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Tuesday, March 01, 2016

FBI puts tiny, dormant Jewish terror group in same league as ISIS, Al Qaeda (update)

This is a screenshot from the FBI's "Don't Be a Puppet" website, aimed at dissuading teens from joining terror groups online.


It lists six of the 50+ US-designated terror organizations. As examples, they chose Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, Hizballah, ISIS, Kahane Chai and FARC.

I'm no fan of Kahane Chai, but including a tiny group - with less than 100 members according to the State Department and no major terror attacks in two decades - together with terror groups that have killed tens of thousands of people - is offensive.

Obviously, the thinking is that the FBI doesn't want the teens reading the site to associate terror with Islamic groups. FARC has claimed thousands of victims, but Kahane Chai? It hasn't been responsible in 30 years for as many deaths as each of the other groups have done in a single day!

Is Kahane Chai recruiting American teens over the Internet? Not that I have heard of. They don't even have a domain name or dedicated website as far as I can tell.

The inclusion of Kahane Chai in this list might be meant to forestall Islamophobia, but all it does is create a false equivalence between major terror groups and a tiny Jewish groups specifically to give the young readers the message that Jews can be terrorists too, just like Muslims.

This is technically accurate and fundamentally a slander.

As far as the US designated terror groups are concerned, there is literally no reason for Kahane Chai to even be on the list nowadays. I recently mentioned the DFLP group which has been actively recruiting members and encouraging attacks on Jews. Today.

But the DFLP was dropped from the State Department list of terror groups because they have not been associated with any fatal attacks lately.

Similarly, Fatah is not designated as a terror group on that list,  This is even though that group has fired rockets on Israeli civilians as recently as 2014.

I would bet that Kahane Chai is an order of magnitude smaller than every single other group on the list.

The State Department and the FBI, in their zeal to appear evenhanded, create completely different standards to include a token, dormant Jewish terror group among the dozens of far larger Muslim terror groups.

There is something very wrong here, sacrificing Jews on the altar of political correctness.

(h/t Irene)


UPDATE: It seems likely that the reason the Kahane Chai group was added was because Muslims objected to an earlier version of the site they previewed as being Islamophobic. (h/t NancyB)

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