Pallywood: Amnesty Int’l Falsely Blamed Israel for Palestinian Missile That Hit Gaza Human Rights Office
Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst: “Israel did not strike this building. (…) I was across the street when it happened.”
Israel has asked the rights group Amnesty International to apologize for leveling false charges against the country’s armed forces for targeting the Gaza offices of a human rights organization.
Shortly after the building housing the Palestinian “Independent Commission for Human Rights” (ICHR) got hit by a rocket on Wednesday, Amnesty International blamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the attack.
The explosion caused partial damage to the building and one person was injured as a result, Israeli media reported.
The news website Times of Israel reported:
A rocket that hit the offices of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday was reportedly fired by Palestinians inside Gaza and not launched by Israeli forces.
The ICHR blamed Israel for the missile, which injured one worker and caused significant damage to the building. Amnesty International issued a condemnation of Israel, as did the US left-wing activist group Code Pink.
However, the rocket, which hit the fifth floor of the office building, was fired by terrorists in Gaza — almost certainly the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group — but it fell short of hitting Israel, Haaretz reported Wednesday.
PIJ pummeled Israel with hundreds of rockets Tuesday in response to the IDF targeted killing earlier in the day of Baha Abu al-Ata, a senior commander in the terror group, and his wife. The IDF responded with airstrikes on PIJ targets. The rocket barrages continued Wednesday and an IDF spokesman said the retaliatory Israeli airstrikes were carefully hitting only PIJ targets while staying away from populated areas to avoid civilian casualties. (…)
Israeli sources confirmed to Haaretz that the rocket that hit the ICHR was not fired by the IDF. In addition, there was an almost total self-imposed blackout of the incident by local Palestinian media, which according to the report, is a further indication that the missile was Palestinian.
The so-called Palestinian rights group also cried foul about “Israeli war crimes” for “targeting human rights institutions in this manner.” The Far-Left group Code Pink also joined the chorus “condemning” the “attack on this important human rights organization.”
These claims have since been refuted by Israeli and foreign media outlets. The ICHR office was hit by a stray rocket intended for Israeli civilians, Reuters’ video footage showed. Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst, who was at the scene in Gaza at the time of the blast, corroborate the claim. “Israel did not strike this building. A rocket misfired from Gaza. I was across the street when it happened,” Fox News correspondent said on Twitter.
Israel did not strike this building. A rocket misfired from Gaza.
I was across the street when it happened. https://t.co/co73PIQooc
— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) November 13, 2019
Faced with mounting evidence, Amnesty International refused to retract the allegation, but admitted that “conflicting information” was “circulating about what exactly hit the ICHR office in Gaza and where the attack came from.”
The UK-based ELINT News shared Reuters’ live stream showing a rocket launched from inside Gaza hitting the ICHR building:
Video from the @Reuters livestream via @RelicHq showing the errant Palestinian rocket falling short and hitting the Palestinian Independent Commission For Human Rights building in Gaza. Not an Israeli airstrike. pic.twitter.com/P76Dx0RyIU
— ELINT News (@ELINTNews) November 13, 2019
Amnesty International has been waging a vicious campaign against Israel, making wild allegations and calling for an “arms embargo” against the country.
“Amnesty should fire the officials who gave the false report from Gaza, and the officials in London who issued the statement of condemnation against Israel with no evidentiary basis,” executive director of watchdog group UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, demanded. He also called upon the rights group to “apologize publicly for its false reporting and baseless condemnation.”
Israel also asked Amnesty International to apologize for its misleading statements.
“Contrary to your claim, the Palestinian commission for Human Rights in Gaza was struck by the enemies of human rights – Gaza terror groups, which you [Amnesty International] repeatedly fail to condemn,” Israeli foreign ministry said.
The latest round of conflict began Tuesday after Israel killed the top commander of the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. The terror operative, Baha Abu al-Ata, was behind several recent attacks on Israel and was planning an imminent attack.
More than 300 rockets have been launched by the terror group. Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has intercepted around 90 percent of these rockets. With central and southern Israel under rocket fire, schools have been closed in the impacted region, and over a million people have been forced to seek shelter.
The truth, they say, is the first causality of war. It’s even more so when Palestinian terrorists launch aggression against Israel. As usual, Arab-Islamic terrorist groups have teamed up with far-left Western “rights groups” in distorting the reality and smearing the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East. The European Union, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and their ilk are all ganging up on the tiny Jewish State amid a barrage of rockets raining down on Israeli towns and cities.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad fires hundreds of rockets at Israel
[Cover image via YouTube]
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Comments
I told you the first move would be to blame Isreal.
With all due respect, one need not be a seer or MENSA member to forecast how this would play out.
You get no credit for stating the obvious and predictable.
Give Amnesty International 48 hours to come clean with full-page ads in all the major US, EU and Arab world papers or be designated a foreign lobbying organization, losing their 501(c)(3) and having their officials denied visas to enter the US.
That’s not an option. Any such action would fall foul of the first amendment.
Part yes, but only part.
There is no Constitutional right to any 501c status except some (most?) religious organizations. That is why the various IRS vs (tea party groups) lawsuits are dragging on, as the Courts allowed that the IRS could have some standards that some groups may fail at and so not qualify for a particular 501c? status. And now we have the many exhaustive cases where the IRS denies the standards the groups were denied on and the judge may or may not require the IRS disclose why a particular group failed (only one reason then they fail at another one reason ad infinitum).
The visa part does not make sense to me unless visas are now issued to persons who except for their AI affiliation would be denied those visas.
There’s no constitutional right to any 501c status; not even for religious organizations. The tax code doesn’t have to have such status in the first place. But like any government benefit, once the status exists it is unconstitutional to deny it to anyone for exercising their first amendment rights. Even a government grant, which is obviously not a constitutional right in the first place, becomes one when the government wants to deny it because it doesn’t like the content of someone’s speech. (cf Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to defund the Brooklyn Museum because he didn’t like a painting it displayed; the courts slapped him down, and quite rightly.)
The US has plenary power to exclude from the country non-US individuals who advocate anti-US positions. The only debates on this are over the balance of this power as between Congress and the President (resolved mostly for the President in the Travel Ban case) and whether or not a particular application of this power is or is not wise. Barring Amnesty International officials from the US to deter their disseminating demonstrably false anti-Israel propaganda is a reasonable exercise if this power. Sometimes this achieves its goal, as in the case a while ago of a nut from the UN or ICJ who wanted to investigate the US Army regarding Iraq or Afghanistan
We were mostly discussing Amnesty USA’s tax status. Since there is such a status as 501(c)(3), the constitution forbids the IRS from denying it to any entity merely for that entity’s viewpoint.
Visas are of course relevant only to those Amnesty officials who are neither US citizens nor residents. The US constitution protects US citizens and residents everywhere in the world, but it protects other people only when they are in the USA. So a foreigner who is not currently here can be denied a visa for things he said while he was in his home country.
As I noted before, You are correct that 501(c)(3) status cannot be denied based on viewpoint, but it can be denied for lobbying and probably for defamation, both of which characterize Amnesty International. Anyone who doubts that should simply refer to the fact that after the source of the rocket that destroyed the building was identified, instead of acknowledging it, much less apologizing, they persisted with a mealy-mouthed reference to “conflicting media reports.” What’s going on, and I don’t think anyone in the organization would really deny this, is that unless they shill for Islamic terrorists in Gaza, their own people there will be killed or they will be denied access to an area where they think their work is important.
I don’t see a First Amendment in the Israeli Basic Laws.
Could you point it out to the class?
We are not discussing Israel, we are discussing the USA government, which is bound by the US constitution, not by Israeli law.
501(c)(3)’s can lose their tax status for lobbying and for engaging in defamation. The First Amendment does not protect defamation, as the media are now discovering in the Gibson’s, Covington and Palin suits.
There is no such thing in US law as defamation of a large group of people (more than about 25), let alone a whole country. Nor can an organization be denied tax status merely for exercising its constitutional right to lobby Congress, so long as that’s not its main purpose and activity.
IANAL so…
Does that mean groups of larger than 25 cannot be libeled or slandered?
And I tried looking up the 501c groups as I recalled that some were contribution deductible from the doners taxes, while some were only tax exempt themselves. 501(c)3 is so encompassing it would seem to include both deductible and not.
???
How to differentiate and which is Amnesty International (and could they plausibly be moved to nondeductible if not there now)
Yes. Members of a group larger than approximately 25 cannot sue for something said about the group in general.
Declare them a terrorist organization.
And they’d immediately challenge that in court and win.
Yup
Look at CAIR
Held in the Holyland Foundation trial as an unindicted co-conspirator but still here, still fundraising, still advocating legal and public blindness for Islamic Supremacist behaviors that the general US public would not support if aware of (and denigrating/demanding legal sanctions against anyone who tries to educate any part of the public of just what Islamic adherents do, Islam supports doing, or finds acceptable).
Short version, find the song “Its in the Koran” by Patrick Henry. The first modern supporter of BAMN philosophy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZWMsBqJvPs
CAIR is a domestic organization, so the whole “terrorist organization” thing can’t apply to it. There is no such thing as a domestic terrorist organization, which is why antifa can’t be designated as one.
I would like to ask anyone who has an opinion: should we keep calling these Arabs Palestinians? They are not and I don’t. But is there a reason why we should?
No reason to call them that fake name.
Only if you need to distinguish between different subsets of Arabs. In that case “Palestinian Arab” (or “Balestinian” if you want to mock their inability to pronounce the letter P) is a useful designation.
Spot on. They are Arabs who happen to live in Judea and Samaria, or if you prefer, in the area roughly bordered by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. No such thing as a Palestinian. Name one Palestinian leader, scientist, author, artist, athlete, performer, statesman, industrialist, etc before 1967. Come to think of it, not including terrorists, name one after.
Good point. I was thinking that the word Palestine comes from Philistine. They were Greeks, not Arabs and they were extinct long before Rome, Christianity or Islam. No descendants of the Philistines exist.
Jabotinsky referred to them as “Palestinians”. But the context was contrasting the Arab inhabitants of the British territory of Palestine with the Arab leaders in other countries who purported to speak for them. In the same context he referred to Italians living in Trieste as “Triestans”, contrasting them with the government of Italy that purported to speak for them. Obviously nobody has ever suggested that there is a separate “Triestian” nationality.
Amnesty used to be an organization that stood mostly on the side or right, and did a lot of good. It was a bulwark against communist oppression. But approximately 20 years ago it took a radical turn to the left and became an enemy of the USA and of Israel. For me it jumped the shark, so to speak, when it pressed Gulag survivors to compare Guantanamo Bay to what they had experienced. From then on I’ve had no time for it at all, and when I see its agents collecting signatures and/or money in the street I ask them how they’re not ashamed to work for an organization that supports terrorism.
IDK, Amnesty International is every bit as trustworthy as Hamas or UNRWA. AI probably even provides warehouse space for Hamas munitions and command centers.
“…Reuters’ live stream showing a rocket launched from inside Gaza hitting the ICHR building:…
Shows you how sneaky the Mossad is, they fire rockets inside Gaza so the media will blame the blameless victims.
For the folks in Rio Linda, everything after the quoted material was pure sarcasm.
Israel should destroy one building in Gaza for every rocket fired into Israel.
A few years back, Israel traded 1027 terrorists for Gilad Schalit, a soldier kidnapped by Hamas. Israel should fire 1027 missiles for every rocket fired from Gaza.
Nah, move the border wall in one square mile, maybe negotiate it down to one acre, but an absolute amount that happens each attack. Modifiers for each injury, further modifiers for each death.
If Mossad were to run a false flag operation power or water disruption would be a better attack point, especially if there were disruptions with the Jewish crews not being safe to restore the power lines or water pipes.
when looking at the terrorist with his mouth open, in the center of the header photo, for some reason am thinking of the bottom tip of the apricot
Who do you believe, AI or your lying eyes?