Black for Palestine: Meet Rashida Tlaib’s favorite Israel-hating group with terror ties

Black for Palestine is “an emerging national network of black activists committed to supporting the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, peace and self-determination” that boasts famous left-wing and anti-Israel activists, including professor Angela Davis, ex-Black Lives Matter head honcho Patrisse Cullors, and 2024 presidential candidate Cornel West.

It also happens to count its co-founder as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), a “Squad” member who was censured last week by her House colleagues for “promoting false narratives” in connection to the recent Hamas terror attacks. Now, the loosely organized Detroit-based coalition, which launched in 2015 and has pledged “solidarity” with terrorists, is mobilizing Gaza-allied protesters across the United States to rally against Israel, where more than 1,400 innocent people have been killed since Oct. 7, flyers and social media posts show.

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Tlaib’s direct connection to B4P could become a larger talking point for Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats, who have slammed the Michigan Democrat for spreading disinformation about the Middle East conflict. The congresswoman has come under particular scrutiny for championing the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which refers to the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea and is used by pro-Palestinian activists to call for the elimination of Israel. She’s also parroted propaganda from Hamas — falsely alleging Israel “bombed” the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza.

“Bigots like Rep. Rashida Tlaib do everything in their power to sow division throughout society in an attempt to advance their antisemitic agenda, and it is vitally important that Americans of all backgrounds condemn such shameful displays of hate,” Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY), who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, told the Washington Examiner.

B4P organized a statement recently calling for a ceasefire in the war and end to U.S. aid to Israel. The statement does not include the words “Hamas” or “terrorists” and calls on “ending the U.S. obstruction of Palestinian protections against genocide under international law.” It has also been signed by over 5,000 people, such as Cullors, who resigned from the BLM Global Network Foundation in 2021 amid financial scrutiny, Davis, a “critical race theory” scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Feminist Studies Department, retired NFL star Michael Bennett, and Marc Lamont Hill, a left-wing commentator and professor at New York City’s CUNY Graduate Center who CNN fired in 2018 after he said in a pro-Palestinian speech before the United Nations, “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

In recent weeks, B4P has joined other anti-Israel groups in leading or promoting demonstrations, such as the Nov. 4 “National March on Washington” and the forthcoming global “Shut it Down for Palestine” strike on Friday. One strike leader is the People’s Forum, a Chinese Communist Party-allied charity in New York. Another is the Palestinian Youth Movement, which has posted images on social media of protesters celebrating leaders from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group.

But B4P’s social media presence has increased dramatically since the Hamas terror attacks. Before Oct. 30, its last Facebook post, in March 2021, was to advocate for the freeing of American Mumia Abu Jamal, who was convicted for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Moreover, before Oct. 30, B4P’s last post on X, formerly Twitter, was on Sept. 11, 2015.

The 2015 X post was a link to an interview B4P’s other co-founder, Kristian Davis Bailey, former co-president of the Students for Justice in Palestine group at Stanford University, gave to the Pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada. Bailey discussed B4P’s genesis in the interview, pointing out that “Malcolm X was talking about the dangers of Zionism in the 1960s” to illustrate how there is a “rich tradition of black solidarity with international struggles broadly, and specifically with Palestine.”

The B4P leader was arrested in 2015 for blocking the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in California, along with other BLM protesters, and wrote in a 2016 article that he was once detained by Israeli officials for “racial profiling” after trying to enter the West Bank. And what wasn’t mentioned in either article is Bailey’s relationship with Tlaib, who would later note in an August 2017 pro-Palestinian event co-organized by B4P, “Kristian Davis Bailey is here. I know him because he reached out and he helped start the [Black] for Palestine in Detroit. Woo!”

“I’m also really proud of the fact that we started the new chapter called [Black] for Palestine in Detroit,” Tlaib also said at the event. “And you can all find a Facebook page about some of the events that we’re going to be having. We meet primarily in the Cass Commons,” she said, according to footage unearthed by Canary Mission, a watchdog group. Bailey would be in attendance in Congress for Tlaib’s 2019 swearing-in and be captured standing next to Tlaib in the nation’s capital in footage posted on Facebook by Palestine TV.

Since getting off the ground, B4P has “posted online more than 100 times in support of terrorists,” including assassinated PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani, Canary Mission said. B4P has also heaped praise on leaders for the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Party, such as Assata Shakur, who was convicted in 1977 for the first-degree murder of a New Jersey state trooper and fled to Cuba upon escaping from prison.

Shakur was the first ever woman to make the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list.

Jose Luis Magana/AP

B4P has also engaged in pro-Palestinian activism alongside Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an Israeli-designated terror group that has shared staffers with the PFLP, according to multiple Washington Examiner reports. Samidoun’s coalition includes a French group called Collectif Palestine Vaincra that says on its website it partners with the PFLP, a relationship that has resulted in watchdog groups raising legal concerns since Samidoun is housed under a U.S. charity called Alliance for Global Justice.

Israel’s government has identified Samidoun activists Khaled Barakat, Mustapha Awad, and Mohammed Khatib as members of the PFLP, which has been a U.S.-designated terror group since 1997. Khatib, for instance, was cited as a PFLP spokesman in a July 2016 article by the Palestinian Information Center, a Gaza-based website publishing pro-Hamas propaganda.

Still, these terror connections haven’t deterred Bailey, who, just weeks after the July 2016 PIC article was published, rallied in Brussels, Belgium, with Barakat and Khatib in support of “Black/Palestinian Solidarity and Struggles for Liberation,” according to a Facebook post. In September 2016, B4P posted an interview on Facebook with Khatib in which he discussed “the need to go beyond solidarity for a unified struggle against our common oppressors around the world,” B4P said.

“Founding an organization calling for America’s ‘defeat’ and to wipe Israel off the face of the earth will get you Hakeem Jeffries’s commitment to spend campaign cash on your behalf,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Will Reinart, referring to the Democratic House minority leader from New York, told the Washington Examiner.

“That’s the dangerous extremism of House Democrats,” he added.

Bailey has also disclosed being a “friend” of Kifah Quzmar, a previously arrested student activist for the Progressive Democratic Student Pole at the West Bank-based Birzeit University.

The group is affiliated with the PFLP and, late last year, marched in honor of the terrorist group’s 55th anniversary, chanting, “Oh, PFLP member, mobilize. Blow up the settler’s head!” the Middle East Media Research Institute reported.

Meanwhile, on Friday, B4P co-released a “Black and Palestinian Solidarity Toolkit” with several other groups, including the ex-Alliance for Global Justice project Movement for Black Lives. AFGJ has seen eight combined payment processors and donors jump ship following a Washington Examiner investigation on its terror ties.

The toolkit, totaling 15 pages, is intended to inform pro-Palestinian peoeple who “have never organized a protest before” how they can “join us at this moment,” according to the documents. It also calls for the “targeting” of politicians to exert pressure on them to propose anti-Israel policies.

“While there are many good reasons to be pessimistic about targeting our elected officials, the fact is they do have outsized power at this moment to put an end to the violence we are witnessing in Gaza — and we have power to influence them, drawing on a long history of civil resistance,” the toolkit says. “In moments of crisis, political positions that once seemed unthinkable can rapidly become viable, aided by organizing and protest.”

On the cover page of the toolkit, in a sea of various faces, are cutouts of Angela Davis, Marc Lamont Hill, and Malcolm X.

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They are joined on the cover by the PFLP’s late Ghassan Kanafani, and Rasmea Odeh, a convicted PFLP terrorist who the U.S. government deported to Jordan in 2017 for her involvement in a deadly 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing.

Tlaib and B4P did not reply to requests for comment.