Understanding the International Solidarity Movement

By Lee Kaplan | More on Lee | Be sure to catch Lee every Tuesday on the Jim Kirkwood show. Hear it live at www.k-talk.com, Monday through Friday at 8pm PST. Watch this site for the Podcast coming soon!

Upon being ordered deported by the Tel Aviv district court by Judge Drora Pilpel on Sunday, Paul LaRudee said from his holding cell: "Am I a security threat to Israel?”

The question was rhetorical, but the answer is not: “Yes!”

Paul LaRudee is the leader of the International Solidarity Movement chapter in the San Francisco Bay Area and one of the ISM’s most active leaders in the USA. As such, he is responsible for recruiting and training radicals and anti-Semites, anyone he can get to help bring down the state of Israel by supporting Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP. The doe-eyed piano tuner who maintains his innocence and calls himself a “peace activist” is in fact working to advance the cause of Palestinian jihadism. And the worst thing is this episode is not over yet despite Judge Pilpel’s wise decision; Israel allows for an appeal of his deportation order.

I dyed my skin and colored my hair and made myself look like a Pakistani Muslim in 2004 to attend an ISM training session in the San Francisco Bay Area that Paul LaRudee personally oversaw. I listened to a colleague of LaRudee’s, Jess Ghannam, of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a Hamas supporting front group, give an orientation speech in which he claimed in 1948 the Jews sought to drive the Arabs into the sea and that Muslim and Christian Israeli citizens do not have the right to vote, own property or run their own businesses. The ADC, funded by Arab interests, helps support the ISM in the US.

One thing made clear during training was that if caught trying to enter Israel as human shields for terrorist groups, we should refuse deportation because a lawyer would be provided free of charge to us. The goal was to tax the resources of the Jewish state in any way possible. We were told that, once we were in the West Bank, we should get ourselves arrested with an Arab because as internationals the police would be reluctant to keep us in jail for long, and if we refused to leave without the Arab prisoner “in solidarity,” they might relent just to get rid of us and let him go too. Never mind what the Arab prisoner did, we were there to overburden the system.

We had nothing to fear from armed terrorists since we coordinated with these groups in advance and would be given safe passage by them. We were told not to tell Arab children not to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers. We were taught “direct action,” civil disobedience and violence that would hamper Israeli security and drain the state’s resources. We were told that we were not there to make peace between two parties; on the contrary, we were there to roil things between Israelis and the Arabs as a step toward making all of Israel into Palestine.

We were given training manuals with a history of the conflict that focused on bringing down western governments like in Israel and America. We were instructed on working in non-hierarchical “affinity groups” so nobody could pinpoint the actual leadership. Thus, LaRudee claims he is not a leader because “the ISM has no leaders.” In fact, he is a driving force behind their movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The average Israeli and American does not know the damage that someone like LaRudee does to Israel bit by bit, day by day. In the US, LaRudee and his pals in the International Solidarity Movement organize fundraisers, conferences, phony debates and radio shows portraying Israel as Nazism redux, an apartheid state like South Africa where human rights are trampled and Israeli boys in the IDF shoot Arab children for sport. Their goal is to poison the minds of the next generations of young Americans in the same way the Arabs poison their childrens’ minds to hate the Jews and Israel. LaRudee even recruits kapos to help him in his passion, people of Jewish ancestry who worship the political god of radical Communism or Anarchism.

LaRudee's visit to the Holy Land is to facilitate ISM activities with the new Hamas government and other PLO leadership. Even as LaRudee appeals deportation after getting caught, another ISM activist named Hannah Mermelstein snuck in elsewhere. The Shin Bet and Border Police need to develop a special task force to catch ISM activists who enter the territories and expel them immediately. Israel may fear offending other nations where these subversives come from, but allowing what amounts to a western wing of the PLO free access to Israeli territory under some abstract right of “free movement” involves too high a price for the Jewish state.

Source: FrontPageMagazine.com