The United States will remove an extremist Jewish organization associated with Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Palestinian Mujahideen Shura Council near Jerusalem from its list of terrorist organizations for not engaging in violence for many years.
The official said the State Department told Congress that it would stop using the term “terrorist” to refer to the “living priests” group because its name “has not been associated with any terrorist attack since 2005.” The organization filed a court appeal against this classification. The source added that the Mujahideen Shura Council in the Beit al-Maqdis region would also be excluded from this list. The name of this Palestinian group was associated with rocket attacks ten years ago.
The US State Department designated Kahana a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, three years after the 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron by one of its supporters, Baruch Goldstein.
The movement was founded by Kahane, an American rabbi and former Israeli lawmaker who campaigned for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and was assassinated in New York in 1990.
A US State Department spokesman, who asked not to be named, said the removal of the designation “ensures that our sanctions against terrorism remain credible and relevant,” stressing that it “does not reflect any change in policy toward the past.” activities of an organization.
Although the organization has not carried out attacks, the rabbi is still a hero to some on the far right in Israel, including the hardline Knesset member Itamar Ben Gvir, who advocated the annexation of the West Bank. Listing a foreign organization on a terrorist list severely limits its room for maneuver in the United States, where, for example, its financial support is a criminal offense.
The State Department announced that it would keep both groups on a less stringent list of global terrorists.
