JERUSALEM, Israel – A U.S. law firm and an Israeli legal group have teamed up to sue two organizations involved in recent college campus protests.
CBN News spoke with one of the attorneys in Jerusalem about their lawsuit’s goals.
Anti-Israel demonstrations began at Columbia University and quickly spread to college campuses coast to coast. Authorities dealing with the unrest found a number of outside groups supported the protests and even encouraged violence.
The lawsuit filed in Virginia accuses American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine of collaborating with Hamas to serve as their propaganda division in the U.S.
Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the Jerusalem-based International Legal Forum told us, “These groups are the primary drivers of what we’re seeing happening across campuses in the United States, which have effectively become a second front for Hamas since October seventh.”
Ostrovsky, who is working in conjunction with the U.S. legal team of Greenberg, Traurig, and the National Jewish Advocacy Group, claims these groups are more than advocacy organizations.
“They are acting and serving in collaboration and coordination with Hamas, essentially as propagandists and collaborators on campus to try and promote the Hamas extremist ideology,” he explained.
According to Ostrovsky, the campus agitators began mobilizing the day after October 7th.
“Hamas issued a call to action. And the very next day, SJP and their affiliates throughout the United States – they answered that call. They answered that directive. They created a toolkit, a manifesto for chapters across the United States, echoing the language, the terminology, the instructions by the Hamas terror group, and propagated that across campuses,” Ostrovsky said.
The lawsuit also seeks compensation for damages. It documents how these groups became the foot soldiers of Hamas on college campuses.
“There are nine plaintiffs, including Americans and Israelis as well,” Ostrovsky explained. “And these plaintiffs include victims of survivors of the Nova massacre that include those that have been displaced. Amounts include family members of those that have been massacred by Hamas.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys hope they can shut these groups down by proving they’ve violated the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act by aiding and abetting a terror group.
“They are the ones fomenting the hatred, the antisemitism, the harassment of Jewish students,” Ostrovsky asserted. “We need to shut them down. And we can do that legally by branding them as a terrorist organization, as a collaborator of the Hamas terror group, and making sure once and for all they cannot be active on campus.”
The Israeli attorney believes that in addition to the military battlefield, Israel must also fight the legal arena.
“Today what we’re seeing is that the State of Israel is being demonized and vilified and delegitimized and painted as a pariah. Where we’re seeing the international law not only being misused but being turned into an act of lawfare against us for the simple act of defending our citizens, trying to bring back our captives,” Ostrovsky stated.
He added, “We need to change this paradigm, and we need to hold not only the perpetrators, the Hamas accountable, but all those that enable support a bit and fund them. And that is how we’re using the law to go after all those who are supporting Hamas and will hold them accountable. And we will do that through the courts.”
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