The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, has endorsed the Mapping Project, even as others including the Palestinian BDS National Committee disavow it.
Founded in 1967, the PFLP has “carried out a long list of terrorist attacks in the international arena, particularly hijackings against aviation targets,” according to GlobalSecurity.org. Rasmea Odeh, the supermarket bomber whom we have covered extensively, was prominent in the PFLP. Convicted PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled [see Featured Image], the first female airplane hijacker (she hijacked one plane and tried to hijack another), is deemed by the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, to be part of the Jordanian command of the PFLP. Odeh and Khaled are heroes among anti-Israel activists on campus, where the PFLP is widely supported.
Prominent terror attacks it has carried out have included:
The PFLP is also believed to have planned three other attacks carried out with the help of the Japanese Red Army:
Further attacks are listed here.
The Mapping Project is an anonymous self-described “multi-generational collective of activists and organizers” that may or may not be an alter ego of BDS Boston. We previously wrote about it here. The Mapping Project runs a website purporting to connect pro-Israel Jewish billionaires – and any Jewish (and non-Jewish) institutions supported by them – to oppression of Palestinians and of minorities in the U.S. As the website’s title suggests, it maps the locations of these supposed Jewish “oppressors” and lists specific addresses.
The Mapping Project has received serious blowback. As our prior blog noted, many politicians have denounced it. Apparently sensing the political wind, the Palestinian BDS National Committee sent a letter to BDS Boston directing it to take down the Mapping Project from its social media and dissociate itself from the project, or else to “remove the BDS acronym from your name.” The letter acknowledged that by promoting the Mapping Project, BDS Boston was “promoting messaging which indirectly advocates for armed resistance and associating with groups that do,” and that furthermore, “The association of the BDS name with such groups and activities hurts our entire movement…”
It also issued a public disclaimer, captioned, “Palestinian BDS National Committee Has No Connection To and Does Not Endorse The Mapping Project.” Naturally, the BDS National Committee could not resist the opportunity to claim the “Palestinian solidarity movement” was the real victim here – not the Jews against whom the Mapping Project “indirectly” advocated for violence. It also baselessly accused AIPAC and the ADL of being “anti-Palestinian racists and apologists for Israeli apartheid…”
But the Mapping Project has found a stalwart supporter. Enter the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine. According to a PFLP press release (who knew terrorist organizations issued press releases?),
The Popular Front appreciates the “mapping project” and calls for exposing the supporters of the Zionist entity. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine highly appreciates and appreciates [sic] the organizers of the “mapping project” that was launched in the American city of Boston…
It’s not hard to see why the PFLP would support the Mapping Project. Like the PFLP, the Mapping Project rejects the very existence of the state of Israel. Like the PFLP, which advocates terrorist violence against Israelis, the Mapping Project implicitly calls for violence against the people and organizations it “maps” – the specific name and address information it supplies appears designed to serve as a target list.
Moreover, both groups try to present their hatred of Israel as an anti-colonialist “liberation” struggle that other so-called liberation movements would naturally want to support. The Mapping Project constantly uses the language of “apartheid” and “white supremacy,” and portrays the Israeli fight against terrorism as analogous to supposed police oppression of black people in America. The PFLP endorses it using similar language:
We in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, at a time when we value the launch of this project and see in it a new and qualitative addition to the campaigns to confront the Zionist entity through the use of new technology and documented information, we call for the unity of the joint struggle in the United States with the various liberation movements and friendly forces to confront the mechanisms of… [t]he whole racist system and its bias towards reactionary regimes around the world.
Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist, observed that “A man is known by the company he keeps.” The anonymous Mapping Project should be known as the fellow traveler of rejectionist terrorists.
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