A live-blog at The Times on the UK’s decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel, edited by Laurence Sleator, Geraldine Scott and Seren Hughes, included the following entry:
A hearing in a High Court legal challenge against the government by a human rights organisation over arms exports to Israel will no longer go ahead.
Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organisation, is taking legal action against the Department for Business and Trade over decisions not to suspend licences for the export of weapons and military equipment.
At a hearing in London on Tuesday, Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled that a three-day hearing scheduled for October would no longer take place after the government suspended some of the licences on Monday.
To describe Al-Haq as a “human rights organisation” is an appalling inversion of reality.
As NGO Monitor has demonstrated, Al-Haq is an extremist organisation which promotes antisemitism, and is designated as a terrorist entity by Israel due to its ties to the PFLP terror group, a faction which participated in the October 7 massacre and is reportedly holding some Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Al-Haq’s general director, Shawan Jabarin, was convicted in 1985 for recruiting and arranging training for PFLP members and, in 2008, was referred to by Israel’s Supreme Court as a “senior PFLP activist”.
Further, many of the NGO’s officials have “made comments appearing to support Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians – often under the slogan of ‘a right of resistance’.
Not only did Al-Haq fail to condemn Hamas’ murder, torture, rape, mutilation and hostage-taking, but on October 8, it co-signed a statement describing the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust as “Palestinian armed groups engaged in an operation in response to escalating Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people” and “urge[d] the international community to take immediate and urgent action to stop Israel’s revenge and reprisal.”
The failure to critically scrutinise Palestinian organisations who, while operating under the facade of ‘human rights, promote hate, extremism and terrorism is one of more common journalistic failures within British media outlets’ biased coverage of Israel.
Related Posts
The Times describes terrorist murderer as a “political prisoner”
