The indictments brought in the Eastern District of Michigan last week against eight 20-somethings deeply involved in anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus pull back the curtain on what that movement is really about.
Announcing the indictments, FBI director Kash Patel described a “campaign of violent, criminal acts” in which the Michigan eight engaged in a coordinated campaign of intimidation against university leaders—the president, the provost, the chief investment officer, members of the board of regents, and university police officers, plus “anyone they believed supported” the State of Israel—after the school shut down their illegal “solidarity encampment.”
They threw noxious chemicals through the windows of victims’ homes, taped demand letters to their doors, defaced the Jewish Federation of Detroit on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, and spray-painted private homes with messages like “Intifada” and “Free Palestine.”
Then they tried to intimidate a witness, identified in the indictment only as a University of Michigan student the defendants believed was cooperating with federal authorities. Defendants Paige Feyock, a Wellesley graduate and University of Michigan medical researcher, and Zainab Hakim, a 2024 University of Michigan graduate who was then hired by the university for a full-time job in the Center for South Asian Studies, hatched a plan to confront the witness. In mid-July 2024 Feyock aired her concerns about a “snitch” who was “going to send us to federal prison.” In early August, she told her pals she and Hakim planned to get coffee with the witness: “ima strip search [him] … to see if he is wearing a wire. not taking no chances with him.” After the fact, she reported, the victim “knows not to talk.”
The alleged criminality on display in Ann Arbor is hardly an isolated incident. At UCLA, so-called protesters set up a “Jew Exclusion Zone” barring Zionists from a portion of the campus. At Columbia, pampered rich kids stormed and occupied a university building and held two janitors hostage. At Harvard, a pair of graduate students accosted a fellow student walking across campus.
We’re picking up what they’re putting down. The nucleus of the “pro-Palestine” protest movement more closely resembles the violent left-wing movements of the past, from the Weather Underground to the Symbionese Liberation Army and Black Lives Matter, that have used terror, violence, and intimidation in an attempt to achieve their political aims.
The Weather Underground didn’t end U.S. imperialism. The SLA didn’t spark an uprising against capitalism. We are still living through the backlash to BLM and the George Floyd protests.
How will the “pro-Palestine” movement fare? The leading candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, had one of the alleged thugs on his payroll and not a whole lot to say about the indictment except that he blames the Trump DOJ for selective prosecution. One of the Democratic Party’s nominees for University of Michigan regent is a Dearborn attorney, Amir Makled, who has represented anti-Israel protesters on campus and is more or less a proxy for the alleged criminals. The party chose Makled in favor of Jordan Acker, the pro-Israel regent whose law firm, home, and car were vandalized by the Michigan eight.
If the “pro-Palestine” movement goes the way of the Weather Underground, the SLA, and BLM, it will be in spite of the Democratic Party, which is aiding and abetting its intimidation and infiltration of one of the crown jewels of the public university system.
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