The activist group at the helm of the anti-Israel student protest movement in America, American Muslims for Palestine, will have to comply with a court order to hand over sensitive financial documents, a Virginia circuit court has ruled. 

The ruling deals another setback to American Muslims for Palestine as it seeks to challenge an investigation into the group’s alleged ties to terror organizations launched in 2023 by Virginia’s attorney general, Jason Miyares. Although a Virginia court upheld Mr. Miyares’s subpoena for the financial materials last summer, AMP has “refused to comply” with the order, the attorney general wrote in a January petition. 

Judge Devika Davis shot down AMP’s efforts to delay producing the records, explaining, “To rule otherwise would render the statute practically inoperable and gut the attorney general’s authority to engage in pre-enforcement civil investigations and promote the public interest.”

AMP, which has twice sought to challenge the subpoena, has now exhausted all legal means to delay releasing the requested materials. 

In accordance with the ruling, the group will have to fork over “AMP’s finances, organizational structure and governance, its solicitation activities, and its potential ties to terrorist organizations” dating back to when the group started taking donations in Virginia eight years ago. 

The closely guarded documents could shed light on allegations that the anti-Israel group “may have used” funds “for impermissible purposes, such as benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations,” the attorney general wrote in a statement regarding the ruling. 

AMP’s attorneys, though, maintain that the advocacy group has been operating “in full compliance with the laws” and have vowed “to pursue all legal options available within Virginia law, which include pursuing our existing appeal on the merits and filing an additional appeal, if necessary, in the duplicative matter,” attorney Christina Jump told Jewish Insider. 

American Muslims for Palestine is one of America’s largest pro-Palestine advocacy groups and describes itself as “grassroots organization dedicated to advancing the movement for justice in Palestine” through education and “mobilization and advocacy.” 

The Anti-Defamation League, however, profiles the group as a promoter of “extreme anti-Israel views” that provides a “platform for anti-Semitism under the guise of educating Americans about ‘the just cause of Palestine and the rights of self-determination.’” 

AMP’s staunch anti-Israel advocacy — along with its college campus affiliate, Students for Justice in Palestine — has led to allegations that the group illegally furthers Hamas’s terror agenda in America and triggered a mountain of government probes and lawsuits. 

Most recently, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee launched an investigation into AMP’s relationship with Students for Justice in Palestine, whose chapters have organized violent pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses across the country. 

Additionally, in a federal lawsuit filed last May, a group of American and Israeli plaintiffs accused AMP and SJP of deliberately serving as “the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization operating in plain sight.” 

The suit claims that American Muslims for Palestine is simply a “reincarnation” of the Islamic Association of Palestine — a group that operated as a propaganda arm for Hamas in America before it was dissolved in 2004 — and holds “the same core people and endeavors to achieve the same goal.”

“There is no indication Defendants ever ceased providing material support to Hamas and its affiliates — even in the transition period between IAP and AMP — and there is no reason to believe that Defendants have suddenly stopped engaging in the same conduct they have publicly acknowledged,” the complaint alleges.

Also looming in the background is a decades-long civil suit in Chicago in which the plaintiffs — parents of a Jewish teenager killed in the deadly 1996 West Bank attack — accuse the group of being an “alter ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine.