This post may be about anti-Israel activism in a single U.S. state, but it has relevance everywhere. It shows just how easily one man can build a movement on falsehoods, distorting his own story and misleading those around him.

On 26 January, the City Council in Burlington, Vermont will once again discuss whether to divest from Israel. It is part of an organised campaign that has been spreading across the tiny state for years.

The public face of the campaign to ostracise and boycott the Jewish state is Wafic Faour – a U.S. citizen of Syrian heritage treated as a leading subject matter expert on the Middle East.

In reality, the personal tales he peddles are false, as are many of his stories about Israel.

It is time to rip off his mask.

(This research could not have been completed without the help of Rachel Feldman, an independent journalist in Vermont.)

Wafic Faour and the Movement

Wafic is peppered throughout Vermont’s anti-Israel story, with his presence photographed everywhere from protests and educational seminars to working groups, the Vermont State House, and local community meetings.

Wherever you look, anti-Israel discussions are being pushed onto the agendas of committees and councils primarily mandated with local issues.

When the Burlington City Council sat to discuss an anti-Israel motion on 13 September 2021, Wafic Faour was front and centre during the debate. On 12 November 2023, he was there again. Again on 22 January 2024, and yet again on 28 April 2025:

And those are only some examples. Let’s also not forget inciting students at the University of Vermont, or trying to force legislators who visited Israel to resign:

It would be fair to say that Vermont’s anti-Israel movement, along with the ridiculous Apartheid-Free Communities campaign, might not exist without the decade-plus presence of Faour as the tip of the spear on every issue related to Israel.

He founded Vermonters for a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine. The group later became Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, dropping all pretence about wanting “peace” for Israel.

He’s “educated” Vermonters by being one of the few people in the state with lived experience in the Middle East. Effectively, his narrative has become “THE” narrative – spread from the State House to selectboards to small country classrooms with nary a Jew in a 10-mile radius.

But his real story, which he cleverly conceals, is one historically rooted in hatred and violence in the name of “justice.”

The Terrorist Supporter

Shamelessly described as a “human rights activist,” Wafic publicly celebrated the October 7 2023 Hamas terror attack on Israel. The religious symbolism is unmistakable: Hamas terrorists descend, Jews are murdered, and Al-Aqsa is depicted as the ultimate objective. This isn’t a dream of equality or human rights – it’s a religious narrative of jihad, liberating Islamic land from the “stain” of Jewish sovereignty.

And the timing removes any doubt. Wafic posted this roughly 40 hours after the attack began, by which point the full scale of the atrocity was already clear:

The next two posts show Wafic mourning the deaths of two butchers. Hassan Nasrallah was responsible for the murder of innocent Israelis, as well as the slaughter of countless Syrian civilians after sending Hezbollah forces to Syria to prop up Assad’s murderous regime. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was known as “the Butcher of Khan Younis” for torturing and killing Palestinian opponents after branding them “collaborators”:

On Instagram, he posted this image commemorating 94 years since the deaths of Mohammad Jamjoum, Ata al-Zeer and Fuad Hijazi. The three were executed as key figures in the 1929 massacres of innocent Jewish civilians:

The 1929 massacres took place long before the events of 1948 and were pivotal in destroying any credible “one-state” vision. They became part of the accumulating evidence that partition was necessary, as coexistence had already collapsed under organised anti-Jewish violence.

But Wafic’s supporters in Vermont do not seem to care. Just as we saw with Mohsen Mahdawi, open glorification of violence and support for terrorism is simply ignored.

Lies and Deception

Support for terrorism may be ignored by parts of Vermont’s activist scene, but it won’t persuade ordinary Vermonters to follow Wafic’s lead and boycott a democratic U.S. ally. To build support, Wafic has to demonise Israel – and he does it by spinning an endless web of lies.

A great example of Faour’s dishonesty can be found in a viral statement he made, which helped trigger the Episcopal Church of Vermont condemning Israeli “apartheid” at its 2021 annual convention.

He weaponised a real 2018 incident into a permanent apartheid fable.

Faour claimed that family members living in the village of Sha’ab in Israel had their fresh water siphoned away to supply nearby Jewish settlements, were instead given “filtered sewage water”, that it was illegal for them to access fresh water, and that villagers regularly saw yellow and brown water coming from their taps.

In reality, he was constructing a familiar antisemitic narrative. It echoes the old “Jews poison the wells” libel. And he built it around a specific, time-limited water contamination incident reported in the spring of 2018, during a period of severe national water stress. Sha’ab was one of many communities affected.

The crisis led to Israel approving a $30 million water plan in 2018 to strengthen water infrastructure and reduce the risk of it happening again.

Temporary water contamination happens everywhere, including Vermont. It isn’t “apartheid”. It’s a public infrastructure failure – and in this case, a local crisis driven by drought that officials were pressured to resolve.

The image below is revealing: a member of Faour’s own family in Sha’ab is tagged into a post by Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of Parliament. Tibi had met Israel’s water minister, who promised urgent measures to deal with the problem. Rania Faour, part of Wafic’s family, thanked him for his efforts:

This was a single event, and part of a wider national issue. We can see a political representative for the village – a sitting Arab member of Parliament – having a meeting with the relevant minister, who listened to the grievance and promised urgent action. Shortly afterwards, a multi-million dollar project was announced.

This is democracy in action. And it is an insult to black South Africans of the Apartheid era that their very real suffering should be belittled in this fashion.

Faour took this episode and turned it into an outrageous and disgraceful lie.

A Christian group took a vote based on false witness. And yet, despite the persistent deception, Faour remains a hero in some of Vermont’s Christian circles – while the Jewish state is treated as the pariah.

That is how baseless accusations are manufactured and recycled to hang Israel, time after time.

Wafic Faour and the Nakba

In almost every speech I found, Wafic was spinning falsehoods. But none is bigger than the foundational lie: the historical revisionism he has built around his own family history.

Wafic Faour has spent decades spreading myths about his origin story. His central claim – one he repeated to council members while pressuring them to boycott Israel – is that his parents were “forcibly removed” from their village of Sha’ab in the Galilee region, that a member of his wife’s family was “murdered by marauding Zionists” because he was rich, and that his own father was “thrown in jail” simply for being there. He also claims villagers fled in fear “after the events of Deir Yassin” in 1948.

Almost none of this survives contact with reality.

Faour is recycling the standard Nakba propaganda script: a peaceful village is attacked by Zionist forces, rumours spread of a massacre at Deir Yassin, families flee in terror, and the Jews arrive to expel the remaining innocent civilians.

That story is not what happened in Sha’ab.

Sha’ab wasn’t a passive village “overrun” by Zionist militia. It was part of a highly militarised area with a long record of organised violence. Sha’ab had armed men, trained fighters, and veterans of the 1930s revolt era. The village’s own accounts boast about attacks, bombings, and killing Jews – years before partition and long before Israel even existed.

We know this because ex-villagers in Lebanon wrote a detailed local history, called “Sha’ab and Its Garrison: The Galilee Village of Shaʿab and Its Defence.” The book was written in Arabic, so I translated all of its 297 pages. It is obsessive in detail, covering everything from family disputes, to property and weapon inventories. And it demolishes the fairy tale of Sha’ab as a helpless victim:

Sha’ab’s people didn’t “flee after Deir Yassin”. They were busy fighting, having formed a local garrison, and opened hostilities against Jewish communities in the region. They were reinforced by the Arab Liberation Army operating from Lebanon, and by additional fighters arriving through Syria. This wasn’t a village “caught in the crossfire” – it was a community actively participating in war.

And crucially: the book openly describes attacks launched during the truce itself. Sha’ab’s garrison wasn’t “waiting to be expelled”. It was busy breaking ceasefires.

Only when the tide turned did civilians start pulling back to nearby villages while fighters continued operating.

This wasn’t “forcible removal”. It was the collapse of a war effort.

Sha’ab is a textbook example of how the Nakba narrative is often built on inversion: armed aggressors rebranded as passive victims, a village garrison turned into a “peaceful community”, and a military defeat rewritten as pure ethnic expulsion.

And the people of Vermont are being fed these fictional tales every time Wafic is invited to speak, and then they discuss whether or not to boycott Israel on the back of them.

If members of Faour’s family were killed, or if they ran, or if they ended up displaced – that wasn’t because Sha’ab was minding its own business and “Zionists” randomly arrived to destroy it.

It happened because Sha’ab wanted to drive the Jews out, chose war, and then lost.

And this is why Faour matters. He isn’t an innocent man “sharing trauma.”

He’s a propagandist laundering a failed war effort into a victimhood story – and then using that lie to radicalise decent people in Vermont into hostility toward Israel.

Wafic Faour: An Indigeneity That Isn’t 

Wafic makes much of his “Palestinian indigeneity” – yet even his own village history suggests his family were not originally from Sha’ab.

On page 53, as the book lists the families that inhabit Sha’ab, it includes this line:

فاعور: أسعد العيسى، ناصر وغانم. وأصل عائلة فاعور من حلب في سوريا.

Which translates as:

“Faour: Asaad al-Issa, Nasser, and Ghanem. The Faour family originates from Aleppo in Syria.”

So even in the village’s own account, the Faour clan is described as coming from a completely different part of the Middle East, with three branches established in Sha’ab.

We can’t date that movement precisely from this line alone – but the implication is obvious: the Faours are not presented here as some timeless “always been here” lineage rooted in Sha’ab. They are described as a family that arrived, settled, and expanded – like many others in the late Ottoman era, when movement across the region was common.

And that is the irony. Wafic spends his life portraying Jews as foreign “colonial newcomers” – while his own village history openly records that his clan’s origins lie outside “Palestine”.

Wafic’s lectures about his family’s “indigenous Palestinian” status are just another political myth.

Wafic Faour’s Apartheid

Before discussing Wafic’s most effective propaganda weapon – his claim of “Israeli apartheid” – it’s worth noting how often he has been caught spreading disinformation.

He claims a member of his mother’s family was killed because they were a major landowner. Yet the Sha’ab book contains detailed property listings with no evidence whatsoever that there was a wealthy landowner family targeted for its assets.

Wafic claimed that three students were shot in a “hate crime” because they had Palestinian heritage. Every available piece of evidence shows this is not true.

He claimed that five state legislators visiting Israel planted a Vermont flag on top of a destroyed Palestinian village. That is not true. The village never existed.

These are not isolated errors. They are a pattern – and Wafic uses them to demonise Israel and mobilise support for boycotts of the Jewish state.

And when we look at Wafic’s flagship accusation – “apartheid” – his own family destroys his narrative.

Wafic described the status of his relatives in Lebanon like this:

“Racism was huge for us. The Lebanese never considered us as equal. Until today 76 years later still my brothers cannot own their own business, they cannot own their own houses. It has to be listed under a Lebanese name, or you have to be married to a Lebanese. At least 64 jobs are registered that the Palestinian cannot do in Lebanon. They are not considered second-class citizens – they are non-citizens.”

That isn’t “apartheid-like”. That is apartheid.

Israel, by contrast, looks very different:

This is the side Wafic will not talk about – because it exposes the deception at the core of his story. Why is he trying to boycott Israel and not Lebanon?

On 24 June 2021, Rania Faour, a close family member, tagged Wafic in a post celebrating a wheelchair basketball competition in Israel. Wafic saw it. And he liked it:

The man in the wheelchair – Nour Toufiq Faour – had just won in the final of a national Israeli championship.

This is inclusion. This is investment. This is equality in action. And it received national coverage in the Israeli press.

But Wafic didn’t share it. He didn’t celebrate it. He didn’t tell his followers.

Instead, while his own family in Israel were celebrating a national sporting victory, Wafic was posting calls to boycott the country that made it possible.

That isn’t activism. It’s propaganda:

And it isn’t the only example. His family members run businesses in Israel. They are educated. They work. They move freely. Some even choose to use Hebrew in their profile names.

Wafic isn’t describing reality. He’s selling a political myth – and using it to manipulate decent people in Vermont into hostility toward Israel.

And the real reason he attacks Israel and not Lebanon is simple. Israel is a Jewish state.

Cheering Those That Kill

This sickening misrepresentation gets even worse. We’ve already seen Wafic glorifying the October 7 attacks, and mourning the death of Nasrallah.

It’s worth pausing on what that actually means.

Because this isn’t some abstract political theatre. We’re talking about the Arab village Wafic claims to care so deeply about, a village where many of his own clan still live.

Sha’ab sits in Israel’s north, not far from Akko. It was directly in the line of fire of Hezbollah’s rocket campaign, and it was hit more than once.

On November 1 2024, Hezbollah rocket fire struck Sha’ab while villagers were out harvesting olives. Eleven people were injured, including five children and a pregnant woman:

Terrifying footage from the moment of the strike can be seen here:

 

And yet Wafic Faour publicly mourned the death of Nasrallah, the man responsible for launching rockets at his own village – and his own family.

The Blindness of Those Around Him

Wafic, like many who lead the anti-Israel groups, claims he is not antisemitic. To do this, these people hug those outliers in the Jewish community who will stand with them, and suggest that proves they do not have a problem with Jews. This is a weak and nonsensical argument that will be dealt with in more detail shortly.

There is also evidence of Wafic defining Jewish identity in ways that suit him, and incredibly he published a post blaming Jewish ethnicity on the Zionists, when matrilineal lineage has been a core feature of Jewish identity for over 2000 years.

This erasure of Jewish peoplehood simply to suit his own political purpose is deeply antisemitic, no matter how loudly Wafic may protest:

And there is plenty more evidence available online. Two quick examples: In the image on the left Wafic amplifies a classic South American antisemitic conspiracy, known as the “Andinia Plan”, accusing “demonic Zionists” of setting massive fires en masse so they can buy land more cheaply. In the second, he posted an Instagram story relying on similar antisemitic tropes of Jewish greed and theft:

My Best Friends Are Jewish

When a minority feels exposed or unsafe, most people don’t become heroes – they become careful. They keep their heads down and soften their identity, because visibility has a cost. That is why it’s so dishonest to parade a handful of loud internal dissenters as “proof” that hostility isn’t prejudice.

Under pressure, silence and conformity are the norm, and the rare outlier who publicly denounces their own group is often rewarded by the majority for doing so. This is a well-known dynamic in the study of stigma and conformity (Erving Goffman, Stigma, 1963). Jews are a tiny minority, just 15 million people worldwide.

Antizionism is antisemitism. Calling for the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world is inexcusable. And no, finding a handful of Jewish activists who will stand beside an anti-Israel movement does not absolve that movement of antisemitism. It is not evidence of moral legitimacy. It is a fig leaf that erases Jewish identity, opinion and purpose.

This erasure is what leads to a local media outlet using Jews for the purpose of a headline, while the photograph itself does not highlight a Jew or Jewish organisation at all, but rather Wafic – a person who publicly celebrated the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust:

Wafic’s Ideas in Vermont’s Schools

Across the West, anti-Israel activism is inserting ahistorical, Israel-punitive (BDS-style), and antisemitic ideologies (such as the erasure of Jewish peoplehood) into educational settings. This is one of the reasons antisemitism is on the rise, and a driver of anti-Jewish violence.

In Vermont, Wafic has been part of this effort since the start. He was on the Campaign Working Group Committee of the Vermont Coalition for Ethnic and Social Equity in Schools (VCESES), created in 2018, which saw its role as teaching not just children, but also state employees about “white privilege, white fragility, and white supremacy.”

The first attempt to pass the bill, H.794, in 2018 failed, but in 2019 a repackaged version, H.3, passed, creating Act 1: An act relating to ethnic and social equity studies standards for public schools.

Wafic was no idle bystander. As H.794 was discussed, Wafic became the face of the bill in Vermont’s media:

It is telling that during the interview, Wafic cited a long list of people who suffered discrimination – including people of colour, Arabs, Latinos, and members of the LGBT community. One notable omission? Jews – as if they don’t exist at all.

Shocking as it may seem, Wafic is still there. He is a board member and current treasurer of the Education Justice Coalition of Vermont (EJC, the VCESES spin-off). The EJC, along with Wafic on its board, was subsequently tasked with appointing key members to the Working Group overseeing the crafting of Vermont’s education equity standards.

On the Education Justice Coalition website, Wafic is even photographed as being present at the launch of the Ethnic and Social Equity Standards Advisory Working Group – created under Act 1 – tasked with writing the “framework of standards on equity”:

Among its alarming actions, the EJC echoes the extremist agenda of the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, signing the VCPL-led apartheid-free community pledge. The EJC was also one of the first organisations in the nation to promote the curriculum “Teaching Palestine”, which presents an ahistorical version of events and views Jewish identity through an antisemitic, antizionist lens.

Given all of this, it is no surprise that antisemitic incidents are rising in Vermont. This didn’t happen by accident – it was an inevitable consequence of the process.

Extremists such as these are helping to shape policy, educate our educators, and influence the curriculum that teaches our children. All of this is inexcusable. Why is there no due diligence here? If the state legislature is incapable of understanding that these groups should not have any say in the education of Vermont’s children, then why are local media outlets not standing there holding everyone responsible to account?

So Where Is the Media?

Looking at the long list of Wafic’s falsehoods, hypocrisy, extremism, antisemitism, and support for terrorism, one of the most obvious questions is this: where are Vermont’s media outlets?

After all, this is not the first time they’ve gone missing.

When five legislators were wrongly pressured to resign simply for visiting a U.S. ally, much of the local media lined up behind Wafic’s campaign rather than scrutinising it. There was no serious pushback when Vermont’s entire federal delegation threw unsupportable and illogical allegations of genocide at Israel.

There wasn’t even any criticism when Vermont senators introduced a resolution implying that the three students shot in 2023 were targeted victims of a hate crime – despite no evidence at all to support such a serious claim.

And Wafic is not the first extremist in Vermont to invent a backstory to demonise Israel. In 2025, Mohsen Mahdawi was shown to have a long record of support for terrorism, alongside manipulating key details about his childhood to elicit sympathy and gain standing. Vermont’s media treated him like a hero.

The role of the media is not to stand in awe of political leaders or act as mouthpieces for extremist movements. It is to hold power to account, interrogate claims with scepticism, and tell the public the truth – especially when it is uncomfortable.

Vermont’s media is failing that basic duty. This is why Wafic can openly celebrate October 7, lie about his past, post antisemitic memes, mourn terrorist leaders – and still face not a single word of scrutiny, even as he tries to push the entire state into boycotting a strong and democratic U.S. ally.

 

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