A private conference at George Washington University's prestigious Elliott School of International Affairs—convened to discuss the war on terror—became two days of far-left ranting overwhelmingly focused on attacking Israel, "Zionist billionaires of the Epstein class," "U.S.-Zionist genociding," and "Anti-Blackness and the Historical Legacy of Amerikkka," among other familiar boogeymen to American academia.
While participants repeatedly denounced "the repression of academic free expression" regarding on-campus anti-Israel activism, conference attendees themselves were strictly policed by event organizers who required them to sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement and promise not to record or photograph anything or identify attendees without explicit approval.
The Muslim Counterpublics Lab—an advocacy group that works to "challenge, disrupt, and subvert the dominant narrative" about Muslims—sponsored the two-day event, which purported to examine the "lessons and legacies of the war on terror" 25 years after 9/11.
But sessions, more often than not, largely fixated on the pernicious influence of "Zionist" Jews and, as one speaker framed it, "how we can continue to strategize within the belly of the beast to produce campaigns that weaken the Zionist state." Breakout panels included "Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia in the War on Terror" and "Palestine and the War on Terror: (Dis)arming Genocidaires and State Repression." A separate "luncheon fireside chat" went by the title "State Violence by Design: Anti-Indigenous Racism, Anti-Blackness, and the Historical Legacy of Amerikkka."
The conference was cosponsored by nearly 40 organizations, most of them fiercely anti-Israel, and provided a rare window into the strategies and motivations guiding American academia's increasingly aggressive anti-Israeli movement. The hostility towards "Zionists" was palpable inside the GW Elliott School's top-floor event space, which was littered with signs stating, "We're here to subvert the dominant narrative" and "Our stories. Our Liberation." One attendee was spotted walking around in a jacket that declared, "STOP ARMING ISRAEL." The confab was notably cohosted by GW's Institute for Middle East Studies, along with an assortment of radical anti-Zionist groups that included the Muslim Justice League, Crushing Colonialism, the Muslim Legal Fund of America, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and the Rutgers Law School's Arab-focused Center for Security, Race and Rights.
Entry to GW's anti-Zionist conclave came with strict conditions: Participants were required to sign a two-page "Conference Confidentiality, Consent, Recording, and Conduct Agreement." It barred "unauthorized recording or photography," for which a Washington Free Beacon reporter was scolded when he initially attempted to capture panelists' name cards, and outlined "respectful and safe conduct" for those in attendance. "Harassment, intimidation, threats, stalking, or unwanted repeated conduct" was verboten during the confab, as were "attempts to identify an attendee who has chosen not to be publicly identified."
Additionally, there was a wholesale ban on "unauthorized recording or photography," including "covert recording and the use of phones, cameras, wearable devices, artificial-intelligence tools, transcription services, or other technologies to capture or reproduce a conversation or presentation" (Organizers recorded the event themselves and did permit a Free Beacon reporter to visibly use his laptop to take notes on the panel discussions).
The most heavily attended session—a discussion on how the global war on terror supposedly victimized "Palestine" and its supporters—took place in the final hours of the conference's first day. Tina Al-khersan, a staff attorney at Project South, an advocacy group that aims to "eliminate poverty and genocide" via means "rooted in Black Radical Tradition," made clear that "Palestine is central to the conversations we've been having all day about the war on terror."
"We find ourselves in a unique moment as we bear witness to the U.S. and Israel's continued escalation of its settler colonial project," Al-khersan said. "We are simultaneously experiencing an expansion of the counterterrorism framework domestically, from the targeting of students whose encampments defied university repression to activists now facing material support for terrorism charges for speaking out against the administration's actions."
"Anti-Palestinianism," she said, has played a central role "in the expansion of the counterterrorism framework."
Another panelist, Irene Calis—"a Palestinian decolonial scholar, educator, and organizer" who serves as director of Arab World Studies at American University—offered a scathing critique of the U.S. university system and its response to the pro-Hamas campus movement.
"I think the short answer is that universities are the liberal face of counterterrorism work," Calis said. "The repression of academic free expression initially operates through Palestine."
Speaking "as someone who's been with and part of that student movement across different continents for over 30 years," Calis said the campus protest movements that exploded after Hamas's Oct. 7 terror spree have proven "that university administrators did not need [President Donald] Trump to do this authoritarian work."
"Zionist interests," she added, "are where the aims and tactics of authoritarian repression and self-declared liberal university administrators converge effortlessly."
"A student in my class filed an official antisemitism claim against me for assigning an article on Palestinian-centered scholarship," Calis griped, saying such behavior is proof of a "Zionist" conspiracy. "Students are emboldened to make these kinds of slanderous claims in an institutional culture that generates and supports the supremacist logic that Palestinian lives are subordinate to Zionist interests."
Calis portrayed herself as a survivor of the "U.S. Zionist genociding—multi-headed genociding—project against Palestinians and our kin elsewhere."
"The student intifadas," she added, "imposed a moral clarity and a political integrity on the entire world, and for this, for standing against the annihilation of Palestinian life and lands, university administrators responded with brute force and brute violence, via the thuggery of police forces that pummeled their bodies, and our bodies that tried to stand between them."
Students who participated in these anti-Israel encampments were wrongly slapped with "draconian criminal charges," Calis said, and in other cases "doxxed" by their pro-Israel peers. "Doxxing," she claimed, "is the well-documented modus operandi of Zionist slandering and harassment of those who speak up for Palestine."
Calis proclaimed that "a white empire is invested in Israel" and that "anti-Palestinian priming is steeped in basic and normalized white supremacy."
"Israeli humanity depends on Palestinians not being perceived and hence not being treated as human," she said. "The deep-seated twinning of Palestinians with terrorism, reinforced through Hollywood image makers, news media, popular imagination, school textbooks, is what allows our white Zionist colleagues to publicly smear us as terrorists."
Later in the discussion, Calis told the crowd: "We are in a moment when Zionist billionaires of the Epstein class, like Robert Kraft—who thought he could shut down Palestine via silencing [popular musician] Macklemore, but instead magnified our struggle globally—are today forced into a position of having to publish statements saying, 'But I do support Palestinians.' … So the power of the people will never be a cliché when the people effectively utilize their power." Calis was referring to the Patriots owner's recent decision to cancel a performance by Macklemore at Gillette Stadium, which he owns, after the rapper engaged in a public anti-Israel rant.
Another speaker on the panel was Sara Arman, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, "an anti-Zionist organization whose members and affiliates have expressed support for terror," according to the Anti-Defamation League. Arman discussed her efforts to force the Virginia state retirement system to divest from Israel, one of many attempts nationwide to spread the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Arman said her BDS campaign dovetailed with the campus protest movement, creating greater pressure on state governments to sever ties with Israel. "It's been a moment of really deep politicization and radicalization for people, where people are awakening to the plight of Palestinians," she said.
Arman laid out her goals clearly: "To deliver that material win, that financial win for our people, and to weaken the Zionist state, to weaken the weapon-war complex that we see."
Shelly Cohen Fudge, "a Jewish anti-Zionist" who founded the D.C. metro chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, discussed similar efforts in Maryland aimed at forcing the state to cancel its stake in Israel bonds, historically a sound investment for local governments seeking a solid return on their funds.
Fudge announced to great pleasure from the crowd that she successfully lobbied Maryland state lawmakers to introduce a bill that would "prevent any funding by the state for a retirement system in Israeli bonds."
"It took quite a while to even find somebody willing to sponsor it," she said. The bill was ultimately backed by Maryland House of Delegates member Caylin Young, according to Fudge, who noted that the bill failed to pass due to opposition from pro-Israel lawmakers that she dubbed the "Zionist Caucus."
Dylan Saba, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which serves "affected communities who stand for justice in Palestine," said during a question-and-answer session "that terrorism as a construct is about criminalizing people for who they are fundamentally, and everything that the State Department says about what it actually is, is bullshit."
Saba added that while he tries "to reject both hope and fear," there are positive signs the American public is beginning to reject the country's strong alliance with Israel: "We are seeing people in this country really turn against Israel and really starting to connect the influence of Zionism and U.S. imperialism with harms that are touching them directly."
On the conference's opening morning, Muslim Counterpublics Lab's executive director Maha Hilal treated attendees to a presentation on the "lessons and legacies of the war on terror." Muslims, Hilal said, "have been disproportionately targeted in the last quarter century" since that global war began.
The Muslim Counterpublics Lab, she added, is a driving force to reshape the American landscape: "Our vision is to create a world where Muslims in all marginalized communities have political, social, and economic power to build societies rooted in liberation instead of oppression."
The following morning, as activists gathered for the conference's second day, Hilal urged them to "really think about how we can dismantle and abolish the war on terror." That message underpinned the ensuing session, "Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia in the War on Terror."
"We can't talk about the war on terror without talking about Islamophobia," said Hilal, who has come under fire for describing the Oct. 7 attacks as a form of "resistance" against the Jewish state. She has been pictured hawking her similarly named book while in a T-shirt that reads, "Stay Trashy America."
Online materials described the session as a look at how "Islamophobia has been entrenched in the War on Terror from its inception." Hilal and other speakers sought to "underscore how Islamophobia was weaponized by the United States from the earliest days of the War on Terror in order to create a massive infrastructure of state violence to target Muslims."
Expanding on that theme, Hilal said the war on terror is not about combating radical anti-American forces that seek to kill innocent civilians, but rather, "it's about inflicting violence, and it's about subduing entire populations to the threat of state violence from the United States."
The terrorism narrative, she explained, is primarily meant "to say that there is only one interpretation, and that no other explanation can possibly inform us as to what happened."
Hamas's war against Israel, or "the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of Gaza and Palestinians," as Hilal framed it, has led the terror group to be conflated "with al Qaeda, because there's this depoliticization, and their goals are simply framed as, 'We just want to threaten Western civilization.'"
Discussing what she described as the U.S.-led assassinations of terrorist masterminds like Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hilal argued that these radical jihadists should have been prosecuted in the American court system, rather than killed on the battlefield.
"Justice is malleable," she explained. "The United States has a legal system that is fully capable of prosecuting individuals."
