U.S. Treasury Sanctions Harvard Palestinian Partner as Fraudulent Terrorist Front Group
West Bank-based Addameer backs Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, U.S. government says
The U.S. Treasury Department today announced sanctions against what it called a “fraudulent charity linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. ” The charity, Addameer, is a group that Harvard University has partnered with and defended.
A press release from Treasury, headlined “Treasury Disrupts Sham Overseas Charity Networks Funding Hamas and the PFLP,” speaks of “terrorist networks that establish seemingly legitimate charitable non-profit organizations (NPOs) under the guise of providing humanitarian assistance but instead are primarily utilized for funneling money to terrorist organizations.”
“Today’s action underscores the importance of safeguarding the charitable sector from abuse by terrorists like Hamas and the PFLP, who continue to leverage sham charities as fronts for funding their terrorist and military operations,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender said.
The Treasury release says that “Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (Addameer), based in the West Bank, purports to represent the interests of Palestinian prisoners. However, like the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network (Samidoun) that OFAC designated on October 15, 2024 along with one of its leaders, Khaled Barakat (Barakat), Addameer has long supported and is affiliated with the PFLP. Additionally, in the spring of 2022, Barakat coordinated with the PFLP to send funds to Addameer and to arrange meetings between Addameer and Samidoun.”
Harvard’s ties to Addameer include the following:
In February 2022, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School filed a joint submission with Addameer to a United Nations Commission. The submission was headlined “Apartheid in the Occupied West Bank: A Legal Analysis of Israel’s Action.” It claimed, “Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank are in breach of the prohibition of apartheid and amount to the crime of apartheid under international law.” The filing says it “reflects the focus and in-depth research of the International Human Rights Clinic as part of a joint project with Addameer during the 2021-2022 academic year.”
The dean of Harvard Law School at that time, John Manning, has since been promoted to Harvard’s universitywide provost.
The report is still promoted on the Harvard Law School website on a page headlined “Addameer and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School Send Joint Submission to the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.”
Like many of Harvard’s most problematic programs, the International Human Rights Clinic has no ladder faculty or tenured faculty in charge. Its director holds the title “clinical professor of law,” and its staff includes a collection of lawyers with titles such as “senior clinical instructor,” “practitioner in residence,” and “clinical teaching fellow.” The clinic’s funding is opaque, though a Harvard press release does indicate it gets some support from Antony Blinken, who was President Biden’s secretary of state and who was rejected from Harvard Law School despite a glowing recommendation from Marty Peretz (Blinken went to Columbia Law instead and did okay for himself anyway.)
On October 3, 2022, the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University hosted an event titled “The Embodiment of Protest: Hunger Strikes, Human Rights, and the Health of Palestinian Political Prisoners.” It included as a panelist the director-general of Addameer, Sahar Francis. That event was also cosponsored by Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and by the Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program. The program remains available on YouTube on a Harvard channel. During the program, an introductory speaker says, “Our session will be moderated by Randa Wahbe, who’s a graduate student at Harvard University and is formerly an advocacy team member at Addameer organization, which is also one of the organizations that's been recently targeted by Israel and deemed to be one of the terrorist organizations, a claim that's been largely found to be unfounded and politically motivated by money.”
Wahbe still has a biography page up at Harvard’s “Critical Media Practice” program. She wrapped up the program by saying, “Thank you everyone for joining us today. I urge you to follow both of these organizations. Addameer is on social media, on Instagram, and Twitter…There will be updates on these websites, particularly the Addameer website about ongoing actions you can take for the hunger strike that's going on right now and various other resources.”
The Harvard Law Review published a 2021 article denouncing Israel for designating Addameer as a terrorist group. “This designation, based on classified evidence, amounts to an attempt to shut down swaths of civil society without meaningful due process,” the Harvard Law Review “blog essay” says. “Israel’s designation is unique for two reasons: it is an egregious misuse of a national security law levied against civil society, and its scope impacts large swaths of Palestinian civil society.” The unsigned article says, “this designation illustrates a worrying, worldwide trend towards suppressing dissidents in the name of combatting terrorism.”
A February 2020 Harvard Law Review article, “Wielding Antidiscrimination Law to Suppress the Movement for Palestinian Rights,” includes in the pdf version a footnote citing Addameer.
The State Department terrorism report from 2023, compiled during the Biden administration and Secretary of State Blinken, described the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as “a Marxist-Leninist group founded in 1967 by George Habash after splitting from the Arab Nationalist Movement.” The State Department notes, “The group earned a reputation for committing large-scale international attacks in the 1960s and 1970s, including airline hijackings that killed more than 20 U.S. citizens.” It says “the group assassinated Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001.” It says, “Since 2014, the PFLP has conducted numerous attacks, including a 2014 attack in which two Palestinians reportedly affiliated with the organization entered a Jerusalem synagogue and attacked Israelis with guns, knives, and axes, killing five persons, including three U.S. citizens…On October 7, members of the PFLP participated in Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel that killed more than 1,100 people, including hundreds of Israeli civilians and at least 31 U.S. citizens. PFLP reportedly holds hostages captured during the attacks.”
Harvard can’t claim it was working with Addameer because it didn’t know it had terrorist ties; the Harvard Law Review article from 2021 indicates that Harvard was aware of the issue, and chose to dismiss the allegations as “an egregious misuse of a national security law” rather than assessing the risk and cutting ties with the group.