Is a Local News Outlet Guilty of Aiding Hamas?

A case filed in Seattle connects an Olympia-based nonprofit to a Hamas spokesman who hid hostages in his family home.

Seattle-area attorneys are confident that they can prove a local publication is guilty of violating the Alien Tort Statute and providing material support for Hamas.

The law office of Tomlinson Bomsztyk Russ is providing local legal counsel for Almog Meir Jan, the 22-year-old Israeli who was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7th and freed by the IDF from an apartment in Gaza on June 8th. Jan, along with two other men, was held by Abdullah Aljamal, a Hamas operative and spokesperson as well as a regular contributor to the Olympia-based Palestine Chronicle. Aljamal, as well as his wife and father, were killed in the raid.

Jan’s case was connected to Aric Bomsztyk via the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which is helping massacre survivors and families of victims seek justice through US courts. The Center is also behind the case against the Associated Press that claims the news agency knew its freelance photographers in Gaza were embedded in the enclave’s terror organization.

“Almost immediately after the successful rescue, there were news reports that one of the people where the male hostages were kept was [involved with] this outfit, the Palestine Chronicle,” Bomsztyk says. “Lo and behold, there’s this guy who claims he’s a reporter for the Palestine Chronicle and it’s based out of Olympia, Washington.”

Then Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center in Atlanta, reached out to Bomsztyk as a local resource. “I said, ‘I think you found the right guy,’” Bomsztyk says.

Bomsztyk is working with the National Jewish Advocacy Center, Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinsky & Josefiak PLLC, as well as David Schoen, the attorney tapped by Donald Trump to represent him at his impeachment trial. All parties are listed on the complaint, which names the People Media Project, a Washington state 501(c)(3) doing business as the Palestine Chronicle; editor Ramzy Baroud; and People Media Project governor and principal officer John Harvey. Both Baroud and Harvey have been involved over the years with Palestinian/anti-Israel activism. Baroud is based in Bothell, Washington, and originally from Nuseirat, the same neighborhood in Gaza as Aljamal. Baroud has written six books, including one called “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story,” and has written for news outlets around the world, including the Seattle Times. Harvey is based in Olympia, the hometown of deceased activist Rachel Corrie, which has long been a home for Palestinian activism. Olympia has an unofficial sister-city partnership with Rafah.

The Alien Tort Statute dates back to 1789 and allows foreign nationals to seek justice in US courts for injuries due to acts of terrorism or human rights abuses, even if they took place outside the United States. The complaint alleges that Aljamal was publicly known as a spokesman for the Hamas Ministry of Labor and had been disseminating Hamas propaganda as a paid correspondent to the Palestine Chronicle since 2019, including during the eight months he and his family held Jan hostage in their apartment, in violation of international law.

“If you are a 501(c)(3), you have a responsibility not to hire people who are working for terrorist organizations,” says Erielle Davidson of Holtzman Vogel. “If someone is holding themselves out as a member of Hamas, you as an organization should not be employing that individual. We think it’s a pretty strong case for material support.”

The Palestine Chronicle has downgraded its relationship to Aljamal from correspondent to contributor and, in an obituary, claimed he was merely a freelancer who contributed on a “voluntary basis.” The obituary also casts doubt on the claim that Aljamal held the three Israeli men hostage, but this appears to be in relation to early confusion about the nearby home that held female Israeli hostage Noa Argamani. In another article, an unnamed author (likely Baroud) doubles down on this dissociation:

Aljamal did not provide analytical or op-ed pieces, he was not an official staff member of the Palestine Chronicle, nor did he charge for his contributions during the war. His stories consisted only of reports and testimonies from Palestinian victims who have lost their homes or loved ones in Gaza. 

Though the Palestine Chronicle made that very clear in an initial statement issued on the subject, the defamation campaign insisted that Aljamal was a staff member of the Palestine Chronicle. 

To avoid further harassment of and threats to its editors and board members, the Palestine Chronicle was forced to make the decision to remove some of these names from our ‘About Us’ section. 

Aljamal’s stories are still live on the website. The Chronicle posted his reports from Gaza several times a week until the day before he died.

“They’re going to say they didn’t know this is happening; no, this person was not a kidnapper,” Bomsztyk says of the possible defense. Davidson adds that even if they admit to a formal relationship, they may deny knowing what Aljamal was up to. “But at a certain point you can’t pull the wool over your eyes,” she says. “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck, you don’t get to say we didn’t know it was a duck.”

The case is yet to enter the discovery process. As for what Almog Meir Jan knows, Bomsztyk cited attorney-client privilege. Jan has not said much about the conditions of his captivity outside of recounting living in a dark room with fellow hostages, where he could hear children playing downstairs.

While Israeli advocacy groups are growing frustrated with the lack of investigation by the US government into nonprofits and news organizations with potential ties to terrorism (like an unanswered letter by Israel’s consul general to Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson about this case), anti-Israel activists claim that lawsuits like this one are designed to silence Palestinian voices. In the same unsigned article as above, the Palestine Chronicle shifts the blame: “The campaign [to connect the news site to Aljamal and to Hamas] also appears to be an extension of Israeli efforts to erase, demonize and justify the unprecedented slaughter of Palestinian journalists.”

According to Bomsztyk, the case is about holding people accountable. “If the case is successful, it will prove that you have to be careful who you give money to,” he says. “This is not about silencing Palestinian voices. It’s about having somebody write articles for your platform who they should have known is a Hamas operative. If they are materially supporting him, that’s a problem. They’ve been publishing for however long things we might find offensive. That’s not what this case is about.”

“The goal is to make the organization suffer for bad choices,” Davidson adds. “Something that is omnipresent in the national security world is charities becoming vehicles for terrorist organizations.”

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