The Guardian published an article on Tuesday about an Israeli comedian, and former soldier, named Guy Hochman, who’s been harassed and threatened while on a North American tour following complaints by a terror-linked NGO called the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF).
HRF routinely campaigns to get former IDF soldiers arrested for “war crimes” when they travel abroad.
As even Haaretz acknowledged, the founders of HRF, Dyab Abou Jahjah and Karim Hassoun, are Islamist extremists who expressed support for Hezbollah, and have “been put on a U.S. list of people required to undergo special security checks before flights, or are prevented from boarding flights to the United States or flights over it – a subset of the U.S. list of terror suspects”.
Abou Jahjah was also banned from entering the UK, due in part to his comments in 2004, during the Iraq War, that he “consider[s] every dead American, British and Dutch soldier a victory.”
The Guardian piece (“Canada briefly detains Israeli comedian after complaints over conduct in Gaza”, Jan. 20), naturally, not only didn’t mention HRF’s extremism, but also uncritically promoted the group’s ‘dossier’ on Hochman, including the following:
[HRF’s] dossier, which includes several photos and videos Hochman himself posted on social media, details evidence of his presence and participation in September 2024 in the destruction of the Raed al-Attar Mosque in Rafah – which the group notes was a religious structure protected under international law.
First, if the Guardian journalist had done some fact-checking on those allegations, she would have discovered that Hochman’s post-Oct. 7th reserve service consisted of performing comedy for IDF soldiers, and that he wasn’t involved in military activity in the territory.
