ACOM will study taking legal action against Spanish NGOs that receive public funds dedicated to terrorist organisations
ACOM’s legal team will begin a legal process against Spanish organisations that receive public funds whose final destination has been to finance international terrorism, specifically the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), considered a terrorist group by the European Union, Spain, Israel, and USA.
The recent sentencing for collaboration with a terrorist group of a Spanish aid worker in Israel, after having confessed that she dedicated the funds obtained from the Spanish public institutions to the financial structure of the PFLP, shows the existence of an industry of hatred established in obtaining public funds from our country.
ACOM takes the initiative again, looking to find the maximum responsibilities, given the exasperating inactivity of the Spanish public prosecutor’s office, which should take action ex officio due to such a conspiracy, financing, and communicating vessels between a terrorist organisation with a bloody history and its support groups in Spain.
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The Spanish aid worker Juani (Ruiz) Rishmawi, 63 years old, has admitted in an Israeli military court having collected funds that went to the PFLP, through the NGO she worked for (Health Work Committees -HWC-). The Spanish aid worker recognised her guilt in exchange for a reduced sentence of 13 months imprisonment, as well as payment of a fine of 16,000 dollars. HWC is a Palestinian NGO recently forbidden by Israel for acting as a front of the PFLP. According to the charges admitted by the sentenced aid worker, the way this organisation worked was by presenting exaggerated invoices and salaries and false projects and documents. The money was then diverted to pay for compensations to relatives of dead terrorists of the PFLP, to recruiting new members, and for propaganda of the group. In the specific case of Ruiz, between 2014 and 2016 the NGO for which the Spaniard collected funds falsified receipts to make believe that a project financed with Spanish public money to supply medicine in East Jerusalem would cost 700,000 euros of the Spanish and European taxpayers’ money. In reality, the project cost less than 28,000 euros, and the difference was used to finance the PFLP. The trick was repeated in many other projects. According to the Israeli army, Rishmawi was fully aware that part of the money she collected was dedicated to financing terrorist attacks.
In the light of these events, ACOM’s legal team is going to study taking the necessary action so that these NGOs with “social” or “humanitarian” missions, which have provided the money, coverage, members, and infrastructure for the terrorists to murder, respond at all levels to the Spanish taxpayers.
The legal action being studied will be focused on monitoring and tracing those funds so the handlers of that bloodstained money pay for their crimes in court.
Not only do we direct our legal effort to studying and controlling the funds already granted, but also we hope this gives the necessary push for improving the control mechanisms in the granting, use, and revision of these funds by the donating institutions: What control is there of who receives them, under what conditions are they given, who are the partners at the destination that participate of them, and what audit is done on the destination of those funds?
ACOM -Acción y Comunicación sobre Oriente Medio- (Action and Communication on the Middle East), as a civil organisation of reference in Spain of friendship with Israel, will continue fighting insistently against all those who, from hatred, lies, and boycotts, target Jews and their state, Israel. The Jew-hating vocation of those who intend to lessen the dignity of dead Jews and attack the existence of living ones will have a firm response in our trust in the Spanish Constitution and the legal action in the courts of justice that protect our democracy.
