NZ group using Kiwibank Bank Account to raise funds online for terror entity
A Christchurch-based group, PFLP Solidarity Aotearoa, has reinstated its website (https://www.pflpsolidarityaotearoa.net/). It is raising funds for PFLP, a a terrorist organisation. The PFLP is a designated terrorist organisation in USA (since 1997), Canada, the European Union, and in some other Western democracies (but not in NZ).
According the website, 100% of the funds deposited into the organisation’s NZ-based Kiwibank bank account go directly to the PFLP (a designated terrorist entity in USA, Canada, EU).
This is rather ironic. As readers know I was recently in Ukraine and before my trip I did a 12 Euro bank transfer to pay for health insurance in Ukraine. My bank froze the transaction in case it was a breach of international sanctions and it took several e-mails to get it released.
Meanwhile Kiwibank is accepting donations for a known terrorist group. The PFLF (a Marxist-Leninist group) pioneered armed aircraft hijackings in the 1960s. They oppose both the Camp David and Oslo accords and any two state solution. The Canadian Government describes them as:
Formed in 1967, the goals of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) are the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a communist government in Palestine. During the 1970s, the group took part in some of the boldest terrorist attacks of the period, such as hijacking three civilian airliners in one day and storming the Vienna headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In 2000, the PFLP turned increasingly to the use of suicide bombers, guerilla tactics, car bombings, and mortar strikes. The PFLP was also responsible for the first assassination of a cabinet minister in Israel’s history, killing Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi in 2001. In 2014, the PFLP claimed responsibility for a November gun and knife attack at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in West Jerusalem that killed 6 people. On June 16, 2017, two coordinated attacks targeting Israeli police officers were carried out near the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s walled old city. In September 2019, the Israeli security forces arrested four PFLP members allegedly responsible for remotely detonating an improvised explosive device in the West Bank that killed an Israeli teenager and seriously wounded two family members.
The US Government notes:
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It combines Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology, viewing the destruction of Israel as integral to the struggle to remove Western capitalism from the Middle East and ultimately establish a Communist Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
And this is who Kiwibank is happy to act as an effective banker for!