By Eliana Rudee/JNS.org – A newly released report by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank exposes the terror affiliations of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an international campus organization that has posed an increasing challenge for Jewish and pro-Israel college students in recent years. The roughly 50-page report claims that principal backers of SJP include “founders, financial patrons and ideological supporters who have been connected to Islamic terror organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).”

Dan Diker, the author of the JCPA report and a former secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, described the undertaking as the first report of its kind “by a respected policy institute.”

“Students for Justice in Palestine has intensified as a network of publicly and demonstrably antisemitic students and faculty who publicly express support for Palestinian Islamic terror groups. This defies all norms of civil behavior on campus and even violates state laws prohibiting support for terror groups,” Diker told JNS.org. “We wanted to unmask this group and let the public finally know what the truth is,” said Diker. “They are not a grassroots pro-Palestinian group, but a group dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish nation-state.” The report’s co-authors, Diker and Jamie Berk, use what they describe as “well-placed intelligence information” to find that a major source of funding for SJP – at least $100,000 in 2014 – comes from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), whose leaders were previously implicated by the U.S. government from 2001-2011 for financing the Gaza-ruling Palestinian terror group Hamas. The report singles out a leader of the SJP-funding organization, AMP board member Saleh Sarsour, who was imprisoned for eight months in Israel for using his Milwaukee furniture store to transfer money to Adel Awadallah, the leader of Hamas’s “military wing.” Additionally, the report maintains that the individual responsible for preparing the SJP donors’ tax returns previously headed a nonprofit responsible for funding Hamas in the U.S.

The JCPA report’s policy recommendations similarly suggest that university donors and members of alumni communities “can serve as powerful channels for holding SJP chapters accountable by speaking to their university administration about the importance of investigating SJP, to ensure that these organizations are not operating with funding from terror-linked organizations or violating freedom of speech rights of fellow students.”