MIFTAH's Democracy
and Good Governance program also sponsors
town hall meetings and TV/radio talk shows to help Palestinians learn
about political issues relevant to their lives. And it advocates a
“Gender-Responsive National Budget” that promotes “strategies for women's
participation in economic decision-making.”
MIFTAH commonly misrepresents
facts and figures so as to cast Israel in a bad light. Once, the
organization charged that that 123 “Palestinian
activists and political figures” had been “assassinated” by
Israeli “death squads,” when in fact the overwhelming majority of
those victims (who were killed by the IDF) were military combatants and known terrorists. In
another case, MIFTAH, ignoring documented evidence that
Palestinian militants routinely expropriated medical
vehicles in order to transport weapons and even suicide bombers,
recklessly asserted that Israel had conducted 216 unprovoked “attacks
on ambulances.”
On April 17, 2007, MIFTAH used the
occasion of Palestinian Prisoners Day to issue a press
release accusing Israel of misusing administrative detention to
impose “collective punishment” on the “hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians [who] have endured the dismal conditions of Israeli
prisons.”
After Israel (in December 2008) launched Operation Cast Lead, a
military reprisal for Hamas's relentless terrorism campaign, MIFTAH condemned
“this latest massacre” which had “claimed the lives of mostly
civilians including women and children.”
In 2010 MIFTAH
identified Israel's repeated use of “grotesque
military violence” and its “denial of the right to
self-determination of the Palestinian people” as “the root
causes of the violence” in the Middle East.
