Hollywood celebrities are backing a terrorist murderer — read the facts

More than 20 actors from the Marvel universe — including Mark Ruffalo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton — have joined a campaign calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti.

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These Hollywood celebrities portray him as a Palestinian political prisoner and compare his imprisonment to that of Nelson Mandela.

This is what happens when Hollywood’s woke celebrity club substitutes ideology for facts.

Barghouti, the convicted head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, is not in an Israeli prison because Israel disagrees with his politics or because he wrote an anti-Israel manifesto; he was charged with five murders, attempted murder and membership in a terrorist organization. He received a fair trial in an Israeli civilian court and was convicted, receiving five life sentences.

The five murder convictions were not abstract charges; they involved five human beings: Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a 35-year-old Greek Orthodox monk and priest, who was shot and killed while driving near Jerusalem in June 2001. Yoela Hen, 45, an American citizen and mother of two, was murdered in a shooting at a gas station near Givat Ze’ev in January 2002. Three others were murdered at Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant in March 2002: Eli Dahan, 53; Yosef Habi, 52; and Sgt.-Maj. Salim Barakat, 33, a Druze Israeli police officer who confronted the attacker.

An American citizen. A Christian priest. A Druze policeman. People who were Jewish, and people who were not. People going about their lives, who were murdered by terrorists on Barghouti’s orders.

The Israeli court did something Hollywood seems unwilling to do: It examined the evidence.

The Palestinian terrorist mastermind was acquitted of 21 other murder charges, involving 33 additional attacks, because the prosecution failed to establish his responsibility to the required legal standard. The court did not convict him simply of the five murders above simply because he was a prominent Palestinian leader; it acquitted him where the evidence was insufficient, and convicted him where it found his responsibility proven.

Yet the Marvel heroes want to bend reality and see Barghouti as “Palestine’s Mandela.”

That comparison is outrageous.

Mandela was not a pacifist: He supported armed struggle against South African apartheid and helped establish uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress.

But there is a fundamental difference between armed struggle directed at a regime and the deliberate murder of innocent civilians. Mandela targeted infrastructure. Barghouti’s homicide convictions arose from terrorist attacks in which civilians were targeted, during a campaign that included suicide bombings on civilian buses and attacks on restaurants, schools and shopping centers.

The historical record is even more damning. Left-leaning Human Rights Watch’s shocking 2002 report on Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians was titled “Erased in a Moment.” It documented systematic attacks against civilians and concluded that the pattern of deliberate attacks constituted crimes against humanity. Amnesty International likewise condemned deliberate killings of Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed groups as crimes against humanity.

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These were not fictional villains in a screen-adapted comic book tale — they were real terrorists with real victims.

And one of the victims was an American citizen.

Perhaps that is the problem with the Marvel campaign. These are limousine liberals at their most comfortable: wealthy, privileged and insulated from the consequences of the causes they champion.

They have spent their careers playing superheroes, but appear to know remarkably little about the history they are now trying to rewrite. They sit comfortably in their movie studio trailers and pronounce moral judgments on a bitter conflict in which they have no personal stake and, judging by this campaign, very little understanding.

They do not have to stand before the widows — the parents and orphans of the five people whose murders resulted in Barghouti’s convictions — and explain why their loved ones’ killer should be released. They simply sign a petition.

Israel must never release Marwan Barghouti. Not because woke Hollywood says so; not because activists have rewritten a heroic biography for him — and not because his name has been attached to some convenient political narrative.

A man convicted of murdering five people, including an American citizen, cannot be transformed into a symbol of peace because the red carpet revolutionaries have decided to make him one.

Before demanding Barghouti’s release, the Marvel justice league should do something remarkably simple: Read the documents.

Read the names of the five people he was convicted of murdering. Read the evidence. Then explain to their millions of followers why those victims should be written out of the story while Barghouti becomes its hero.

Hollywood can manufacture superheroes; it cannot manufacture innocence. The victims were real. The convictions were real. The families are still real. And Barghouti can never go free.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli human rights lawyer and president of the Shurat HaDin Law Center, which represents terror victims.

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