A millionaire anti-war activist who organized the high-profile “humanitarian aid” convoy to Cuba in March has ties to Hamas and the Iranian regime.
The aid flotilla to Cuba attracted much attention as it included Ilhan Omar’s daughter Isra Hirsi and leftist streamer Hasan Piker — who both sung the praises of the ailing Communist ‘paradise’ after their trip.
It was organized by Medea Benjamin, president of the Arc of Justice Foundation, a charity with $51 million at its disposal.
Benjamin, 73, made at least seven trips to Gaza between 2009 and 2012 where he met with Hamas officials, including the group’s then-leader Ismail Haniyeh, publicly posted photos show. Hamas were designated a terror group by the US in 1997.
Both working for activist group CodePink, Benjamin and her friend and fellow activist Tighe Barry, 69, also met Hamas leaders, including foreign affairs minister Ahmed Yusef, who in 2009 handed them a letter to deliver to President Obama, according the group’s website.
Yusef, who has been described as “Hamas’s gate to the West,” was a senior advisor to then-Gaza Prime Minister who was later assassinated in Tehran in 2024.
Benjamin and Barry promptly delivered the Obama letter to the US Embassy in Cairo on June 4, 2009, during a time when the appointed US administration official was refusing to meet with Hamas.
“CodePink is open about being a conduit between Hamas and Obama, even met with Obama administration official Buffy Wicks at the White House after the letter was delivered,” said a report by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a New Jersey-based think tank that studies extremism.
“That’s a remarkable acknowledgment of the intermediary role.” Knowingly providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization is a violation of federal law, legal experts point out.
Benjamin was a co-founder of CodePink, the group started by China-based software entrepreneur and activist Neville Singham’s wife Jodie Evans, and she is still listed as treasurer. Barry was spokesman for Code Pink for over a decade, according to public records.
Benjamin’s Arc of Justice Foundation was previously known as the Benjamin Fund until 2018. It is run in conjunction with Benjamin’s New York City-based daughter, Maya Mandela Danaher, who is listed as the charity’s treasurer and lives in a $2 million apartment in Manhattan.
“I have consistently been against war, and have always encouraged my government — no matter who is in power — to choose the path of diplomacy,” Benjamin told The Post, adding that she has been an activist since the “days of the Vietnam war.”
The charity has moved from California to Washington DC, then New York and is now run out of a modest bungalow in North Miami, owned by Barry.
Arc of Justice Foundation, which did not respond to The Post’s request for comment, did not disclose it was helping to finance politically motivated trips to Cuba — which could potentially violate Florida state law.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS), lists Cuba as “a foreign country of concern,” and requires registration before doing business with the island, however its not clear if providing aid would be considered “business.”
“[Benjamin] signs the checks, she cashes the checks and then runs the Cuba operations the checks pay for — all through an unregistered charity. It appears to be operating in violation of Florida law,” a senior NCRI researcher told The Post.
The Cuba convoy with Hirsi, 23, and Piker was called the “Nuestra America Convoy” bringing in 20 tons of humanitarian in March. Both Benjamin and Evans were also on the trip where some delegates reportedly stayed at the 5-star Gran Hotel Bristol Meliá Collection, where a room costs between $130 and $520 a night.
Hirsi later said the experience of living through numerous blackouts on the socialist island “truly changed me.”
“As Americans, bringing aid to Cuba is the least we could do, as the US has long bullied Cuba with its sanctions, and now this oil blockade is killing people,” added the Barnard graduate on Instagram.
CodePink and Arc of Justice have organized multi-year Cuba aid convoys through the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), which is run by Fernando Gonzalez Llort, who was convicted of spying and collecting information on Cuban exile groups in US federal court in 2001. He served nearly 14 years in US prison, according to the NCRI report.
“One of the great ironies of the modern left is that groups like CodePink claim to stand for human rights while repeatedly carrying water and driving anti-American rhetoric for regimes that imprison women, fund terrorism, crush dissent, and chant ‘death to America,’” said Jay Collins, Lieutenant Governor of Florida. “That’s not moral clarity. That’s ideological blindness disguised as progressivism.”
In addition to the convoys to Cuba, Benjamin has made “multiple trips to Iran,” according to the NCRI. In 2014, she attended a conference in Tehran, where she presented a strategy on Gaza to enforce Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) on Israel, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Five years later, Benjamin led and organized a 28-person CodePink delegation to Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, meeting with then Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the foreign ministry offices in Tehran.
In 2019, Benjamin also attended a conference in Iran designated by the US Treasury as a platform for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to “recruit and collect intelligence” from foreign attendees.
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