Electronic Intifada (EI)

Electronic Intifada (EI)

Overview

* Website that reports on the Arab-Israeli Mideast conflict “from a Palestinian perspective”
* Routinely accuses Israel of human-rights violations, war crimes, and other atrocities
* Supports the Hamas-inspired BDS movement


Launched in February 2001 as a project of the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society, which provides humanitarian support to displaced Iraqis in the Middle East, the Electronic Intifada (EI) is a not-for-profit, independent website that publishes news articles and commentary focusing on “the question of Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal, and human dimensions of Israel’s … occupation of Palestinian territories.” Specifically, EI seeks to provide an alternative to what it calls “the prevailing pro-Israeli slant in U.S. media coverage by offering information from a Palestinian perspective.”

EI’s executive director and principal founder is the Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah. His EI co-founders were: (a) Arjan El Fassed, a former Dutch politician who has had ties to the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies, the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO), LAW, Oxfam International, and Al-Awda; (b) Laurie King, an associate professor of anthropology at Georgetown University and a former editor (from 1998-2000) of the Middle East Report; and (c) Nigel Parry, an Internet consultant who once served as a webmaster for Birzeit University in the West Bank.

Closely allied with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), EI not only refers to Israel’s creation in 1948 as Al Nakba (Arabic for The Catastrophe), but claims that “the … Nakba is ongoing” even today. Moreover, articles published by EI routinely smear Israel as a “racist” nation that practices “apartheid” and targets its Palestinian neighbors with all manner of “atrocities” such as “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” “extermination,” “human rights violations,” “state terrorism,” and “massacres.”[1]

EI reveres the memory of former ISM member Rachel Corrie, an anti-Israel activist whose accidental death during an Israeli anti-terrorism maneuver in 2003 has long been exploited for propaganda purposes by pro-Palestinian radicals falsely depicting her death as a murder. A few days after Corrie’s death, EI’s Laurie King, in an article titled “Of Broken Bodies and Unbreakable Laws,” praised the late activist for her “grit,” maturity,” “bravery,” “intellect,” and “unshakable conviction that all human beings deserve freedom, safety and dignity.”

EI strongly supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.[2]

EI says that its writers and reporters “include Palestinians and others living inside Palestine and everywhere else that news about Palestine and Palestinians is made.” Among the more notable figures who have contributed to EI over the years are Ali Abunimah, Max Blumental, Joseph MassadIlan Pappe, Omar Ahmad, George BisharatCharlotte Kates, and Tanya Reinhart.[3]

EI receives no money from any government or political party. Most of its funding comes directly from its readers, while some also derives from private foundations. NGO Monitor reports that between 2006-10, the Netherlands-based ICCO awarded grants totaling 200,000 euros to EI.

For a number of years, EI extended sympathetic treatment to Samir Kuntar, an Islamic terrorist with ties to the Palestine Liberation Front and Hezbollah. In April 1979 Kuntar shot Danny Haran, a young Jewish father, to death in front of his four-year-old daughter before crushing the child’s skull against a rock with his rifle butt. Notwithstanding these atrocities – and the tragic fact that Mr. Haran’s wife accidentally smothered her two-year-old daughter to death while trying to muffle the younger child’s cries so as to prevent Kuntar from discovering their whereabouts as he carried out the aforementioned murders – EI in 2006 provided a link to Kuntar’s personal website which featured pictures of the smiling killer, personal notes he had written, and an opportunity to purchase his book, My Story. When Kuntar was eventually killed by an Israeli air strike in December 2015 – twelve years after Israeli authorities had released him along with some 400 other prisoners in exchange for the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers – EI benignly referred to Kuntar as a “political prisoner.”

In August 2014, EI writer Rana Baker condemned the “despotic tactics” of the “Israel-trained” police officers who were being “deployed to crush unarmed protesters demanding justice for the brutal murder of eighteen-year-old black American Mike Brown” – a Ferguson, Missouri man who had recently been shot and killed by a white police officer whom he was violently assaulting and trying to disarm. “Although Ferguson and Palestine are two different contexts,” wrote Baker, “both places and their people are fighting against white supremacist regimes of oppression which continue to view them as ‘disposable others.’”

Similarly, in a March 2014 report on the supposed parallels between Palestinian Arabs and Hispanic Americans, EI stated that “[a]s long as Latinos in the U.S. are subjected to racial profiling, the deportation of undocumented loved ones, and the effects of colonialism in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and in the southwest states, comparisons will be made between Latinos and Palestinians.”

In EI’s calculus, free-market economic systems are inherently associated with all manner of injustice and oppression. In October 2007, for instance, EI published an article asserting that capitalism works mainly for “the benefit of multinational corporations and the detriment of ordinary people.” In October 2011, an EI piece lauded the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement’s crusade against “greed” and “corporate power” as a corollary to the Palestinians’ “decades-old struggle against Israel’s occupation of our land, its system of discrimination that matches the UN’s definition of apartheid, and its denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return home.” And in 2016, an EI article praised “the social movements sprouting in Central and Latin America” to “struggle against … capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, militarism and environmental destruction.”

For additional information on EI, click here.

Footnotes:


  1. Articles published by EI routinely smear Israel as a “racist” nation that practices “apartheid” and targets its Palestinian neighbors with all manner of “atrocities” such as “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” “extermination,” “human rights violations,” “state terrorism,” and “massacres.”
  2. Israel Boycott Is Part of Global Anti-Racist Struggle” (Ali Abunimah, 3-9-2017)
  3. The Electronic Intifada Team

Additional Resources:


Further Reading:About the Electronic Intifada” (Electronic Intifada.net); “Electronic Intifada” (NGO Monitor); “Electronic Intifada Biography” (IsraeliPalestinianProCon.org); “Of Broken Bodies and Unbreakable Laws” (Laurie King, 3-19-2003); “Heinous Terrorist [Samir Kuntar] Killed” (CAMERA.org, 12-22-2015); “Palestinians Express ‘Solidarity with the People of Ferguson’ in Mike Brown Statement” (ElectronicIntifada.net, 8-15-2014); “How Latino Activists Are Standing up to the Israel Lobby” (ElectronicIntifada.net, 3-6-2014).

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