A support group for convicts in an antifa terrorist attack joined a Sunday panel in Texas with a convicted Hamas funder’s daughter to denounce both prosecutions.
The DFW Support Committee is speaking out after more than a dozen federal defendants were sentenced since June over an anti-deportation riot despite the committee protesting, fundraising for legal defense, and claiming their innocence. The group sought to prove its point again Sunday by partnering with Nida Abu Baker, whose father was sentenced in 2009 for coleading a Texas charity that bankrolled terrorists.
“We gathered in Dallas to develop an organized strategy against political repression and refuse to be silenced,” said the hosting group Dare to Struggle Dallas-Fort Worth in a Thursday Instagram post. Speakers also discussed the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of Aafia Siddiqui, a suspected al Qaeda operative who tried to kill Americans in Afghanistan and was sentenced in 2010. The event’s description and choice of speakers showed overlapping anti-government narratives used to garner sympathy for leftist and Islamic extremists alike.
The DFW defendants were arrested last year after gathering at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, throwing fireworks, vandalizing property, and bringing a firearm stash as protection from police or federal officers if needed. The incident escalated when activist leader Benjamin Song shot a police officer in the neck and fled from authorities for days with the help of coconspirators.
Defendants were convicted by jurors or guilty pleas on crimes ranging from concealing evidence to attempted murder. The DOJ used defendants’ activist ties, private comments, and anarchist memorabilia to show the pattern of an “antifa cell” bent on violence.
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Abu Baker gained fame among pro-Palestinian groups for advocating her father and four other so-called “political prisoners” from a now-defunct Hamas fundraising front, the Holy Land Foundation. Federal jurors convicted the five leaders on material support for terrorism, tax, and money laundering charges in 2008, with the elder Abu Baker receiving a 65-year sentence as the foundation’s co-founder. Abu Baker spoke at a 1993 meeting with a Hamas-supporting Muslim Brotherhood committee about hiding the foundation’s terrorist ties to solicit donations under the guise of charitable work, the DOJ found.
“We discussed why it is our job to reframe these people as heros [sic], make them a household name, and continue standing up for [what’s] right,” Dare to Struggle’s post said about the antifa cell, the Holy Land Foundation prisoners, and Siddiqui.