The "human rights" terror laundry
Western outrage at Israel's action against NGOs' PFLP links says it all
One of the things that has fried the western brain over the last few decades is the hijack of language to present evil as good and to reverse oppressor and oppressed, victimiser and victim.
One of the principal mechanisms of this moral inversion has been the culture of so-called “human rights,” which has been used to extinguish actual human rights in support of certain agendas. To be more precise, the agenda to destroy the State of Israel. To that end, “human rights” has become in effect a laundromat for terrorism.
In the Middle East, the vehicles for this agenda have been certain “human rights” NGOs. These conduct systematic campaigns of defamation and delegitimisation against Israel — the only upholder of human rights in the Middle East — while downplaying, sanitising or ignoring the real human rights abuses by tyrannical regimes. These include Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which perpetrate or support war crimes and terrorist outrages against Israel as well as committing human rights abuses and /or war crimes against their own people.
Now, the Israeli government has identified six Palestinian “human rights” NGOs that it says go further and work for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been declared a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel, Canada, and the European Union. The Times of Israel reports:
On Friday afternoon, Defence Minister Benny Gantz announced that half a dozen Palestinian civil society groups — including highly prominent ones with significant backing and oversight from the European Union and other international bodies — were being designated as terror organisations, asserting that they worked on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group.
The list consisted of: Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees; ADDAMEER — Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association; Bisan Center for Research and Development; al-Haq Organisation; Defence for Children International — Palestine (DCI-P); and the Union Of Agricultural Work Committees.
“Those organisations were active under the cover of civil society organisations, but in practice belong and constitute an arm of the [PFLP] leadership, the main activity of which is the liberation of Palestine and destruction of Israel,” Gantz’s office said in a statement. According to the Defence Ministry, all six organisations employed senior PFLP members, “including activists involved in terror activity”.
Israeli defence officials fleshed this out.
“The organisations act as an organised network under the directive of the Popular Front’s leadership. Many terrorist operatives, including those convicted of terrorism, have been employed by the organisation. The organisations forged documents in order to raise money and to continue raising them with activities that never took place,” the official said.
“The organisations represent a lifeline for the Popular Front for raising money and recruiting operatives and even for laundering money for the PFLP,” he added.
The defence officials also alleged that the organisations recruited people to join the PFLP’s armed military wing.
The groups have denied the charge; although the PFLP has not denied these links. The Jerusalem Post reports:
Kayed al-Ghoul, a member of the PFLP political bureau, said in a statement that the Israeli measure “aims to tighten the siege on the Palestinian people and its institutions and prevent NGOs from providing services to the Palestinian people”.
The Palestinians are “proud of the affiliation of any of their sons with any national faction that resists the occupation, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” al-Ghoul said.
The Israelis have not made their intelligence public. However, NGO Monitor has published here a summary of the PFLP’s NGO network. It says by way of introduction:
NGO Monitor has identified a network of 13 NGOs linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organisation and funded by European, and in some cases, other governmental frameworks. As of September 1 2021, we have also identified over 70 staff and board members, as well as other officials who hold positions in both the NGOs and the PFLP. This document contains information about 36 of those individuals. The information below is based on open sources, including social media posts.
In the west, those who are either implacably hostile to Israel or are the progressive world’s useful idiots (including some Israeli politicians) and suspend all critical faculties when people parrot the mantra of “human rights” are outraged by the Israel government’s move.
The Biden administration, which consists of both of the types above, has thrown a hissy fit and demanded an explanation. The US State Department spokesman, Ned Price, claimed that the Israeli government hadn’t given the US advance warning that the Palestinian groups would be blacklisted.
Well, why should it? Why should Israel have to tell the US when it acts against groups it believes support terrorism against Israeli citizens? (In fact, an Israeli security official said the Biden administration was informed in advance of the NGOs’ blacklisting.)
Said Price:
We believe respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and a strong civil society are critically important to responsible and responsive governance.
Really? Would that be the same US administration that is funding the Palestinian Authority which locks up its own dissidents, incites hatred of Jews and pays the families of terrorists whom it lionises for murdering Israelis?
Meanwhile, the Guardian’s report on this issue by Harriet Sherwood displays that paper’s customary stellar prowess at anti-Israel disdain. Adam Levick’s withering deconstruction of this piece for CAMERA UK is a must-read. Referring to Sherwood’s description of the PFLP as
a secular political movement with an armed wing that in the past [Levick’s emphasis] carried out attacks against Israel,
Levick writes:
The (Iranian backed) PFLP seeks Israel’s destruction, a fact the Guardian doesn’t mention, and is designated by most western nations as a terror group — a fact only alluded to in the last sentence of the article. The group has carried out scores of deadly attacks on Israeli civilians over the years — including suicide bombings and the murder of an Israeli minister in 2001.
And these attacks weren’t just “in the past”, to quote Sherwood’s odd formulation. The PFLP was one of the Gaza terror groups firing rockets into Israel during the Gaza conflict this past May. They also claimed responsibility for a fatal 2019 West Bank bombing which killed 17 year-old Israeli, Rina Shnerb.
In fact, the PFLP terrorists accused of carrying out that attack, Samer Arbid and Abdul Razeq Farraj, worked for one of the proscribed NGOs, Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). The Netherlands also suspended their funding of UAWC after it was reported that the group used aid money to pay salaries to the two suspected terrorists.
PFLP terrorists also carried out the brutal 2014 massacre of worshippers in a Har Nof, Jerusalem synagogue, which killed six. Amjad Awad and Hakim Awad, the terrorists responsible for the 2011 attack in Itamar, in which Ehud and Ruth Fogel, and three of their six children – the youngest being three months old – were savagely murdered in their home, were affiliated with PFLP. The Guardian reporter no doubts remember that brutal killing because she covered it at the time.
It’s high time the “human rights” terror laundry was called to account. The fact that the Biden administration and other western liberals are horrified not by the weaponisation of human rights culture to advance a war of extermination but instead by the attempt to tackle this grotesque abuse says it all.
Recent posts
My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers is about why we should really be terrified by COP26. This is how the piece begins:
And you can read my most recent post that’s available to everyone, on how the west is like the apocryphal frog being uncomprehendingly boiled in the pot, by clicking here.
One more thing…
This is how my website works.
It has two subscription levels: my free service and the premium service.
Anyone can sign up to the free service on this website. You can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” at the foot of each email.
Everyone on the free list will receive the full text of pieces I write for outlets such as the Jewish News Syndicate and the Jewish Chronicle, as well as other posts and links to my broadcasting work.
But why not subscribe to my premium service? For that you’ll also receive pieces that I write specially for my premium subscribers. Those articles will not be published elsewhere. They’ll arrive in your inbox as soon as I have written them.
There is a monthly fee of $6.99 for the premium service, or $70 for an annual subscription. Although the fee is charged in US dollars, you can sign up with any credit card. Just click on the “subscribe now” button below to see the available options for subscribing either to the premium or the free service.
A note on subscriptions
If you purchase a subscription to my site, you will be authorising a payment to my company Dirah Associates. In the past, that is the name that may have appeared on your credit card statement. In future, though, the charge should appear instead as Melanie Phillips.
And thank you for following my work.