The group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) does not shy away from its support for the terrorist organization Hamas. The group's National Campus Coordinator, Taher Herzallah, recently posted Palestine TV photos of injured Israeli soldiers and a destroyed tank to his personal Facebook page. The caption for both photos read: "The most beautiful site in my eyes." It appears that this post has been removed.
Herzallah proudly lists being part of the 'Irvine 11', a group of students arrested after orchestrating a plan to shut down a speech by then-Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's 2010 speech at UC Irvine, in his biography.
In another recent Facebook comment, Herzallah justified Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians, saying that "in order for them [Israeli society] to feel any compulsion or urge to end the occupation, they need to feel that they are in an abnormal situation. In that regard, Hamas' rockets are effective even though they don't kill anyone."
Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. It imposed a blockade on the territory after rocket fire targeted its civilians, in an attempt to stem the flow of weapons and bomb-making material coming in.
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) was formed in 2006 as a nonprofit organization based in Chicago with chapters around the country. Its message omits any mention of peaceful coexistence with Israel, and routinely includes calls for an end for U.S. aid to the Jewish state. The AMP is a founding member of the new U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, joining the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).
In April, AMP hosted a fundraiser dinner praising Rasmieh Odeh, a women directly responsible for two deaths in an Israeli grocery store bombing. Odeh was indicted in October and charged with naturalization fraud after failing to disclose her arrest and subsequent imprisonment in Israel for her role in the 1969 bombings by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Other event speakers included a Muslim Brotherhood leader in Jordan who led a Hamas-propaganda arm in the United States and a man listed as a member of the Palestine Committee, the Muslim Brotherhood's umbrella organization of US-based Hamas-support groups.
Previous conferences featuring AMP speakers demonstrate the group's radical tendencies with AMP officials repeatedly calling for grassroots efforts to delegitimize Israel in the U.S. and promote Palestinian "resistance."
Click here for more examples of AMP's support for Hamas.