Palestinian rights group Al-Haq was blacklisted by Israel last year over its ties to a terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which included a director of Al-Haq who served as a senior PFLP member and maintained close links to terrorist operatives.
In addition to several other employees having been arrested for PFLP involvement, Al-Haq has long acted as an apologist for other US-designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
It is, therefore, astonishing that reputable news outlets such as The Washington Post continue to give credence to a group that disguises its support for Islamist terrorism behind human rights concerns.
In a recent piece headlined, ‘How an Israeli raid on a Palestinian rights group unfolded,’ the WaPo regurgitates Al-Haq’s narrative that Israel is attempting to “defund, smear and silence” the group after an IDF raid on its offices in Ramallah.
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The article opens with the following colorful intro:
The soldiers can be seen busting down doors and rummaging through documents. They casually take selfies and mockingly distribute business cards.
CCTV footage from an Israeli raid last month on the leading Palestinian human rights group sheds new light on the operation and challenges the official narrative about why the organization was targeted.”
First, it is incredible that the WaPo journalist who wrote the story can ascertain that the soldier who picked up business cards did so “mockingly” just by looking at the back of his head.
Second, how does the release of CCTV footage challenge the official narrative about why Al-Haq was raided?
Hint: it doesn’t.
The August raid was conducted by IDF soldiers following a decision by Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz that ratified the 2021 decision to label six Palestinian organizations as terror groups. Soldiers who conducted the search then seized documentary evidence from the offices, as is standard practice in all investigations.
The WaPo piece continues:
The Forensic Architecture study group, which is based at the University of London and runs an investigations unit in partnership with Al Haq, mapped and synchronized footage of the raid from the office’s four CCTV cameras, and shared it exclusively with The Washington Post.
‘The footage shows a real contradiction between what the [Israeli] Ministry of Defense is saying Al Haq and its sister human rights organizations are, and how its soldiers behave in the field,’ said the report’s lead researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity over fears of backlash from Israeli authorities.”
The WaPo sadly fails to elaborate on this supposed “contradiction” between the troops’ actions and Israel’s terror designations, which — rather worryingly — forms the entire basis of the article.
Furthermore, apart from briefly mentioning Forensic Architecture, the WaPo neglects to give readers any additional information about the British research outfit. If such details had been offered, readers would have been told that Forensic Architecture has a long history of smearing the Jewish state, including spreading conspiracy theories and using unreliable sources to inform its anti-Israel ‘investigations.’
Just this week, Forensic Architecture published another report that claimed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was intentionally targeted by the IDF when she was shot dead during a firefight between Israeli forces and Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank city Jenin in May.
Despite the fact that an independent probe by the United States found that Abu Akleh was killed in error, Forensic Architecture claims its own “advanced spatial and audio analysis” shows the veteran reporter was “explicitly targeted” by an Israeli gunman.
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Also quoted in The Washington Post piece is a United Nations “expert” who condemned the raid and terror designation of Al-Haq on the grounds that it “has not been accompanied by any concrete and credible evidence.”
However, one must wonder how much credibility should really be afforded to the UN given the organization’s long history of a deep-seated anti-Israel bias, which has included the hiring of an expert tasked with investigating the Jewish state who claimed a “Jewish lobby” controls social media.
News outlets have a duty to tell their readers all of the relevant facts in stories. In this case, the Washington Post should have detailed the documented links between Al-Haq and the PFLP, rather than simply presenting them as allegations used to justify “Israel’s tightening restrictions on Palestinian civil society.”
Instead, the WaPo is allowing itself to be used as a mouthpiece for groups with nakedly anti-Israel agendas.
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