Hamas’s propaganda war in the United States didn’t begin on October 7, 2023. Lara Burns, a former FBI agent who spent decades tracking the group, the terror organization quietly built its American infrastructure years ago — laying the groundwork for today’s battles on college campuses and online.

Burns, who led the Justice Department’s largest terrorism financing case against Hamas in the early 2000s, told a group of journalists in Tel Aviv earlier this month that the group’s strategy has always been about more than weapons. It was about winning minds — especially young ones. “Hamas plans hundreds of years in advance,” she said. “When they’re quiet, that’s when they’re the most lethal.”

She traced much of that early groundwork to Musa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader who was among the targets of Israel’s recent strike in Qatar. Marzouk first arrived in the United States in 1982 on a student visa, later gaining permanent residency in 1990. Seven years after that, Washington formally designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, banning fundraising and political activity. But by then, Burns said, Marzouk had already established three organizations in America that would serve as the movement’s propaganda, financial, and academic arms.

In 2008, the Holy Land Foundation, one of the groups linked to Marzouk, and several of its top officials were convicted of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. Burns called the case a “major victory” — one she helped build — but said momentum quickly evaporated. “After the conviction, FBI priorities shifted,” she said. “We stopped looking at Hamas.”

The consequences, she argued, are now painfully clear. Burns pointed to recent polling showing that 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 support Hamas over Israel in the current conflict. For her, it’s proof that the group’s long-term information strategy succeeded where its military reach could not. “When I woke up on Oct. 7 and saw the attack, I was devastated. But what struck me most was seeing individuals who were part of that U.S.-based infrastructure — people we had tracked — praising the attacks and pushing false narratives online.”

Burns likened Hamas’s influence to the threat of a shark beneath the water’s surface. “Everyone sees the danger above the surface. But the real threat is underneath — in the radicalization model, the propaganda machine, the ability to shape hearts and minds.”

She argued that the U.S. government consistently underestimated Hamas because it was not staging mass-casualty attacks on American soil. “Because they weren’t conducting overt military operations in the U.S., they were deemed less of a threat than ISIS or Iran,” she said. “But Hamas never stopped. They just operated quietly, building support.”

Burns’s own career offers a cautionary tale. She joined the FBI in 1999, just months before the 9/11 attacks, and spent more than two decades teaching counterterrorism, tracking financing networks, and interviewing Hamas officials. She insists the lesson of her years in government is clear: Hamas’s presence in the United States is not an abstraction. It is the product of decades of careful planning, the creation of front organizations, and the exploitation of America’s freedoms to embed sympathetic voices in academia and politics.

“That’s Hamas’s propaganda model,” she said. “Co-opt groups, magnify their numbers, and make false narratives resonate until the world questions whether terrorism is actually terrorism.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)