This is a guest post by ‘unseen’
In its update email last Thursday, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign included the following advice:
If you want to keep up-to-date with what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, there are a number of English language websites from the region that offer comprehensive coverage, without the Israeli Government lies and spin. They include:
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/
palestine-info.co.uk is the website of the Palestine Information Centre. But who or what is the Palestine Information Centre?
The PIC a series of websites run directly by Hamas. For the last twelve years, PIC has been Hamas’s primary way of getting its message out to a diverse international audience.
In 2000, the PIC had English and Arabic sections and was the only Hamas website on the Internet. The English PIC site had a Hamas section complete with the logo below.
This had a page called “Hamas operations -The Glory Record”, listing the 85 terrorist attacks Hamas had conducted. Highlights include:
24. Soldier Aloun Kervaty Being Kidnapped: A group belonging to Al Qassam Brigades was able to kidnap an Israeli soldier, Aloun Kervaty, near Al:breij Camp after they had disarmed him. They proceeded to exterminate him and threw his corpse near a gas station on 18 September 1992.
…83. Al-quds (Jerusalem) Operation: Two militants belonging to Al Qassam Brigades were able to penetrate all Israeli security checkpoints and shoot down several Israelis at Nehlat Shafa’a near Jaffa Street in Jerusalem on 9 October 1994. Two Israelis were killed and 16 were seriously injured. In the process, the militants Essam Al:jawhary from Egypt and Hassan Abbas from Gaza were martyred.
Today’s PIC is a rather slicker affair. Hamas has other websites, so uses the PIC to spread its communiques worldwide. The main site at http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/ is available in eight languages inclding French, Urdu, Turkish and Russian. The English site contains PIC “news reports” (news with an offical Hamas spin), official communiques, and the occasional polemic by Khalid Amayreh. No logos though. At first glance you might not realise it was a Hamas site – until you actually started reading the stories
PIC’s arabic site is a different matter. The Hamas logo appears on the front-page, along with the logo of the Izzadeen al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. The Brigades are a proscribed terrorist entity in the UK, and displaying their logo is a criminal offence.
you can see the Al-Qassam logos marked out above. The one on the right is also a link to the official website of the al-Qassam Brigades. Further down the page is a link to the Hamas site for children – al-Fateh Magazine.
PIC also still has a Hamas mini-site though it hasn’t been updated for a while.
Finally, let’s take a trip to PIC’s cartoon gallery. Two examples:
Why is the Palestine Solidarity Committee promoting an openly antisemitic website of a terrorist organisation as a good source of unbiased news on the conflict in Gaza?
