ANTI WAR
Oxfam the First Target of Israel’s ‘Media Blitz’
Jason Ditz, February 20, 2014
A quick timeline of the backstory:
Late last month, international charity Oxfam split with “ambassador” Scarlett Johansson over her involvement with SodaStream, an Israeli company with a factory in the occupied West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. SodaStream accused Oxfam of having joined the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement against Israel.
A week and a half ago, Israel held a ministerial meeting about a planned “media blitz” against boycott backers, ordering its spies to dig up dirt to use against them and openly plotting to portray them all as supporters of terrorism.
You can see where this is going.
Today, it was announced that Oxfam is being threatened with a lawsuit by Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin, which was founded in 2003 explicitly to sue opponents of the Israeli government. They are accusing Oxfam of having ties with a pair of Palestinian charities, which Shurat Hadin claims are “instrumentalities of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).”
Oxfam hasn’t responded to the totality of the allegations but insisted in the past that its support for one of the charities, the Union of Health Workers Committees (UHWC) was not a problem, and that the UHWC is registered to legally operate in Israel.
Still, the first whiff of Oxfam as a “terrorist organization” is out there, and it’s likely not to be the last, if Israel’s planned media blitz continues to progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment