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[Excerpts:]

The Jerusalem-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor sharply criticized a large German foundation on Wednesday for funding left-leaning online magazine +972 .

Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a German think-tank affiliated with the Green Party, provided 6,000 euros to the magazine, which uses Israel’s international calling code number as its title.

Professor Gerald Steinberg, head of NGO Monitor, told The Jerusalem Post that “Heinrich Böll’s decision to support +972 fulfills no humanitarian purpose and does not foster peace and mutual understanding.”

He continued that Böll “cannot justify funding an online magazine that targets English speakers and routinely presents biased, one-sided perspectives on the Arab-Israeli conflict. This funding helps provide a platform used to demonize Israel. +972 reporters and bloggers, for example, invoke the hateful ‘apartheid’ analogy. Why is German taxpayer funding going to this counterproductive activity?”

Steinberg said, “Contrary to Böll’s claims, +972 presents a one-sided, highly distorted view of the complex Arab- Israeli conflict. Such interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign state is a blatant violation of democratic norms.”

Meanwhile, the German Shoah Foundation EVZ cut its financial support for Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that supports nakba. The Palestinians use the word nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) to reject Israel’s existence and to commemorate an estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled during the 1948 War of Independence.

Steinberg said, “This is a significant victory in the battle to hold funders accountable for their support of NGOs involved in demonization. Zochrot, a radical Israeli NGO, supports the Palestinian claim to a ‘Right of Return’ – which has no legal basis and would end the existence of Israel as the Jewish nation-state – endorsed the violent ‘Free Gaza Flotilla,’ and falsely accused Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘forcible displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.’”

In an e-mail to the Post on Wednesday, Eugen Esau, a spokesman for EVZ, wrote that “the support for the projects from Zochrot contractually ended on December 31, 2011.”