The Times describes PFLP terror org as a “radical secular group”

A Times article, written by Richard Spencer and Oliver Marsden (“Palestinians defy Israel’s ban on celebration as Prisoners freed“, Jan. 20), included the following, concerning Palestinian terrorists released in the deal between Israel and Hamas:

They included Khalida Jarrar, a senior figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical secular group, and a former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. She has been jailed in the past for membership of a banned organisation

In fact, as the Times as noted in previous articles, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a terrorist organisation – designated as such by the US, EU, Canada and Israel – which has carried out plane hijackings, suicide bombings, assassinations and various other deadly attacks on Israeli civilians.

A 2019 attack by PFLP killed a 17-year-old Israeli girl named Rina Shnerb in a bomb attack – and Jarrar, the head of the terror group’s overall operations in the West Bank, was soon arrested in a round-up of the group’s top leaders and operatives.

See here and here for more information about Jarrar’s involvement in PFLP-related terror activities.

PFLP is also allied with Hamas, and admitted that its members carried out attacks on Israelis during the Oct. 7th massacre.

Still shots from PFLP video posted on Telegram.

The Times article also grossly misleads readers in the following paragraph:

Marwan Barghouti, the man many imprisoned Palestinians view as their leader, is not on the list. He is viewed as the mastermind of the Intifadas or uprisings against Israeli rule in the late 1980s and early 2000s. As a result he is a hero to many Palestinians but a terrorist to the Israelis, who sentenced him to five life terms.

Though, at some point, the sentence was changed, and the word “murderer” placed before the word “terrorist”, the article still omits crucial information.

Barghouti is considered a terrorist, because, during the 2nd Intifada, he was the leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades terror group, which, between September 2000 – April 2002, carried out hundreds of attacks against Israelis, including many deadly suicide bombings.  He was sentenced to five life sentences because, as the Times itself reported in 2004, he was convicted of having been directly involved in planning attacks that killed five Israelis: a Greek Orthodox monk in the West Bank in 2001, an Israeli in Jerusalem in 2002 and three people at a Tel Aviv restaurant in 2002.

We complained to Times editors, asking that they amend the grossly misleading omissions about both the PFLP and Barghouti.

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