An Israeli government report charges that staffers at some of the most prominent organizations and NGOs advocating boycotts of Israel are also members of terrorist groups, The Times of Israel reported Sunday.
The report, Terrorists in Suits, which was released by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, charged that a number of high-profile staffers at NGOs that promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign are tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other terror groups.
The report highlights the role of Leila Khaled in promoting BDS. Khaled, who was involved in the armed hijackings of planes in 1969 and 1970 is a frequent promoter of anti-Israel boycotts in Europe and South Africa.
Khaled, according to the report, has been “coordinating between a PFLP command center in Syria and operatives in Jerusalem planning lethal attacks against Israelis,” even as she was in South Africa raising money to fund the BDS movement.
In 2017, Khaled was barred from entering Italy due to an invalid visa. In December of last year, Germany pressured the Palestinian mission in Berlin to remove a post promoting terrorism that featured a picture of Khaled.
Two anti-Israel NGOs, Addameer and Al Haq, had ties to the PFLP, according to the ministry’s report.
Khalida Jareer, a Palestinian legislator who used to be on the board of Addameer, is a member of the PFLP.
According to the report, Shawan Jabarin, who heads al-Haq, is a “former senior operative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group, who has served several prison sentences due to his terrorist activity.”
Jabarin, however, denies the charges and claims that his organization is “an apolitical and professional humanitarian and legal organization.”
In addition to the BDS ties to the PFLP, the ministry’s report found that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which is active in the United Kingdom and Europe, “has ties to Hamas operatives such as Muhammad Sawalha and Zaher Birawi.”
Members of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a pro-BDS tax-exempt group in the United States, have been involved “directly and indirectly, in providing funding assistance to Hamas,” according to the report.
Following the release of the Israeli government report, NGO Monitor noted on Facebook, “In recent years, and based on NGO Monitor’s findings, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland issued clear guidelines preventing funding for these NGOs.”
The ties between the BDS campaign and terrorists has previously been documented.
Research by NGO Monitor, a watchdog group, found in 2016 that “many European countries fund a network of organizations, some of which are directly affiliated with the PFLP, and others with a substantial presence of employees and officials linked to the PFLP.”
About the same time, research conducted by Jonathan Schanzer and Kate Havard of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies found, “The BDS campaign in the United States broadly identifies as a nonviolent social justice movement. But, its connections to the PFLP, a decidedly violent group, are troubling.”
Schanzer also showed, using publicly available documents, that members of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, Kind Hearts Foundation for Humanitarian Development, and the Islamic Association for Palestine — groups that were found to have raised some $12 million for Hamas over the course of ten years — were associated with the organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) in 2016.
[Photo: Ofir Gendelman / Twitter ]