Inside the Terror-Finance Case Exposing the West's New Red-Green Axis
NORTH AMERICA — A Western network of far-left, openly antisemitic activists — its founding doctrine the rejection of peaceful protest — has fused with the Islamist armed-resistance axis in the emotional aftermath of the October 7 massacre and the war that followed.
Its first high-profile prosecution, unsealed this summer in upstate New York, arrives with granular financial detail that inverts the conventional picture of terrorist financing. In the most notorious modern case, the September 11 attacks, money moved from the Middle East into American cities to fund devastating actions. This time, the Department of Justice alleges, it moved the other way. Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, of Irondequoit, New York, is charged with wiring $30,116 in cryptocurrency, in roughly eighty transfers over six months, to a purported fighter for Palestine Islamic Jihad — the faction descended from the Muslim Brotherhood and backed, according to the intelligence sourcing quoted in the charging documents, by Iran and Lebanese Hizballah.
In messages recovered from her iCloud account under federal search warrant, Washburn told the man she believed to be an Al-Quds Brigades fighter: “I wish every day were October 7th.”
The Bureau’s examination of the same network finds it surfaced earlier, and more violently, on Canadian soil. By claims of responsibility compiled by researchers, and by the participants’ own published communiqué, its documented arc runs from arson at a US defense contractor’s warehouse in Calgary, to the defacing of a Conservative member of Parliament’s constituency office north of Edmonton, and then south into a summer of vandalism and incendiary attacks across the eastern United States.
The analysis lands as attention slowly turns toward what sits behind a so-called progressive protest movement in North American cities.
In Toronto this week, a man was charged with a terrorism offense. The Toronto Police Service Hate Crime Unit, working with the federal Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, alleges that at pro-Palestinian demonstrations near Bay Street and Front Street West on May 25 and September 7, 2024, the accused used amplification devices to make public statements advocating harm against members of the Israeli and Jewish communities, and that he acted for the benefit of, and in association with, Hamas, a listed terrorist entity in Canada. Investigators searched a Toronto residence in March 2025 and seized multiple electronic devices.
Police allege that Ahmad Hassan Layosa Hajahmad, also known as Ahmad Jarrar, contributed to the activities of Hamas in order to enhance the group’s ability to carry out terrorist activity. Hajahmad, 33, was arrested on the morning of July 21 and has been released on bail. A man of the same name, using the alias recorded on the charging document, appears to have been so prevalent in the street protest movements of Ontario that he was recorded as a spokesman in Canadian television news coverage.
No public document connects the Toronto prosecution to the network described in the New York complaint.
What the two files share is a date — October 7, 2023. Read alongside the unprosecuted attacks in Alberta, they describe three concurrent national-security actions in North America arising from the same terrorist attack in Israel.
What surfaces, in The Bureau’s mapping, is a triangle drawn from documents.
One line runs from New York state to a purported fighter in Gaza — and behind him, according to the intelligence sourcing in the American charging papers, to Tehran.
A second runs through a Manhattan nonprofit and media complex toward the Marxist, Shanghai-based tech tycoon who finances it, Neville Roy Singham — and, in the reporting of a former Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence expert, to the Chinese Communist Party.
The third runs through Canada: an arson in Calgary authorized in the words of a Palestinian faction’s founding theorist — the same ideological fountainhead claimed by Samidoun, the protest network coordinated from Vancouver.
And Samidoun closes the triangle.
Its international coordinator, a lawyer named Charlotte Kates, appeared repeatedly at events hosted by the protest coalition commanded from Singham’s Manhattan media complex — the tycoon whose network the former FBI analyst ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The same Samidoun is connected through its parent faction directly to Tehran, and is named by Ottawa — on paper, with no prosecution to follow — a terrorist entity.
These dots do not flow from a single command structure.
But they connect, again and again, to the same active leftist street movement in North American cities — a movement in which some voices have espoused violence, and in one case allegedly murder, in the killing of two young Israeli embassy staff outside a Jewish museum in Washington.
What can be said without equivocation is that the ideological glue is a doctrine of decolonization and anti-imperialism — one that intersects, in the documents, with overt Islamist religious language, with communist organizational lineages, and with the interests of Gaza, Tehran and Beijing.
“One of the Leaders”
The affidavit establishing probable cause against Washburn was sworn by Timothy J. Klapec, a special agent with the FBI since November 2004, assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Rochester. It identifies her as one of the leaders of the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation.
The affiant dates the group’s formation to the aftermath of October 7. Researchers date its public launch to the spring of 2025.
It rejects peaceful protest and practices what it calls direct action — sabotage and property destruction — against entities it associates with Israel. Its members operate pseudonymously, mask their faces with keffiyehs, and alter their voices in videos, coordinating through Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, Signal and Discord.
In a video statement in May 2025, one of its leaders described direct militant action as the only viable means of Palestinian liberation, characterized liberation of the “homeland” as inseparable from the broader fight against global imperialism, and signed off with the slogan “Intifada until Liberation,” followed by an Arabic threat to scorch the earth.
Its summer 2025 campaign carried the brand Operation Global Monsoon, an apparent echo of Al-Aqsa Flood, the name Hamas gave its October 7 attack. Its graffiti and its videos carry the inverted red triangle, the symbol Hamas used in propaganda after October 7 to mark Israeli targets.
The group was defined by Jennifer Baker, a senior research fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism, who spent twenty-five years as a special agent with the FBI working counterterrorism and counterintelligence. In September 2025 she authored the report describing it as a new domestic extremist organization that had escalated rapidly from online rhetoric to vandalism, intimidation and attempted incendiary attacks. Two months earlier she had authored a separate report on another face of the triangle, tracing funding linked to the Chinese Communist Party through a network of American nonprofits and into mass pro-Palestinian mobilization.
That July 2025 report documented at least sixty-five million dollars flowing between 2018 and 2023 from the network of Neville Roy Singham into aligned nonprofits and media outlets, with The People’s Forum — the activist hub in Manhattan — described as a command center for Shut It Down for Palestine, the protest mobilization launched within days of October 7.
The Forum’s own revenue traced the arc of the Red-Green axis: roughly $487,000 in reported income in 2021, then $4.4 million in 2022 — the funding surge arriving before October 7, the street mobilization after it. Moving repeatedly through events hosted by the coalition and the Forum itself was Charlotte Kates, the Vancouver-based coordinator of terror-listed Samidoun — the personnel-level junction between the Beijing-linked funding wing and the terror-designated node.
The same former counterintelligence agent, in other words, drew parallel maps — and set out the dots running between Tehran, Beijing, and the pro-Palestinian street protests that surged from a pooling of foreign money in Manhattan.
The clearest picture of what the radical edge of that broad protest movement in North America leads to in the Middle East was drawn by Washburn herself, on a garment.
In messages on August 6, 2025, she sent the purported Gaza fighter a design for a white sweatshirt bearing the words “Freedom Fighters” and a red triangle breaking a chain, its left sleeve carrying six logos arranged in a column: Hamas, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Al-Qassam Brigades, the National Resistance Brigades, Jund Ansar Allah, and the Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades. He told her she had omitted the most important one. She added the logo of Palestine Islamic Jihad.
A second design followed in black, carrying the movement’s own logo and the line “Our Blood Lines May Differ But Our Chains Are The Same.”
What did she mean by it? In the group’s own doctrine, the chains are imperialism, and the struggle against them is indivisible — the liberation of the homeland, as one of its leaders put it in May 2025, is inseparable from the broader fight against global imperialism. Different peoples, one chain. Whatever the case, Washburn called the design “Lions of Islamic Jihad.”
The man at the other end of those messages is identified in the complaint only by his initials, H.H.; the task force says it knows who he is and is withholding the name to protect an ongoing investigation. He replied that the design would sell out quickly. The FBI affiant concluded that the merchandise was fundraising for the benefit of several designated organizations, Palestine Islamic Jihad among them.
In messages collected from Washburn’s iCloud account, H.H. described himself as a native of Beit Hanoun who entered the training program of the Islamic Jihad Movement at seventeen and a half, broke his hand during training, and graduated into what he called the elite ranks, as a member of the anti-armor forces. He told Washburn that he and a man he called his brother had taken part on October 7 at the Erez Crossing, and that they had obtained Israeli military equipment after attacking and killing soldiers. He sent photographs of himself with rifles and with a light anti-tank weapon bearing Hebrew markings.
His family tree, as he described it, spans the Gaza factions: a connection by marriage to the Abu Hamza lineage, the nom de guerre used successively by spokesmen for the Al-Quds Brigades, one of whom was killed in an Israeli airstrike in March 2025; and an uncle with eleven sons, all of them, he said, in the Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas.
Institutionally, according to the intelligence sourcing quoted in the complaint, Palestine Islamic Jihad was founded in 1979 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, drew inspiration from the Iranian Revolution, receives support from Iran and Lebanese Hizballah, fields roughly four thousand fighters, and has historically been more willing than Hamas to act militarily.
Ten Days Before Boston, a Warehouse Burned in Calgary
In the early hours of July 13, 2025, a Raytheon Technologies warehouse at 838 55 Avenue Northeast in Calgary was set ablaze — an attack later claimed, according to researchers, by the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation, the group Washburn is accused of helping lead in the United States.
An account including a photograph was submitted anonymously to a Canadian anarchist platform the following day and republished across an aggregator that automatically syndicates the feeds of hundreds of anarchist collectives. The vandalism, the communiqué states, included smashed windows, a fire set within the warehouse, and “Let Gaza Live” spray painted in red across the exterior. It was accompanied by a photograph appearing to show flames burning inside a doorway, beside a no-smoking sign. Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League list the Calgary attack among the actions for which the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation claimed responsibility. The communiqué itself is unsigned.
Its demands were addressed to Ottawa.
The participants called for a two-way arms embargo on Israel, and for restrictions preventing Canadian facilities from producing components sent to Israel through intermediaries such as the United States. They identified Raytheon, now part of RTX Corporation, as a supplier of weapons and technologies used against Palestinians, naming the Canadian subsidiaries they associated with that supply chain — Collins Aerospace, and Pratt and Whitney — and citing components for the fighter aircraft flown over Gaza. They urged activists elsewhere in what the statement twice called the imperial core — a phrase in anti-imperialist doctrine for the Western powers — to act against arms manufacturers, arguing that facilities like the Calgary warehouse form part of a global supply chain.
Then the statement closed with a remarkable sentence.
Its final words are a quotation attributed to Ghassan Kanafani, the spokesman and founding theorist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, assassinated in Beirut in 1972. “Imperialism has laid its body over the world,” the Calgary communiqué reads, quoting him. “Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.”
The doctrine invoked in Calgary belongs to the same faction whose Canadian-based advocacy network Ottawa listed as a terrorist entity nine months earlier, and whose international coordinator lives in Vancouver.
In April 2025, speaking in Athens at the Second International Conference on Imperialism and Law, Charlotte Kates named him among the intellectuals she said had been targeted by a policy of assassination — a speech memorialized on Samidoun’s own website.
In 2022 the network published a call to organize demonstrations venerating him, host presentations on his ideology, and post his quotations in cities around the world. That July, marking the anniversary of his death, Samidoun Vancouver organized an event honoring “Ghassan Kanafani: Palestinian revolutionary, artist and writer.” The following July it held another, celebrating the fifty-first anniversary of what it called the martyrdom of the revolutionary author.
Three years later, one of his quotations closed a communiqué claiming an arson in Calgary.
What Samidoun’s venerations leave out is the rest of the record.
Kanafani announced the Popular Front’s responsibility for the Lod Airport massacre of May 1972, in which attackers recruited by the faction killed twenty-six people at Tel Aviv’s international airport. He was assassinated in Beirut two months later.
The lineage here is ideological. No public document establishes funding, personnel or command connecting the Alberta actionists to that Vancouver-based network, or to any designated group.
Four weeks before the fire in Calgary, the constituency office of Conservative member of Parliament Michael Cooper, in St. Albert—Sturgeon River north of Edmonton, was defaced by masked perpetrators who left graffiti and threatening messages.
It was the second such attack on the office.
Local police opened a hate-motivated vandalism investigation. Cooper said publicly that his office had been vandalized for the second time because of his consistent support for Israel and Canada’s Jewish community, and that he would not be intimidated or silenced. Researchers list the vandalism among the movement’s claimed actions.
No link has been drawn between the two, but the attack on Cooper’s office echoed one carried out sixteen months earlier against a Jewish lawmaker on the other side of the Rockies.
On the night of February 5, 2024, the constituency office of Selina Robinson — then a New Democratic Party member in Premier David Eby’s caucus, and the most senior Jewish politician in British Columbia — was papered with posters and chalked slogans: “Zionism is Nazism,” “Free Palestine,” “we do not accept your apology,” and a call for intifada revolution. An account calling itself Canadian Antifa claimed responsibility.
The vandalism came the day after Robinson resigned as minister of post-secondary education over remarks describing the land on which Israel was founded. She later received a death threat and left the country briefly for her safety. On March 6, 2024, she quit the New Democratic Party caucus in a five-page letter citing the party’s silence on antisemitism.
Mere weeks before the attack on Cooper’s office in Alberta, the movement had already declared where its escalation was headed.
In May 2025 the group’s leadership publicly praised the killing of two Israeli embassy staff, Yaron Lischinsky, 31, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. The couple were engaged to be married. One of the group’s self-described founders declared in a video that bodies would drop.
The suspect, Elias Rodriguez, a Chicago man, was apprehended by event security staff and, according to accounts of his arrest, pulled out a keffiyeh, said “I did it for Gaza” and chanted “Free, free Palestine” while in custody.
Rodriguez had previous ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition — organizations researchers place within a broader activist and funding network overlapping with CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans and her husband, Neville Roy Singham. No direct affiliation between Rodriguez and CodePink has been established.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation publicly disputed reports linking it to the suspect, saying he was not a member, that he had a brief association with one branch of the party that ended in 2017, and that it knew of no contact with him in more than seven years. Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League documented his participation in protests organized by both groups from late 2017 into early 2018.
An article published by the party’s own news outlet in October 2017 identified him as being from the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
From there the summer of direct action for Palestine accelerated.
Through June and July the group claimed more than a dozen actions across the United States and overseas: the George Washington statue in Boston Public Garden, the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, property at the University of Portland, a Microsoft office in Reston, an Apple store in San Luis Obispo, a General Dynamics plant in Wilkes-Barre, a Civil War memorial in Logan, Ohio in a joint action with another group, and the headquarters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, after which the group warned on social media that the next time it painted those walls, what was cleaned up would not be paint. On July 13 came the Calgary arson.
Ten days later, on July 23, the Massachusetts State House was struck with paint mixed with feces and homemade thermite flares lit at its gates. Overseas, the group claimed vandalism at a Coca-Cola facility in Berlin and a Starbucks in Valencia.
The Canadian attacks do not trail the American escalation. They bracket it.
Two Ledgers Out of Rochester
Until Washburn’s prosecution, the movement’s only known charge was for property. On August 11, 2025, authorities announced the arrest of Jermaiah Yusuf Sawaqed, 25, of Everett, Massachusetts, in connection with the State House attack.
Charging documents described him as a central and active participant in a series of organized, politically motivated acts of vandalism spanning the State House, the George Washington statue in Boston Public Garden, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The New York case is the first to allege financing rather than destruction.
The group did not invent its methods.
Researchers place its tactical lineage with Palestine Action in the United Kingdom, whose franchise network now spans a dozen countries and includes branches in Canada and Tunisia. The Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation has affirmed its ties with the Tunisian branch, sharing collaborative content online and asserting cooperation on the ground. An unclassified assessment by the United Kingdom’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in March 2025 counted more than 385 direct actions by Palestine Action in Britain since July 2020.
The most consequential fact in the affidavit is a matter of sequence.
Washburn’s fundraising in the fighter’s name began in or about November 2024. She learned of his claimed affiliation with the Al-Quds Brigades on February 15, 2025 — the date from which the charged conduct runs. Her movement’s public launch followed in the spring.
The foreign contact, in other words, predates the domestic organization.
A figure the government calls one of its leaders was already in sustained communication with a purported Palestine Islamic Jihad fighter before or during the group’s formation, not after some radicalization inside it.
The financing ran on two ledgers.
Publicly, appeals on Facebook and on the Australian crowdfunding platform Chuffed sought donations to help a young man in Gaza support his family of nine, describing a life stolen from them by genocide.
Privately, the merchandise Washburn designed to raise that money carried the insignia of designated organizations, and the fighter told her that her assistance to them in Gaza was fighting in the path of Allah — to which she replied that the battle was a sacred one.
Donations arrived by PayPal, Stripe and Zelle into a Bank of America checking account she opened in October 2024.
A Coinbase account created in September 2025 was funded from it. From there came roughly eighty transfers of the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC, between October 8, 2025 and April 6, 2026, totaling 30,116, into a wallet on Bybit, a cryptocurrency exchange based in the Republic of Seychelles, registered in the fighter’s name with Palestine listed as the account holder’s nationality.
The pattern was purchase and near-immediate transmission — what anti-money-laundering practitioners would call a pass-through — usually the same day and in the same amount. Nothing accumulated. Washburn’s public link page carried at least eight further Gaza fundraising campaigns alongside resistance-themed clothing for sale.
On November 24, 2025, she wrote that based on her past fundraising and posting she was going to get put away for a few lifetimes, and appended a laughing emoji, filings say.
The transfers continued for five more months, through the February and March 2026 search warrants on her iCloud account, ending on April 6.
On the evening of October 19, 2025, the two discussed reports that an Israeli vehicle had been struck during the ceasefire.
At nine o’clock the fighter told her the Al-Qassam Brigades had neither shelled nor killed that day. Twenty-one minutes later, Washburn wrote to one of the other leaders of the movement on Threema, an encrypted messaging application, that she had just heard from her friend in the Islamic Jihad that the story of the tank strike had been fabricated by the occupation.
Money was flowing out of New York state, raised from donors told they were supporting a young man and his family in Gaza. The source of funds, in other words, would have been ordinary people who believed they were giving to humanitarian relief.
In the government’s telling, the recipient was a man Washburn believed to be a fighter for a designated terrorist organization. Money moving out of Rochester; battlefield reports moving back in, relayed by Washburn to the leadership of a new American extremist organization in near real time. The second leader is unnamed in the complaint and, on the public record, uncharged.
Washburn is presumed innocent, as are Jermaiah Sawaqed and Elias Rodriguez. The Bureau will continue to follow the cases.
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