Gaza-based Amnesty Int’l Consultant Accused of Turning In Other Gazans For Video Chat With Israelis
Hamas security forces detained the leader of the offending group on charges of “treason”, and he has not been heard from since.
A (now former) Gaza-based “consultant” with the ‘human rights’ behemoth Amnesty International has suddenly found herself in hot water after she allegedly sold out out fellow Palestinians in Gaza to the terrorist group Hamas.
Self-styled “journalist” Hind Khoudary took to Facebook last week to alert three Hamas officials that a group of her fellow Gazans had had held an online chat with Israelis about the coronavirus crisis.
Soon, Hamas security forces detained the leader of the offending group on charges of “treason”, and he has not been heard from since.
Meanwhile, the staunchly anti-“normalization” Khoudary continues to justify her actions, and Amnesty International refuses to condemn her behavior. Anti-normalization means that groups, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, do not want positive contacts between Israeli Jews and Palestinians that might foster understanding and peace.
Khaudary’s actions first came to public attention on April 10, when the New York Times reported (emphasis added),
For five years, a small but feisty group of Palestinian peace activists in the blockaded Gaza Strip has been organizing small-scale video chats with Israelis under a bridge-building initiative it calls “Skype With Your Enemy.”On Monday, the group, the Gaza Youth Committee, drew one of its biggest crowds yet — more than 200 participants — this time on Zoom, the newly popular teleconferencing platform.
But other Palestinians in Gaza, who took umbrage at the idea of befriending Israelis, were also listening in. And the resulting public uproar prompted Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, to arrest the youth committee’s leader and several other participants.
The charge: “holding a normalization activity” with Israelis, which a Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman, Iyad Al-Bozom, called a crime, saying it amounted to the “betrayal of our people and their sacrifices.”
The youth committee’s leader, Rami Aman, 38, has not been heard from since he surrendered Thursday morning at Internal Security headquarters in Gaza City, a family member said late Friday afternoon.
…[After the Zoom meeting], he came in for vituperative criticism online, and early Thursday morning, a freelance Gaza journalist, Hind Khoudary, posted angry denunciations on Facebook of Mr. Aman and others on the call, tagging three Hamas officials, including Mr. Al-Bozom, to ensure it got their attention.
An arrest warrant was issued by the Hamas military prosecution, which handles accused collaborators with Israel, would-be suicide bombers and other serious security threats, Mr. Al-Bozom said. He did not identify or say how many other youth committee members had also been detained.”
April 8: Khoudary unleashes storm of vituperative posts against Rami, tagging 3 Hamas officials, while identifying as “Amnesty International Research Consultant” (see ⬇️)
April 12: Khoudary claims she’s now ex-Amnesty
April 13: Amnesty still silent on Rami Aman, and on Khoudary pic.twitter.com/150YCiTRFc
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) April 13, 2020
Amnesty’s claim is an odd one. For one thing, its website includes multiple pages whitewashing the Gaza Great Return Marches and bewailing “Israel’s deplorable use of excessive force in response to protests”; one of these pages, dated October 2018, shows that Khoudary was working with Amnesty at least as early as that.
For another, as the the blog IsraellyCool and the organization UN Watch have noted, Khoudary identified herself as a current consultant for Amnesty International only days ago. David Lange, who runs the IsraellyCool blog, captured a screenshot of her Facebook profile with the April 9th, 2020 post alerting Hamas of the Gaza Youth Committee’s activities:
Khoudary seems to be participating in Amnesty’s apparent subterfuge. Barely five days after she posted her original screed, her Facebook profile lists Khoudary’s position with Amnesty as “former”, and she has deleted that post. (Although, an article on the controversy by the largely anti-Israel publication Middle East Eye alleges that Facebook administrators were the ones responsible for deleting the post. Khoudary tweeted that article with the caption: “If you want to know the unbiased story (:” )
Khoudary also took to Twitter on April 12 to claim that she is no longer with Amnesty, and that she’s left Gaza.
The organization’s silence on the subject is quite a departure from its behavior in March 2019—when Hamas arrested Khoudary herself as a result of her work with Amnesty (or so the group claimed).
On the other hand, several Amnesty International branches (archived here) have instead found the time over the last few days to lobby Trip Advisor in an effort to get the company to de-list all attractions and accomodations in “settlements”—i.e. Jewish areas of the West Bank.
Tell @TripAdvisor: #CheckOut of illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine https://t.co/h9MNnVWNG8
— Amnesty Bristol (@amnestybristol) April 13, 2020
For her part, and despite her claim to first-hand experience with Hamas’ brutality, Khoudary has shown neither remorse nor empathy for the suffering Rami Aman must be enduring at Hamas’ hands.
Instead, she has complained about online backlash against her generated by the NY Times piece, claiming in another Facebook rant that she only tagged the three high-ranking Hamas officials in her original post to register her dissatisfaction with “normalization” activities (meaning: any Palestinian having any kind of conversation with any Israeli).
In the same post, she rejected the notion that she helped instigate the Gaza Youth arrests.
However, in other Facebook posts by Khoudary expressed last week she expressed the hope that the peace activists would not only be summoned for interrogation. “All normalization activities must stop,” she wrote. “I hope there will be a statement clarifying the measures that will be taken to stop such activities. The government in Gaza must prove that it does not agree to these activities that are organized by Aman and his friends.”
In another post, Khoudary wrote: “How do we allow someone like Rami Aman to talk on behalf of Gaza? Normalization was never an ordinary thing.”
In yet another Facebook comment, Khoudary said: “I really hate this person (Rami Aman). I’m willing to accept anything other than a person who makes normalization with the occupation. This is not the first time that Rami carries out such activities, and he always justifies his normalization.”
Furthermore, Khoudary has justified her recent actions by continuing to decry “normalization” as a “crime”—even calling it “the worst sin” a Palestinian could commit (archived here, here, here and here). Not only that, she has tried to frame her actions as being universally approved of among Palestinians, presuming to speak on behalf of them all in a tweet that reads, “We dont want to talk with people who stole our land” (archived here).
Any type of normalization is a crime, and it is unacceptale.
— ʜɪɴᴅ ᴋʜᴏᴜᴅᴀʀʏ ﮼هند،الخضري (@Hind_Gaza) April 12, 2020
Normalizations seeks to move forward with connections to Israel and Israelis without holding the accountability of the ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.
— ʜɪɴᴅ ᴋʜᴏᴜᴅᴀʀʏ ﮼هند،الخضري (@Hind_Gaza) April 12, 2020
Normalization; which is any joint activity between Palestine and Israel.
No form of joint activity, cooperation or dialogue with Israelis is acceptable, even engaging with Israeli “Peace Activists”.
These actions are collaboration with enemies of us, the Palestinians.— ʜɪɴᴅ ᴋʜᴏᴜᴅᴀʀʏ ﮼هند،الخضري (@Hind_Gaza) April 12, 2020
Normalization can be defined as pursing policies or action that treat Israel and Israeli people as a normal part of the Middle East ignoring the role of the “Israeli state and citizens” in the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinians.
— ʜɪɴᴅ ᴋʜᴏᴜᴅᴀʀʏ ﮼هند،الخضري (@Hind_Gaza) April 12, 2020
https://twitter.com/Hind_Gaza/status/1249310730878439425
https://twitter.com/Hind_Gaza/status/1249214591978082304
She has even gone so far as to defiantly applaud herself for being “against…any action that would ever harm the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause” (archived here).
Tweeting against me wont ever scare me from being a Palestinian that is against normalization and any action that would ever harm the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause.
— ʜɪɴᴅ ᴋʜᴏᴜᴅᴀʀʏ ﮼هند،الخضري (@Hind_Gaza) April 12, 2020
We wonder: does Amnesty International agree?
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Samantha Mandeles is Senior Researcher and Outreach Director at the Legal Insurrection Foundation.
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Comments
Hamas is “the Palestinian wing of al Qaeda.” We should deal with them and their supporters the way we dealt with that other al Qaeda offshoot ISIS (nee al Qaeda in Iraq).
It would be a shame if a drone got her…
Those paws!
They look like the hands/paws of Seinfeld’s girlfriend,
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/10/be/df/10bedf9dd62eb26ed36dbb46ab186687.jpg
i fully support “anti-normalization” for her…
take her body temp down to the ambient air temperature.
“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” – Golda Meir (1898 – 1978), former Prime Minister of Israel
Ah, members of the religion of peace at work.
It is difficult to believe this religion, which rarely ever voices anything negative toward these terrorist groups, are about anything but destroying lives of any who oppose them. For the all the talk about it being such a small percent of these animals, they certainly get far too much support.
It sure smells like she was a plant.
I think our left look at these things and wish they could implement their tactics.
“Soon, Hamas security forces detained the leader of the offending group on charges of “treason”, and he has not been heard from since.”
The reason that camel jockey, goat abusers beliefs have remained stagnant for 1400 years is that they murder anyone who would reform their cult like, oppressive beliefs.
Personally, I think that these people are collectively like rapid dogs, that they are not salvageable, and they should be put down.
Some people treat the Israelis as if they can do no wrong. I’d say we have unequivocal evidence that they aren’t good at everything.
The are the worst “ethnic cleansers” in the history of the world.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15739/israel-palestinians-coronavirus
“In the past few days, Israeli authorities delivered 200 coronavirus testing kits to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. In addition, Israeli and Palestinian professional teams have been working together to prevent the spread of the virus.
The Israeli authorities have also delivered another 200 coronavirus testing kits to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, despite the thousands of rockets and incendiary and bomb-carrying balloons that the ruling government, Hamas, has launched from there towards Israel.”
There is one thing where Israel is wrong, they have not started fuel air bombing to create an ever widening DMZ between them and psychotic, homicidal palestinians.
Has the new normal become that any NGO that is not explicity and proudly pro-Israel will, in time, align itself with the Arab League’s Three No’s (“no peace,” “no negotiations” and “no recognition” of Israel)? And, having done so, will it then see no moral problem in aiding the deadly work of terrorist organizations such as Hamas?
Gaza-based Amnesty Int’l Consultant Accused of Turning In Other Gazans For Video Chat With Israelis.
While Amnesty International has done some good things over the years, its less than pristine origins indicate that it should not be a surprise that a consultant for Amnesty International would turn Gazans in for the “horrible” crime of talking with Israelis.
The True Genesis of Amnesty International,”Quadrant Magazine (2007).