Treasury Department’s crackdown reveals terror on – Latest News
When the US Treasury Department sanctioned the transnational group Masar Badil final week, Washington took a much-needed step towards thwarting terrorist exercise and recruitment right here within the homeland.
The pro-Palestine group was acknowledged as an arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist group.
Yet Treasury’s designation stops there — with out naming a single one of Masar Badil’s home associates.
Those associates, related to faculty campuses in Minnesota, Oregon and Washington state, have been vocal advocates for armed resistance in opposition to “colonialism” — and in latest months their requires “resistance” have escalated into violence and intimidation.
One of essentially the most lively is Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return on the University of Washington, which till lately was a formally registered pupil group.
Masar Badil itself has listed SUPER-UW amongst its “frameworks and militant networks,” and the scholar group’s evolution over the previous three years reveals simply how deep a foothold the community has gained inside the US.
SUPER-UW’s speedy development from rhetoric to violence started with Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist assault, which killed UW alumnus Hayim Katsman together with 45 different American residents.
SUPER-UW instantly cheered the killing of civilians and commemorated these accountable, later inviting UW college students to a an occasion celebrating the slaughter “as not only a victory for the resistance, but a scientific necessity.”
In September 2024, SUPER-UW inspired followers to find out about “defending the Palestinian resistance” in a workshop organized by Samidoun-Seattle — the native arm of Samidoun, a Treasury- designated “sham charity” that raises funds for the PFLP.
When Oct. 7 architect Yahya Sinwar was killed weeks later, SUPER-UW known as him “our martyr leader” and pledged to hold “their struggle forward, until Palestine is free from the river to the sea.”
By venerating Sinwar, SUPER-UW moved past solidarity with Palestinians towards glorifying the architect of mass civilian deaths.
That development culminated in May 2025 when 33 SUPER-UW protesters, most of them college college students, occupied UW’s newly constructed engineering building in a chaotic anti-Israel protest.
They demanded that the college cut ties with Boeing — which had contributed $10 million towards the building’s construction — attributable to its protection contracts with the US army and the Israeli Defense Forces.
They vandalized partitions, shattered glass and set fire to dumpsters, inflicting roughly $1 million in damages.
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UW quietly severed ties with SUPER-UW that very same month, although the college didn’t publicly announce it till this July.
Yet regardless of the ban, SUPER-UW nonetheless makes use of the “UW” tag in its title and identifies itself as half of the college throughout its social media and in activist mobilizations all through better Seattle, together with an Oct. 7 Okay-12 faculty walkout final fall.
Last month, SUPER-UW’s three years of escalating rhetoric culminated in an act of focused intimidation.
When the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle introduced an Aug. 20 book-tour look by Ira Kohler, an Oct. 7 first responder, SUPER-UW responded with threats.
The group posted a image of Kohler beneath an inverted purple triangle — a image utilized by Hamas to mark army targets — and urged “comrades” to protest the occasion and “prove that THESE G3NOCIDERS ARE NOT WELCOME IN SEATTLE!!”
When the Seattle synagogue set to host Kohler modified the venue attributable to security issues, SUPER-UW printed the new deal with as effectively, framing the transfer as proof that “cowardly z1ionists” feared “the masses of Seattlites.”
“These zionists continue to cower and run,” the group posted when Kohler’s look was lastly moved to an undisclosed location. “They should be scared!”
Masar Badil doesn’t operate alone: At its March 2026 convention in Brazil, messages from Hamas and Hezbollah officers had been relayed to attendees.
At that very same convention, Masar Badil acknowledged it had acquired “political and organizational reports” from SUPER-UW.
Its Seattle community extends via Bissan Barghouti, a member of Masar Badil’s government committee who has spoken at a number of UW demonstrations and has met with Iran’s Mission to the United Nations.
And the hyperlinks run deep: Two of the SUPER-UW members arrested for storming the UW building, Jessica Schutz and Kimaya Mahajan, are lively members of Tariq El-Tahrir, Masar Badil’s youth wing.
The escalation we’ve seen on the University of Washington shouldn’t be dismissed as one more instance of leftist campus protest.
When our schools flip a blind eye to teams that rework terrorists into heroes and overtly have a good time violence, we’ve got taken a harmful flip.
SUPER-UW’s story is a warning that universities, college students and the public should acknowledge this development — earlier than the road between political activism and political violence disappears totally.
Samantha Wampold is a researcher for the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University.
