust, calling Gaza “an epistemic Warsaw Ghetto but only different Semites are locked up this time around.”
• In January 2015, Bazian tweeted a link to an article by the Islamic Human Rights Commission which claimed: “The Europeans who fought Nazism with arms were labeled ‘terrorist’ by Hitler. Hamas is fighting against the occupation of Palestinian lands and is labeled ‘terrorist.’”
• In December 2014, Bazian played into the antisemitic trope that Jews control the U.S. government in his speech at the Muslim American Society (MAS)-Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) convention, saying, “America has the best Congress that money can buy, but we also say that our Congress is an Israeli-occupied territory because Israel can get its way time and time again.”

Another prominent AMP leader is Director of Outreach & Grassroots Organizing Taher Herzallah who catapulted into the national spotlight in February 2010, when he and ten other students heckled then-Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren as he delivered remarks at University of California, Irvine. Herzallah and the other students were escorted out of the room and later taken to court and convicted on misdemeanor charges (except one student who settled before the conviction).

AMP's Taher Herzallah speaks at AMP’s 2023 Palestine Convention. (Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

In June 2024, Herzallah spoke on a panel at the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference where he venerated “the resistance” following the October 7 attack, referencing U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and The Houthis. Some excerpts from his comments included:

• “...the events of October 7th, definitely shook the state of Israel, that's undoubted… within a span of several hours, young men, most of whom were orphans, unraveled a security regime that had taken 75 years to build.”
• “What the Yemenis are doing today, the Lebanese are doing today, what the Iraqis are doing today, what the Palestinians have been doing for decades, showing the world that [at] the end of the day... What matters is what happens on the ground, because nobody... could have ever told you that after 180 days, Palestinian resistance is still whooping Israel's butt.”

At the May 2024 People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, MI, which AMP endorsed, Herzallah shared extreme anti-Zionist rhetoric that echoed age-old antisemitic themes during a plenary session, saying: “The long tentacles of Zionism have always reached deep into the American heartland…Zionism has penetrated the depths of American society, economics, and politics for decades.”

Herzallah made additional comments at that event that could be interpreted as an endorsement of audience members traveling overseas to fight Israel: “I caution you of the days to come, because they will not be easy. There are people among us today who might not be with us next year at this conference. And this is a reality. Because the liberation struggle requires sacrifice. And I know everyone here is prepared to make that sacrifice.”

Additional problematic comments from Herzallah over the years included:

• December 2023: During a talk at the Islamic Center of San Diego, Herzallah described the terrorists of October 7 as “poor, under-resourced, devastated starving people” who “have destroyed the veneer of superiority that the West and the colonizers have fed us for generations.” He further asserted that in this current political climate, it is time “to make Zionists feel very uncomfortable on campus.”
• March 2023: Speaking at an event sponsored by Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, Herzallah called the Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List” a pro-Israel “propaganda piece.”
• March 2021: Discussing Saladin’s conquering of Jerusalem from the Crusaders during a webinar with the UK-based Friends of Al-Aqsa, Herzallah suggested that the audience should view Israel as Saladin viewed the Crusaders, stating that “the parallels between then and now are unbelievably similar” and expressed hope that people would “rise to the occasion to defeat Zionism.”
• January 2021: In a Facebook post commemorating the 10^th anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, Herzallah described the 2011 violent takeover of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, during which Israeli personnel had to be rescued and airlifted to safety, as “too good to be true.”
• March 2017: As a guest of George Mason University’s Muslim-Jewish Alliance, Herzallah stated that “any Muslim-Jewish partnership” must include “a disavowal of Zionism.”
• December 2014: At AMP’s annual conference, Herzallah told the audience that “Israelis have to be bombed, they are a threat to the legitimacy of Palestine, and it is wrong to maintain the State of Israel. It is an illegitimate creation born from colonialism and racism.”

AMP Board Member and Convention Chairman Salah Sarsour, based in Milwaukee, is the one representative who has been reportedly directly implicated in Hamas activity in the West Bank in the 1990s.

According to a 2001 FBI memorandum, Jamil Sarsour was arrested in 1998 for funding Hamas and told Israeli investigators that his brother Salah Sarsour was involved in funding Hamas through his fundraising for the Holy Land Foundation (HLF).

Salah Sarsour, AMP Convention chairman and board member, in a promotional video for the 2024 AMP conference, October 2024. (Source: Instagram/Screenshot)

In 1995, Salah Sarsour was arrested and imprisoned by Israel for eight months for supporting Hamas. According to his brother, while in prison, Salah became close to the West Bank commander of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

In addition to his position with AMP, according to Wisconsin state records, from 2005 to 2016, Sarsour was the registered agent of the Muslim American Society (MAS) in Milwaukee, a non-profit educational and religious organization that defended the HLF case.

AMP Activities: Anti-Israel Rallies and Protests Post October 7

Since October 7, 2023, AMP has co-sponsored over 300 anti-Israel rallies. The tone was set just a day after the Hamas attack, when AMP NJ posted about a rally to “defend Palestinian resistance” that included an image of a bulldozer breaking through Gaza-Israel border fence on October 7.

On April 1, 2024, AMP’s New Jersey chapter co-sponsored a protest with radical anti-Zionist organization Within Our Lifetime (WOL) outside of a synagogue in Teaneck, NJ that was honoring ZAKA, an Israeli organization of volunteer emergency rescue workers who were involved in recovering, cleaning and identifying the bodies of those killed in the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack. Protesters shared antisemitic and extreme anti-Zionist rhetoric, including chanting, “Go back to Europe!” at Jewish individuals and holding signs with messages saying that Zionists “should be destroy [sic].”

An image of a protestor wearing a Hamas headband at an AMP-sponsored rally outside of the Democratic National Convention, August 2024. (©ADL)

Other AMP-sponsored and co-sponsored protests with problematic or antisemitic elements included:

• October 2024, Minneapolis, MN: A rally to mark “One Year of Genocide, One Year of Resistance” included a sign reading: “Where is your pride and sovereignty America? Free America from the Zionist Lobby.”
• August 2024, Chicago, IL: At least one protestor wore a Hamas headband at a rally outside the Democratic National Convention.
• October 2023, Chicago, IL: A sign depicted dollar bills in the shape of a snake, bloody handprints and the message “Zionism is racism” with the letter “s” stylized as a dollar sign.

An image of an antisemitic sign at an AMP-sponsored anti-Israel rally in Chicago, October 2023 depicting dollar bills in the shape of a snake, bloody handprints and the message “Zionism is racism” with the letter “s” stylized as a dollar sign. 

AMP Chapter Leaders and Activists Espouse Rhetoric That Sanitizes Terrorism, Engage in Far-Right Conspiracy Theories

In addition to egregious rhetoric from AMP’s national leadership, AMP chapter leaders and members across the country also regularly express antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, engage in inflammatory language about Zionism and the Jewish community and praise FTOs such as Hamas.

In one instance, an AMP employee appeared on a panel that was sponsored by Samidoun, an extreme anti-Zionist group that was sanctioned by the U.S. government in October 2024 for fundraising for The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an FTO.

Zarefah Baroud, AMP’s digital media associate, also appeared at an event hosted by Samidoun in April 2024. In October 2024, Baroud was a keynote speaker with her father, anti-Israel journalist and editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle Ramzy Baroud, at an event titled “Pulse of Palestine: Resistance and Prisoners” in Olympia, Washington. She referred to October 7 as the “Al Aqsa Flood,” which is the name chosen by Hamas for their “operation” on that horrific day.

Zarefah Baroud (second on the left) speaking on a panel in April 2024 for Samidoun, a U.S.-designated sham charity for the PFLP. (Source: YouTube [removed])

Neveen Ayesh, the government relations coordinator for AMP Missouri, has shared videos from Hamas’s military wing and of its spokesman, Abu Obaida, on X in addition to praising Hamas as “an ideology for freedom” and lionizing the late arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar.

In addition to praising terrorists, Ayesh has also spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. On January 1, 2024, she posted about the tunnels under Chabad Headquarters in New York City and suggested such tunnels were being built across the country: “Tunnels in New York, United States of America. Ask them about this they’ll respond by asking whether or not you condemn Hamas. I need the same folks talking about the southern border being open, looking underground. When are we going to start having honest conversations?”

AMP's Neveen Ayesh shared a video from Al Jazeera Plus about Hamas’s military wing in December 2023, praising the organization as “an ideology for freedom” and lionizing the late arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar. (Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

Ayesh has also expressed support for antisemitic right-wing commentator Candace Owens. On August 24, 2024, she tweeted in response to Owens complaining about the FBI and “Zionist organizations” saying she wants to “applaud this woman for her bravery bc [sic] a lot of us have been paying a heavy price for just being honest. The manipulation and defamation is crazy. The fbi [sic] reports, the Zionists taking their terror to mainstream media bc [sic] they can’t cancel you on social media.”

Sayel Kayed, vice chair of AMP New Jersey, has retweeted antisemitic and problematic accounts like far-right commentator and influencer Jackson Hinkle, an anti-LGBTQ post from self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and content from antisemitic conspiracy theorist Jake Shields. In May 2024, Kayed encouraged his Facebook followers to rally at a synagogue’s Yom HaZikaron event commemorating fallen Israeli soldiers and victims of terror.

Funding

AMP’s fiscal sponsor is the Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP) Educational Foundation. Its funding is quite opaque though some insights can be gleaned from 990 filings.

In the fiscal year ending in December 2023, AJP Educational Foundation reported revenue of $2,260,531, an increase from $1,556,567 in 2020. According to tax records from that same year, the Yoosufani Family Foundation, based in Austin, TX, gave $55,000 to AJP Educational Foundation and $55,000 earmarked for AMP.

Minneapolis-based Headwaters Foundation for Justice, a community foundation that focuses on funding groups "led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color” in Minnesota, said in a December 2023 grant announcement it had made rapid-response grants of $25,000 in 2023 to American Muslims for Palestine – Minnesota.

In 2022, AMP received $5,300 from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund. In 2021, it received $36,657 from the Network For Good, and $10,548 from the American Online Giving Foundation in 2020.