• Co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) with Adam Shapiro (her husband), Ghassan Andoni, and George Rishmawi
• A key ISM coordinator and spokesperson who publicly invokes the names of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi to American audiences, while privately endorsing and assisting Palestinian terrorists in their anti-Israeli endeavors
• Based in Ramallah, where she controls propaganda media reports for the ISM and organizes demonstrations around the West Bank in support of Palestinian terrorist groups
• Frequently lectures and recruits in the United States at fundraisers and at anti-Semitic, anti-Israel conclaves 
  
  

Born in Detroit to Arab Christian parents, Huwaida Arraf is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) with Adam Shapiro (her husband), Ghassan Andoni, and George Rishmawi. The eldest of five children, Arraf in 1998 graduated from the University of Michigan, where she was active in anti-Israel politics. Her father works for General Motors and was born in Galilee; her mother, a nurse, hails from the village of Beit Sahour near Jerusalem.

Functioning as a spokeswoman for the ISM, Arraf clears most ISM communications personally through the organization’s media office; she frequently leads demonstrations in the West Bank and addresses anti-Israel audiences in the United States on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). During her visits to the U.S., she also recruits people to go to the West Bank as ISM “internationals” to interfere with the anti-terrorist activities of the Israeli army.

Arraf instructs other ISM activists in the delicate art of conveying to the American media false images of the ISM as a “nonviolent” organization of “peace activists ” concerned with “human rights.” When appearing in the United States, Arraf portrays herself as a champion of peace, invariably extolling the virtues of nonviolent resistance as practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. The use of such imagery has even gained her the opportunity to address members of Congress in the U.S. Capitol.

Away from Western cameras and microphones, however, Arraf has stated that suicide bombings are a “noble” means of “legitimate resistance” to what she deems Israeli oppression. She has stated (along with her husband, Adam Shapiro) that the Palestinian “resistance movement” must be violent if it is to be effective. Toward that end, ISM activists frequently serve as human shields for armed Palestinian terrorists; many act as couriers for terrorists, smuggling explosives and bomb-making materials into Israel for the PLO. Among the lessons these activists learn from Arraf and other ISM leaders are strategies for slipping past Israeli security authorities in Israel and the West Bank to aid or provide cover for terrorist groups.

At the Fourth Annual National Student Palestine Solidarity Conference at Duke University, Arraf was recorded telling a seminar of potential recruits that the ISM works willingly with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine, all designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. State Department. On another occasion, she held a seminar on how people could use the Israel Birthright program under false pretenses in order to procure free airplane tickets to Israel, where they could work with the ISM.

Arraf counsels her fellow ISM activists to use disingenuous rhetoric of “nonviolence” as a means of masking the group’s true intentions when speaking publicly. ISM training manuals teach volunteers, in language cleared by Arraf personally, how to lie and deceive most effectively: “Instead of HUMAN SHIELDS, we refer to ourselves as INTERNATIONAL PEACE ACTIVISTS or PEACE ACTIVISTS/WORKERS…When possible say ETHNIC CLEANSING. This can be used to refer to the expulsion of Palestinians from historic Palestine in 1948 as well as the current situation.”

In a January 29, 2002 piece in the Palestinian Authority’s mouthpiece, the Palestine Chronicle, Arraf and Shapiro spoke out in favor of a Palestinian “right to resist with arms.” They also advocated in favor of using the nonviolent “methods of Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr.” – not because they deemed such methods preferable to violent ones, but rather as a means of winning public support. “[T]hose who maintain nonviolence and exploit the use of violence by the oppressor maintain control and power,” they wrote, “which is something that can be manipulated to present a story, a case or an image.”

Arraf was one of the ISM participants who slipped past Israeli security forces into Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in 2002 to bring supplies to, and act as human shields for, Palestinian terrorists who were holding the clergy and staff as hostages inside. While in the church, the ISM members did nothing to stop the terrorists from desecrating holy shrines and terrorizing the captives.

Arraf has acknowledged that ISM cooperates with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

In 2008, Arraf became a member of the newly formed organization Free Gaza. In this role, she and ISM worked closely with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). Arraf also worked closely with former Palestinian Authority presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouti (cousin of Marwan Barghouti, who founded the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades); ICAHD founder Jeff Halper; Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera reporter and a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay with ties to Osama bin Laden; former Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney; and British journalist/Muslim convert Yvonne Ridley.