The Trump administration is preparing to block visas for Palestinian terrorists slated to appear later this month at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Michigan, which will feature a number of radical Palestinian activists, a senior State Department official told the Washington Free Beacon.
“Given the public invite lists seem to include a number of terrorist sympathizers, we are going through and ensuring all international speakers slated to attend the conference are being placed on a ‘look out’ status for visa applications, so we are alerted if a request is submitted and can ensure they are appropriately processed,” the senior official told the Free Beacon.
While the official would not identify which of the nearly 40 speakers would be assigned special “look out” status, some are Palestinians who have spent years behind bars in Israel for conspiring to kill Jews.
Hussam Shaheen spent 27 years in prison for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was released from prison just months ago, on Feb. 1, in a deal that exchanged Israeli hostages for Palestinian terrorists. Omar Assaf, a former member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, is also slated to appear, along with Lama Ghosheh, a Palestinian journalist from East Jerusalem. Assaf spent eight years in jail for his role in the DFLP terror group—a member group of the Palestine Liberation Organization—and Ghosheh received a three-year sentence from an Israeli court in 2023 for inciting violence and praising terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.
Also slated to speak at the conference is Gaza-based poet Mosab Abu Toha, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his writings on the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Soon after, his extremist anti-Israel social media posts came to light.
“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Abu Toha wrote on Facebook. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage.'”
Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson, who served on the jury for a different Pulitzer Prize, raised Abu Toha’s rhetoric with the awarding organization—which includes acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman as a board member—and the Pulitzer board falsely accused her of violating a confidentiality agreement instead of explaining whether it knew of Abu Toha’s social media activity.
Several U.S.-based speakers have deep ties to the global anti-Israel movement and protests on American college campuses. They include Hatem Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley professor who has served as a leading force in the Students for Justice in Palestine movement, which has engaged in violent and anti-Semitic campus protests. Bazian claimed shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree that Israel “is a creation of Western powers and they collectively fund and support the destruction that have [sic] befallen Palestine and its people.”
Infamous anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, who has compared Zionism to “white supremacy in America” and publicly supported terrorism, will deliver remarks. Attendees will also hear from anti-Israel campus activist Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian national whose leadership role in the violent protests at Columbia University earned him detention from the Trump administration until a federal judge ordered his release in June of this year.
“With Gaza as our guide, people from across North America will come together for a weekend to continue building and strengthening the movement for Palestinian liberation in North America,” an advertisement for the conference—scheduled to run from Aug. 29 to 31—states.
A number of organizations at the forefront of the pro-Hamas movement on college campuses have signed on as sponsors, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Al-Awda: the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, among others.
Plenary sessions will center on efforts to implement a global embargo on weapons sales to Israel and address “Zionism, imperialism, and the shifting battlefield,” according to the organization’s website.
“By outlining the trajectory and agendas driving two years of Zionist and US-led imperialist genocide in Gaza and agression [sic] on the region, panelists will discuss the immediate challenges and confrontations the region is facing and offer insights into what might lie ahead,” a description for the latter session states.
The Israel arms embargo panel, meanwhile, will bring “together speakers from across different geographies to discuss the momentum behind grassroots arms embargo campaigns; the strategic role of labor, civil society and state forces; and most importantly, how we can enact a people’s arms embargo.”
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