Ever since the Israeli raid on a Turkish group’s boat filled with aid for the Gaza Strip, there has been a lot of attempts in the\u00a0press, following Israel’s\u00a0lead, to label the Turkish humanitarian group IHH a supporter of “terrorism.”<\/p>\n
The latest salvo comes from a\u00a0New York Times<\/em> article<\/span> about the Turkish group having “extensive connections with Turkey\u2019s political elite.”<\/p>\n The\u00a0Times<\/em> reports:<\/p>\n On Monday, Germany banned the charity’s offices, citing its support for Hamas, which Germany considers a terrorist organization. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizi\u00e8re said the charity abused donors’ good intentions “to support a terrorist organization with money supposedly donated for charitable purposes.” The newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung said that from 2007 the charity collected $8.5 million and transferred money to six smaller organizations, two belonging directly to Hamas and four with close ties to it.<\/p>\n The charity called the ban a “disgrace” and “misanthropic” and said it would challenge it in court.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It looks like the reporters on this story didn’t do their homework. Numerous news outlets have noted that the German organization, which shares the Turkish group\u2019s initials, is not connected to the Turkish group that co-sponsored the aid flotilla, meaning that Germany did not ban the Turkish group over “terrorist” ties. (The <\/strong>Turkish group’s<\/strong> initials stand for \u0130nsan Hak ve H\u00fcrriyetleri, or Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms; the <\/strong>German acronym<\/strong> stands for Internationale Humanit\u00e4re Hilfsorganisation, the International Humanitarian Aid Organization.)<\/strong><\/p>\n A\u00a0report in\u00a0Ha’aretz<\/em> states: “Despite sharing the name, the German IHH has no connection to the Turkish group that organized the flotilla”; the\u00a0Financial Times <\/em>reports<\/span> that “IHH Turkey and IHH Germany share the same roots, as they were founded as a single group in Freiburg, Germany, in 1992. But the group split in two five years later”; and a\u00a0Turkish daily states<\/span> that “German authorities” say the group split in 1997 and “are now two separate entities.”<\/p>\n The Times also relays the Israeli talking point that “the group has links to Al-Qaeda,” despite the fact that\u00a0independent journalist Max Blumenthal forced the Israeli Defense Forces to retract that false claim.<\/p>\n This article originally appeared on the national media watchdog group\u00a0Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s blog.<\/em><\/p>\n https:\/\/mondoweiss.net\/2010\/07\/nyt-ties-turkish-group-to-terrorism-by-mixing-it-up-with-a-different-group\/<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since the Israeli raid on a Turkish group’s boat filled with aid for the Gaza Strip, there has been a lot of attempts in the\u00a0press, following Israel’s\u00a0lead, to label the Turkish humanitarian group IHH a supporter of “terrorism.” The latest salvo comes from a\u00a0New York Times article about the Turkish group having “extensive connections […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":60022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,148,89,34],"tags":[1557,1050],"class_list":["post-20776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany","category-israel","category-turkey","category-usa","tag-disinformation","tag-misinformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}