I quit the Labour Party in Britain years ago over the decision to drag the UK into an illegal war based on the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was a good call for me to resign before being pushed out, as many members, including dozens of Jews and former leader Jeremy Corbyn, MP, have since been hounded out of the party which is now under the control of confirmed Zionists. Pro-Israel lobby organisations fund more than half of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Cabinet. This would, of course, be a huge media scandal if the UK Cabinet was under the influence of a foreign power, such as Moscow, for example, and not America’s and the UK’s favourite apartheid state.
Sorry, I digress, but there is a very serious connection here. I am writing now in response to the latest human rights atrocity and war crime carried out by the so-called “Israel Defence Forces” (the self-declared “most moral army in the world”).
A matter of hours ago, nine humanitarian aid workers and journalists were killed in Israeli missile strikes in the Gaza Strip. As we all know, Israel kills innocent civilians and has done day after relentless day for months, years, decades. There was even an almost copycat atrocity last April, when seven aid workers from the American charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) were murdered.
In this latest attack, the occupation regime not only violated (yet again) the fragile ceasefire, but also chose to target the British-based Al Khair charity, the very charity that I’ve been promoting at pre-Ramadan fundraisers in Scotland. Not content with killing the charity’s multimedia and aid team, rather than face the consequences of its actions, the IDF has now set about trying to frame its victims as “terrorists”. It even went to the extreme of using social media to circulate photographs of those it has killed, and linked them — without a single shred of evidence — to Palestinian resistance groups. In the haste to try to justify the occupation forces’ murderous attack, though, and cover-up the killing of innocent aid workers, the wrong photographs have been used in the IDF tweets.
Last night, as I walked into the Al Khair Foundation’s TV studio in London, there was a huge pall of sadness in the air. The charity has a really close-knit team and losing these eight aid and media workers was like suffering multiple deaths in the family.
The photographs of the martyrs bore no resemblance to the IDF’s “Hamas and Islamic jihad” “terrorist” tweet, but who would know the difference other than their family, friends and colleagues?
As Sir Winston Churchill once observed:
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
I now fear that the Zionists, unless they are held to account over the murders of aid workers, will continue targeting Al Khair charity which has raised tens of millions of pounds in donations for humanitarian aid since it was launched 20 years ago.
For me there is a feeling of déjà vu, because exactly the same sort of hate-filled campaign was directed over three decades towards the heroic British charity Interpal. Interpal faced a tsunami of lies and allegations almost from the day it was founded in 1994. No evidence was ever provided by the US which declared that it was a “specially-designated global terrorist organisation” in 2003, at Israel’s insistence. Compliant Zionist journalists and newspaper were part of the campaign. The UK’s charity regulator, though, found no evidence of illegal activity in its investigations. In the words of one senior Metropolitan Police officer, “The absence of any police involvement [in Interpal’s case] is hugely significant.”
Newspapers making and repeating “terrorist” allegations against Interpal were challenged, and all were settled without going to court. Most resulted in damages and costs being awarded to the charity, including from the Jewish Chronicle. The newspaper’s editor published an apology in August 2019 stating that they “accept that neither Interpal, nor its trustees, have ever been involved with or provided support for terrorist activity of any kind.” It also agreed to pay the charity’s legal costs. The JC is a major supporter of Israel.
Nevertheless, Zionists made it virtually impossible for the charity to operate in the public sector, putting pressure on banks to close its accounts. No bank account, no fundraising. Today Interpal acts largely as an advocate to encourage people to help the people of occupied Palestine. Again, though, no evidence of any wrongdoing or illegal activity has ever been produced by its accusers.
Now it seems that a similar campaign is being unleashed on Al Khair Foundation which, unlike Interpal, operates around the world in war zones and humanitarian disaster areas, not only Palestine.
Mohammed Abu Hasna, director of the Al-Khair Foundation’s international offices, told the Washington Post what happened in Gaza. He pointed out that humanitarian workers were opening camps for displaced Palestinians in the enclave when one of their vehicles was bombed. Two photographers who were documenting the work — important for fund-raising purposes as well as for due diligence, as evidence of where donors’ money has been spent — were killed.
The organisation sent another car to evacuate the survivors, said Abu Hasna. “But as soon as they got into the vehicle, they were targeted and all killed.” The dead included seven Foundation workers and someone from the camp, he explained.
On Saturday evening the head of Al Khair, Qasim Rashid Ahmad, the founder and chairman of the charity, told the BBC that his team was in the area to set up tents and document the work for the charity’s own promotional material. He said that the cameramen came back to the car and were hit, while its team members who rushed to the scene were then struck by an Israeli drone which had followed them when they went to the charity’s second car.
Imam Qasim spoke movingly on TV about the deaths of the humanitarian aid workers, none of whom, he insisted, belonged to any political group or movement in Gaza.
Such facts will certainly not get in the way of the story being manufactured by the Zionist army, which has a track record of churning out lies and misinformation.
Israel, already under investigation for war crimes in Palestine, is clearly rattled by the massive global media attention given to the Al Khair tragedy. Clearly, the last thing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants is to release another humiliating apology and climbdown after the WCK scandal. He is himself charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court, of course, and he acknowledged that the Israeli military hit “innocent people”, describing the WCK attack as tragic and unintentional. “It happens in war, we check it to the end, we are in contact with the governments [of the victims], and we will do everything so that this thing does not happen again,” he said in a video message.
Well, it has happened again, Mr Netanyahu, another copycat killing, which leads us to only one conclusion: your rogue regime has criminalised charity work by targeting civilians working in the field, as you have done with those in the healthcare sector, journalism and teaching. Most moral army in the world? You and your soldiers don’t know what morals are.
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