Terror group leader who trained Columbia students on ‘Palestinian resistance’ attends Hezbollah chief’s funeral

She also praised Iran—Hezbollah’s backer—as ‘a nation on the side of the Palestinian people, intervening and building a movement of resistance to free this entire region … from U.S. imperialism.’

By Jessica Costescu, The Washington Free Beacon

Among a crowd mourning Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s death and chanting “Death to Israel, death to America” in Beirut on Sunday was Charlotte Kates, a leader of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the United States sanctioned for providing financial support to terrorists.

Just last spring, she was instructing Columbia University students on “Palestinian resistance” tactics.

Tens of thousands of black-clad mourners flooded the funeral at Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, Lebanon’s largest sports arena.

They vowed support for Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group that began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, following the latter’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.

Israel, in response to Hezbollah’s assaults, invaded Lebanon and killed Nasrallah on Sept. 27, 2024.

“It is such an honor to be here in Beirut today, one among a sea of over a million people in collective tribute, mourning, love and commitment to the road of resistance and liberation exemplified by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Sayyed Hisham Safieddine,” Kates posted to X on Sunday with photos of the crowd.

“The masses are truly out in the streets, affirming the indelible living legacy of the great anti-imperialist leader of our day, the great Arab and international revolutionary, the beloved speaker of truth and warrior of justice,” Kates, Samidoun’s international coordinator, added.

In October, the United States sanctioned Samidoun and Kates’s husband, Khaled Barakat, for providing support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist organization that participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.

Less than a year before Nasrallah’s funeral, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Ivy League school’s most notorious anti-Semitic student group—invited Kates and Barakat, a PFLP member, to deliver speeches on “the fight for liberation,” as part of a lecture titled “Palestinian Resistance 101.”

Shortly after the event, which the Washington Free Beacon attended virtually, Columbia student radicals launched the anti-Israel encampment and eventually stormed a campus building.

In November, a month after the sanctions were issued, CUAD passed out pamphlets just outside Columbia’s Morningside Heights gates encouraging attendees to “get involved” with Samidoun.

They included a QR code that sent users to Samidoun’s website, which touts an “Amsterdam free from Zionism” and calls to “globalize the intifada!”

“The fact is that October 7 changed the world … we saw the potential of a future for Palestine liberated from Zionism,” Kates told a group of keffiyeh-clad Columbia students during her March 24 speech.

She also praised Iran—Hezbollah’s backer—as “a nation on the side of the Palestinian people, intervening and building a movement of resistance to free this entire region … from U.S. imperialism.” She advocated for a campaign to eliminate America’s list of designated terror organizations.

“It is important to popularize campaigns to … scrap the U.S. terror list entirely, or at the very least to get Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Filipino, and other revolutionary organizations off the terror list,” Kates said.

“Because that’s a weapon that’s being used against the Palestinian people, against the Arab people, and against the solidarity movement as a whole, and in order to kind of fundamentally deform the politics of the movement.”

In August, Kates traveled to Tehran where Iran awarded her the “Eighth Annual Islamic Human Rights and Human Dignity Award.” Other recipients included Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh and Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a U.S.-designated terror group.

Barakat, meanwhile, explicitly endorsed terrorism against Jews during his own lecture for CUAD and lauded airplane hijackings as “one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

Barakat is not the only person to have glorified plane hijackings at Columbia.

In October, Joseph Slaughter, a member of Columbia’s top disciplinary body and an English professor who defended the illegal encampment at the Ivy League school, delivered a lecture that lauded a string of terrorist plane hijackings as “spectacular” and “remarkable,” the Free Beacon reported.

CUAD has continued to terrorize campus. Last month, for example, anti-Israel radicals dumped cement into a campus building’s sewage system. A week earlier, pro-Hamas agitators stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.