(Tea Party PAC) – Joe Biden’s woke State Department is funding a project to train Palestinian journalists. Aside from not being particularly pro-Israel, as the regime claims to be, the training will be carried out by a charity that has partnered with terrorist groups.
The Washington Free Beacon has revealed that grant documents show the State Department gave $41,000 last September to Fares Al-Arab, an organization based in the Gaza Strip that has a history of partnering with the Hamas government. The money is intended for Fares Al-Arab to start a 15-month training program that will “target employed and unemployed journalists” and focus on “developing the Palestinian journalists’ English language skills.”
We already knew that Joe Biden and his regime are fine with terrorists, as long as they’re not Russian. All we have to do is look at what happened in Afghanistan to see that. So, it really shouldn’t be shocking to learn the State Department handed $41,000 to an organization that routinely works with Hamas, even as recently as 2021.
Fares Al-Arab has worked with Hamas on a number of projects but that’s not all. The Free Beacon reports, “The charity gave its media award to a radio network run by the Islamic Jihad Movement, honored a self-described journalist who belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hosted a press freedom event that featured a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, and co-led a human rights training course with a convicted terrorist.”
The group is openly anti-Semitic, having called Israel an “apartheid” regime. It also supports boycott campaigns against Israel and has signed a petition calling on the United Nations to “uncover the terrorist face” of Israel.
Areej Al-Massry, a spokeswoman for Fares Al-Arab, told the Free Beacon that “the group’s views on Israel will not be a part of the media training program.” Program participants will be selected “in partnership with the project’s management staff in the U.S. Department of State,” she said. That doesn’t exactly instill confidence.
US lawmakers are raising concerns over the group’s ties to terrorist organizations and their obvious anti-Israel activism. The Israel Defense Forces has warned that terror groups often use “journalism as a cover for terrorism.” Is there any question that’s exactly what’s going on here? Hamas has reportedly employed operatives as cameramen and have literally operated directly out of media buildings.
In 2015, an Israeli soldier was stabbed by a terrorist who was posing as a photographer wearing a yellow “press” vest.
“It’s no surprise that the Biden State Department is funding groups committed to inciting violence against Israel and waging economic warfare against our Israeli allies,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) told the Free Beacon. “Biden officials have been taking money that Congress allocated for programs in Israel aimed at coexisting and integration, and instead poured them into Hamas-controlled areas.”
Cruz further asserted that State Department officials “regularly refuse to disclose the groups and locations for their grants, and have even actively entered false information, to shield them from congressional and public scrutiny.”
The spokeswoman Al-Massry, however, stated that many of the terrorist-related events the group participated in took place more than 10 years ago, and the group has “signed the Anti-Terrorism Agreement with USAID.”
Meanwhile, watchdogs point out that the local reporting in Gaza tends to be skewed and biased because of the repressive anti-Israel government. Conservatives in the US can relate.
“Truthful journalism in Hamas-ruled Gaza can be a death sentence,” explained Jonah Cohen, communications director for CAMERA, a Middle East media watchdog group. “If you want to improve the quality of reporting in Gaza, you first need to change the violently oppressive political conditions that Hamas imposes on reporters.”
Despite the urging of Al-Massry that Fares Al-Arab is a new organization free of involvement with terrorists, it has a long history of partnering with media figures linked to terror organizations and there’s really no reason to believe her.
The Washington Free Beacon:
“In 2010, Fares Al-Arab gave an award to Voice of Al-Quds radio, a network run by the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Fares Al-Arab “presented a symbolic gift and a certificate of appreciation to the radio [station] for its efforts in supporting a cause through programs and news bulletins on the radio,” a press release notes. Later that year, the charity also honored Hassan Jaber, a journalist and former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group.
In 2007, Fares Al-Arab held an event to celebrate World Press Freedom Day, which included calls for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and featured Daued Shehed, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, as per Wafa news.
Gaza anti-prison activist Jamal Farwana sat on Fares Al-Arab’s board until at least 2008 and also partnered with the charity on several events protesting Israeli prisons. Farwana—who served prison time in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s—has advocated for the release of convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti and other Palestinian terrorists. Farwana’s father, who passed away in 2020, was one of the original leaders of the PFLP’s military front, according to the terrorist group’s website.”
Just further proof that the Biden regime has no intention to hide their anti-semitism.
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