The Decade-Long Libels & Lies of Deranged Jewhater Nerdeen Kiswani

From Barclays to Bay Ridge: A Professional Victim, Her Fabrications, and the Jewish Men She Put in the Emergency Room

Nerdeen Kiswani held a press conference this week. She does this a lot. In fact, if you want to understand Nerdeen Kiswani, the press conference is probably the best place to start, because she is far better at calling them than she is at telling the truth to them.

This time she was announcing, with appropriate gravity, that the FBI and NYPD had foiled an assassination plot against her. A 26-year-old named Alexander Heifler had allegedly assembled Molotov cocktails in his Hoboken apartment, intending to throw them at her home. Heifler was arrested. He has been charged. If the allegations are true, what he planned was serious and wrong, and law enforcement did exactly what it is supposed to do.

But let's be precise about what this was. Heifler was not a trained operative. He was not a state-sponsored assassin. He was a disturbed young man with a Ziploc bag full of grievances and some improvised incendiary devices.

What he allegedly planned was horrifying, but it was, at its operational core, an arson scheme, and probably just a fantasy if the undercover FBI agent did not hold his hand and encourage him. This is the kind of thing Kiswani has spent ten years inspiring her own followers to do.

In 2021, standing at a microphone in front of her own crowd, she said she hoped "a pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime". Her attorney Lamis Deek helped organize a pro-Hamas convoy to Gaza. One of her regular rally attendees, Saadah Masoud, pleaded guilty in federal court to a hate crime conspiracy after beating a Jewish man named Matt Greenman unconscious with his fists at a WOL midtown rally in April 2022.

The word for what Kiswani does professionally is "projection." She is very good at it.

The Punch That Wasn't

To understand how she got here, you have to go back to Barclays Center in October 2014. The Brooklyn Nets are hosting Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv. Kiswani is 20 years old, a Hunter College student, and already a practiced street organizer. She shows up with a Palestinian flag. A scuffle breaks out. A man grabs the flag. And Kiswani turns to the cameras and says he punched her in the stomach.

The video showed no punch. The Brooklyn Paper reviewed the footage and reported exactly that — a man grabbed the flag, no punch was visible. Her own attorney, Lamis Deek, later told reporters the punch "cannot be seen on the video".

When your own lawyer cannot find the punch, you are entitled to ask whether the punch happened.

But look at what the incident actually accomplished. Leonard Petlakh, a Jewish man who had been assaulted that same evening in what he described as an antisemitic attack, suddenly found himself reframed as the aggressor. A Jewish victim became a Jewish perpetrator. A press conference was convened on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall with Deek at the microphone. CAIR issued a statement. The NYPD Hate Crimes Unit was called in. The original story of the Jewish victims that night was buried.

That is the magic trick. Kiswani spent the next eleven years refining it.

The Hijab

April 2024. Kiswani is arrested at a Manhattan protest where demonstrators are burning American and Israeli flags and carrying Hezbollah banners through the streets of New York. She was released the same day. And then she posts to social media that the NYPD ripped off her hijab without warning, that it was the second time they had done this, and that her upper body was in agony.

The NYPD released the bodycam footage. It showed an officer helping her reposition her hijab after the arrest. Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daugherty was specific: "Not only was the hijab not removed from the subject's head, but our officers once again demonstrate the utmost courtesy, professionalism, and respect — by fixing the hijab for the subject".

Kiswani said the video did not show the moment she described. She maintained her account.

There is a secondary element worth noting. When critics circulated older photographs of Kiswani without a hijab, she responded on X: "If you have videos of me without the hijab on please feel free to send them to me". The sarcasm was meant to close the subject. What it revealed instead was that the religious violation narrative, like the punch at Barclays, was built for an audience and adjusted as needed.

The Blood Libel Franchise

The medieval blood libel required no evidence. That was always the point. Entire Jewish communities were massacred on the strength of an accusation that nobody was asked to prove. The contemporary version wears humanitarian clothing. It arrives as casualty statistics, dying babies, invented weapons, and fabricated intentions. Kiswani has been a reliable retailer of the genre for years.

On October 7, 2023, hours after Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis, burned infants, gang-raped women, and dragged elderly hostages across the border, Kiswani posted that "supporting Palestine necessitates supporting our right to liberate our homeland by any means necessary". The massacre was, in her framing, a liberation act.

In January 2025, she eulogized Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, writing that "His name now resonates across generations. They didn't kill him — they made him eternal".

Then there is the 14,000 babies claim. In May 2025, a UN official told the BBC that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours unless aid reached Gaza. The claim collapsed almost immediately — it was not a projection, not a statistic, not a verified figure. It was a fabrication, and it was retracted. Kiswani's network amplified it without qualification and without correction after it fell apart. The retraction ran as a paragraph below the fold three weeks later. The original had already done its work.

Most recently, Kiswani has been circulating the claim that the United States and Israel plan to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East. There is no credible evidence for this. There is no credible source. It is a lie built for circulation, and it will be believed by thousands of people who will never see the correction.

Her Goons, Their Victims

The most important thing to understand about Within Our Lifetime is that the violence is not incidental to the organization. It is what the organization produces.

Canary Mission's 2025 report documented eight acts of violence at or following WOL rallies where antisemitic chanting and explicit calls to harm Zionists were standard features. Seven WOL regulars were convicted or awaiting trial for violent offenses: Saadah Masoud, Mohammed Othman, Mohammed Said Othman, Suleiman Othman, Mahmoud R. Musa, Waseem Awawdeh, and Faisal Elezzi.

Consider Masoud specifically. On April 20, 2022, at a WOL midtown Manhattan rally, Masoud followed Matt Greenman — a Jewish man who had done nothing except hold an Israeli flag — chased him down, threw him to the ground, and punched and kicked him in the face. Greenman left in an ambulance with a concussion. In November 2022, Masoud pleaded guilty to a federal hate crimes conspiracy charge. The U.S. Attorney confirmed he had "deliberately targeted three victims because of their religion and nation of origin".

This happened at a WOL rally. Kiswani had just been on stage.

At a protest outside a Teaneck synagogue, Kiswani wore a button bearing the image of Abu Obeida, the Hamas military spokesman, while the crowd chanted "Abu Obeida, ya habib, adrab adrab Tel Aviv" — Strike, strike, Tel Aviv.

These are not protesters who occasionally get out of hand. This is an organization whose chair selects targets, incites crowds with explicit calls to violence, and watches what happens when the rally ends and the men she radicalized go looking for someone wearing a Star of David.

The Production

So we come back to this week's press conference. Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a statement emphasizing that Heifler had "allegedly planned to flee to Israel following the attack" — a detail inserted to implicate the Israeli government, for which there is no evidence. For one full news cycle, nobody was talking about the Jewish man with the concussion, the federal hate crime conviction, the Sinwar eulogy, or the nuclear weapon that does not exist.

This is the formula. Kiswani builds the climate. She celebrates Hamas commanders by name. She leads chants at rallies where Jewish men are beaten in the street. And when someone in the opposing ideological ecosystem does something genuinely threatening, she becomes instantaneously the most persecuted woman in America, invoking the KKK Act and posing for cameras while her network drowns every outlet in the story of her suffering.

The cycle has run since 2014. The punch at Barclays that wasn't there. The hijab that wasn't ripped. The 14,000 babies who didn't die. The nuclear weapon that doesn't exist. And through all of it, real Jewish men and women in New York City, at concerts, holding flags, walking to their cars, getting punched and kicked and chased into emergency rooms by the people Nerdeen Kiswani trained and sent into the street.

The story is documented. Most of it is in federal court records. All of it is on tape.

You just have to be willing to watch it.

Research sourced from Canary Mission, StandWithUs, InfluenceWatch, Brooklyn Paper, NYPD bodycam records, U.S. Department of Justice press releases, and Honest Reporting.