Students for Justice in Palestine Grooming American Students for Intifada: A First Person Account

I walked up to a young man wearing a balaclava and sunglasses that obscured most of his face. When I got close to him, I discerned that he was a blond, white kid in his early twenties. He wore a dark hoody and an upside down cross on a chain around his neck as he stood in the corner of an alley doing his best to look tough and mean. He stood watch over the dozen or so pro-Hamas activists who had taken up unlawful residence in Boylston Place, a public alley that feeds into the sidewalk alongside Boylston Street, a major thoroughfare in downtown Boston. It was the fourth day of the encampment organized by Emerson College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which took possession of the alley on Sunday, April 21, 2024. The graphic on his hoody, which showed a camera with a line through it, indicated he didn’t want anyone to take his photo, but I took one anyway. He was making a spectacle of himself in a public alley.

“Who are the organizers here?” I asked him. “I want to know who’s paying for all of this. By “all of this” I meant a picnic table covered with food and the dozen or so tents strewn about the alley that, in addition to serving as the hub for Emerson College, also serves as entrance to the Massachusetts Transportation Building. I also wanted to know who — if anyone — was giving these folks media training.

“They are right over there, sir,” he said, pointing to the alleyway entrance.

I kept my head on a swivel despite the polite response. In particular, I was on the lookout for Naim Ball, a member of the Nation of Islam whom SJP activists from UMass Boston had recruited to provide muscle for a rally they organized in Boston on June 24, 2021. During that rally, which took place only a few blocks away, Ball had shoved me in the back after I had gotten out of the way of the crowd that had mobbed me.

The mobbing was pretty bad, but at least Ball hadn’t stabbed me as he had apparently stabbed a Trump supporter in front of the State House in late 2020. It took some poking around, but I eventually discovered that two weeks before UMass Boston SJP enlisted him to provide security at its rally in downtown Boston, Ball, a member of the Nation of Islam, had pleaded guilty to a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The judge sentenced Ball to one year in prison, suspended the sentence, put him on two years’ probation, and ordered him to complete mental health treatment and to write a letter of apology to the victim.

Documents on file at Boston Municipal Court tell the story. According to the police report, Ball appeared on videotape stabbing a pro-Trump protester in front of the Massachusetts State House on November 21, 2020. Officers monitoring the surveillance cameras at the State House recognized Ball from a protest the previous month during which he allegedly called for a civil war and assaulted a Boston police officer. For one reason or another, the District Attorney’s office, then under the leadership of the now-disgraced Rachel Rollins, abandoned prosecution of Ball’s alleged October 2020 attack. In light of his guilty plea, Ball is not the type of guy who should be providing security at a public rally. But that’s who SJP recruited to serve as security for one of its rallies in 2021.

Consequently, it was with some trepidation that I walked through the crowd to where SJP activist Amrita Bala was sitting in in a yellow and green folding chair with a blanket over her lap. She held court wearing a blue winter jacket, hoop earrings, and a keffiyeh perched on her head like a donut. She had long fingernails that made it clear she wasn’t going to be doing any manual labor anytime soon, and an intricate henna design on her wrists. As Bala exuded privilege from her ersatz throne, a slightly older-looking man with long curly black hair sat next to her. He wore sunglasses, a creepy mustache, and mom jeans with elastic ankle cuffs. Sporting orange fingerless gloves, he banged a drum intermittently. I asked Amrita if she would give me an interview.

“And who are you?” she asked me, as if I were a commoner. I gave her my business card from the Middle East Forum (MEF), which she handed off to one of her ladies-in-waiting, a much less photogenic woman standing nearby, for inspection. I figured that my affiliation with MEF would soon render me persona non grata, so I jumped right in with the questions.

“I just have one question,” I said. “Whose paying for this?”

“What type of dumb-ass question is that?” Drum Boy said.

“A good one,” I said. If I had a chance to explain myself, I would have said that while the tents didn’t seem all that expensive, the folks involved in this protest didn’t seem to be outdoorsy types who frequented Eastern Mountain Sports or Recreational Equipment Incorporated on a regular basis and that to my mind, somebody gave them those tents and sleeping bags. Was it Neville Roy Singham, a multimillionaire tech mogul with ties to U.S. rival China, who has reportedly dumped millions of dollars into anti-Israel propaganda over the past few years? Or was it the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a George Soros- and Rockefeller Foundation-supported organization that has been charged with grooming prominent leaders of the encampment movement? And who was giving protesters their talking points? Alas, Amrita said she was too tired from previous interviews and wouldn’t be answering any of my questions.

“Yeah, we’re good,” said the squat lady-in-waiting who was inspecting my business card.

“Go back to your f-----g hole,” Drum Boy said.

It was a special moment I wanted to record for posterity, so I took out my iPhone and took a picture of Amrita and Drum Boy. Another one of Amrita’s attendants asked me if I had just taken a picture. I felt the tension increasing rapidly.

“Do you have picture with his face on it?” she said. “Would you mind deleting that?”

And with that request, I put my phone back into my pocket, and walked briskly away without saying another word. I had asked the question I needed, got the refusal I expected, and obtained the necessary image to document the interaction. Time to move on before things got crazy.

Things did get crazy later that night when police moved in and arrested 118 protesters for obstructing a public way. The Boston Herald mocked Emerson students for complaining about pictures of their arrests being published in the paper, but other news outlets portrayed the protesters as victims of police brutality. Such outlets paid little attention to the protesters’ efforts to recreate the atmosphere manufactured by the SJP chapter at Columbia University in New York City, which turned an Ivy League campus into a Jew-free zone where even Jewish professors, much less students, could not walk in safety. It’s all par for the course given that one of the lead organizers of the Columbia protests, Khymani James, declared a few months back that Zionists are genocide-supporting Nazis who don’t deserve to live and that we should “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

While events at Emerson were not nearly as crazy at what had happened at Columbia, the atmosphere wasn’t good, with the college’s newspaper reporting that Jews who attend the institution “have experienced antisemitic incidents on campus, leading them to feel unsafe and contemplate transferring out of the school.” This is no accident.

Given what he has seen, Ron Schleifer, an Israel-based expert on psychological warfare, suspects the encampment are part of a “regime destabilization effort [that] utilizes a lot of psychological manipulation on students as a target audience.” If America’s rivals on the world scene such as Russia, China, or Islamist-governed countries supported the encampments, they would qualify as a campaign of psychological warfare, he added.

After fighting the urge to look over my shoulder to see if I was being followed, I hoofed it to Park Street Station and got on the subway to Cambridge, where encampments were taking place at Harvard and the Massachusetts institution of Technology (MIT). As I sat on the train, I contemplated the incongruity between the attention-seeking narcissism on display at the Emerson encampment and the protesters’ refusal to accept the scrutiny they invited. I had seen this incongruity on display during my first visit to the Emerson encampment a few hours before noon that same day.

No one had bothered me as I used my iPhone to take photos of the tents in the alley, nor did they harass me when I stood for a long moment in front of the bronze statue of Emerson alum, sitcom producer Norman Lear, contemplating how protesters could support trans and Palestinian rights at the same time without their heads exploding in stupidity. No one bothered me as I nodded in agreement at a nearby sign declaring that the school was failing its students. And no one bothered me as I used my iPhone to take a picture of the sheets promoting the work of the antisemitic Council on America-Islamic Relations taped on the glass doors of leading into Emerson College’s classroom buildings.

But the moment I took out my antiquated through-the-lens Nikon DX to take a panoramic shot of the alley, a young woman with brown hair stood in front of me and started waving her arms to obstruct my view. I looked at the young woman with astonishment. “I thought you were trying to get your message out,” I said, “and here you are blocking my shot. I don’t get it.”

Two other SJP activists joined in the brown-haired girl’s efforts to obstruct my shot. Ostensibly, these women were being charged more than $50,000 a year to attend Emerson College, a school with a well-regarded journalism department, and here they were interfering with someone’s First Amendment rights to document events taking place on a public street in Boston. Do they even know how public life works in modern America?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with such shenanigans at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where students had erected 15 tents in Kresge Common, an open space in sight of the school’s student center, to protest the school’s relationship with Israel. Clearly, the folks at MIT had done a better job keeping a lid on the craziness than administrators at Columbia and Emerson College had done.

Several MIT security personnel guarded the perimeter of the encampment. A sergeant informed me that I could take pictures of the gathering with my iPhone but that if I wanted to use my “professional” camera, I could only do so from Massachusetts Avenue, which was a few hundred feet away. Moreover, if I wanted to record any interviews with the participants, I could not do so on MIT property, but would have to do it on Mass. Ave.

As I stood near the encampment, I listened briefly to an olive-skinned woman give media training to a dozen or so of her fellow activists. The trainer advised her charges on how to deal with people who might aggressively badger them about their stance regarding the conflict. After listening briefly to the training, I asked an African American woman who was sitting on the ground next to me if it were possible for me to enter the encampment take photos with my iPhone and speak briefly with activists. She asked me who I was writing for, and I gave her my business card.

“We’re busy right now, so you’ll just have to get wide shots,” she said.

David Berkinsky, an MIT student who agreed to speak with me the following day, Thursday, April 25, 2024, had clearly internalized the trainer’s instructions. When I approached him for an interview, he walked briskly to the center of the encampment to ask permission to speak with me. He had been conversing with an elderly woman who told me her name was Rachel. As Berkinsky spoke with his higher ups, Rachel gushed about how the encampment before her reminded her of the protests the U.S. bombing of Cambodia she had witnessed five decades ago.

Mercifully, Berkinsky came back and escorted me across the common to Mass. Ave. for an interview. During our walk, he told me he was a graduate student in chemistry and a member of a group called “MIT Jews for Ceasefire.” During our conversation, Berkinsky said that “many groups of students, staff, faculty that feel an affinity towards the cause for Palestinian liberation” had organized the encampment.

What about the hostages? I asked.

“Our demand right now with this encampment is to cut ties with the Israeli Ministry of Defense,” Berkinsky said. “We do direct research for the Israeli government, and that is the impact that we can make in terms of stopping the bloodshed. We all want a ceasefire, and that includes a release of the hostages in exchange of all political prisoners.”

When I told him that in my travels it seems that people object more to Israel’s self-defense than they do violence against Israel, Berkinsky said, “I don’t think I’m really going to engage with this framing that much, if I’m going to be honest. We’re seeing day after day just absolute bloodshed.”

He went on to recount atrocity stories of mass graves discovered beneath hospitals in Al-Shifa and Khan Younis, asserting that Israel is killing civilians in cold blood as “part of an ongoing genocide to ethnically cleanse Gazans from their land.” He preached to me as if I were the simple son at a Passover Seder.

The history of the Holocaust and the lessons of the Passover Seder demonstrate that “Jewish safety is intrinsically tied to the safety of other people,” Berkinsky added. This prompted me to ask what was wrong with the Clinton Parameters (a peace deal accepted by Israel but rejected by the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat that could have brought an end to the conflict more than two decades ago). I’ve been asking this question of anti-Israel activists for years and rarely get a substantive response. Sadly, today was no different.

“I’m not going to comment on greater politics. I’m here as an MIT student who does research here, who does work. You come here [to] MIT, and they tell you that you can do great things through MIT. You can create new medicine. You can help the world,” he said. “That’s just not reflected in these research projects through the Israeli Ministry of Defense. And so, we can control here what MIT does. We don’t have a broader solution or comment on broader things. We’re here to affect what we can at MIT. And that’s direct complicity of Israeli Ministry of Defense funding that’s contributing to the genocide.”

When I asked him if any of the deaths he characterized as genocide would have taken place if Hamas hadn’t attacked on October 7, he told me I was engaging in “bad faith.” (Oh, so now I was the wicked son!)

“What’s happening in Gaza today is just absolutely horrifying. We’re seeing everyday they’re told to go from the north to the south, and then once they get to the south, they’re told they’re safe and they get bombed again,” he said. “This is the erasure of Palestinians from their homeland.”

When asked if he had any concerns about Hamas’s agenda, he said, “It’s not something I’m here to comment on. At MIT we have we have direct military research projects with the Israeli government. We don’t have any research projects with Hamas. We can control what we can at MIT.”

“So basically, that would kind of leave Israel defenseless,” I said. “Is that what you want?”

“I don’t think there’s a need for greater escalation,” he responded.

When I asked him who was paying for the costs of the encampment and told him that people were curious as to why all the tents at Columbia were the same color, Berkinsky said the MIT encampment was being “crowdsourced,” meaning that organizers solicited donations on the internet. “As graduate students, we don’t have that much money, so we all look for the cheapest tents. Sometimes it’s nice to look like we’re all in unity together. So, I don’t know, it depends on where you are. But, yeah, we have a great community here that’s crowdsourcing a lot of resources.”

I asked him one last question. He is worried about American support for Israel, I said. “But we’ve also given money to Iran. We’ve given billions of dollars to Iran. We’ve released funds to them. And they [Iran] launched a whole bunch of drones at Israel. Do you want to separate America from Iran?”

“We’re here to cut ties,” he said, "[to] demand that we cut ties with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to end the genocide in Gaza.”

“Okay, but so you don’t really want to basically limit American resources or dollars going to Iran?” I said.

“This is, I think, again, just not painting the full picture,” he said.

“You would think that the full picture would include something to do with Iran because Hamas is an Iranian proxy,” I said.

“Iran ended up firing those missiles after the bombing of what was an embassy,” he said.

“I’m not sure it was an embassy or even a consulate, but the thing is that Iran has basically been attacking Israel through proxies for years,” I said. “You got a problem with that?”

Berkinsky wouldn’t answer the question: “I’m going to leave you with this. We’re going to be in this encampment until MIT is willing to have a conversation, a real conversation, about cutting ties with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. We have multiple projects that contribute directly to the murder of people. And just more broadly, we just need to question the ethics of our research and what those projects contribute to.” You have to hand it to him: this guy stuck to his talking points.

At this point, it was my turn to think I was reliving the 1970s. But instead of listening to protesters condemn the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, I was listening to liberal protesters siding with the Islamists who hijacked the Iranian Revolution in Iran in 1979, ushering in decades of repression and abuse at the hands of the Islamist regime in Tehran. No, these young people are not Islamists, but they are promoting a central element of Islamist propaganda—that through its support for Israel, the United States is revealing itself to be a singular force for evil in the modern world. They’re paving the way for Islamists in the West just as they did in Tehran in 1979.

And that’s the point. Richard Landes, a former history professor at Boston University and author of Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, says the encampments taking place throughout the United States are part of a “cognitive war” intended to convince Westerners to stand down in the face of Islamist efforts to transform our civilization.

The success of the encampment movement, Landes declared, “is the culmination of fifty years during which [Edward] Said’s Orientalism occupied Western academia (hence it’s most apt for [the campaign] to emanate from Columbia) pushing out any sane narrative about Caliphators’ invasion of the West.”

The encampments represent “a new stage in the Bolshevization of the movement in which outside money and outside actors are infiltrating, brainwashing, and regimenting the wannabe ‘true believers’ on the inside,” Landes reported. “Thus, the ugliest aspects of global Jihadi warfare can express their desires openly, with the support of the ‘cream’ of the elites they target. It’s hard to imagine a greater cognitive war victory for the Jihadis and a greater peril for the West.” (This may sound preposterous to the uninitiated, but anyone who thinks Landes is overreacting needs to take a close look at events at Columbia University, where one lawyer reports activists are making open calls for genocide.)

An hour or so after my interview with Berkinsky, I stood outside Harvard Yard, which was closed to anyone who did not have Harvard ID. I was almost relieved at not having to listen to pro-Hamas campers complain about the sprinklers going off at four in the morning; I would have had a tough time stifling my laughter. I almost broke out in laughter when I came across a young man standing near the Harvard Square train stop carrying a sign complaining that Harvard trustees closed access to Harvard Yard because “they don’t want the public to see peaceful protests.”

“Did they really turn on the sprinklers?” I asked with faux incredulousness.

“Yes, at 4 am in the morning. It was 31 degrees outside,” he said. (Later I learned that the sprinklers that inundated the students were operating according to a pre-arranged schedule.)

When I got to Johnston Gate, I saw a man who appeared to be in his late sixties handing out pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-American buttons to passersby. Standing to the right of the gate, he said he appreciated but did not need donations for the buttons. When one passerby generously gave him several one-dollar bills in exchange for a button, the man said don’t give too much, because at some point, he’d have to start declaring the income on his taxes, and if he did that, he’d end up paying to support U.S. wars overseas. He and the passerby laughed.

Joyce E. Kim, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson, interviewed Button Man. When she saw my Nikon, she asked me if I were a journalist and if I would be willing to speak with her about Harvard’s decision to close Harvard Yard to outsiders. In the ensuing interview, which did not make it into the story, I told Kim that while I was disappointed at not being able to speak with the protesters, it was well within the rights of the Harvard Corporation to keep people out of the yard during the protest. Their decision was likely motivated by a desire to keep what happened at Columbia from happening at Harvard, which to my mind is a good thing to do. A look of disappointment flashed on Kim’s face as I defended the actions of the corporation. “Screw it,” I thought to myself. “Let’s tell her the truth.”

“These people are not victims,” I said, gesturing toward the encampment. “They are some of the most privileged people on the planet, and here they are siding with a political movement that has committed terrible atrocities in an effort to deprive the Jewish people of their sovereignty. It’s disgusting,” I said. And with that, I walked to a nearby bus stop and headed home.