Nothing Spontaneous About Anti-Israel Protests

Since the beginning of the pro-Hamas protests, which began as their October 7, 2023 atrocities in Israel were still unfolding, the media has been driving the notion that these are spontaneous, grassroots protests. According to a new explosive report by the acclaimed international organization NGO Monitor: Dream on. Pictured: Anti-Israel protesters in London on January 13, 2024. (Photo by Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

Since the beginning of the pro-Hamas protests, which began as their October 7, 2023 atrocities in Israel were still unfolding, the media has been driving the notion that these are spontaneous, grassroots protests. According to a new explosive report by the acclaimed international organization NGO Monitor: Dream on.

"As thousands of Hamas invaders murdered, raped and kidnapped men, women and children across southern Israel on 7 October 2023, mass anti-Israel demonstrations began appearing on the streets of London, New York and other Western cities. Despite their being thousands of miles apart and spread across the globe, marchers carried the same professionally printed signs and shouted the same slogans and chants....

"The protests have been widely portrayed in the media as grassroots and spontaneous. In reality, they are professionally organised and are part of a well-funded, coordinated global advocacy network."

Much of the world nevertheless bought into this highly orchestrated show. Who is behind it? A dizzying number of actors, all invested in fatally destabilizing the West, destroying Israel and denigrating Jews. According to NGO Monitor:

"Today's anti-Western influence networks are global, coordinated, top-down, well-funded and sanitised. Viewed graphically, they resemble a series of concentric circles. At their centre sit hostile state actors (Iran, China, Russia, Qatar), terrorist organisations (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda), and extremist religious-political movements (Muslim Brotherhood). Around them operate charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organisations that can provide legitimacy, amplify propaganda and serve as vectors of transmission for extremist agendas to society more broadly. Some of these groups are directly funded by hostile actors, or in turn, divert publicly raised donations back to them."

In its investigative report, NGO Monitor focuses on how this industry of organized hatred operates in the UK "mapping... 40 major anti-Israel protests... and campaigns in the United Kingdom between October 2023 and May 2026, and the organisations and individuals identified as recurring actors within protest coordination, advocacy, funding and related activity."

So, what did NGO Monitor find?

"Those responsible for the UK demonstrations are a core group of professionally organised NGOs, some even household names in the UK, which are part of a sophisticated, internationally connected and funded ecosystem. This ecosystem, while self-proclaiming the noble aims of peace, human rights and humanitarianism, also launders extremist narratives into UK mainstream politics, media, academia and public life."

In the UK, the same six organizations – Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Palestinian Forum in Britain, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – were involved in 32 out of the 40 protests mapped by NGO Monitor.

At least four of those organizations – the Muslim Association of Britain, the Palestinian Forum for Britain, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Friends of al-Aqsa (FOA) – have links to Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, a fact that has been known since at least October 2023.

"Members of the FOA leadership have longstanding overlap with figures associated with Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks in the UK. FOA founder Ismail Patel has participated in events alongside Muslim Brotherhood-linked figures and has been pictured with Ismail Haniyeh, the late political leader of Hamas.... In 2009, Patel delivered a speech in which he rejected the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organisation..."

Supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK, could lead to up to 14 years in prison. It's been three years of pro-Hamas agitation, and yet those protests continue to be allowed. So much for equality before the law.

Several other British organizations and institutions are heavily involved in the protest ecosystem, among them: Amnesty International, Palestinian Youth Movement, Islamic Human Rights Commission, CAGE International, Oxfam GB, University College London, Students for Justice in Palestine, Islamic Relief, CODEPINK, and Doctors Without Borders:

"Many receiveforeign funding, and somesolicit financial support via cryptocurrency. Several are directly involved in targeting youth to groom them in antiIsrael activism. Some haveconnectionsto extremist actors or proscribed terrorist organisations, and areinvolved in violencein the UK."

Palestinian Youth Movement Britain (PYM) -- to mention one example -- is an offshoot of its main organization which primarily operates in the US and Canada, where it has "established a significant professional activist and campus-based infrastructure."

"PYM has 'close ties with the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine] and its affiliates, as well as with the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] organisation linked to Hamas' . In 2019, a French court decision citing intelligence reporting similarly described PYM as 'affiliated with' the PFLP'..."

Amnesty International -- another example -- "has played an increasingly active role in protests, activist capacity-building and legal initiatives targeting UK government policy toward Israel," notes NGO Monitor, adding that Amnesty has been brainwashing 16–24-year-olds, effectively training them, since 2019, to become radical activists:

"It is a 'fully funded training course for 16- to 24-year-olds, which helps young people develop their campaigning skills .... [regarding] the Occupied Palestinian Territory [the programme] trained hundreds of young people in protest rights, media engagement and campaign strategy'. In reporting to the Charity Commission, Amnesty stated that Rise Up 'supported activists who were disciplined by their universities for legitimate campaigning. This included connecting some students who had been arrested with legal support.'"

In 2024, Amnesty boasted about the "impact" of its Rise Up campaigns:

"Our student-led campaigns secured major wins: Queen's University Belfast has agreed to divest from companies operating in the illegal Israeli settlements, and several student unions have committed to stock Palestinian produce in their stores. Following our intervention, two universities have also dropped disciplinary action against student activists."

"The anti-Israel protests that exploded across the Western world on October 7 are presented as grassroots appeals for Palestinian human rights," said NGO Monitor's legal advisor, Anne Herzberg, to Britain's House of Lords.

"In reality, and as our new report documents, they are organized by a globally connected and financed network of NGOs aimed at promoting IRGC propaganda, Islamist and anti-Western narratives, and Israel eliminationism. Many of these groups are overtly linked to Hamas and other terrorist actors. It is time to see these demonstrations as a significant destabilizing threat and for governments to investigate these networks."

For the past nearly three years, Jews everywhere have borne the brunt of the deep polarization and violence brought by these protests celebrating Hamas.

The NGO Monitor report concluded:

"As the protests and associated campaigns continue, and society becomes more polarised, British Jews are facing rising intimidation, exclusion, threats, stabbings, shootings and arson attacks. Communities live with fear, while the response too often appears to be more security funding, barriers and police protection, rather than addressing the root causes of this hate and violence."

The exceptional report, however, leaves the reader with more troubling questions than it answers: Why has such organized, unbridled hatred of one minority group – the Jews – and the world's only Jewish state been allowed to fester and wreak its destabilizing and polarizing damage on Western societies? Why are governments across the West – whose intelligence services cannot possibly plead ignorance about what and who are behind these protests – not protecting their citizens instead of letting these criminal elements import anarchy? Why is the British government arresting more than 30 British citizens every day, including mothers and pensioners, for mostly harmless social media posts, while activists with links to terrorist groups working against those very societies are left free to unleash their worst?

What interests, in short, are British authorities pursuing when they continue to allow, for years. an international cohort of terror supporters to operate freely on British soil?