Tag Archives: PFLP

Nov 11 2012

Update on latest round of Gaza terror: Over 60 rockets fired; 7 Israelis injured

Report collated from the Israeli media and the blog ‘This Ongoing War‘ edited by Arnold and Frimet Roth

Israelis run for cover after rocket sirens are triggered in Ashkelon

  • On Saturday night, Nov. 10, terrorist forces in Gaza fired an anti-tank missile that hit an IDF jeep patrolling 200 meters inside the Israeli border with Gaza near the Karni border crossing. Four soldiers were injured, and two are in serious condition (one with shrapnel wounds to the head).

A wounded Israeli soldier is evacuated by ambulance in southern Israel on Saturday. | Photo credit: AP

  • On Saturday night, Tzeva Adom (Code Red) warnings were blaring in the cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Netivot, Sderot, Gedera, Yavne, Kiryat Malachi and Beit Gamliel, as well as in the Sha’ar Hanegev, Eshkol, Lachish and Sdot Negev regions.  
  • In addition to the injuries to IDF soldiers, three civilians have been injured by rocket shrapnel.
  • ‘Credit’ was claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) for the initial round of rockets, but the IDF believes Islamic Jihad is behind most of the attacks. 
  • The so-called Al-Mujahideen brigades (which likely means the Mujahideen Shura Council of Jerusalem, a terrorist group that claims to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda) is claiming responsibility for 2 of the rockets fired into Israel.
  • The Popular Resistance Committee said it had fired four rockets at Israeli communities close to the Gaza border and at Sderot and Netivot.
  • Hamas, which controls Gaza, published an announcement saying all Israeli military targets (meaning civilian targets) are “legitimate” objects of attack.
  • Islamic Jihad announced on Saturday that it “…will not give the Zionist enemy calm for free… The Resistance cannot sit idly by. Our message to the foe is that it will be bombardment for bombardment, blood for blood…”.
  • Israeli Channel 2 reported on Saturday that “recent cross-border fire from Gaza had included highly accurate Katyusha rockets, capable of doing far more damage than previous rocket fire”.

  • Overnight, the IDF carried out well-targeted air assaults on several Gazan targets involved in yesterday’s attacks against Israeli civilians: a Palestinian weapons manufacturing facility, two weapons storage facilities, and two rocket-launching sites in northern Gaza.  
Thus far, there are no reports on the latest round of Palestinian terror on the Israel, Palestinian territories, or Gaza pages of the Guardian.
(Update: A few minutes ago, at 14:45 Israeli time, the Guardian published an AP report on the latest terror from Gaza)
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Jun 20 2012

Anatomy of a story from Gaza.

It is not a new tactic. When Palestinian terrorists in Gaza decide to up their usual daily quota of rocket fire at civilian communities in the south of Israel, a story suddenly breaks about a child in Gaza killed by Israel. So it was in March 2012 when Harriet Sherwood and many others blindly attributed the death of a boy named Nayif Qarmout to Israeli actions.

And so it is too in the latest round of escalated missile fire from Gaza which is still going on. On Tuesday, June 19th, a story emerged about a toddler named Hadeel Haddad from the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza, supposedly killed in an Israeli airstrike. 

The IDF quickly confirmed that it had not been operating in the area at the time and Ma’an news agency stated (at least on its English language site) that the little girl’s death was related to Palestinian terrorists firing a rocket from the region of her family’s home. Some 10 to 15% of all rockets fired fall short and land in Gaza itself.

However, the false version of the story was published widely (and is still available on the web) in Palestinian press and other media outlets – among them Scoop (Kia Ora’s Julie Webb-Pullman reporting), The Shia Post, the official PA Wafa news agency, the Palestine Press news agency,  the Palestine Times,  Palestine Today and the Iranian Ahul Bayt news agency. 

So where did the story originate? Most of the media outlets claim that their source was Adham Abu Selmeyya (aka Adham Abu Musa Salamia) – spokesman for the Emergency and Ambulance Services in Gaza. Selmeyya, however, has a history of exploiting his official position to spread untrue stories.  In fact, as Elder of Ziyon points out, he was also the person who spread the false story about Nayif Qarmout. 

Another aspect to the story is that of the photograph of the dead child – obviously taken at a mortuary. The website ‘Occupied Palestine’, which ran the story using that photograph, credited it to Twitter user @PFLP67 and indeed the photograph appears on his timeline, addressed to the ‘Occupy Palestine’ Twitter account. The same picture was also used by several of the media outlets promoting the false story. 

Note: @PFLP67′s Twitter account now seems to be experiencing technical difficulties or to have been blocked, so that is the reason the  disturbing image is being published here.

Whilst it is not known whether or not @PFLP67  (whose twitter profile states, predictably, that “the way to Palestine passes via the barrel of a gun”) took the picture himself, what we obviously do have here is a member of a terrorist organization who either has access to the morgue in Gaza himself, or has an associate there, promoting a picture which does not tell the story as he claims it to be. What @PFLP67′s connections are (if any) to Adham Abu Selmeyya and the Gaza emergency and ambulance services remains, of course, a mystery. 

Besides the story being published by media outlets and news agencies, it also spread via Twitter and Facebook.

Some of those Tweeting the story appear to have got their original information from the timeline of the BBC’s correspondent in Gaza, Jon Donnison. 

However, despite the fact that Donnison – who would also appear  to have got the story from Adham Abu Selmeyya – has obviously yet to learn that ‘medical sources in Gaza’ can also be ‘propaganda sources in Gaza’ (and sometimes worse), he did correct himself within the hour. 

Unfortunately, by that time the damage was already done, with the false information – now sporting the trusted BBC’s stamp of approval – retweeted and passed on and his correction largely ignored. 

And what of the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood? Well, her somewhat belated report on the current barrage of rocket attacks on southern Israel, published well over 24 hours after the attacks commenced, appears to indicate that this time around she managed to avoid falling into the trap set by Adham Abu Selmeyya the ‘medical source’ propagandist.

“A two-year-old Palestinian girl was killed in an explosion in Gaza on Tuesday evening, and her brother was injured. The Israeli military denied it had launched an air strike in the area. According to the Palestinian news agency, Ma’an, witnesses said the child died when militants launched a rocket nearby.”

Once bitten twice shy? Let’s hope that the BBC learns the same lesson soon, because spreading unsubstantiated stories and rumours is a very dangerous practice in the Middle East and journalists – like medical staff – should be bound by the commitment to do no harm. 

Apr 13 2012

‘Airflotilla 2′ & “normal, average Europeans”

Earlier in the week the organisers of the ‘Airflotilla 2′ (‘Welcome to Palestine’) campaign held a press conference in Bethlehem. Among the speakers the organisers chose to address journalists was the mayor of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh who urged Israel to allow the flytilla activists in.

“These people are coming to talk about peace, they are not coming to wage war against Israel,” he said. “They are coming to visit the Palestinian people who are under occupation and to talk to them and to help them because these people are isolated.”

 “We are asking our neighbors the Israeli government to make it easy for these people to enter the Palestinian National Authority, so that we can have this message of peace starting from this holy city of Bethlehem.”

He called on Europe and the United States to support the protest. People who speak out about Israel’s policies are called “anti-Semitic,” he said, but urged the US and Europe not to fear this label.

Whilst he can certainly talk the talk, Mayor Batarseh’s ‘message of peace’ should be seen in light of the fact that he recently took part in the ‘Christ at the Checkpoint‘ conference held in his town, during which he told the audience that the Palestinians were being crucified by Israeli security measures, Bethlehem was a giant prison and that Jesus Christ, embodied by the Palestinian people, was imprisoned in the city by the security barrier.

Batarseh is known to be allied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – a terrorist organization proscribed by Canada, the EU and the US. In January this year Batarseh attended a memorial service for PFLP founder George Habash held in Beit Sahour.  Terror attacks perpetrated by the PFLP include:

  • On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv.
  • In September 1970, the PFLP hijacked three passenger planes and took them to airfields in Jordan, where the PLO was then based; after the planes were emptied, the hijackers blew them up. In response, King Hussein of Jordan decided that Palestinian radicals had gone too far and drove the PLO out of his kingdom.
  • In 1972, PFLP and Japanese Red Army gunmen murdered two dozen passengers at Israel’s international airport in Lod.
  • In 1976, breaking a PLO agreement to end terrorism outside Israeli-held territory, PFLP members joined with West German radical leftists from the Baader-Meinhof Gang to hijack an Air France flight bound for Tel Aviv and landed the plane in Entebbe, Uganda. In a now-famous raid, Israeli commandos freed the hostages. [Despite the overall success of the raid, three hostages were killed in the firefight and one was killed by Ugandan Army officers in a nearby hospital.]

Also speaking at the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ press conference was project organizer Mazin Qumsiyeh who said of the campaign’s participants:

“These are not hooligans. The people who are coming are normal, average Europeans who want to learn and visit people under occupation,”

Hooliganism is defined as ‘rowdy, violent or destructive behaviour’ or alternatively; ‘willful, wanton and malicious destruction of the property of others’. Some might say that the attempts of Mazin Qumsiyeh and his Palestine Justice Network to eliminate the Israeli state amount to little less.

Certainly, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Mustafa Barghouti –  an endorser of the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ – do not qualify as being best placed to define hooliganism in light of their equally suspect definition of the recent March 30th ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ events  (which they also co-organised) as ‘non-violent resistance’ and Barghouti’s active participation in the Qalandiya riots.

Neither, of course, is Qumsiyeh’s definition of the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ participants as “normal, average Europeans” at all accurate. Average Europeans do not – unlike the members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or London BDS  (both of which are involved in ‘Welcome to Palestine’)  – align themselves with the oppressive human-rights abusing, terror financing and supporting  Iranian regime by promoting and participating in ‘Al Quds Day‘ marches.

Normal Europeans do not march under the flags of terrorist organisations such as Hizbollah and Hamas who indiscriminately murder civilians. Average Europeans do not disrupt cultural events and call for boycotts of a democratic country as a means of bringing about its dismantling. And ordinary Europeans certainly do not try to deliberately get themselves deported from other countries by knowingly engineering provocations.

As for Qumsiyeh’s claim that the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ participants wanting to “learn” about the conflict – that of course is highly dubious. Seasoned activists such as these are precisely what they are because of the fact that they have no desire to have their well-entrenched opinions challenged by facts and knowledge.

But let’s say they did. A viewing of this video made by Mustafa Barghouti shows exactly what participants in the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ will be ‘learning’ on their trip – should they actually arrive.

Jan 24 2012

Political Activism as Journalism: Harriet Sherwood promotes agenda of radical anti-Israel NGO

On Saturday February 16th 2002, at around 7:45 p.m., an 18 year-old terrorist – wearing an explosive vest containing 25 pounds of nails for added damage – walked into a pizza parlour in the crowded shopping mall in Karnei Shomron and detonated his device.

Two teenagers were killed instantly, some thirty people (many of them children) were injured – six of them seriously – and one died of her wounds 11 days later. Rachel Thaler was 16 years old, Keren Shatsky and Nehemia Amar were both 15 when they were murdered.

One member at that time of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – the organisation which later claimed responsibility for that terror attack – is named Shahwan Jabarin. 

Strangely, (at least according to Western standards) for someone involved with an organisation with such obvious disregard for the lives of either terror victims or the brainwashed teenagers sent to perpetrate terror attacks, he is today active in the field of ‘human rights’ NGOs as director of ‘Al Haq’ and a board member of ‘Human Rights Watch’. He also sits on the board of an organisation named Defence for Children International – Palestine (DCI-Pal).

In June 2007 the Israeli Supreme Court noted that:

“[Jabarin] is apparently active as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in part of his hours of activity he is the director of a human rights organisation, and in another part he is an activist in a terrorist organisation which does not shy away from acts of murder and attempted murder, which have nothing to do with rights, and, on the contrary, deny the most basic right of all, the most fundamental of fundamental rights, without which there are no other rights – the right to life.”

In 1985 Jabarin was sentenced to 24 months’ imprisonment after having been found guilty of recruiting members for the PFLP (designated as a terror organization by the US, EU and Canada) and arranging PFLP training abroad. In 1994 he was arrested and placed in administrative detention for six months due to the fact that he “had not discontinued his terrorist involvement and maintains his position in the leadership of the PFLP”. In 2003 his PFLP links caused him to be denied entry into Jordan.

The director and founder of DCI-Pal is Rifat Odeh Kassis – another seasoned anti-Israel campaigner who is active in a number of organisations (some of which he founded), including OPGAI, The World Council of Churches, EAPPI, the Alternative Tourism Group, and the Alternative Information Centre (also known for links to the PFLP).  Kassis is the co-author of the notorious Kairos Document, which promotes BDS and suggests that Jewish sovereignty is an affront to God’s plan for humanity.

Last year Kassis took public objection to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s expression of anxiety regarding the future of Christians in the Middle East and used the anti-Semitic canard of dual loyalty to attack the Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal.

Far from confining itself to the objectives of its mission statement (“Promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), as well as other international, regional and local standards”), DCI-Pal is active in various Boycotts, Divestment and Sanction campaigns and in lobbying foreign governments and organisations.  It promotes the ‘right of return‘ of Palestinian refugees and lobbied for the UNHRC to endorse the Goldstone Report.

DCI-Pal also supports the Muslim Brotherhood-organised ‘Freedom flotillas’ and promotes the myth of “a large-scale humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, and continues to promote the libel of the ‘Jenin massacre’ on its website.

Snapshot of DCI-Pal website, taken Jan. 24, 2012 (Click to Enlarge)

After Operation Cast Lead, DCI-Pal posted a list of the names of children it claimed had been killed during the war. Other organisations such as B’Tselem and PCHR later identified some of those named as combatants.

Clearly, DCI-Pal is yet another on the long list of organisations which employ the fig-leaf of human rights to advance radical anti-Israel agendas.

It is also the organization that raised the unproven allegations which  Harriet Sherwood has chosen – yet again – to repeat  unquestioningly in no less than two articles and one video report in the space of 24 hours on the subject of Palestinian youths detained by Israel .

Sherwood’s complete failure to make any attempt to verify the claims she parrots in order to make them more than just hearsay will hardly come as much of a surprise to those familiar with her track record. Her symbiotic relationship with an NGO which has a (former?) member of a proscribed terrorist group on its board and an often debatable relationship with the truth should, however, raise eyebrows.

Sherwood gets easy and plentiful material for her ‘special report’ and DCI-Pal gets free publicity for its political campaign – but at what price to the reputation of her profession and its ethics?  

It is precisely the failure to confirm or even question the accusations made by DCI-Pal – even in light of the response she received in advance of publication from the Israel Security Agency (ISA) – which indicates that Harriet Sherwood was not interested in providing her readers with facts, but in supplying a steady stream of emotive pieces consistent with their (and her) stereotypes.  Of course by the by, she is also campaigning on behalf of a cause she apparently either considers worthy of political activism or is too ignorant of the elements at work in the region to identify.

It is long past time for Harriet Sherwood – and her editors – to return urgently to her own words from 2006:

“The first thing we need to be absolutely sure of is the purpose of our news reporting from the region. Our correspondents are there to give our readers accurate information about Israel-Palestine. We are not there to bat for one side or the other, but to report on the situation on the ground as we find it.”

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Dec 13 2011

Guardian’s Seumas Milne: Trainee @ PFLP terror camp in Beirut? (Updated)

Harry’s Place today asked the question, “Did The Guardian’s Seumas Milne spend his gap year training at a PFLP camp in Beirut?

Here’s an excerpt from their post.

According to a number of prominent journalists, he did indeed, and used to brag about it at cocktail parties. “He wasn’t there to report,” one journo who knew Milne back in the bad old days of Soviet stooging and third worldist terrorism, told me recently, adding that Milne was “so Stalinist, we used to say he had snow on his boots.”

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash in 1967, was a Leninist terrorist organisation which, in Habash’s words, “held the ‘Guevara view’ of the ‘revolutionary human being’. A new breed of man had to emerge, among the Arabs as everywhere else. This meant applying everything in human power to the realization of a cause.” In the first decades of its existence, the PFLP were responsible for airline hijackings, the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket, bus bombings in Europe, airport shootings, and a synagogue bombing in Paris.

All of this would have struck young Milne as revolutionarily vogue.

While a definitive answer to the question of whether Milne spent his gap year at a PFLP training camp may be difficult to obtain, there is no question that Milne certainly shares some common ideological terrain with the Marxist-Leninist Palestinian terror group.

As we’ve noted, Milne worked for “Straight Left”, the pro-Stalin Marxist newspaper, prior to joining the Guardian.  Further, Milne’s communist sympathies don’t seem to have waned over time, as he demonstrated by lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union in a 2001 CiF essay. 

Milne also regularly accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing, is explicit in his support of so-called “Palestinian resistance”, and downplays the antisemitic nature of Hamas.

He also seems quite sympathetic to Islamist terrorist “resistance” movements around the world.

See our dossier on Milne, here.

I’d also recommend Tweeting Milne, to see if he’ll definitively deny any past association with the PFLP.

UPDATE: The Guardian’s legal department contacted Harry’s Place, and wrote the following:

“Hello,

I am contacting you from the Guardian’s legal department in relation to the article that you published on 13 December entitled: ‘Did The Guardian’s Seumas Milne spend his gap year training at a PFLP camp in Beirut?‘

The allegation that Seumas attended a terrorist training camp is entirely false and defamatory. We would request that you remove this article from your website and run a correction as a matter of urgency.”

It’s interesting that the Guardian didn’t deny that Milne was associated with the PFLP, only that he never “attended a terrorist training camp.”

Stay tuned.

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