By, Jonathan Kalmus
1 min read
ByJonathan Kalmus, Jonathan Kalmus
A woman from Bolton who claims she was "brutally" locked up by Israeli immigration staff at Ben Gurion Airport for no reason other than wanting a holiday in Israel has been unmasked as a high-profile anti-Israel political campaigner.
She is also behind a website which peddles the claim that Israel harvests human organs and that "the Jews are eating villages".
Komal Adris (below) told the Bolton News and Asian Image, which runs the UK's leading Asian news website, she was strip-searched and locked up for 15 hours without access to lawyers, on Tuesday.
She said she had been interrogated for nine hours by Israeli officials after she flew to Tel Aviv from Luton. She was then escorted on a plane back to the UK. She claimed she intended to see the sites of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
But on the website of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), a vehemently anti-Zionist group, she writes that her "Palestinian summer plans were brutally crushed by Israel's refusal to let me enter the country".
Ms Adris, who has headed MPAC's northern team, is also a key Labour Friends of Palestine executive committee member. In 2002 she campaigned for a motion at Manchester University branding Israel an apartheid regime. Ms Adris said she had told Israeli officials her trip was "just a holiday", but that they had insisted on making her sign a document confirming she would not travel to the West Bank.
"I told them I have friends in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, I thought it was ridiculous and illegal and I wanted freedom of movement. I have nothing to hide and have been as open as I possibly could be and I found it strange I was held in that criminal manner."
Ms Adris is also a founder of the lobby group Organ Donor Campaign, which launched in Parliament last year. The website of the organisation, which is not a registered charity, runs a blog linking to news about the Swedish journalist who accused the IDF of killing Palestinian youths to harvest their organs. It also links to the story of a Jewish New Yorker who was arrested for illegal organ transfer, while the anonymous blog quotes a Moldovan man who says "the Jews are eating our villages".
Ms Adris said that the blog had been written by a medical student volunteering for the organisation, adding: "I absolutely do not condone those comments. We have a good relationship with the Jewish community in Britain, we wouldn't think about jeopardising that." She would not confirm whether or not the comments would be removed.