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Sunday, April 12, 2020

The @Amnesty employee who insisted Hamas arrest Gazans for videoconferencing with Israelis



The New York Times reported:

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.”

...[E]arly Thursday morning, a freelance Gaza journalist, Hind Khoudary, posted angry denunciations on Facebook of Mr. [Rami] 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.
Hind Khoudary isn't just a "freelance journalist." She works for Amnesty International.

Yes, a person working for an organization that was founded to fight for the freedom of people imprisoned for free speech demanded that a terror group put people in prison for talking to Israelis.

Here is a post of hers still up on Facebook, autotranslated. where she denounces the "normalization" video, which can be downloaded here.


David Collier found a lot of other pro-terror posts from her, like these:


Even though this article about the Hamas arrests of people wanting to talk about how peace might be possible was prominent in the New York Times, I could not find a single "peace" group a day later that denounced Hamas. Nothing from B'Tselem or Peace Now or Gisha or IfNotNow or J-Street or Jewish Voice for Peace.

The one comment I did see was from Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch. But instead of a full throated denunciation of Hamas for arresting people speaking to Israelis, somehow he found a way to bash Israel, with an implication that is anything but compatible with human rights:


Roth seems to be saying that if Gazans had held a videochat with Israel's Foreign Ministry, then Hamas would be justified in arresting them. There are good Jews and bad Jews, and it is only a crime for Hamas to abduct people from speaking to good Jews.

This one incident shows the abject hypocrisy of the entire so-called "human rights" and "peace" communities. Amnesty hires a worker who explicitly supports terror, "peace groups" are silent when ordinary Gazans are arrested for speaking to Israelis online, and the head of HRW implies that Hamas' actions would be OK if only the Jews were more right wing.

It would be unbelievable if this sort of thing hasn't happened so many times before.

(h/t Petra)









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