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Just a few minutes of basic research uncover facts that upend the entire narrative around the pending deportation of Badar Khan Suri and his wife. Yet not one major outlet, nor the dozens more covering the story, bothered.

By: David M. Litman

The arrest, detention and pending deportation of Badar Khan Suri, an “academic” at Georgetown University, illuminates a disturbing reality. No, not about U.S. immigration policy. Rather, the situation is exposing the mainstream media’s extraordinary failure.

Consider the narrative consistently advanced in major western media outlets.

“Having a view of the ongoing conflict is not a crime,” reads one quote at the BBC. “He is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife,” reads another from Politico. “To his defenders, Khan Suri is an accomplished scholar whose research focuses on peacebuilding,” writes CNN. “Suri was detained because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage and the couple’s political beliefs about U.S.-Israel policy,” his lawyer claims in a Washington Post article. His arrest is part of “efforts to expel foreign nationals who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations,” asserts The Guardian.

The gist? Khan Suri and his wife are being unfairly targeted merely for pro-Palestinian speech.

The problem? Just a few minutes of basic research uncover facts that upend the entire narrative. Yet not one of these major outlets, nor the dozens more covering the story, bothered.

In 2010, Khan Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, was a part of Hamas’s Committee to Break the Siege in Gaza. Yes—Mapheze was herself a member of the internationally designated terrorist organization, providing them with her services, a fact of which she makes no secret in Arabic media outlets. Notably, the committee happened to be chaired by her father, Ahmed Yousef, a senior official in Hamas’s “foreign ministry” and adviser to Hamas’s former leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

Mapheze’s role involved at least two tasks. First, she welcomed organized groups of “solidarity convoys” to the Gaza Strip. Second, she was tasked with maintaining communication with members of those convoys so as to continue feeding them Hamas propaganda.

This is how she came to first meet Badar Khan Suri, her future husband.

For context, in January 2009 Israel instituted a naval blockade on the Gaza Strip. The move, made during the first major Israel-Hamas war, came in response to the launching from Gaza of some 5,000 rockets at Israeli communities. By then, Hamas—which had violently taken over the territory in 2007—had already been amassing an arsenal of weapons smuggled in by actors such as Iran.

With its ability to smuggle in weapons drastically curtailed, Hamas viewed the blockade as an existential threat. Hamas and its supporters thus began organizing “convoys” and “flotillas” to “break the siege.” It was this effort in which Saleh and her father, Yousef, played an important role.

In the following months, numerous ships carrying weapons attempted to break the blockade but were turned back. The most infamous attempt, which involved a flotilla that included the Mavi Marmara in May 2010, resulted in deadly violence when Israeli forces boarded to halt the vessel.

The convoy was organized by Insan Hak ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi (IHH), a Turkish Islamist organization. In 2008, IHH was designated by Israel as a terrorist organization due to its provision of material, financial and propaganda support for Hamas. It is also a part of the Union of the Good, which is designated by the United States as “an organization created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.” In addition to Israeli authorities, even a United Nations panel of inquiry charged with investigating the Mavi Marmara incident expressed doubts about the “true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers, particularly IHH,” which claimed to be a “humanitarian” organization.

IHH and Hamas’s collaboration in such efforts was well known. IHH had even established an office in Gaza, headed by a man named Muhammad Kaya, who held meetings with senior Hamas officials about providing aid to the terrorist organization and continuing to send flotillas and convoys. So close were IHH and Hamas that Kaya’s son, Matin, was married to Ahmed Yousef’s other daughter, Mapheze’s sister.

After the Mavi Marmara incident, Hamas and IHH didn’t let up, and both publicly promised to continue organizing convoys and flotillas to break the blockade preventing weapons from entering Gaza.

Among those subsequently organized by IHH was the “Asia 1 Convoy” which departed in late 2010. In addition to members of IHH, Khan Suri was among the participants. His convoy began its trek with a stop in Iran, where they met with Iranian regime officials, including Ayatollah Javadi Amoli and Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi. The convoy continued to Syria, where they were welcomed by Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashaal, who told them, according to MEMRI: “the [only] option for liberating Palestine is resistance and jihad,” and, “Today, we will break the siege on Gaza, and tomorrow, with your help, we will liberate Palestine.”

The convoy would also stop in Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt before making its way into Gaza. This is when Khan Suri met Saleh. But Saleh wasn’t the only Hamas official Khan Suri met.

Publicly available images of the convoy in Gaza show Khan Suri engaging in a celebratory pose with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Also present at some of the welcoming events for the Asia 1 Convoy were other senior terrorists, including Ahmed Yousef (Saleh’s father), Mohammed al-Hindi, the deputy secretary-general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a senior Hamas political bureau member.

Images posted by local journalists show convoy participants holding images of Ayatollah Khomeini (the former supreme leader of Iran) and Ismail Haniyeh, wearing Hamas headbands, waving the flag of the Iranian regime and holding posters of “martyrs” (i.e., terrorists). Convoy leaders were quoted by the press as praising the “resistance” and referring to Israel as “the usurping state.” Haniyeh himself praised the convoy as a means to undermine Israel’s blockade. Al-Hindi, the Islamic Jihad official, stressed “the path of jihad” and “resistance” to the visitors. Zahar instructed the convoy members to “Continue to send convoys until the oppressive siege is lifted.”

This was not, as the BBC claimed, a trip that simply “brought [Khan] Suri closer to the Palestinian cause,” but a mission organized by one terrorist organization (IHH) to aid another terrorist organization (Hamas).

Khan Suri and Saleh would get married within a couple of years, receiving the personal congratulations of senior Hamas officials such as Mohammed Awad, the future Hamas “prime minister,” and Ghazi Hamad, a specially designated terrorist who was in charge of Hamas’s border authorities in Gaza. So central was Hamas to their identity and relationship that pictures from their wedding show Saleh and Khan Suri holding up an image of Yasser Arafat, the former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, kissing the forehead of Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas.

Following their marriage, Saleh and Khan Suri would continue engaging in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-American and antisemitic propaganda.

In a December 2017 article, Saleh admitted being “ashamed” of her American citizenship and blamed the 9/11 attacks on “the stupid policies of successive American administrations.” Saleh’s article also quoted Khan Suri, without disclosing their relationship, as calling on Arabs to “launch a revolution to confront these corrupt leaders in your countries” who were willing to work with the U.S. administration’s peace efforts. Saleh concluded by calling for a boycott of America “economically, culturally, and politically.”

In a February 2018 article, Saleh condemned the United States for designating Ismail Haniyeh as a terrorist, claiming that he was just a “freedom fighter” and that Palestinians have a “right to resist the invaders.” She recounted personally meeting Haniyeh during her work in the Hamas Committee to Break the Siege in Gaza, describing him as a “humble man.” Once again, Saleh quoted Khan Suri, who claimed that “What Ismail Haniyeh is doing … is no different from what any national leader would do….” Once again, Saleh declared she felt “insulted and ashamed” to be an American.

In both articles, Saleh expressed her unabashed hatred for Jews. She asserted that American political figures are “driven by Zionist agendas linked to Jewish pressure groups,” that America “has been biased towards the Jews and global Zionism,” and that “Jewish influence” was controlling American politicians. She echoed this sentiment in other writings, such as one claiming that Israel’s “propaganda machine” and “methods of deception” include a “powerful Zionist lobby” that “influences policymakers” in the United States.

In March 2018, Saleh attended the “Fourth International Forum in Solidarity with Palestine” in Beirut. Attendees and speakers included senior terrorists from Hezbollah (Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem), Hamas (Ismail Haniyeh) and the PFLP-GC. According to Saleh, the participants were simply “human rights activists.”

In a February 2019 piece, Saleh glorified “resistance missiles” (i.e., rockets launched at Israeli civilian centers) and expressed how two particular Hamas terror attacks “healed our hearts.”

CAMERA has already exposed much of Saleh’s reprehensible rhetoric glorifying Oct. 7 and terrorism in an article at National Review. She has repeatedly made posts glorifying or mourning prominent terrorists, including Yahya Sinwar (see also here, here, and here), Mohammed Deif (see also here), Ismail Haniyeh (see also here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), Ismail al-Ghoul, Zakaria Al-Zubaidi, Ashraf Nofal and Mohammed Zayed. She has also repeatedly posted videos mocking Israeli hostages and glorifying their terrorist tormentors. Likewise, the Middle East Forum has documented some of Khan Suri’s continuing pro-Hamas propaganda.

Disturbingly, however, it gets even worse.

One of Saleh’s first posts after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre was a Hamas propaganda video featuring a two-minute speech by Hamas spokesperson Abu Obeida. Playing over the image of dead Israeli soldiers, Abu Obeida declared that Hamas had decided to start executing “the enemy’s civilian hostages with us” unless the Israeli military stopped its operations, pledging to “broadcast this … with sound and image.” Saleh’s text alongside the post: “Word of truth,” with a victory sign emoji.

Praising the threat to murder innocent civilians is not “pro-Palestinian advocacy.” This misleading and frankly racist conflation of glorifying terrorism with “pro-Palestinian advocacy” serves no one except for Palestinian terrorists.

Furthermore, directly working for and aiding terrorist organizations, as Saleh and Khan Suri did respectively, is not “pro-Palestinian advocacy,” but rather support for terrorism.

All of this is open-source information. None of it required any special skills or tools to uncover.

Readers should ask: With hundreds of reporters covering the story, and with all the resources at their disposal, why did they disclose almost none of these details to their audiences, and what does that say about the current state of journalism?

          (JNS.org)

Originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

CAMERA-Arabic provided research assistance for this article.

David M. Litman is a media and education research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).