Why Does a Zionist Group Invite a Pro-PA Activist?

Ghaith al-Omari backs a PA state that would divide Jerusalem and leave Israel without Judea and Samaria. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) asks why the pro-Israel Coalition on Campus (ICC) is trying to “engage” him by inviting him to speak?

The ICC invited al-Omari, advocacy director of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), to speak this week in Washington, and the ZOA has asked the group to cancel his appearance.

“The ATFP includes in its staff far-left anti-Israel ideologues like its Senior Fellow, Hussein Ibish, who has sanitized Hamas as an organization ‘running schools and orphanages,’ while saying nothing of its Charter commitment to the destruction of Israel and the global murder of Jews,” according to ZOA president Moron A. Klein.



Ibish, who last week debated Shomron Liaison Office David Ha’Ivri in a Washington synagogue, previously has labeled U.S. sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as “genocidal.” He also has claimed to be “skeptical” that Al Qaeda carried out the 1998 East Africa bombings of U.S. embassies, has described President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 strike on Libya after a Libyan terrorist attack on U.S. servicemen in Europe as a “terrorist” act,” Klein added.


“It is especially shocking that the ICC should give a platform to Omari and the ATFP, thereby legitimizing and giving credibility to their heinous views anti-Israel views. In an era when so much of the world is attempting to delegitimize Israel’s very existence, why is a Jewish group giving a platform to these delegitimizers," the ZOA president asked.


 “Gaith Al-Omari speaks publicly in a range of venues so pro-Israel activists who wants to discover what he is saying can easily do, just as they can peruse his publications and interview on the Internet,” according to Klein. “What the ZOA cannot understand is why the ICC would pay out of its own pocket the funds to bring Ghaith Al-Omari to disseminate his propaganda to pro-Israel student activists at a conference designed to enable students to counter propaganda. The ICC should be debunking in detail the ATFP’s agenda for the benefit of student activists, not paying for it to be promoted at their own event.”
The pro-Israel Z Street organization added that the ICC is inviting the ATFP to speak to "’student group leaders, faculty members, and other student services professionals’ about the grave dangers for Israel of Durban III.


“ATFP is entitled to teach what it wants to its followers, but why would we want that viewpoint to be one brought at our expense to our students and faculty?”