President Joe Biden’s administration has rebuked Israel for designating “human rights” NGOs linked to a notorious terror group as terrorist organizations.
“The US State Department criticized the announcement on Friday in the most explicit admonition from the Biden administration since the new Israeli government was formed in June,” the Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday. The left-wing Israel newspaper Haaretz called it “perhaps the Biden administration’s harshest public rebuke of Israel since [the new Israeli government took] office.”
The Biden administration characterized the Israeli decision targeting six NGOs run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as an attack on “human rights” and “fundamental freedoms.” The Marxist PFLP is a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
“We believe respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and a strong civil society are critically important to responsible and responsive governance,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
On Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared six PFLP-run NGOs as terror organizations. The decision came after years of extensive investigation by Israeli researchers — notably led by the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor watchdog — that clearly expose ties between these “human rights” groups and the Palestinian Marxist terror group.
The six banned NGOs, who have been exposed as the front groups of the PFLP, are Al-Haq, Addameer, Defence for Children International-Palestine, the Bisan Center, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees. Some of these benign-sounding NGOs are a “central source” of funding for the PFLP and have received “large sums of money from European countries and international organisations,” the Israeli defense ministry disclosed.
“Those organizations were active under the cover of civil society organizations, but in practice belong and constitute an arm of the [PFLP] leadership, the main activity of which is the liberation of Palestine and destruction of Israel,” the Israeli ministry added.
The Biden White House also slammed Israel for not informing Washington about the measures against the terrorist-linked NGOs in advance — a claim denied by Jerusalem.
“Officials in the American administration were updated in advance of the intention to make this declaration and they received intelligence information about the matter,” The Times of Israel reported on Saturday citing an Israeli defense official.
The evidence tying these NGOs to the notorious Marxist terror group is a matter of public record. Years of meticulous research by Israeli watchdog group, NGO Monitor, has exposed PFLP’s nefarious “civil society” network. Legal Insurrection has extensively reported on the PFLP’s NGO network and how they are being used to get millions of dollars in aid from U.S. and European government agencies.
Leading left-wing groups and activists joined the Biden administration in a chorus of condemnation against Israel. Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib came to the defense of the terrorist-run NGOs, describing them as “award-winning human rights groups.”
The PFLP, the leading Palestinian-Communist terror group, first gained notoriety in the 1970s when its carried out a series of deadly aircraft hijackings and other acts of terror — several of them in coordination with left-wing German terrorist groups. The outfit continues to carry out terror attacks against Israeli civilians and military personnel.
The NGO Monitor describes the nature of the terrorist group:
“PFLP is a (…) Marxist-Leninist terror group, originally supported by the Soviet Union and China. (…) “Since its inception, the terror group has been involved in suicide bombings, shootings, and assassinations, among other attacks targeting civilians. The group was well-known for hijacking commercial airlines in the 1960s and 1970s, involving thousands of civilians in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and is responsible for countless deaths and injuries.”
The terrorist group has used its left-wing credentials to make inroads into the U.S. and European academia. The outfit sends its propagandists to college campuses to campaign for the anti-Israel boycott movement, or the BDS.
As Samantha Mandeles wrote in a January 2021 post: “PFLP is the home association of Rasmea Odeh, the supermarket bomber who murdered two Jewish students in Jerusalem in 1969. It’s also the group of the first female airplane hijacker, Leila Khaled. Both women are still the darlings of anti-Israel campus activists; likewise, the PFLP itself remains an object of obsessive apotheosis for notoriously hateful student groups such as SJP.”
Convicted PFLP terrorist Odeh is now a highly sought-out speaker for anti-Israel groups on Western campuses. She was even embraced by notorious agitator Linda Sarsour at an anti-Israel event in 2017.
The Link between the Palestinian NGOs and terrorist organizations (a 2019 report by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs)
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