I have spent 25 years dragging terrorist groups, their leaders and their bankers into courtrooms and taking their money for their victims. I know what a terror operation looks like when it puts on a suit. This week my NGO, the Shurat HaDin Law Center, placed a complaint on the desk of the Attorney General of the United States, and I will say plainly what our petition documents in eight pages of receipts: The Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation is a hunting operation. Its prey is Jews.
Let the record speak. HRF’s chairman, Dyab Abou Jahjah, told the world in his own words that he joined the outlawed Hezbollah resistance against Israel and received military training, and he called it a source of pride.
Israel’s government identifies him as a former Hezbollah terrorist. He has boasted of personally arranging European visits for the political leadership of Hezbollah, an organization the United States has designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997. This is the man the world’s newsrooms keep describing as a human-rights advocate. A Hezbollah alumnus does not retire into humanitarianism. He changes uniforms.
And look at what his foundation actually does, because it is not advocacy. It is target acquisition. HRF scrapes soldiers’ social media, harvests their faces, maps them to their units, tracks their flights and then springs frivolous criminal complaints on them in whatever airport they land in.
Sixteen jurisdictions. A claimed dossier on a thousand names at the International Criminal Court. And after all of it, the scoreboard reads zero, zip, nada! Not one court, anywhere on Earth, has found one of these soldiers guilty of anything.
Dismissals, rejections, refusals, releases. Totally baseless claims repeatedly filed. HRF does not care, because conviction was never the product. The terror is the product. The knock on the hotel-room door is the product. The reservist who cancels his honeymoon, the student who withdraws from a foreign university, the young officer who learns her name sits in a foreign dossier: these are the trophies.
They pluck random names off the internet, conjure up fake claims and then run off to file them with never any consequences for their rejected lies. This is intimidation and malicious harassment laundered through court clerks, an abuse of the well-intended universal jurisdiction statutes and every honest jurist on earth should be insulted by it.
There is an old and rotten tradition of dressing the persecution of Jews in the language of law. Every blood libel and every pogrom had their paperwork too.
What HRF has built is that tradition running on modern infrastructure: one people, and one people only, marked for pursuit across every border on the planet, not for anything a judge has found they did, but for the crime of defending the Jewish state against murderous extremists.
Quite rightly, American veterans fly wherever they wish. British veterans, French veterans, the same. Only the brave Jewish serviceperson who wears a uniform is made a fugitive in advance. Call that what it is. It is antisemitism with a filing fee.
Now hear the part that should make every
