Lobby Watch 12 March 2025
Supporters of Mahmoud Khalil gathered outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan on 12 March, as lawyers argued for the Columbia University student’s release from custody. The Trump administration is attempting to deport Khalil for his advocacy for Palestinian rights.
SIPA USAA New York-based Zionist group that is taking credit for the Trump administration’s arrest of Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil may be raising funds without being registered as a charity, a violation of the law.
Betar USA is notorious for spreading hatred against Palestinians and has explicitly and directly incited the mass murder of Palestinian babies.
Until recently, this unsavory organization was led by Ross Glick, a man charged with crimes related to revenge porn, and convicted of harassment of the mother of his child.
Betar USA describes itself as “the North American arm of the international movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky,” the Russian settler who inspired the violent anti-Palestinian ideology of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.
In February, Palestinian journalist Laila al-Arian posted on Twitter/X a list of the names of hundreds of Palestinian babies killed in the Israeli genocide in Gaza before reaching their first birthday.
In a now-deleted tweet, Betar USA gave this blood-curdling response: “Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza.”
The same month, Betar USA declared, “We do not want peace, we don’t seek peace with Palestinians. There’s no peace with Nazis.”Betar USA openly supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland.
The group is so explicit in its hatred of Palestinians that even the Anti-Defamation League, one of the leading anti-Palestinian lobby groups in the United States, has added Betar USA to its “extremism database.”Yet Betar USA purports to be acting to make American campuses safer by targeting supporters of Palestinian rights.
“Dossiers”
“We have started commencing lists of Jew-hating foreign nationals on visas who support Hamas,” Ross Glick, the director of Betar USA, told The New York Post in November.
“We are strongly supportive of the Trump administration’s plan to deport jihadis who seek to destroy America. Our campuses and our streets are filled with violent people who hate Jews and cannot co-exist with Western society,” Glick added.
“In part by using artificial intelligence, the group has compiled dossiers on the most active protesters to submit to the Trump administration for deportation,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in January.
Its list of “pro-Hamas” students targeted for deportation includes Khalil.
On 29 January, Betar USA posted a video of Khalil on Twitter/X and stated, “It’s 10 pm and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is aware of his home address and whereabouts.”
“We have provided all his information to multiple contacts. He’s on our deport list,” Betar USA added.
Since federal agents seized Khalil from his home on Saturday night, leaving his eight-month pregnant wife alone, Betar USA has taken credit for his arrest, calling it a “victory against terror.”
But it has been a victory for Betar USA’s terror against this student and his family. Khalil’s wife has said that even prior to his arrest, the harassment the family was experiencing had made their lives into a “nightmare.”
She described “an intense and targeted doxxing campaign” that involved “spreading false claims about my husband that were simply not based in reality.”
Amid the escalating harassment and threats, Khalil had also desperately sought protection from Columbia University, which failed to provide it and appears to be complicit in his arrest by the government.
The Trump administration’s public demonization of Khalil as supporting “terror” is only the start of a promised broad attack.
President Donald Trump has personally vowed that Khalil’s arrest is the first “of many to come.”
In fact, despite the government’s lurid accusations against Khalil, he has not been charged with any crime.
Rather, the Trump administration is claiming that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has the sole discretion to deport any non-citizen, including legal permanent residents, if he decides that their presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
If successful, this would mark an unprecedented expansion of executive power, effectively canceling the First Amendment free speech rights of millions of green card holders and other non-citizens.
On Monday, a federal judge in New York, halted for the time being the government’s efforts to deport Khalil, but he remains in detention in Louisiana.
As thousands of Khalil’s supporters rallied outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Wednesday, US District Judge Jesse Furman ordered the government to allow Khalil’s lawyers to have more access to him.
But the judge did not rule on a request that Khalil be moved back to New York, closer to his family and legal team.
Unregistered fundraising
On its website, Betar USA asks for donations from the public “to combat the rising tide of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism sweeping across college campuses and communities in the United States.”
In 2024, Betar USA obtained tax-exempt charitable status from the US federal tax agency, the Internal Revenue Service.
Betar USA calls for donation checks to be mailed to a post office box in White Plains, New York.
As a New York-based charity, Betar USA is required to register with the state before it can solicit donations from the public.
But despite being based in New York, the organization cannot be found in the state’s charities database.
In a phone call with The Electronic Intifada on Wednesday, an employee at the New York State Charities Bureau confirmed that he could find no registration for Betar USA. The employee confirmed that if a New York-based charity is soliciting donations without being registered, it is violating the law.
Betar USA did not respond by a deadline to The Electronic Intifada’s request for comment.
The Electronic Intifada has also written to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James asking for an investigation of why Betar USA appears to be soliciting donations even though it is not registered as required by law.
On Monday, James posted on Twitter/X that she is “extremely concerned about the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an advocate and legal permanent resident of Palestinian descent.”
“My office is monitoring the situation, and we are in contact with his attorney,” James added.
Founded by funder of Israeli military
A physical address associated with Betar USA in Katonah, New York, is shared by the Ronn Torossian Family Foundation.
A public relations executive with a long history of anti-Palestinian extremism in the United States and Israel, Ronn Torossian has been identified in media reports as founder and chairman of the North American branch of Betar.
In recent years, according to his foundation’s public filings, Torossian has made donations to several groups that directly support soldiers in the Israeli military, including the notorious Duvdevan unit whose members disguise themselves as Palestinians to carry out extrajudicial executions and indiscriminate killings in the occupied West Bank.
There appears to be no public information as of yet as to whether and how much money Torossian has donated to Betar USA.
Revenge porn allegations
Torossian is not the only unsavory character associated with Betar USA.
In 2019, Ross Glick, who would later become director of Betar USA, was accused by his former partner of publicly posting nude photos of her online.
The New York Post reported that Glick was charged under New York’s “revenge porn” law “with unlawful use of a computer and unlawfully posting the lewd images” of the woman, who is the mother of his child.
“He ended up pleading guilty to second-degree harassment, a violation, and paid a fine,” the newspaper reported.
After this news resurfaced on social media in recent months, Glick moved aggressively to try to quash the bad publicity, threatening to sue anyone who makes “any statement charging Mr. Glick with a serious crime such as revenge porn or any sex crime.”
Glick also sought to minimize the actions to which he pled guilty as the “legal equivalent to a parking ticket.”
Ironically, for someone involved in an organization that revels in publicly harassing and intimidating students for speaking out against genocide – including by handing out fake pagers, a reference to the Israeli attack that killed and maimed thousands of people in Lebanon last year – Glick warned social media users that “you must stop endangering Mr. Glick’s family while inciting harassment and violence.”
“Any individual engaging in such behavior is participating in targeted harassment and child endangerment,” Glick claimed.
But Glick’s efforts at damage control appear to have failed, even with Betar USA.
At the end of January, the hate group distanced itself from him, announcing, “Glick is not our executive director at this time.”
Even though Glick’s unsavory past is a matter of public record, he appears to have access not only to the Trump administration, but also to lawmakers such as John Fetterman, the fanatically pro-Israel Democratic senator from Pennsylvania.
Glick also met with aides to Republican Senators Ted Cruz and James Lankford, who, he claimed, encouraged the efforts of Betar USA.Growing support
In recent days, some lawmakers and officials have spoken out forcefully against Khalil’s arrest, including Representative Rashida Tlaib and more than a dozen other Democratic lawmakers.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy called the Trump administration’s arrest of Khalil “a disappearance.” The stakes of the fight, not just for Khalil and his family, could scarcely be higher.“This is clearly an attempt to deport Mahmoud by exploiting a vague and overly broad provision of US immigration law,” said lawyer Brad Parker, of the government’s claim that the secretary of state can unilaterally order any non-citizen deported.
Parker, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of Khalil’s legal team, added that “This provision, if not reined in, will be exploited to pursue the deportation of anyone who disagrees with the administration’s foreign policy agenda. This is not about security, this is about absolute executive power and repression.”
Aiding the government in this further lurch towards American tyranny is Betar USA, a “charity” that advocates violent extremism and war crimes and itself appears to have little regard for the law.
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