AMP
Convention Sees Opportunities in U.S. Elections
IPT News
November 27, 2017
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 One of the country's
most visible anti-Israel groups spent the Thanksgiving weekend engaged in some magical
thinking and planning to change America's political landscape.
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) has long rejected Israel and turned
a blind eye to the ways terrorism from groups like Hamas and Fatah actually make life worse for average Palestinians. It is
consistent with an organization that has documented links to a defunct Hamas-support network in
the United States.
The convention, held in Chicago, marked the 100th anniversary
of the Balfour Declaration – Britain's endorsement of
"the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people." Several speakers spoke of demanding a British apology. Other
speakers claimed that the effort to boycott, divest from and sanction
Israel (BDS) is hurting the country's economy, that the media is slanted
toward Israel and that Iran is not as big a source of regional mischief
compared to Israel.
But the broader focus was on next year's elections, and a belief that a
better organized Palestinian movement can dramatically change American
policy.
Polling indicates younger liberals are increasingly more supportive of
the Palestinian cause than of Israel, Josh Ruebner told a session on
campaigning. Ruebner, the policy director for the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian
Rights, said this change in attitude can lead directly to changes in
America's Middle East policy.
Politicians "pay attention to these polls. They also pay attention
to a poll last year by the Brookings Institution which found that 60
percent – 60, Six-Zero, not 16 – 60 percent of all Democrats supported
sanctioning Israel," he said. "So when we see all these
politicians trying to pass these laws to punish us, to criminalize us for
engaging in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns, we only have to
point to the fact that the majority of the base of the Democratic Party
supports those efforts."
Ahlam Jbara, former interim director for the Council of Islamic
Organizations of Greater Chicago who worked with the Bernie Sanders
presidential campaign, described an increased emphasis Palestinians
received during the election cycle. "It was on the radar
because organizations like AMP, the US Campaign, and others, made a really
big push to make sure that Jerusalem is on the platform. Right? You had
Bernie Sanders say Palestinians have human rights, Palestinians have the
right to exist, Palestinians have the right to clean water..."
 Jbara's Facebook
page icon features her pictured with convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Odeh, who was deported from the United States in September after
being convicted of naturalization fraud. When she applied to become a U.S.
citizen, Odeh failed to disclose her conviction for a 1969 Jerusalem
supermarket bombing that killed two university students. Her cause was embraced by anti-Israel groups including AMP.
During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Palestinian advocates came close to changing the party platform in their
favor. That result was thwarted by "the highers-up, said Milwaukee
attorney Othman Atta, Milwaukee attorney, a former director of the Islamic
Society of Milwaukee. "So, we need to change the leadership at the
top," he told the AMP convention, "because these people are just
like the elites that are doing whatever they want. We need to have more
grassroots effort. And as Muslims, we need to be involved."
In 2011, Atta dismissed the U.S. terrorist designations for Hamas and
Hizballah as "a political decision" and wondered why Israel was
not similarly labeled.
Other speakers cast Palestinians as innocent, passive victims too
impotent to be engaged in "conflict" with Israel, their story
misrepresented by a media that they say favors Israel.
"I travel to Palestine and Israel and I discovered there is no
Palestinian-Israeli conflict," Florida political activist Manal
Fakhoury said. "None. Zero. Zilch. Diddly-squat. I can say with
confidence that Palestinians have no agency. The Israeli government
controls everything. Currently there is no conflict. Only the omnipresent
power of Israel and people trying to resist it."
This position, of course, pretends that Hamas terrorists in Gaza have not launched
thousands of rockets into Israel, and diverted money that could be used to
build the territory's infrastructure and improve the quality of life in
order to invest in re-arming and building attack tunnels for its terrorists.
Fakhoury also seemed to equate the Nazi Holocaust, which claimed 6
million Jewish lives as part of a "Final Solution" to eliminate Jews from the planet,
with the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, of Israel's 1948 creation.
When her daughter was in middle school, Fakhoury explained, she texted
her mother to say the class was learning about the Holocaust. Was it okay,
her daughter asked, to ask the teacher why the class wasn't also learning
about the Nakba. The teacher didn't know anything about it, but Fakhoury
said her daughter was allowed to make a presentation the following week.
"We need to tell our story," Fakhoury said.
The media also fails to tell the Palestinian story, said Ahlam
Muhtaseb, media studies professor and interim director for
California State University, San Bernardino's Center for Islamic and Middle
Eastern Studies. She portrayed coverage of the last Gaza war as slanted in
Israel's favor.
Israel was "genociding (sic) against the people in Gaza. You can't
really hide that," she said.
"CNN for the first week, all it did is repeat Israeli propaganda,
official narrative of what's happening in Gaza," Muhtaseb said.
"Firstly the dominance, infatuation of Israeli officials or Israeli
spokesperson in the United States or you know those kinds of sources were
just dominant. You did not see any Palestinian voice."
Genocide is the "deliberate and systematic
destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group."
Palestinian sources say 2,300 people died during the 2014 war. Many of
them turned out to be Hamas fighters. But even if you accept that the
number is accurate, it is nowhere near a genocide.
Muhtaseb also overlooks the extraordinary effort by Israeli officials to
minimize civilian casualties, including advanced warnings by flyers and in
direct telephone calls for civilians to leave a targeted area before the
bombs fell.
"I believe that ... everything the IDF does to protect civilians
and to stop the death of innocent civilians is a great deal more than any
other army, and it's more than the British and the American armies,"
Colonel (ret.) Richard Kemp CBE, the former commander of the British armed
forces in Afghanistan, said
in 2014.
Much of the reporting during the Gaza wars has been heavily slanted toward the Palestinian narrative. Many
news outlets never reported Hamas threats to journalists, who in turn
feared reporting on Hamas rocket fire from areas surrounded by civilians.
Reporters acknowledge this after they leave Gaza.
Other programs focused on concern over legislation in several states and
proposed in Washington to thwart the BDS movement.
The legislation essentially creates a state boycott of any business which boycotts
Israel due to the inherent anti-Semitic nature of the boycott movement.
While BDS campaigns on college campuses have won support from student
bodies, they have failed to persuade officials responsible for school
endowments from withdrawing investments in companies doing business in
Israel.
But AMP Associate Director of Outreach & Grassroots Organizing Taher
Herzallah, who in 2014 justified Hamas rocket fire into Israel and called
images of wounded Israeli soldiers "the most beautiful sight,"
painted a picture of BDS success crippling Israel's economy.
"Over the past 12 years we've seen banks, labor unions, artists,
governments such as South Africa, companies, academic associations, student
groups and religious institutions take formal positions to withdraw their
investments from, cancel shows in, or boycott the Zionist regime," he
said. "There's been marked success with billions of dollars of investments
threatened to the point that the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs has
dedicated an immense amount of resources fighting what it calls the
delegitimization of Israel through BDS."
While imperfect, Israel's economy has been thriving, drawing 15 percent of global
venture-capital investment to its burgeoning tech sector.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism has demonstrated how blind hate toward Israel drives Palestinian advocates
to make outlandish claims and faulty analyses. Just last week, AMP National
Chairman Hatem Bazian had to apologize for retweeting anti-Semitic cartoons.
In each, the message was that Jews get away with things others cannot.
AMP convention speakers, including Bazian, were influenced by that blind
hate when discussing indications that a new U.S. peace initiative could
include regional partners as part of an alliance against Iran's dangerous
and expanding influence.
Two senior AMP officials described opposition to Iran as misguided, or
perhaps disproportionate. National Chairman Hatem Bazian described the
situation for Palestinian advocates as "very dark ... we are in the
lowest period in our political history and power. Not only do we have to
deal with Israel's occupation, we have to deal with the Arab world. They
have turned around thinking that Iran is the biggest threat, and they're
just cooking to think about Iran. And they have an Arab summit which is
silence toward Palestine ... it is difficult."
Several countries threatened by Iran, including Saudi Arabia, have been moving toward
relations with Israel.
Iran's military support may be the only reason Syrian dictator
Bashar al-Assad has survived, at a cost of war crimes and mass killings
enabled by Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hizballah. Iran also is stoking
killing in Yemen by arming Houthi rebels as it seeks to establish its
regional dominance. Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley faculty
member, places the need to protect Palestinian intransigence as more
important.
At least AMP National Policy Director Osama
Abuirshaid acknowledged he's "not a fan of Iran," before
finding fault with Sunni states who see the Islamic Republic as an enemy.
"But to go against Iran by justifying the Israeli crimes and
normalizing them, this is appalling," he said. "So now Iran is
the enemy. Saudi Arabia and UAE, they want Israel to be their ally against
Iran."
No speaker during the three-day convention spoke about ways Palestinians
and their advocates might make conditions better for peace. None talked
about finding ways to engage with supporters of Israel to find a way
forward.
The one Israeli voice present, Miko Peled, is a staunch anti-Zionist who
wore a BDS badge. He won applause when he described the goal of popular
resistance a freeing all of Palestine. He even contested using the name
Israel – "the country must be called by its name, and its name is
Palestine."
In September, Peled seemed to question the Holocaust and equate Israelis
with Nazis when he addressed Britain's Labour Party. Free speech, he said,
includes "the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether
it's the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation, the whole
spectrum." There are limits, however, to tolerance. No one invites
Nazis to defend their view, "and in the same way we do not invite
Zionists."
In a video appearance, former Palestinian parliament Mustafa Barghouti,
a leader in the BDS movement, described the demands all Palestinian
factions insist upon: A state with "Jerusalem as its capital, and ...
the right of every refugee to come back to their towns and villages that
they were displaced from." Barghouti, and all Palestinian advocates,
know that a "right of return" could swamp Israel with people who
call themselves refugees, but who are two and three generations removed
from stepping foot there. The resulting demographic change would cost the
country its Jewish majority, effectively giving Palestinians the one-state
solution they want.
AMP's rhetoric was somewhat toned down, but it's ultimate message
remains the same. It has no interest in peaceful coexistence.
Related Topics: Elections
/ Campaigns, Media, American
Muslims for Palestine, BDS,
Josh
Ruebner, Osama
Abuirshaid, polling,
Ahlam
Jbara, Othman
Atta, Manal
Fakhoury, Gaza
wars, Hamas,
Iranian
threat, Ahlam
Muhtaseb, Taher
Herzallah, Hatem
Bazian, anti-Semitism,
Miko
Peled, Mustafa
Barghouti, Elections
/ Campaigns, Media
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