The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has issued a report on last year’s Gaza conflict titled “One Year After ‘Operation Cast Lead’: No Change, No Accountability.” According to the MPAC summary of the report:
On December 27, 2008, the Israeli government launched a 22-day offensive on Gaza and its people in an effort to halt rocket and mortar attacks into Southern Israel by the armed faction, Hamas. Operation ‘Cast Lead’ resulted in about 1,400 casualties, over 5,000 injured, and a debilitating blow to its already fragile infrastructure. The damage and casualties incurred surpassed that of any previous siege. The use of indiscriminate military tactics on part of the Israeli Defense Forces resulted in a disproportionate level of damage and casualties. Twenty thousand people remain homeless making due with makeshift tents, residing with relatives, or in their damaged homes. Further exacerbating the deteriorating humanitarian crisis as a result of the attack, is the blockade in place since June 2006. The severe restrictions on goods, raw materials, medicine, educational material, and people in and out of Gaza has incapacitated a region and its people to the degree that it constitutes as collective punishment. 1.2 million of the Gazan population relies on international food aid, and 80% live in poverty. Gaza has virtually turned into an “open-air” prison. “One Year After ‘Operation Cast Lead’: No Change, No Accountability,” takes a look back at the degree of death and destruction caused as a result of the 22-day conflict, and the indiscriminate methods of warfare employed by both the IDF and Hamas. The international communities’ condemnation and lack of follow through continues to display a level of ineptness. It’s imperative that both parties to this conflict are held fully accountable for their violations of international law and crimes of humanity in order to institutionalize the change in that region that has been deliberated for decades.
Although the summary appears to hold both sides accountable, the full report focuses almost entirely on Israel and relies on other reports produced by four NGO’s: B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, and Amnesty International. According to NGO Monitor, a group which monitors what they believe to be politicized NGO’s reporting on the conflict, the first three NGO’s share common funding sources including the Ford Foundation, Christian Aid, and Diakonia, a Swedish Christian group.
MPAC was established initially in 1986 as the Political Action Committee of the Islamic Center of Southern California whose key leaders likely had their origins in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Since that time, MPAC has functioned as the political lobbying arm of the U.S. Brotherhood. MPAC has opposed virtually every count-terror initiative undertaken or proposed by the U.S. government. At times this opposition was said to be on civil-rights grounds but, just as often, MPAC claimed that U.S. counter-terror efforts were aimed at the U.S. Muslim community itself. MPAC has consistently supported and facilitated terrorism by supporting terrorist organizations and, more broadly, constructing an elaborate ideology defending the use of violence by Islamists and Islamist organizations. More than any other U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organization, MPAC has developed extensive relationships with the U.S. government which have included numerous meetings with the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The Investigative Project has just released the first part of a report on MPAC which states that it will detail the organization’s “blatant conspiratorial anti-Semitism.”