The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, produced a martyr video for one of their deceased terror operatives who died in the 2014 Gaza war, Mohammed Rafiq Alareer. The video was not made available for viewing on the Hamas website, it was placed on an internet video platform for public viewing.

On October 8, 2017, “Big Tech” censored the video, removed it from their platform allegedly for violating their “terms of service”, it was gone, no longer available for public viewing. No longer available for public viewing until now. Before “Big Tech” removed the video in 2017, it was downloaded and saved in a mp4 file. Now, it can be seen on the internet for the first time since its removal, by either clicking on this URL or entering the URL into your browser’s address box:

https://humanizepalestine.net/gallery/

The video is prima facia evidence that the University of Hawaii is promoting a false identity for this Hamas terrorist, effectively concealing who he was and how he died. This fake biographical profile was then used to memorialize him and dedicate one of their journals to his memory.

The video proves that the editors of a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to biographical research, biographical scholarship, published false biographical facts in their journal relating to the life and death of Mohammed Rafiq Alareer.

During the summer of 2014, the University of Hawaii Press published a special issue of the journal Biography, “an interdisciplinary quarterly that provides a forum for biographical scholarship.” The title of this issue was “Life In Occupied Palestine”, Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2014. It was dedicated to the “memory of Mohammed Alareer, ….”. This issue is currently available on Johns Hopkins University’s database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books, Project MUSE.

“Life In Occupied Palestine”, dedicated to the memory of Mohammed Alareer, was not only memorializing an infamous Palestinian terrorist, it presented a false narrative that not only concealed Alareer’s terror identity, it contained alleged facts describing his life and death that were patently false. The recently published on-line video cited above, assists in exposing this obfuscation.

As previously stated, Mohammed Rafiq Alareer was an Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades terror operative combatant, a member of Hamas’ military wing. He was a “Qassami”, an al-Qassam Brigades soldier or fighter. He died in his house during the 2014 Gaza war, killed together with one other Qassami, while they were engaged in combat with the Israeli military. These truthful facts, revealed in part by the martyr video, directly contradict the University of Hawaii’s brief bio of Alareer, reproduced below, appearing in the journal’s postscript and dedication:

Postscript and Dedication

"As July 2014 comes to its bloody close, those killed include Mohammed Alareer, brother to Refaat Alareer, along with four other members of Refaat’s family, all of them found dead in the wreckage of their own home during a “humanitarian ceasefire.” Only hours after hearing this, Refaat writes, “A house of four floors but thousands of stories is no more. The stories, however, will live to bear witness to the most brutally wild occupation the world has ever known” (“The Story of My Brother”). We dedicate this volume, in which Refaat and the other contributors bear witness and tell their stories, to the memory of Mohammed Alareer and to all the others who died while trying to live life in occupied Palestine. We offer it as a small yet insistent intervention in the greater struggle for justice in Palestine.

“… those killed include Mohammed Alareer, brother to Refaat Alareer, along with four other members of Refaat’s family, all of them found dead in the wreckage of their own home ….”

The statement above is absolutely false. Mohammed Alareer was not killed in his home with four other members of his family. He was killed with one other individual, Mus’ab Nafez al-Ajla, another Hamas terror operative, they were both engaged in combat when the house was targeted by an Israeli aircraft. Evidence of this is supported by the video.

In the following screen grabs from the video, Alareer and al-Ajla can be seen training together:

In the two screen grabs above, Alareer is on the right and al-Ajla on the left. Their faces are revealed in the video because they have been martyred. Terror operatives who are not dead have their faces obscured, this can be seen in one of the screen grabs above.

The following narratives are a translation of the Arabic from the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades website, al-Ar’eer and al-Ajla webpages:

Mohammed Rafiq al-Ar’eer’s webpage

on time

... on Tuesday, 22/07/2014 following the targeting of the home of the F16 aircraft, where he was in the company of the martyr Musab al-Ajla, where they were seriously injured and led to their martyrdom.

Mus’ab Nafez al-Ajla’s Izz al-Din webpage

on time

... on Tuesday, July 22, 2014, following the targeting of the house of the F16, where he was in the company of the martyr Mohammed Rafiq al-Ar'eer, where they were seriously injured and led to their martyrdom

There is no mention of any Alareer family members killed in the house alongside the two terror operatives. The only deaths in the Alareer home were the two Qassamis.

Mohammed Rafiq Alareer’s sister, Moataza Rafiq, has a Facebook page. The sister’s Facebook page corroborates the narrative found on the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades webpages. There were no family members in the house when Mohammed Alareer was killed together with al-Ajla.

Moataza Rafiq’s Facebook timeline has the following post:




The narrative in the post above:

Forgive me brother, for not saying goodby. But that was your decision. YOU YELLED AT US: Come on, get out

You scared us and didn’t fear yourself

I hate that house that crashed over your body. And let us talk about you in the past tense. God bless you brother


Mohammed Rafiq Alareer was no ordinary terrorist. He had another job with Hamas. He was an actor who appeared on their TV station in a program entitled Tomorrow’s Pioneers. Alareer played the part of Narhoul, a giant bee, that taught very young children to “shoot all Jews”.





“We are now broadcasting this show from the studios of Al-Aqsa TV, which were destroyed by the enemy. They destroyed every stone and every tree, but they will never destroy our resolute will. ... We appear before you today, after having lost our dearest beloved, who was loved by young and old alike – the famous puppet, who angered the enemy for many many years. He is the heroic martyr Muhammad Al-'Ar'ir, who would put a smile on the faces of children through the character of the puppet Nahoul.”

The facts presented above made little difference to the University of Hawaii. This is the narrative they promoted:




“Mohammed was timid but humorous and adventurous. His public speaking and acting skills won him the role of Karkour, the most famous television character in the Gaza strip.”

The University of Hawaii advanced this false narrative on-line, in the classroom, and in a lecture that took place in London. On February 18, 2015, Prof. Cynthia Franklin gave a lecture at SOAS University of London, the School of Oriental and African Studies. The title of the lecture was “Life in Occupied Palestine”: Accounts of Existence and Other Acts of Resistance.

In the photograph below, Prof. Franklin (L) is seen sitting in front of a projected image of “Mohammed Alareer (1983-2015) and his daughter Raneem (aged 4)”, the same image as seen above:




This is an enlargement of the projected image:


This image of Mohammed Alareer appeared on a website that memorialized martyred Palestinian terrorists. The website was linked to University of Hawaii content and the website was required reading in one of Prof. Franklin’s seminars.

The University of Hawaii presented Mohammed Alareer as an individual who was simply “trying to live life in occupied Palestine”, who was found dead in the wreckage of his own home along with four other members of his family. He was timid and adventurous and his acting skills won him the role of Karkour the chicken, the most famous television character in the Gaza Strip.

All of this is false.

He played the role of Narhoul who taught young children to attack and kill Jews.

He was not timid and adventurous, just trying to live life. He was a terror operative combatant as seen in the video. Below, a translated passage from his al-Qassam Brigades webpage:

March of the jihadist

Our martyr got to know his mujahideen brothers and loved to join the rode of jihad and resistance, and he had what he hoped for, as he joined the ranks of the Brigades of the martyr Izz al-Din al-Qassam, and here began his Qassam jihadist journey. Muhammed joined many Qassam military courses that qualified him to be a solid Qassam fighter. He also participated in the Battle of Days of Wrath in the northern Gaza Strip, and in the Battle of Al-Furqan, he participated in Rabat on the eastern outposts of the Shujaiya neighborhood, accompanied by the martyr Issam Shamali, in addition to his participation in the battle of Shajil, where he was one of the young people who initiated jihad in the way of God, and in the battle of the edible storm, our martyr, accompanied by his mujahideen brothers, set out to fight the Zionists Allah's enemies.

The untruthful narrative of Mohammed Alareer’s life and death found in the journal’s dedication is an introduction to the chapters that follow. They are very similar in content. This is not about the greater struggle for justice in Palestine, as the University would have us believe. It is about Palestinian advocacy that conceals the truth and misrepresents facts, disguised as biographical scholarship.

This is the time to confront the University of Hawaii at Manoa with the truth before it is too late. Prof. Cynthia Franklin, a member of the Department of English, and on the Steering Committee for the Organizing Collective of USACBI, the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israelis, is currently on a team developing a partnership between al-Quds University and The University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Watch the Alareer video then ask yourself the question, how could a scholarly academic research journal Biography, Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2014, be dedicated to Mohammed Rafiq Alareer. Professor Franklin memorialized an Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades terror operative in a peer-reviewed academic journal she co-edited. There are many more Mohammed Rafiq Alareers at al-Quds University. They may soon become residents of the state of Hawaii.

https://humanizepalestine.net/gallery/

Jonathan Slosser is an independent researcher who has degrees from the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and the Univ. of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the relationship between Human Rights NGOs, The Academy, and Palestinian Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) as well as exposes of the terrorism of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brig.etc.