The Associated Press wrote a story about David Friedman, President Trump’s nominee for Ambassador to Israel, featuring an image of a man holding a Palestinian flag behind him. AP labeled him as a simple “protestor.” What it did not know was that the individual behind it is one of the most sinister individuals in the United States of America.
His name is Taher Herzallah. He has a long record of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and pro-Hamas activity. He first earned recognition for being a part of the infamous “Irvine 11,” a moniker describing the 11 students at University of California, Irvine who got arrested for disrupting a speech by then Israeli ambassador and now Member of the Knesset Michael Oren. He was charged with disrupting a peaceful assembly.
After graduating from UC Irvine, Herzallah started working for an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) at first as a National Campus Coordinator. Today, he is the Associate Director of Outreach & Grassroots Organizing. AMP describes itself as “a national education and grassroots-based organization, dedicated to educating the American public about Palestine and its rich cultural, historical and religious heritage.” In his capacity, Herzallah works alongside student-run chapters of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to organize viciously anti-Israel activities across the United States, including mock checkpoints, apartheid walls, and anti-Semitic speakers.
AMP’s board of directors consists of a handful of members who were part of the now-defunct “Palestine Committee,” a group that the Investigative Project on Terrorism said was “created by the Muslim Brotherhood to advance Hamas’ agenda politically and financially in the United States.” The Palestine Committee was connected to the Holy Land Foundation, a charity that the Justice Department dismantled and exposed as a financier to Hamas. The committee also contained representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that represents itself as a civil rights group for the American Muslim community.
Given Herzallah’s employment with an organization connected to Hamas financiers and terrorist supporters, it makes sense that Herzallah has been quoted saying the following:
Israelis have to be bombed, they are a threat to the legitimacy of Palestine, and it is wrong to maintain the State of Israel. It is an illegitimate creation born from colonialism and racism.
He has also expressed support for creating an Islamic state and for radical Islamic terrorism at AMP’s National Conference in 2014:
What if, as Muslims we wanted to establish an Islamic State? What if as Muslims we wanted to use violent means to resist occupation? Is that wrong?
He has also advocated for destroying Israel and replacing it with a Judenrein “Palestine”:
Many of us do not limit our discourse on a future Palestine based on the 1967 lines. Many of us are still talking about to this day, I fully free Palestine. A free historic Palestine.
This is an excellent representation of the kinds of individuals protesting the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Herzallah does not want to see the existence of a Jewish state alongside a future Palestinian state like J Street claims to advocate for. He does not want to see the Jewish people live in their ancestral homeland according to international law. Herzallah is a terrorist apologist bankrolled by organizations run by former Hamas financiers teaching college students to hate Israel, the Jewish people, and to harass them on college campuses.
The Associated Press may see Herzallah as a simple “protestor”; Americans should see him as the deplorable human being working to undermine the values that the United States holds dear in the name of “social justice.”