“Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., retweeted a video produced by an anti-Israel organization previously investigated by the FBI for possible terrorist ties.
On Tuesday, one day after she posted a now-infamous tweet likening the U.S. and Israel to terror groups Hamas and the Taliban, Omar retweeted a post including a video produced by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
The video shared by Omar depicted a Palestinian child being carried off by Israeli police forces as an explosion is heard in the background.
https://twitter.com/marwasf/status/1402192672891232262
In 2010, ISM was deemed by the Anti-defamation League (ADL) as one of the top 10 anti-Israel organizations in the country. The FBI has also investigated ISM for possible links to terrorists, but FBI documents reported in 2020 by the Intercept did not detail any charges levied.
ISM was also criticized by the ADL in 2014 for the group’s response to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, with ISM saying the teens were “missing” and dismissing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attribution of the murders to internationally recognized terrorist organization Hamas.
While ISM promotes itself as “non-violent,” its founders have endorsed Palestinians’ right to “armed struggle” in the past.
David Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, blasted ISM as a “pro-terrorist organization” in a 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post, noting that the group had expressed support for a violent terrorist, Samer Issawi.
“Consider ISM’s support for Samer Issawi, a terrorist affiliated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” Bernstein wrote. “Israeli authorities arrested Issawi at the height of the second intifada in 2002 for crimes that ‘included four shootings, between July 2001 and February 2002, in which Issawi and his partners fired on police cars and buses travelling between Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem.’”
Bernstein pointed out that ISM has called Issawi a “freedom fighter” on its Twitter account and suggested that he is a “political prisoner” in an Israeli prison.
Issawi was freed in a prisoner swap in 2011, but was quickly re-arrested after breaking his release terms. While in prison, he began a hunger strike that captured international attention.
In a Saturday statement to Fox News, Bernstein said he doesn’t believe that ISM has “been very active lately” and suspects that the video retweeted by Omar “is recycled from some time long ago.”
“But in any event, ISM’s always been a propaganda machine for the Palestinians, not an objective human rights source,” he said.
This is an excerpt from Fox News.
