Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon reports a disturbing development in the nation’s largest city.
Pro-Hamas activists Abdullah Akl and Mohammad Badawy have called to “strike Tel Aviv” and destroy “the illegitimate Zionist occupiers and all of their supporters.” Now they’re launching an initiative to form student chapters in dozens of New York City public high schools.
Akl, an advocacy director with the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center in Brooklyn, recently announced the group’s “MAS in Schools” initiative, which aims to create prayer spaces and host Islamic events at 50 New York City high schools. The group will partner “for the first time ever” with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the radical organization that earlier this month called for “death to all collaborators” of Israel, to do so.
Akl is well known as a pro-Hamas activist in New York City, having led a chant at a local rally last year calling on Hamas to “strike Tel Aviv.” At a rally this month, he said “we will show up stronger than we did the first October 7th.” Akl is an organizer at Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a group so radical that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) denounced it for “atrocious anti-Semitism” over its protest last year at a remembrance exhibit for the victims of Oct. 7.
Mohammad Badawy, the MAS Youth Center’s resident scholar, is no less extreme. At an event in April, he prayed for the “destruction of the illegitimate Zionist occupiers and all of their supporters” and encouraged “all those resisting against them by any means necessary.” Quds News Network cofounder Raja Abdulhaq, meanwhile, is a frequent speaker at MAS Youth Center events, including a “Resisting Capitalism” seminar last month. He has called the actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups an “authentic indigenous response to a violent, colonial project.”
