Noran Elzarka

Overview

Noran Elzarka was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the City University of New York School of Law (CUNY Law). She is a founder of SJP at Drew University (Drew).

Elzarka was an outspoken supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement — in particular, the American Students Association academic boycott of Israel.

Elzarka was also a member of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Drew and a legal intern at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in 2012.

She was also president of the Middle Eastern Student Association at Drew (MESA at Drew) in 2013. MESA claims to be a student-run organization that "works to raise awareness of the current events and daily realities of Middle Eastern culture, politics, and history."

On July 25, 2014, MESA at Drew posted a video entitled "Hug A Terrorist," which obfuscated the history of the 2014 Gaza War and implied — deceptively — that the terrorists Israel fought in that conflict were merely huggable children. On July 24, 2014, MESA’s Facebook page declared “It it [sic.] NOT A WAR between Palestinian and Israelis, but it's an oppression and constant massacres against Palestinians.”

As of December 2018, Elzarka’s LinkedIn page said that she graduated CUNY Law in 2018 and is a Staff Attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services since September 2018.

Elzarka was a legal intern at Brooklyn Defender Services, a student attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, and dean of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project.

Promoting Incitement to Violence and Murder

On October 18, 2015, Elzarka promoted a protest, titled "Rise Up for Palestine," which called for “solidarity with the Palestinian uprising.”

The Facebook post publicizing the protest displayed masked "supporters" holding rocks, in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance”. The rally featured chants calling to “Smash the Settler-Zionist State!” and declaring “There is only one solution; Intifada, Revolution!”

In October 2015, there was an upsurge in violence across Israel incited by Palestinian political and religious leaders. The wave of stabbings, known as the “Knife Intifada,” was characterized by young Palestinians throughout the country stabbing and attempting to stab Israeli civilians. The attacks were incited by Palestinian leaders propagating the libel that Israel intended to desecrate the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Also on October 18, 2015 Elzarka’s organization, SJP Drew, promoted the same rally, on Facebook.

Supporting Terrorists

On July 7, 2016, Elzarka posted on Facebook article from Samidoun, the Palestinian Solidarity Network, that characterized criminals jailed for terrorist in Israel as “political prisoners.”

Elzarka’s post quoted a section of the article that demanded the release of “Palestinian political prisoners, imprisoned for their struggle against racist oppression and settler colonialism… as well as Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims imprisoned for their resistance to racism and oppression.”

Defending a Terrorist

Elzarka is an outspoken defender of terroristmurderer Rasmea Odeh. On May 1, 2015, Elzarka wrote a blog post chastising the Arab American Civil Rights League, after the group decided to honor U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who was involved in Odeh’s prosecution.

Odeh was a key military operative with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization. In 1969, she masterminded a PFLP supermarket bombing that killed two college students. She also attempted to bomb the British consulate in Jerusalem. Odeh later moved to the United States but was deported to Jordan in 2017 for immigration fraud.

Demonizing Police Officers

In a July 8, 2016, Facebook post — published one day after a U.S. serviceman espousing militant black nationalist views assassinated five Dallas police officers — Elzarka suggested that all police officers should be considered guilty of perpetuating violence against the Black community until proven otherwise.

Elzarka wrote: "...making it out to be about individual cops presents this idea that each murder and violence done against Black people is circumstantial and fact-specific."

Elzarka adjudged every police officer accountable for upholding “white supremacy” and went on to intone that judging individual cases of police violence on their particular merits was “[d]erailing the conversation.”

SJP Drew - Promoting Anti-Semitic Professor Steven Salaita

On October 30, 2014, SJP Drew advertised on Facebook a speaking tour of Steven Salaita — mischaracterizing him as someone "who was unlawfully terminated from a teaching position at the University of Illinois because a few donors disagreed with his criticisms of Israeli policy."

In 2014, The University of Illinois withdrew an offer of employment to Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, read: "You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” In 2017, Salaita posted to Facebook: “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not…I will die unapologetic.” In February 2019, Salaita stated that he had become a school bus driver in the Washington, D.C., area.

NYC SJP - Calling for Intifada

On January 10, 2016, NYC SJP shared a video on Facebook of their members at a rally in New York, shouting ""Trump, Obama: You will feel the Intifada!" and "There is only one solution: Intifada, revolution!"

On October 6, 2015, NYC SJP co-sponsored a rally held at the Israeli consulate in New York with a number of Israel-hating organizations including NY4Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). The rally urged support for a "Day of Rage" called for by “Palestinian forces. The same day, NYC SJP posted a “statement of solidarity” with the “Day of Rage” rally featuring a rock-throwing Palestinian, with the caption “Let the Intifada pave the way for People’s war! [sic.]”

The “Days of Rage” in October of 2015 were heralded by Hamas as the advent of a new intifada. They directly resulted in the deaths of Israeli civilians by shootings, stabbings and car rammings.

Protesters at the rally alternately screamed: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,”— the genocidal chant popularized by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and others to call for the replacement of Israel with an Arab Islamic state.

Agitators also yelled:"Long Live the Intifada! Intifada! Intifada!" and “Settler settler go back home, Palestine is ours alone!"

NYC SJP - Denying Israel’s Right to Exist

On October 4, 2015, NYC SJP wrote a statement titled “the BDS Ceiling” that conveyed the organization’s view of BDS’s ultimate purpose — to “confront and defeat Zionism” — with the goal of “the eventual establishment of a single Palestinian national state covering all of historic Palestine.”

The statement concluded that: “SJP… cannot be divorced from a larger, off-campus movement that organizes for the progressive demands of the people, regardless if those demands are related to the university.”

NYC SJP then clarified in its statement on BDS, that the movement “is not only fighting to drop israeli investments, but is fighting to change the content of the Zionist, imperialist education itself, by engaging in a struggle to liberate the university and democratically administer it to serve the oppressed communities from New York City to Palestine.”

On April 26, 2016, NYC SJP tweeted a graphic showing the map of Israel overlaid entirely with the colors of the Palestinian Flag and superimposed with the text “Je Suis One State.” The comment on the graphic read “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free. #1948”

On March 1, 2015, NYC SJP members Atika Al-Bashir, Dan Cione, Nerdeen Kiswani and Leena Widdi were panel speakers in an event titled: “Revitalizing the One-State Solution.”

NYC SJP - Spreading Blood Libels, Exploiting Feminism, Glorifying Terror

On March 5, 2016, NYC SJP shared an event and blog post on Facebook to "commemorate International Working Women’s Day as an inseparable aspect of the fight for Palestinian liberation."

NYC SJP’s blog post announcing the event spread the blood libels that "Israel is a state that was built on the murder and rape of Palestinian women" and that “the state forces women to give birth at checkpoints, where more than half of the babies died as a result.”

The event description, excerpted from the blog post, slammed Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for "colonizing Palestinian land through zionist Ideology", and praised International hijacker Leila Khaled for “committing her life to be a freedom fighter in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”

Khaled is a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and participated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and El Al Flight 219 in 1970. As of 2017, Khaled was a member of PFLP's Political Bureau.

Khaled has said that the second intifada failed because it was not violent enough, advocated for the use of children in terror activities and compared Zionists to Nazis.

The PFLP claimed credit for the 2014 Har Nof Massacre where six people were murdered during morning prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue. The PFLP also claimed credit for the 2001 assassination of the Israeli tourism minister.

NYC SJP’s blog post went on to praise PFLP member Khalida Jarrar.

Khalida Jarrar is a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization. She has reportedly been the head of the PFLP in the West Bank since 2016. In 2015, an Israeli military court sentenced Jarrar to 15 months in prison for calling to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Israel arrested Jarrar again in 2017 “on suspicion of involvement with terrorist activities and violent public disturbances.” In 2019, she was arrested by Israel with 50 other PFLP operatives following a deadly 2018 bombing attack.

The blog post’s promotion of female terrorists also featured praise for terrorist-murderer Rasmea Odeh, and mischaracterized Odeh’s federal conviction for lying on her immigration application as part of a "concentrated state effort to suppress the support she has been extending the Arab population of Chicago."

The blog post concluded “Smash the Patriarchy! Smash the Settler Zionist State! Free Palestine, and Free Women EVERYWHERE!"

SJP

SJP is a student organization engaged in anti-Israel activity on North American college and university campuses.

The first chapter of SJP was founded in 2001 at the University of California at Berkeley by Professor Hatem Bazian. Bazian has spread classic anti-Semitism, reportedly promoted religious anti-Semitism and defended the Hamas terror group. In 2004, Bazian called for “intifada” in America.

SJP organizes anti-Israel campaigns, including running annual Israel Apartheid Weeks, often in collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Muslim Students Association (MSA) campus chapters.

SJP has been a major force in pushing the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses. Chapters have initiated dozens of BDS resolutions in student governments, which have been proposed on or around Jewish holidays, a time when many Jewish students are off-campus.

SJP activists have reportedly physically assaulted, intimidated and harassed Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israel campus events and demonized pro-Israel campus organizations.

Chapters have often endorsed and campaigned for numerous terrorists and whitewashed terrorism.

BDS

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.

MSA

The MSA was established by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in January 1963 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with the goal of "spreading Islam as students in North America." A 2004 FBI investigation uncovered an internal Muslim Brotherhood document in which a brotherhood leader identified the MSA as "one of our organizations."

The MSA reportedly has “nearly 600 chapters” located in the United States and Canada, and is “the most visible and influential Islamic student organization in North America,” boasting conferences, special events, publications, websites and other activities.

The organization includes a number of previous chapter presidents with explicit links to terrorist groups. Included are al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (Colorado State University), Somali al-Shabaab militant leader Omar Shafik Hammami (University of South Alabama) and Pakistani Taliban recruiter Ramy Zamzam of the MSA's Washington, D.C. council.

CAIR

CAIR describes itself as a “grassroots civil rights and advocacy group” and “America's largest Muslim civil liberties organization, with regional offices nationwide.” Its official mission is “enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.”

CAIR reportedly has “significant ties” to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as Hamas. A number of former CAIR employees have been convicted on fraud and terrorism-related charges that resulted monetary fines, jail terms and, sometimes, deportation.

CAIR was founded in 1994 and opened its first office in Washington, DC, with the help of a $5,000 donation from the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity founded by Mousa Abu Marzook.

Marzook, who was listed as a "Specially Designated Terrorist" by the U.S. Treasury Department in 1995, is reportedly a senior member of Hamas.

In May 2007, CAIR was listed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a U.S.-filed action against the HLF for providing funds to Hamas.

CAIR was also listed as a terrorist entity by the United Arab Emirates, in 2014.