Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: sergeitokmakov/Pixabay
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(JNS) — In July, the heads of three House committees — on education, oversight and on ways and means — urged the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the Palestine Chronicle and its parent nonprofit People Media Project, which they said “appear to be at the very least complicit in supporting Hamas, and at worst full-fledged financiers of terrorism.”
The letter came after the revelation that a writer from the publication both supported Hamas and held Israeli civilian hostages in his home. But despite this context, a major U.S. investment advisory firm uses Palestine Chronicle as a source to assign damaging ratings to two major U.S. companies that do business in Israel.
A source familiar with the practices of the New York-based MSCI told JNS that the firm, which is already under separate multi-state investigations for assigning damaging investment ratings to an Israeli military defense contractor and to Israeli banks, uses information from the publication to assign a “severe controversy” rating to the telecommunications company Motorola and the construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar.
JNS sought comment from MSCI, which has consistently denied supporting or practicing boycotts against Israel.
In a 2024 report on Caterpillar, MSCI cites a Palestine Chronicle article about British college students calling on their university to divest from Caterpillar, because the company makes equipment used for demolitions in Judea and Samaria.
Socially-conscious investors often turn to the environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings of firms like MSCI for guidance on investment options and could be swayed from investing in companies accused of poor corporate practices, including human rights violations.
“College campuses can just have votes and movements and generate press coverage, and that’s enough to create a severe ESG controversy for an American company,” Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS.
“It’s so wild,” added Goldberg, the architect of the first Illinois law barring boycotting Israel.
Abdallah Aljamal, a former spokesman for Hamas’s labor ministry in Gaza and a writer for the Palestine Chronicle in Gaza, was found to have held three Israeli hostages in his home.
In addition to Palestine Chronicle, MSCI used other information from other groups that support boycotting the Jewish state, including Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, War on Want and Amnesty International in its Caterpillar report, per the JNS source.
The JNS source also said that MSCI tagged Motorola with three controversies, including one “severe” controversy, related to the company’s dealings in Israel-controlled territory.
The severe controversy is based on Motorola’s supply of surveillance equipment used to detect human movement near the security barrier that Israel built in response to numerous Palestinian suicide bombings during the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005.
The systems also surveil perimeters around Jewish communities beyond the Green Line to prevent terrorist attacks.
MSCI classifies a class action wiretapping lawsuit filed against Motorola this year in U.S. district court as only a “minor” controversy, according to the JNS source. The suit was brought against the company and the Massachusetts State Police, which used Motorola technology to surreptitiously record citizens without a warrant, in violation of the state wiretap law.
A state police audit found more than 180 likely cases of covert recordings that weren’t turned over to prosecutors.
“The growing body of evidence makes clear that MSCI is intentionally inflicting economic harm on firms operating in Israel on a discriminatory and politically-motivated basis,” Goldberg told JNS. “Any state with an anti-BDS law should be activating that law right now.”
