NY Attorney General Criminalizes Opposing Islamic Terrorism

Attorney General Letita James shuts down Jewish group for fighting back.

After two years of Hamas supporters assaulting NYPD officers and Jewish community members, besieging synagogues, blocking streets, vandalizing buildings and making death threats, New York Attorney General Letitia James finally took action. Against Jews.

In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.

Shortly after nearly all New York politicians condemned Hamas supporters showing up outside a Jewish school to chant, “we support Hamas”, a fairly straightforward case of bias intimidation, Attorney General James instead decided to announce action against a Jewish protest group rather than against the Islamic and Antifa groups whom it had been defending against.

Many of the ‘charges’ laid out by AG James are forms of speech that may be derogatory or abrasive towards Islam, Muslims or Islamic terrorists, but are not in any way illegal.

For example, the filing by AG James complains that “Betar members repeatedly referred to keffiyehs” (the pro-terrorist scarves worn by some Muslims and radical leftist supporters of terrorism) “as ‘rape rags’ in public and private”, that some member of the group stated “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’” and that the group tweeted that it “hate(s) Gazans”.

Under the First Amendment, Betar members are entitled to say these things whether or not anyone finds them deplorable. AG James does not allege that Betar members stood outside a mosque and shouted these things. Indeed her filing reveals that some of these comments came from private ‘members only’ chats on Whatsapp that were spied on by Islamists and Antifa.

Attorney General Letita James is criminalizing private speech in a private forum. That reflects the weakness of her case against Betar which is long on rhetoric and short on actual crimes.

The preponderance of the filing by the attorney general’s office and its ‘hate crimes’ division is dedicated to the rhetoric of Betar or members of the group. It’s only able to document three types of illegal activities, these are stealing and burning ‘Palestinian’ flags, pushing beepers at terrorist supporters, and fighting back against pro-Hamas mobs attacking synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods. James does not cite any Betar members arrested for these alleged acts.

While stealing and destroying flags, no matter how hateful, is illegal, anti-Israel rioters and terrorist supporters have routinely stolen and destroyed Israeli flags without any sanctions being imposed against the larger group. For example, James Carlson, a lawyer for some of those participating in the pro-terrorist encampment at Columbia, was charged with grabbing an Israeli flag from a student and setting it on fire, but the movement and organization were not charged.

Tarek Bazrouk, a Muslim activist in the vicinity of the Columbia pro-terrorist protests, was charged with federal hate crimes after he assaulted several Jewish people, and punched a man in the stomach during an incident where he stole an Israeli flag. He was defended by many of the groups involved in the riots including Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Within Our Lifetime, and Columbia University Apartheid.

Attorney General Letita James has taken no action against any of them.

In D.C., a Jewish woman wearing an Israeli flag like a cape was choked by a Muslim protester during a Code Pink rally. Code Pink itself, despite a long history of illegal activities, was not sanctioned. Unless there’s an actual assault, such as in the above cases, the perpetrators are rarely charged for seizing and burning American or Israeli flags at their hate rallies.

People on the street pushing objects at those who don’t want them is a New York City tradition. To the extent that they physically made contact with anyone by pushing beepers into their hands or pockets, this may potentially be assault, but this takes place within the context of a city where a Jewish man was kicked, punched, and beaten with a metal object while merely walking in the vicinity of an anti-Israel rally and most of the Muslim perpetrators walked away with probation.

No one was injured by the beepers.

Finally, the New York Attorney General’s office documents claims that Betar “incited” and “promoted” violence at what it misleadingly describes as “pro-Palestinian protests”. What James leaves out is that many of these “protests” invariably involved attacks on Jewish neighborhoods and synagogues. One of the assaults that James accuses a nameless Betar member of actually occurred outside a prominent Brooklyn synagogue besieged by a pro-Hamas mob.

Nowhere in the document does James claim that Betar came to a mosque or a Muslim area. Instead, she does the equivalent of accusing members of a black church of fighting back against a Klan rally outside their doors. Such charges would never be brought except in this case.

Even there Attorney General James focuses on Betar’s social media rhetoric because she lacks incidents of serious acts of violence. So she has to resort to documenting a “shoving” incident and forcing “a beeper into the academic’ s front pocket against his will.” She dubiously claims that at one event where Pal-Awda called to “flood Borough Park”, an echo of the Hamas name for Oct 7, “Betar members attacked protesters and at least one activist was stabbed.”

No such stabbing is documented in a single news story about the pro-terrorist riot. The wording from a legal document filed by the state’s top prosecutor is even stranger in that it claims that “at least one activist was stabbed.” Doesn’t the AG’s office know how many stabbings took place?

Had a pro-Israel activist stabbed a Hamas supporter, that would have been a major news story. And certainly the attorney general’s office would be able to cite specifics, not “at least one”.

There were certainly scuffles involving Betar, yet the document fails to list a single arrest, a single criminal charge and any actual evidence or specifics about prosecutions.

Attorney General Letita James relies heavily on hollow social media rhetoric from Betar because it’s not grounded in anything. For example, “Betar publicly claimed to have used facial recognition software to identify protesters and to have placed their names on lists for deportation in retaliation for their political speech. But Betar informed OAG not only that it had never used any facial recognition software but that it had also never made such lists.”

Not only is there nothing illegal about identifying terrorist supporters and passing their names on to federal law enforcement (just the opposite, even if James opposes it for political reasons) but it never even happened. Most of Betar’s rhetoric is similarly social media online noise, not acts.

Many pro-Israel activists and groups in the New York area deplore Betar’s tactics, but it doesn’t change the fact that the illegal and unconstitutional effort by Attorney General Letita James to shut the group down is a violation of the First Amendment and creates troubling precedents by the Mamdani ally. Betar is a blueprint by Mamdani-allied radicals like James to criminalize any kind of Jewish activism and criticism of Islamic terrorism and violence by Mamdani’s allies.

Betar was ‘low hanging fruit’, but if it can be shut down for a list of charges that includes assembling lists of terrorist radicals and criticising Islam, then anyone can be shut down.

And that is the point.

Attorney General Letita James has a particularly egregious history of political prosecutions that include targeting the NRA, VDARE, an anti-immigration group allegedly targeted for ‘self-dealing’ in a case involving a castle in West Virginia, but in reality targeted for its political speech, as the fact that the prosecution was led by the ‘Civil Rights Unit’ revealed, and now Betar, on the shoddiest of legal grounds and for the most transparently obvious political motives.

James, who is facing several federal investigations, has campaigned on shutting down political opponents like the NRA and now the Jewish community, as part of her plans to run for governor. Her efforts to criminalize any opposition to Islamic violence and terror are a violation of the First Amendment. Only federal intervention can restore civil rights for Jews and everyone else in New York.