Gaza protests continue same revolutionary ‘omni-cause’ given life by Black Lives Matter

James “Fergie” Chambers is in a Spanish jail fighting the threat of extradition to America. The violent movement he fueled, however, is alive and kicking.Sealed U.S. documents accuse the Marxist Muslim convert of funding Hamas and helping the activist group Palestine Action U.S. with a 2023 riot in New Hampshire, defense lawyers and Spanish officials told the press earlier this year. Chambers cofounded Palestine Action’s American branch after its first branch in the United Kingdom made a name for itself attacking defense infrastructure. Palestine Action supporters continue to recruit rioters and take credit for violence worldwide — most recently for ransacking a Manhattan bank on Oct. 19 — despite the United States designating the group a terrorist organization in August.Chambers’s money is at the forefront of other pro-Palestinian organizing that has persisted on American streets and college campuses for three years since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. He boasted in archived social media posts about financially supporting key players such as Students for Justice in Palestine, a group repeatedly suspended by schools for various disruptions. Chambers himself is now accused of riot, conspiracy to riot, and money laundering offenses, defense attorney Aitor Martínez Jiménez told the Washington Examiner. The millionaire activist previously rode the wave of another tumultuous political moment: Black Lives Matter riots that brought around 30 deaths, thousands of reported injuries to law enforcement, and more than $1 billion in estimated property damage in 2020. Chambers was in a crowd clashing with New York officers in June 2020 as they made arrests for curfew violations, a response that led to a class-action lawsuit settlement, according to Saporta Report.Individual Americans often join marches against police conduct or Israel for a variety of reasons and remain peaceful. But to radicals like Chambers, who proclaimed “death to America” in a 2023 interview, the struggles against law enforcement and U.S.-funded Israeli “genocide” are part of the same revolt against an oppressive America. Other leftist organizations and figures also transitioned seamlessly from 2020 BLM protests to the post-Oct. 7 uprising and occasionally crossed paths, a Washington Examiner investigation found. The activities they support have frequently put them or others in courtrooms and jails, leading critics to argue that the disorder they create is, in fact, their goal.Volunteers carry brooms after participating in a community cleanup effort as they walk by a boarded-up pawnbroker’s store, Tuesday, June 2, 2020, in the Fordham Road area of the Bronx borough of New York. (AP Photo) “America absolutely has a ‘professional rioter’ class,” Sean Durns, director of counter-extremism research at Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. “Organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, Palestine Action, and others are a part of it.”The National Lawyers Guild was at the same 2020 incident as Chambers, with its “legal observers” scrutinizing police conduct on protesters’ behalf, according to the group’s own reports and city officials. The guild complained that nine legal observers were held for about 20 minutes among roughly 100 detainees.The National Lawyers Guild similarly moved resources from BLM to Gaza-related disruptions as political tides shifted. Others fitting that category include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Within Our Lifetime, Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return, Palestine Legal, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, and the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the Washington Examiner found. Each did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did Palestine Action’s global affiliate.“It takes big money, and expansive networks, to equip and fuel what might seem to the disinterested observer like an ‘organic’ protest,” Durns said. “But there’s nothing organic about it. They’re carefully planned, well-funded, and highly organized.”“Both sides are anti-West,” Heritage Foundation national security analyst Mike Gonzalez told the Washington Examiner. The two sets of rowdy demonstrations are an “omni-cause” that stems from “hatred for the Judeo-Christian, capitalist, free, democratic West,” the former State Department official said.Gonzalez coauthored a 2024 paper, later cited in a congressional letter and testimony, that tracked numerous financial and organizational connections between pro-BLM and pro-Gaza groups since 2020. Large liberal nonprofit entities such as the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation and Alliance for Global Justice poured money toward both movements, the research found.To illustrate their point, Gonzalez and Durns both pointed to a quote that the late conservative writer David Horowitz used to describe the far Left: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”The college campus struggle American schools became a breeding ground for unlawful tent encampments and rioting after Oct. 7. For some participants, it was not their first rodeo.The University of Washington chapter of Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return, or SUPER UW, spearheaded a May 2024 encampment at the Seattle campus with other groups, according to reports and SUPER UW’s statements. Protesters remained for three weeks, assaulting or harassing people and vandalizing property with messages such as “kill your local colonizer,” all with no pushback from SUPER UW.Rather than disperse them with police, UW gave several concessions to rioters in a written agreement in exchange for the encampment’s end, including “waiving tuition for at least 20 Gazan students.” The agreement also led to the creation of an academic committee that sought out anti-Israel figures for ideas to expand scholarship on Palestinians, emails obtained by the Daily Caller showed.A year later, SUPER UW openly led a May 2025 takeover of a UW building involving vandalism, arrests, and an outdoor dumpster fire. SUPER UW still operates despite the school clarifying it cannot be a registered student organization due to violations of campus rules.The SUPER chapter currently affiliates itself with the youth wing of the pro-Palestinian group Masar Badil. The U.S. sanctioned Masar Badil in August as an offshoot of the already-designated foreign terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has killed dozens of Americans.SUPER UW also coordinated a “day of rage” protest during the BLM craze against the American and Israeli governments. “We demand the defunding and dismantling of US police alongside the defunding and dismantling of Zionist colonialism and racist Israeli apartheid,” reads a June 2020 SUPER UW post about the event. SUPER UW announced the action “in solidarity with” Samidoun, another entity the Treasury Department later designated as a foreign terrorist front.Students with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment break the doors to the entrance of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University after taking over it on Tuesday, April 30. (Marco Postigo Storel via AP) Among the most broadly condemned Gaza encampments was one at Columbia University in New York. Rioters camped out for two weeks as they harassed and assaulted Jews, occupied and barricaded a building, and refused orders to disperse until police came.Two people reportedly at the encampment previously attended 2020 anti-police actions: Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani and Isra Hirsi, whose mother is Congresswoman Omar.Hirsi later announced she was suspended from Columbia-affiliated Barnard College over her participation, while Kiswani said Columbia University threatened her with arrest if she ever returned to the private campus. Kiswani and her supporters have been arrested multiple times at various Within Our Lifetime demonstrations, the New York Times reported.“Those of us in Gaza Solidarity Encampment will not be intimidated,” Hirsi posted on X in response to her suspension. She demanded the school’s “divestment from companies complicit in genocide, transparency of @Columbia’s investments and FULL amnesty for all students facing repression.”Hirsi described herself as an “organizer” for the unregistered club Columbia University Apartheid Divest. The pro-terrorist club called the Oct. 7 massacre a “crowning achievement” in a November 2024 blog post honoring deceased Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar.“It’s now the time for us to reflect on how we can make ourselves more like him,” Columbia University Apartheid Divest wrote.Two Columbia University Apartheid Divest activists, bemoaning their opposition, coauthored a June 2024 opinion article signaling overlap with the police abolition movement.“The severe repression of the recent encampment protests proves that these struggles are inexorably linked,” they wrote.The foreign-aligned network Aside from Palestinian terrorists, leftists connecting the anti-police and Gaza movements also show sympathy to other U.S. foreign adversaries.The Party for Socialism and Liberation, for example, is deeply tied to a network of activists funded by China-based Marxist donor Neville Roy Singham. The party praised late dictator Mao Zedong in September for making China communist through his bloody revolution and reign. It also celebrated Hamas’s mass slaughter of civilians in October 2023 as “morally and legally legitimate.”It is “no surprise whatsoever” that American Marxists find affinity with Palestinian militants, Gonzalez told the Washington Examiner. “They have a given theory that says, ‘Look, it’s not your fault. It’s systemic. The system is holding you down, and the people that are doing well do not deserve it.'”Four Party for Socialism and Liberation members were also arrested in a 2020 anti-police action, with authorities accusing a crowd of trapping officers inside a Colorado police station. The group demanded that charges be dropped — and got that wish from a court and district attorney.First aid is administered to a demonstrator at a protest near the Capitol during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit on Wednesday, July 24, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo) The socialist group later helped organize a 2024 anti-Israel rally that led to chaos at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. The party joined in praising those among the mob after they vandalized federal property and clashed with police. Rioters also pulled down an American flag at the station, burned it, and replaced it with a Palestinian one.Party for Socialism and Liberation founding member Eugene Puryear, who spoke at the D.C. rally, has organized BLM-focused activism in the district since at least 2014 and was on the ground filming in support of Minneapolis protesters in 2020.“The far left has become increasingly good at co-opting moments of outrage and fitting them into their omni-cause,” Durns told the Washington Examiner.“Revolutions require constant outrage, manufactured and otherwise,” he said. “Mao, in a way, recognized this and embraced it with his toxic theory of continuous revolution that left China a smoldering ember after the Cultural Revolution. Constant chaos and outrage feeds the anger that they need to keep the revolution — and that is precisely what some of these individuals and groups want — going.”The legal defense army The Left developed a legal advocacy network to support street agitators well before 2020.The National Lawyers Guild boasted of giving attorney referrals and representation to around 20,000 arrestees from George Floyd demonstrations in 2020. Meanwhile, Palestine Legal provided a page promoting the National Lawyers Guild and solicited funds for detained protesters.City University of New York’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project, or CLEAR, published legal guides for BLM advocates on avoiding law enforcement scrutiny in 2020. “Cease your interactions with anyone you suspect ofbeing an informant, undercover agent or other infiltrator,” one CLEAR guide reads.CLEAR is also representing Palestinian man Mahmoud Khalil as the Trump administration tries to deport him in part for his role in the Columbia University encampment. Khalil openly acted as a spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest to give the school its political demands during the unrest.Legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild look on Sunday, June 28, 2020, in Seattle, where several streets are blocked off in what has been named the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone. (AP Photo) Under President Donald Trump, federal prosecutions and global terrorism sanctions have made the legal environment far more perilous for would-be revolutionaries. His administration now prioritizes targeting alleged crimes tied to leftist “extremism” based on a presidential national security memo dubbed “NSPM-7.”The crackdown prompted alarm among radicals as signs increasingly showed the government treating political violence as a product of organized networks, not just individual defendants. Leftists are now building an “NSPM-7 Defendants Union” around a “pledge” not to cooperate in any investigation against one another.BLACK POWER MOVEMENT SUCCESSORS USE SHARIA LAW TO RAISE BAIL FUNDSChambers also made his X posts private sometime after gaining prominence as an extremist — but an Islam-themed quote in his bio still lets viewers know his basic mission.“If I’m the Imam of Mecca, and American imperialism is fighting the devil, I’m on the side of the devil,” it says.