Pro-Hamas activist who spoke at Columbia said ‘long live October 7’

A pro-Hamas activist who spoke at Columbia despite being banned in Germany for supporting terror is a communist from New Jersey who openly supports the October 7 massacre of Israelis. Charlotte Kates, a major figure in the pro-Palestine movement in colleges for over two decades, has been a constant presence at anti-Israel encampment at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The New Jersey native is the international coordinator of Samidoun Prisoners Solidarity Network, a group with ties to the PFLP that is listed in Israel as a terror group and banned in Germany as such. Kates was seen on Friday in Vancouver praising the terrorist attack by Hamas , which left 1,700 Israelis dead and sparked the war in Gaza , where 30,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed.

‘We say today, long live October 7!’ Kates yelled outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, calling the attack a show of ‘beautiful, brave and heroic resistance of the Palestinian people.’ ‘We stand with the Palestinian resistance and their heroic and brave action on October 7,’ she said. ‘Long live October 7.’ Kates went on defending terror groups, adding: ‘It is long past time to delist Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations from Canada’s so-called list of terrorist entities.

‘Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Islamic Jihad is not a terrorist organization. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization.’ She continued: ‘These are resistance fighters. These are our heroes. These are those who are sacrificing so that we can live and speak and struggle and fight. These are the people whose blood is being shed to defend humanity and to defend the world.’

Her husband Khaled Barakat is an alleged senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US government for its links to Hamas and Hezbollah. The group is known for suicide bombings and airline hijackings and its military wing has boasted about having participated in the Hamas attack on Israel. The PFLP has been involved in several suicide bombings and claimed responsibility for a 2014 attack on a Jerusalem synagogue which killed four rabbis and a policeman. Barakat has denied he is linked to the organization.

However he and Samidoun, and by extension Kates, have been banned from Germany over alleged anti-Semitism, due to the ‘celebration of October 7’ by Samidoun members. The couple currently reside in Canada. Kates has been promoting armed resistance of Palestinians from the comfort of North America since her days at Rutgers University in New Jersey, asking people to support terrorism as the path for the freedom of Palestinians. In a New York Times profile published in 2003, the then-Law student describes herself as a communist, claiming she has dreamed since childhood of the ‘utopian vision’ of the Soviet Union.

Kates said she became a paying member of the American Communist Party at the age of 13 and bragged about reading Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and having a poster of Che Guevara in her dorm room. The communist told the Times she came from ‘working class parents, with her mom working as a service representative at a bank and her dad retired from his job driving heavy equipment. Her brother, Benjamin Kates III, worked as a US marshal in Texas and is now a law enforcement specialist. The then-student stirred chaos at Rutgers as a students with stunts that saw her place a banner on campus that read ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.’

Kates told the Times she refused to condemn suicide bombings because ‘it is not our place in the United States to dictate the tactics Palestinian groups use in the liberation struggle.’ She was also featured in the New York Post the same year, in a piece titled ‘Rutgers gets ‘F’ For Putting Anti-Semitism 101 on the Schedule.’ In the article, which highlighted Rutgers’ controversial National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, Kates told the Post she supported suicide bombers. ‘Palestinian resistance in all its forms has been a very powerful tool of justice,’ she said.

‘All forms, from armed struggle to mass protest.’ DailyMail.com has reached out to the University of British Columbia for comment on this story. Despite her vast history of supporting terrorism, Kates and Barakat were invited to give a talk at Columbia university last month. Barakat openly referred to his ‘friends at Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ during the two hour session, while Kates told attendees, ‘there is nothing wrong with being a fighter in Hamas’. Their event was organized by the Columbia University Apartheid Divest Group which has orchestrated the encampment currently besieging the Ivy League school. During the meeting, Kates insisted that the designation of certain pro Palestine movements as terrorist organizations is a deliberate tactic to undermine Gaza’s resistance movement.

‘The fact is, that Hamas is a mass-Palestinian movement that is in a leadership role and there is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,’ Kates said. ‘These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine for its liberation.’ President Minouche Shafik slammed the talk for going ahead without the university’s permission and strongly condemned as an ‘abhorrent breach of our values’. She stated the speakers were ‘known to support terrorism and promote violence’ and that the they have since been banned from campus. A week later, the university suspended four students for their involvement with the event, Columbia Spectator reports.

As reported by the Vancouver Sun , Kates moved to Canada over a decade ago after a dispute with pro-Palestine activists at Rutgers. Kates, a lawyer, also works with US National Lawyers’ Guild’s International Committee, which has been representing pro-Palestine protesters in encampments at universities across the country. Jewish groups in Canada have been pushing president Justin Trudeau to list Samidoun as a terror group, but the organization remains listed as a charity in the country, and pays no taxes. Israeli Ambassador Iddo Moed told the Vancouver Sun on Monday that ‘Samidoun is known to be directly linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is already a listed terrorist organization.’ Moed added: ‘They have been inciting and glorifying terrorist attacks and massacres since October 7, Saturday morning. They were already hanging signs from bridges in Vancouver. ‘This is a serious source of concern.’

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