Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi barred from U.S.

Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi barred from U.S.

Bassem Tamimi has been on these pages quite frequently in the past half year, most of it related to his appearance at an Ithaca, NY, third grade class as part of an anti-Israel propaganda event organized by local Jewish Voice for Peace activist Ariel Gold (now employed by Code Pink) and one of the teachers.

Tamimi is best known for using children, including his own, to confront Israeli soldiers in the hope of creating viral video and photo images. He has been quite successful at this, and many of the images resulting from these provocations have become international hits, such as this video of his daughter from several years ago:

And this more recent incident:

Legal Insurrection’s reporting on the event sparked huge national and international controversy, particularly Tamimi’s call for the children to become “freedom fighters for Palestine.”  The Superintendent of the Ithaca City Schools condemned the event and apologized:

“The Ithaca City School District’s position is that such statements [at the event] are not developmentally appropriate for third graders, nor aligned with the New York State standards. The statements were politically skewed, inflammatory, and not endorsed by the Ithaca City School District.”

[Ithaca 3rd Grade appearance of Bassem Tamimi]

That wasn’t the end of our Tamimi story.

We wrote about how Jewish Voice for Peace, which co-sponsored his national tour, launched a campaign claiming that criticism of the third grade event was an attempt to silence Palestinian voices.

JVP and its local operatives never seemed capable of appreciating that the outrage was that they abused the public school system for their own political purposes and conducted an event targeting 8-9 year old children. They just can’t grasp how inapproriate this was, because they are all-consumed by their hatred of Israel, which has become their religion.

We also documented how Tamimi spread the blood-libel that Israel arrests children in order to harvest their organs.

We filed a request under the NY Freedom of Information Law, and the new docs revealed Third Grade Anti-Israel event much worse than thought, and included showing this video to students:

The presentation troubled the third graders and caused hostility to Israel, as this partial transcript of the reaction reflects:

We then had to seek emergency court relief to prevent the possible destruction of electronic evidence, litigation in which we have been successful although the results are not yet known.

More litigation will follow as we seek documents and video that has been withheld by ICSD, and removal of redaction from many documents:

It took us almost two years to get the District of Columbia to cough up all the documents regarding David Gregory’s non-prosecution. I’m hopeful that we won’t have to wait that long, but the court process takes time.

In the meantime, it appears that we don’t need to worry about a repeat appearance by Tamimi in any more schools anywhere in the U.S. because his visa was just revoked for failing to disclose his convictions in Israel.

Israelly Cool broke the story:

Bassem Tamimi, terror supporter & enabler, and father/exploiter of “Shirley Temper”, has apparently had his US visa revoked, according to a letter he himself posted on his Facebook page.

In 2012, Tamimi was arrested and sentenced to prison for planning demonstrations in Nabi Salih, as well as “soliciting” others to throw stones at IDF soldiers as they attempted to disperse the weekly rallies. Later that year, he was again arrested, this time for an illegal demonstration in the car park of Rami Levy, a supermarket accessible to both Jews and palestinians. I am guessing he failed to disclose at least one of those.

Ironically, that visa revocation came just a few days before Tamimi filed a lawsuit as lead plaintiff against dozens of Americans and American businesses for supporting Israel. But Tamimi is claiming the visa revocation was retaliation for the filing of a lawsuit that had not yet been filed.

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