Tuesday, April 11, 2023

04/11 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: An unspeakable atrocity; Husband, father of three murdered Jewish women calls April 10 to be ‘Dees Day’; UN Rapporteur Plays the Victim Card

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: An unspeakable atrocity
The dead were from a British family. You might have thought the British government would be outraged at the murder of three of its citizens. You might have thought that it would seek to hold the Palestinian Arabs to account for their incitement and complicity.

But of course, the British government is itself complicit in this and in all the other attacks on Israelis. That’s because it connives at the incitement to murder Israeli Jews by continuing to insist falsely that Israel is in “illegal occupation”; it continues to sanitise or ignore fanatical Palestinian Arab Islamic incitement to murder Israeli Jews and steal their land; it continues to refuse to exert any pressure on the Palestinian Arabs to cease their war of extermination against the State of Israel. Instead, it calls on both sides to “de-escalate” — an obscene moral equivalence between terrorists and terrorised, which means in practice telling Israel not to take the action that’s necessary to protect its people.

In similar vein, the UN Special Rapporteur Occupied Palestinian Territory (sic) Francesca Albanese tweeted:
The loss of life in the oPt & Israel is devastating, especially at a time that should be of peace for all, Christians, Jews, Muslims. Israel has a right to defend itself, but can't claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses/whose lands it colonises.

The Jews are the only people with any legal, historical or moral claim to this land. That’s why in 1922 the international community enshrined in treaty law the pledge to settle the Jews alone in the whole of mandate Palestine — the land that is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza. The would-be colonisers are not the Jews. The would-be colonisers are, as they have been for decades, the Arabs.

These comments by Albanese and the UK government were sick. Alas, this is what passes for conventional wisdom among so many in the west and is unchallengeable dogma in liberal and left-wing circles.

After the death of Lucy Dee, and doubtless aware of the gathering outrage over the British government’s initial response, the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tweeted:
Tragic news that Leah Dee has also died following the abhorrent attacks in the West Bank. There can be no justification for the murder of Leah and her two daughters, Maia and Rina. We will continue to work with the Israeli authorities to end this senseless violence.

This was too little, too late, and still utterly vacuous. The attack on the Dee family wasn’t “senseless violence”. It was part of a century-old Arab strategy of extermination aimed at removing the Jewish presence from the entire land. Unless the UK government starts exerting pressure on the Palestinian Authority by reducing aid and diplomatic recognition until it stops its murderous incitement and rejectionism, all such protestations of sympathy for Israeli terrorist victims will remain merely nauseating hypocrisy.

And let’s not overlook as well the sly references by Lucy Winkett, Canon of St James Piccadilly, on BBC Today’s Thought for the Day slot on Good Friday (listen here on BBC Sounds at 1hr 50 minutes in) hours before the attack on the Dee family. Woven into rambling about being a good neighbour, Winkett — who has long-standing form as an Israel-basher — included lightly-coded trigger phrases about “an occupying army brutalised by its occupation” and the “killing of God”.

This was a veiled but unmistakable reference to the Crucifixion as a “deicide” — the lethal accusation against the Jews derived from medieval Christian supersessionsism, and which often provoked pogroms during Passover by precisely such sentiments voiced by the priests in inflammatory Good Friday sermons. Supersessionsism — aka replacement theology — was supposedly disowned by the church because of the thousands of Jews slaughtered across Europe as result by vengeful Christian mobs. It has, however, resurfaced in the Church of England and other “progressive” Christian denominations lightly disguised as support for the Palestinian Arab cause.


Husband, father of three murdered Jewish women calls April 10 to be ‘Dees Day’
In a video message, Rabbi Leo Dee—whose wife, Lucy, 48, and daughters, Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, were murdered in a terrorist attack—called for the observance of April 10 as “Dees Day.”

“Today, we differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong,” he said.

Dee described being unable to reach his wife and daughters, who were traveling in a different car, after hearing that there had been a terrorist attack. Then he saw a missed call from one of his daughters.

“The feeling that she called me during the attack, and I wasn’t able to speak to her, would come back and haunt me for a while,” he said.

After recognizing the family’s suitcases, with blood on them, and after authorities showed him an identification card for one of his girls, Dee learned that his two daughters were murdered and that his wife had been airlifted to a hospital with two bullets lodged in her body. Somehow, he managed to drive 90 minutes to be with her.

Rabbi Leo Dee and his remaining three children after two of his daughters, Maia and Rina, were killed on April 7 when their car was ambushed by terrorists in the Jordan Valley. The sisters were buried on April 9 at the Gush Etzion Regional Cemetery in Kfar Etzion, one day before their mother, Lucy Dee, succumbed to her wounds and died on April 10, 2023. Photo by Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90.

“I went numb. I didn’t cry yet. I was highly rational,” he said.

There was cause for hope, but that turned out to be short-lived. “Alas, our family of seven is now a family of four,” he said.

Noting that it was the first time in 30 years that the holidays of Passover, Easter and Ramadan coincided, Dee stated that all three have to do with making the world a better place. He said humanity has lost the ability to differentiate between good and evil in recent years, as a “small minority” has peddled moral relativism.

“If you feel that it was wrong to shoot dead, at close range, three beautiful, innocent young ladies in the prime of their lives, then please post a picture of you, or your spouse, or your children with an Israeli flag,” he said. “Or just post a picture of an Israeli flag and share it on Facebook, Instagram or whatever social-media app you use.”


Social-media users post Israeli flags for ‘Dees Day’
They started popping up on social media one after another on Monday afternoon. Israeli flags blowing in the wind. Israeli flags with pictures of families hugging each other. Israeli flags with the image of a mother and her two daughters smiling, with the words “Am Yisrael chai”—Hebrew for “The nation of Israel lives.”

On Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the images were posted within hours of Rabbi Leo Dee’s plea to post photos of Israeli flags to honor the memory of his wife, Lucy, and daughters Maia and Rina. The 22-year-old and 15-year-old were shot and killed by a terrorist during a car attack on April 7 during the holiday of Passover.

“If you feel that it was wrong to shoot dead, at close range, three beautiful, innocent young ladies in the prime of their lives, then please post a picture of you, or your spouse, or your children with an Israeli flag,” he said in a press conference three days later, on April 10, the day his 48-year-old wife succumbed to her wounds. “Or just post a picture of an Israeli flag and share it on Facebook, Instagram or whatever social-media app you use.”

The Israel-education organization StandWithUs was among those heeding Dee’s call. “We are standing with the Dee family, who lost their beloved wife and mother, Lucy, and teenage daughters, Maia and Rina, to Palestinian terrorism,” the nonprofit, nonpartisan group tweeted. “We’re joining Rabbi Leo Dee’s call and asking our supporters—share and post an Israeli flag in their memory.”

The Twitter handle @Israel, which Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintains, also highlighted the campaign and asked followers to post photos of themselves with an Israeli flag. “We hope you join us and use #DeesDay,” it posted.
'I am paralyzed by the pain': Hundreds accompany funeral of Lucy Dee
Hundreds of people gathered for the funeral of Lucy (Leah) Dee in Kfar Etzion on Tuesday afternoon, just two days after Dee's daughters were buried at the cemetery.

Lucy and her daughters, Maia and Rina, were murdered in a shooting attack near Hamra in the Jordan Valley on Friday. After extensive efforts to save Lucy's life at Hadassah Medical Center, she succumbed to her wounds on Monday.

Residents of Efrat and Gush Etzion gathered with Israeli flags along the roads where the funeral procession passed.

Lucy's daughter, Karen, eulogized her mother, saying "yesterday, beside the grave of Maia and Rina, I closed my eyes and prayed that you would wake up, so that we wouldn't need to go through this pain twice. My heart is already so full of pain, I am paralyzed by all the pain. To lose your mother is like losing your life. I don't want to move on."

"Everyone will move on, and just us will remain behind with this hole that cannot be filled. Even in a thousand words, I cannot summarize you," added Karen.

"Who will accompany me to the wedding canopy? I cannot return to routine. I cannot accept that it is over. I do not know how to end the eulogy, because no matter how I end it I will never succeed in fitting in everything."

Lucy's husband, Rabbi Leo Dee, eulogized his wife, saying "We literally traveled the world together, we made aliyah together. We built a new life for ourselves in the promised land. You would frequently say that you couldn't imagine living anywhere else, nor could I, even now, especially now."


‘An incredible mother’: friend reveals her admiration for murdered Lucy Dee
It’s a routine selfie of two friends on a day out at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the bedrock of the Jewish people’s bond with the Land of Israel.

But the image, of Rebbetzin Lucy Dee on the left and her friend from Efrat, Elana Abelow Kronenberg, on the right, now represents almost unimaginable loss.

Lucy died on Monday after being shot by a terrorist on Friday, caught in the same atrocity in which her daughters, Maia and Rina, were killed. Leo and Lucy (2)

“It’s very hard to speak of Lucy in the past tense,” Abelow Kronenberg, 45, told the JC. “She was very idealistic, an incredible mother, an incredible wife, and an extraordinary friend.

“I will miss her knocking on my door on Shabbat afternoons, when we’d go on walks, and being part of the classes for women she’d ask to join her studying the Torah.”

Lucy had succumbed to her wounds on Monday afternoon, three days after terrorists killed their daughters 20-year-old Maia and 15-year-old Rina in an attack at Hamra Junction in the West Bank as they drove from their home in the settlement of Efrat 70 miles away.

The gunman had forced the three women’s car off the road as they headed north for a family holiday in Tiberias, firing 20 bullets into their vehicle.

Palestinian security forces hunting the attackers said they had found the car that had been used by the gunmen abandoned in the West Bank city of Nablus and that they were believed to be hiding.

The sheer scale of the grief that has followed the shooting has been exceptional, with thousands attending the girls’ funeral on Sunday and their mother’s on Tuesday.

It has also spanned two countries.

The sadness and horror of those who knew them in Britain, where Rabbi Leo Dee served congregations in first Hendon then Radlett, before the family made aliyah in 2014, has also been immense.

“They are just the loveliest, most intelligent, bubbly people you could ever meet,” Hendon’s Rabbi Mordechai Ginsbury told the JC. “Above all, full of life, and always very giving. They kept an open house, were always ready to welcome guests. They made a difference.

"Their murders are a huge source of shock. There was and is so much warmth and love for the Dees.”

Another of the family’s UK friends is Lord David Wolfson, formerly both a government minister and the chair of the JC’s board. The Dees, he said, “have an ability to connect, a warmth that is quite rare. I tried to watch the girls’ funeral online, but I had to turn it off.”
Five people saved by organ donations from Lucy Dee
Five patients received life-saving organ transplants from Lucy (Leah) Dee, who was murdered in the shooting attack in the Jordan Valley last week, the National Transplant Center announced on Tuesday.

A 51-year-old woman received a heart transplant, a 58-year-old woman received a lung transplant, a 25-year-old man received a liver transplant and a 58-year-old and a 39-year-old received kidney transplants.

Dee's corneas will be transplanted in the future.

Dee was murdered alongside her daughters, Maia and Rina, in a shooting attack near Hamra in the Jordan Valley last Friday. Dee's funeral will take place in Kfar Etzion on Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m.

Lital Valenci, the woman who received the heart transplant, suffered from severe heart failure for a very long time.

"A simple action like going up the stairs was impossible for me," she said.

"This is a second heart that we are transplanting in the past week following a terrible tragedy," said Prof. Dan Aravot, head of the cardiac and thoracic surgery department at Rabin Medical Center. "The act of the noble family is a point of light in the darkness and they saved the lives of many patients."

Dr. Evyatar Nesher, the director of the transplant division at Rabin Medical Center, stated "This is the second transplant operation at Rabin, there was one on the Seder night and now the current one. I have been doing transplants for many years and am very moved by the strength of the donor family, the unimaginable nobility at a time of such a terrible tragedy."
Rishi Sunak: The killing of Maia, Rina and Lucy Dee is abhorrent
Rishi Sunak has condemned the killing of British-Israeli citizens Maia, Rina and Lucy Dee as “abhorrent” and “appalling”.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Prime Minister also sent his “deepest condolences” to Rabbi Leo Dee and his family.

The PM said:”The killing of British-Israeli citizens Maia, Rina and Lucy Dee is abhorrent.

“The UK condemns this appalling attack on civilians, and I send my deepest condolences to Rabbi Dee and his family.”

Sunak added:”“We continue to urge all sides to de-escalate tensions in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and end the deadly cycle of violence.”

On Monday foreign secretary James Cleverly tweeted;” Tragic news that Leah Dee has also died following the abhorrent attacks in the West Bank.

“There can be no justification for the murder of Leah and her two daughters, Maia and Rina.

“We will continue to work with the Israeli authorities to end this senseless violence.”

David Lammy, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, had tweeted on Friday:” I am shocked by reports of the killing of two British sisters in an appalling and cowardly attack in the West Bank. My thoughts are with their family and loved ones.

“More civilian victims of this cycle of violence show the urgent need for diplomatic efforts to de-escalate.”
Justifications of Dee sisters', mother's murder contrary to int'l law - analysis
In attempts to justify the terror attack that killed a mother and her two children in the Jordan Valley, some commentators have argued that the residence of the family in disputed territory meant that they were not civilians and thereby the use of violence against them was legitimate.

Such a standard is against the protections afforded to civilians under international law, and if applied generally, would legitimize human rights atrocities around the world.

The argument by supporters of Palestinian terrorism that Israeli settlers are not civilians is not a new one, but it has seen a resurgence with the killing of Maia, Rina and their mother Lucy Dee on Friday.

“These are not pictures of innocent civilians,” University of Tehran professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi wrote on Friday, sharing widely distributed photos that falsely identified the Dee sisters. “They are photos of militant colonizers who enforce apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”

Online, many anonymous and minor social media accounts have also justified the murders by describing the family as settlers rather than civilians.

Some like Ali Abuminah and the NGO CAGE have shied away from explicitly permitting terrorism against civilians, instead noting that residing in the disputed territories was a violent and dangerous act in and of itself and that terrorism against them was a natural outcome.

“The reality of settler-colonialism is that it is a very unsafe activity to come from overseas to violently steal the land of an indigenous people,” Abunimah wrote on Twitter on Friday. “It is unconscionable and reprehensible that Zionist land thieves involve their own children in such dangerous and criminal activities.”

CAGE has also made points against the civilian status of the UK citizen victims by comparing them to those that had left Britain to join the Islamic State.

“We are told of two sisters killed. We are not told of the choices made by parents to put them in harm's way. Tragic as it is for any loss of life, the family that took this choice did so knowingly of the provocation they were making when doing so,” was written on Sunday by CAGE, a UK-based non-profit that claims to advocate on behalf of communities and individuals it says have been misaligned and mistreated during counter-terrorism campaigns. “We do not mourn as a UK nation the actions of ‘stupid’ and ‘impressionable’ schoolgirls that go off to Syria and are killed.”
UN human rights official says Israel ‘can’t claim’ self-defense after deadly terror
A lawyer heading the UN Human Rights Council’s open-ended investigation into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians said Saturday that Israel does not have the right to self-defense against Palestinians, after two deadly terror attacks and volleys of rocket fire against Israel.

Other UN human rights bodies have also been mum about terrorism and rockets — also fired from Lebanon and Syria — over the past week, while criticizing Israel.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, said “the loss of life in the [occupied Palestinian territories and] Israel is devastating, especially at a time that should be of peace for all, Christians, Jews, Muslims.”

“Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses/whose lands it colonizes,” Albanese said on Twitter. Albanese regularly refers to Israel as a colonial enterprise that subjugates Palestinians, and rejects the conflict paradigm, assigning Israel sole responsibility for all disputes.

She said she was “saddened” by the death of a tourist in a suspected terror attack in Tel Aviv on Friday, without assigning any responsibility. The tourist, Alessandro Parini, and Albanese are both Italian. All three fatalities in the recent attacks were civilians.

Albanese has not mentioned the recent rocket barrages or a terror attack that killed two sisters in the West Bank on Friday, but has repeatedly lashed Israel over the past week, including by calling for an International Criminal Court investigation into Israel.

Albanese has a history of antisemitism, which she has not explicitly apologized for, denouncing criticism of her rhetoric as a smear campaign.

The UN Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, has repeatedly criticized Israel over the past week, mostly for Israeli police forcefully removing Palestinian rioters from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s flashpoint Temple Mount, but does not appear to have made any mention of Palestinian terror or rockets.

The Twitter accounts for the UN Human Rights Council, UN Special Procedures, UN Human Rights MENA, and UN Geneva have all shared anti-Israel content in the past week, but none has mentioned violence against Israel.
UN Rapporteur Plays the Victim Card
Playing the victim card is nothing new for Rapporteur Albanese. Last December, the Times of Israel uncovered that Francesca Albanese had a history of antisemitic remarks that she failed to disclose when applying to be UN Rapporteur. In 2014, she posted on Facebook that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby” and that Europe is subjugated “by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust”. Another post said “[t]he Israeli lobby is clearly inside [the BBC’s] veins…”

Francesca Albanese was roundly condemned for this antisemitism by the US, by antisemitism monitor Deborah Lipstadt, by members of the European Parliament, and by others. She called this little more than a “politically-motivated attack”. Rather than own up to her antisemitism and well documented bias violating UN rules, Albanese played like she was the victim of a nefarious smear campaign.

Such accusations of a smear campaign would be a little easier to believe if she didn’t repeatedly use antisemitic tropes, express a desire to remove Hamas’s terror designation, or defend antisemitic peers. (Those antisemitic peers include Miloon Kothari, a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s anti-Israel ‘Commission of Inquiry’ who said social media is “controlled largely by the Jewish Lobby” and fawning praise for world renowned antisemite Richard Falk.) But she repeatedly does all that and more.

For the same reasons, no one should believe her new attempt to play the victim.

The facts are plain. On Saturday, Francesca Albanese tweeted that “Israel… can’t claim [a right to self-defense] when it comes to [Palestinians].” There is no other way to interpret her clear language inciting violence during this “tumultuous and painful time.” Playing the victim card because the Times of Israel reported on the facts is not new for her. She has flaunted UN bias rules and has a well recorded history of antisemitism.

The UN Human Rights Council, High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, and Secretary General António Guterres have a renewed responsibility to censure Francesca Albanese. It is past time they end a UN tenure that only serves to further tarnish the UN human rights system. Let’s hope they finally act.


The Caroline Glick Show: BREAKING: The Perfect Storm Hitting Israel
The perfect storm is hitting Israel - Internal rebellion, American rejection and Passover terror attacks.

In this special episode, Caroline Glick discusses all the breaking news in Israel.

In this special episode, Caroline Glick discusses breaking news in Israel.
- Recent terror attacks in Tel Aviv and the Jordan Valley
- Missiles being fired from Lebanon and Gaza
- Leaked Pentagon documents that point to the Mossad directing rebellion against the Netanyahu government
- American criticism of Israel and Netanyahu's government

Lastly, a message from the funeral in Caroline’s neighborhood of the two murdered sisters.




CNN Israeli Cars “Receive” Bullets from Mysterious Sources, Occupants “Killed in That Crash”
On Friday, April 7, a mother, Lucy Dee, and her two daughters, Maia and Rina Dee, were murdered in a terrorist attack in the Jordan Valley. Terrorists fired on them as they were driving to Tiberias as part of a family trip, causing the car to veer off and crash. The terrorists then fired again at the Dee family to make sure they were dead.

How did CNN correspondent Frederik Pleitgen describe this incident?
“But earlier in the West Bank, there was a shooting incident where a car received a bullet shot, or gunshots, with the family in it. It was a mother and her two daughters, and the two daughters were killed in that crash.”

The car “received…gunshots.” The mother and her daughters were “killed in that crash.” It was a “shooting incident” instead of a terror attack (not even “terror attack” in scare quotes, or qualified by the word “suspected.”) Who the suspected shooters were is left entirely unaddressed.

The description stands in stark contrast to how another “shooting incident” was covered by the same correspondent.

On Monday, April 10, a Palestinian, Mohammad Fayez Balhan, was killed during an Israeli military raid in Aqabat Jabr, near Jericho. The Israel Defense Forces were operating in Aqabat Jabr to detain a suspected terrorist when “Palestinians confronted the soldiers,” according to Palestinian Authority’s Wafa News Agency, during which “suspects hurled explosive devices and Molotov cocktails and opened fire” at the Israeli soldiers, according to the IDF. The exact circumstances of Balhan’s death are not clear, however.

Did the CNN correspondent use the same evasive, circuitous style of speaking as he did to describe the murder of the three Israelis? No.

Instead, Pleitgen states:
“[T]he Israeli military shot and killed a 15-year-old boy, Mohammad Fayez Balhan, in another part of the West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health says.”

Earlier in the segment, Isa Soares’s own language was similar:
“Elsewhere in the West Bank, mourners buried a 15-year-old Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers in a refugee camp near Jericho.”

In both cases, the language is clear: Israeli military action killed Balhan.

Lest one suggest that the correspondent’s language on the shooting death of Balhan was more direct because he cited the Palestinian Ministry of Health, notice that no Israeli official sources were used in describing the murder of the three Israelis. For example, nowhere did the segment use the word “terrorism” in reference to the attack on the three Israelis, despite the fact that Israeli and other governments have clearly labeled it as such.

Furthermore, while Balhan’s age is referenced twice during the segment, not once was it mentioned that Rina Dee, one of the Israeli shooting victims, was also 15 years old.

The bizarre, inconsistent treatment of these two incidents is yet another example of an unmistakable decline in the quality of CNN’s coverage of Israel.


Israeli forces arrest terrorist cell in Jenin, foil 'imminent attack'
Israeli forces on Tuesday arrested a terrorist cell in the West Bank city of Jenin that was planning to carry out "an imminent attack," the army spokesperson announced.

The IDF together with the Shin Bet security agency acted overnight to arrest seven wanted persons across the West Bank. Five of them were detained in Jenin, according to the spokesperson's statement. In addition, ammunition and military equipment were also confiscated.

"During the operation, the forces fired at armed men who shot and threw an explosive device at them, hits were detected," the army spokesperson said.

The forces also arrested a wanted man in the village of Al-Ram. During the operation, Palestinian suspects used burning tires and threw stones at the Israeli forces.

"IDF soldiers arrested another wanted man in the village of Ha Abu Najim in the Etzion Brigade area. During the forces' activity in the Ezaria village in the brigade area, suspects threw Molotov cocktails and stones at the fighters, who responded with measures to disperse demonstrations," the army statement said.

The forces also confiscated cartridges and military equipment in Kfar Samua in the Yehuda Brigade area. The arrested suspects were transferred for further investigation by the security forces. There are no casualties to the Israeli forces.


IDF: 2 Palestinian gunmen trying to carry out attack shot dead by troops near Nablus
Two Palestinian gunmen were shot and killed by Israeli troops while attempting to carry out an attack near Nablus in the northern West Bank on Tuesday afternoon, the military said.

According to the Israel Defense Forces, troops stationed outside the Palestinian town of Deir al-Hatab identified a number of Palestinian gunmen opening fire from a passing vehicle at a military post near the adjacent settlement of Elon Moreh.

The troops of the 636th Combat Intelligence Collection Battalion ambushed the gunmen, killing two, a military source said. A third was reportedly wounded and fled toward the Nablus area.

The IDF said three M16 assault rifles and two handguns were seized at the scene from the suspects and following searches in the area.

The gunmen were named as Saud al-Titi and Muhammad Abu Dara al-Boub, from the Balata refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus.

The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry said it was notified of their deaths, indicating their bodies were being held by the IDF. Firearms seized by Israeli soldiers from Palestinian gunmen near Nablus in the West Bank, April 11, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)

No Israeli soldiers were hurt in the attempted attack, the IDF said.


130 US lawmakers urge EU to give terrorist stamp to IRGC
A bipartisan group of 130 U.S. lawmakers on Monday sent a letter urging the European Union to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

The letter, addressed to E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, points out that the IRGC “has freely and openly carried out plots targeting citizens across the E.U.”

The legislators were led by Reps. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.), Thomas Kean (R-N.J.) and Bill Keating (D-Mass.).

Borrell said in January that the 27-member bloc cannot blacklist the IRGC as a terrorist group despite the European Parliament voting 598 to 9 in favor of a measure urging the designation. Following the vote, the E.U. Foreign Affairs Council decided to not execute the parliament’s recommendation, citing legal hurdles.

“It is something that cannot be decided without a court, a court decision first. You cannot say I consider you a terrorist because I don’t like you,” Borrell said at the time.

The Foreign Affairs Council is composed of the ministers of foreign affairs, defense and/or development of the member states.

While sympathizing with the legal complexities, the missive urges Borrell to “treat the issue with the utmost urgency,” given the threat posed by the IRGC. The letter cites a study from the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, showing that in the past five years, the Revolutionary Guard Corps has instigated at least 33 plots against E.U. citizens.

“We believe that there is an abundance of evidence available to the E.U. to provide the necessary basis for a terror designation of the IRGC, particularly given the European Court of Justice’s ruling that investigations and prosecutions outside of the E.U. may be used as evidence to support additions to the terror list,” the letter states.




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