Hotovely: Palestinian leaders have created a culture
of death that is motivating the latest violent terrorism.
The
latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the
immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill
blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which
Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred
value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their
aspirations.
Such
violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin
al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in
the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved
into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under
Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror
against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements,
should become more informed of the conflict’s history.
Yet the
apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by
Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is
often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry
between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly
irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.
A few
recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.
Mr.
Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said the following on Palestinian
television on Sept. 16: “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.
This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of
Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”
Two
weeks later, on Oct. 1, Palestinian terrorists murdered an Israeli couple,
Eitam and Naama Henkin, in cold blood in front of their four children, who
ranged from 9 years old to 4 months.
Days
later, with the Henkin children still in mourning, PLO official Mahmoud Ismail
went on official Palestinian television, PBC, and proclaimed their parents’
murder to be a fulfillment of Palestinian “national duty.” He was one of
several Palestinian officials who condoned the murder.
Such
statements strike a resonant chord among generations of Palestinian children
who have been taught that Jews are the descendants of “barbaric monkeys” and
“wretched pigs” (a phrase from a poem repeatedly recited on PBC television, to
the applause of children.) They have been taught that “armed conflict” (a
common Palestinian euphemism for the murder of Jews) against “the so-called
State of Israel” is both a religious duty and an act purportedly legitimized by
the United Nations—a falsehood repeated in a number of 12th-grade Palestinian
textbooks.
The
Palestinian Authority also pays handsome stipends to terrorists and their
families, which serve as a powerful incentive to carry out acts of terror.
Is it
surprising, then, that Mr. Abbas’s explicit call for “blood on its way to
Allah” has resulted in a surge of stabbings and other attacks against Israelis?
Is it any wonder that viewers of official television recently were treated to
the sight of a Palestinian boy, dressed up in battle fatigues, telling a
smiling talk-show host of his wish to become an engineer “so that I can build
bombs to blow up all the Jews.”
The
unending stream of blood-drenched caricatures and video clips that circulate
virally through Palestinian social media is a telling indication of how
profoundly the worship of violence is entrenched in Palestinian society. So are
the many schools, city squares and sports tournaments named for
arch-terrorists.
The
cultivation of this culture of death is having devastating effects. As
Palestinian terror touches more Jewish families, Israelis, especially of the
younger generation, are increasingly resigning themselves to the fact that
Palestinian society is guided by a dramatically different set of values.
Israeli
society and Jewish tradition sanctify life. Palestinian society glorifies
death. Israeli children grow up on songs of peace and the biblical vision of
“nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” Palestinian children are
taught to hate.
Yet
there is no international outcry. No indignation at the exploitation of
Palestinian children from all the nongovernmental organizations and U.N.
agencies that profess to monitor human-rights abuses.
This is
tragic because the international community could make a practical difference.
About a third of the Palestinian Authority’s budget is financed by foreign aid.
This money is intended to develop Palestinian infrastructure and foster
economic growth, but it is being misused by the Palestinian Authority to
promote the murder of Jews and to sow destruction within Israel. The
international community can wield its influence toward a cessation of
incitement.
Turning
a blind eye to the enormous harm that the Palestinian leadership is doing to
its own people—by raising successive generations of children on blind hatred of
the Jews and Israel—is dooming these children to a bleak future. This ought to
be a compelling reason for the international community to seriously rethink the
strange tolerance it exhibits toward the Palestinian death-culture.
Changing
this culture of death is no less important for the Palestinians than for
Israel.
Transcript: Hamas cleric and TV host Sheikh Iyad Abu
Funun recently said that he would swear on the Quran “that not a single Jew
will remain on this land.” He further said: “We will not leave a single one of
you, alive or dead, on this land. By Allah, we will dig up your bones from your
graves and get them out of this country.” He was speaking on Al-Aqsa TV on
October 13, 2015.
Following are excerpts
Iyad Abu Funun: Let me
say something clearly to the Zionists, something that should reach all those
enemies – whether left-wing, right-wing, secular, religious, or extremist.
Regardless of their appearance or the color of their skin, they are on the land
of Islam, and the Muslims, on the land of the Prophet’s nocturnal journey. Any
of our enemies living on this land must understand that they have no place on
this land.
Brother,
could you bring me a copy of the Quran? I want to swear on the Quran that not a
single Jew will remain on this land. Not a single settler will remain on this
land. Absolutely not. The sheikhs who preceded me swore on the Quran [a producer hands Abu Funun a Quran] that
not a single Jew would remain on this land and that you would not win any
battle. I too swear on the Quran that by Allah the Almighty, who created the
skies above and all creatures, who sent us the Quran and the messengers, who
created Paradise and Hell, life and death, we will not leave a single Jew on
our Islamic land – no child, no adult, no settler, no soldier, nobody of
Eastern or Western origin. No Jew will remain on the land of Islam and the
Muslims.
This is
my vow on behalf of the entire Palestinian people, and of the Arab and Islamic
nation in its entirety, from East to West. If the enemies do not understand
this, they are stupid. They have not read the books of history. Go and read
them, and learn what happened between us. In the days when the Prophet Muhammad
was in Medina, the Jews of Bani Qaynuqa’, of Bani Nazir, and Bani Qurayza were
there. What did you do? You betrayed the Prophet once and did not learn your
lesson. You betrayed him a second, third, and fourth time, and did not learn
your lesson. We trampled on you time and again.
Our
nation is invincible. We are killed, martyred, wounded… When a thousand are
killed, thousands come in their place. When one commander is killed, a thousand
take his place. We are nation that cannot come to an end.
Read
the books of history carefully, and learn who were the men who were educated by
the Prophet Muhammad. Go back to the history books. When we set out to fight
the Byzantines in the battle of Mu’tah, we had 3,000 fighters, while the
Byzantine numbered 200,000. We, the men educated by the Prophet Muhammad, are
invincible. Don’t talk to me about security forces, airplanes, tanks,
intelligence agencies, about detentions, deportations, destruction of homes,
missiles… This is all meaningless. The Quran is in our hearts, and you and all
your forces cannot rip it out.
Therefore,
you should study the books of history because history repeats itself. Our
tragedies will not repeat themselves. This is where the equation ends. We and
you are on the same land, but we have our complete faith in Allah and in the
strength of the mujahideen, and will not leave a single one of you, alive or
dead, on this land. By Allah, we will dig up your bones from the graves and get
them out of this country. We will not leave any trace of you on this land.
Transcript: Fatah Central Committee Deputy Secretary
Jibril Rajoub recently lauded the Palestinian attackers, saying: “These are
individual acts of heroism, of which I am proud.” In the interview, which aired
on the official TV channel of the Palestinian Authority on October 17, 2015,
Rajoub further said: “We refuse to pay the bill for the Holocaust. What is
being done to us is exactly the same as what was done to the Jews in Europe.”
Following are excerpts:
Jibril Rajoub: These
are clearly individual operations, but they require heroism, courage, and a
value system, which forces the Palestinian elite and the Palestinian national
forces to see in the final words of one of those heroes, written in a blog, a
document that could be taught in schools in a lesson about the meaning of
martyrdom…
Interviewer: You
are referring to Fadi Alwan…
Jibril Rajoub: ...and
about the meaning of patriotism. This is not about factions or about personal
agendas. Today, we are at a crossroads. The Palestinian conduct on the ground,
which is characterized by a readiness for self-sacrifice… You see a soldier with
his gun fleeing a guy with a knife, or even someone empty-handed. You see a
soldier terrified by a Palestinian, merely because he is a Palestinian… The
self-confidence of this racist soldier has clearly been shaken. We should rise
to the level of that understanding, and translate it into a strategy with
goals. I believe that the confrontation between the Palestinian people and the
occupation has reached the point where coexistence is impossible.
[…]
I am
telling you that these are individual acts of heroism, of which I am proud. I
am proud of these [attacks] and I salute all the people who carried them out.
We are proud of them. We must view this in an objective and accurate way. The
various factions have greater capabilities. They are capable of carrying out
huge military operations, which would shake the whatchamcallit… But I think
that politically speaking, we do not want these operations, because our goal is
liberation and independence. We fight the occupation, but we want the
international community to be on our side.
[…]
For the
international community, it is unacceptable for a bus to explode in Tel Aviv,
but it does not care what happens to a settler or a soldier who finds himself
in the wrong place at the wrong time in the occupied land. Therefore, we must
fight in a manner that keeps the world on our side. I believe that there is a
consensus about this.
[…]
We are
4.5 million Palestinians who have been living under this racist occupation
since 1967. We refuse to pay the bill for the Holocaust. What is being done to
us is exactly the same as what was done to the Jews in Europe. We will not pay
the price. We will not be a scapegoat. But our conduct must also rise to the
occasion. […]
Times of Israel Staff: A video
posted by a Jordanian-Palestinian teacher on Facebook shows his young daughter
holding a large knife and declaring, “I want to stab a Jew,” the watchdog group
MEMRI reported, amid an ongoing surge of stabbings and other terror attacks by
Palestinians on Israelis.
Abdulhaleem
Abuesha, a teacher in the Madaba refugee camp in Jordan, posted the clip on
Friday. MEMRI translated and highlighted it on Tuesday.
After
his daughter Rahf, standing in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen,
declares her desire to stab a Jew, Abuesha asks, “Why do you want to stab the
Jew?”
“Because
he stole our land,” she replies.
Her
father confirms approvingly: “They stole our land.” He then asks, “With what do
you want to stab them?”
“With a
knife,” she says.
Abuesha
is then heard encouraging her, saying, “Oh, you’re so strong! Allah willing, my
dear.” MEMRI
said Abuesha’s Facebook account “also features a picture of a little boy –
presumably his son – holding a large knife and smiling at the camera.”
Palestinians Resent the Status Quo. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 19, 2015. Tobin: After
more than a week of studied neutrality about the surge of terrorism against
Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry finally said something useful to the
cause of restoring calm. Though he and other administration officials have at
times blamed the Israelis for provoking the spate of bloody terror attacks by
building homes or by shooting terrorists, Kerry got to the core of the problem
when he noted that the alleged threats to the al-Aqsa mosque are not real. By
noting that Israel was opposed to changing the status quo on the Temple Mount,
Kerry implicitly backed the Netanyahu government’s assertion that the violence
was the result of incitement by Palestinian leaders who have circulated that
false charge. He said what was needed was “clarity” about the situation in
Jerusalem that would make it clear to Muslims that there was no truth to the
blood libel circulated by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas about the
Temple Mount. Moreover, Kerry noted that the key point was to make sure
Palestinians understood that Israel was supportive of the status quo. But the
notion that what Palestinians want on the Temple Mount or anywhere else is the
status quo is a misnomer. As has been the case with each stage of fighting
during the recent history of the region, both the Palestinians and much of the
American foreign policy establishment hopes the growing pile of corpses will
serve to increase the pressure on Israel to give up more territory.
It’s
taken what is now being called the “stabbing intifada” for even a staunch supporter
of the Obama administration’s foreign policy like the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to recognize that disagreements about
settlements and territory haven’t caused the violence. Goldberg correctly links
Abbas’s incitement about the Temple Mount to the blood libels circulated by
Palestinian leaders in the 1920s. The reason why Israel’s maintenance of a
status quo on the Temple Mount that actually discriminates against Jews (they
are forbidden to pray at what is the holiest site in Judaism), is that Palestinians
see all of Israel, including everything inside the 1967 lines, as an illegal
settlement populated by foreign colonists. As occasional COMMENTARY contributor Daniel Gordis also noted in an insightful if depressing column in the New York Daily News, even educated Palestinians who engage in daily friendly interaction
with Jewish Israelis view them as usurpers who will be thrown out sooner or
later.
But
unfortunately, this insight hasn’t penetrated into the consciousness of most of
those who comment about foreign policy. A good example came in Monday’s New York Times when the International Crisis Group’s Nathan Thrall wrote that the problem was that there was no sign
that Israel would relax the occupation of Palestinians. So long as Palestinian
thought that only violence would force Israel to make concessions on land and
settlements, terrorism would be seen as a legitimate, even necessary, political
tool for an otherwise powerless Palestinian people. He believes if Israel and
the United States merely seek to “manage” the conflict rather than solving it,
the result will only be more violence since the Palestinians will keep shedding
blood until their grievances are addressed.
Thrall
is right when he notes that many Israelis dream about being able to completely
separate from Palestinians and thus be rid of the nightmare of stabbings,
shootings and other mayhem. He says support for separation was also at its
highest during the second intifada as Israelis reeled from suicide bombings.
But
what he and many other establishment think tank voices fail to understand is
that the tumult about al-Aqsa betrays what is at the root of the violence. The
talk about the mosque isn’t really so much about a fear that the Israelis will
harm it but an ideological/religious commitment to ensuring that this site is
made a Muslims only enclave where Jews have no rights. That’s why the PA is
also seeking to get UNESCO to recognize the Western Wall as part of the al-Aqsa compound.
Thrall
says Palestinians believe a “cost-free occupation” will only serve Israel’s
interests and that a sign that the Jewish state will withdraw from more
territory would give them reason to stop stabbing Jews. But the only status quo
the Palestinians are interested in preserving is the one that existed before
the modern Zionist movement began the return of the Jewish people to their
land. Palestinian national identity remains inextricably tied to the war
against that return, and as far as the Palestinians are concerned it makes no
difference whether the “occupied” land under discussion is the West Bank or
pre-1967 Israel.
A peace
deal that would separate the two people sounds like a good idea in theory, but
the results of Ariel Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal remain the object lesson in what
happens when Israel undertakes such a retreat. The notion of replicating it in
the West Bank still strikes the overwhelming majority of Israelis as madness
even if they would like to separate from the Palestinians. Nor do they harbor
any illusions about such a gesture satisfying the territorial aspirations of
the Palestinians. Israel
has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to grant the Palestinians a state in
exchange for real peace. But as Gordis and Goldberg both correctly observe,
peace will be impossible so long as the Palestinians aren’t prepared to
recognize the religious and national rights of the Jews. Those who wish to
promote a solution to the conflict would do better to stop talking about
settlements (most of which would remain inside Israel in a peace deal) and
start telling Palestinians the hard truth about giving up their century-long
war. Until they grasp this, managing the conflict is all Israel or anyone else
should be trying to do.
The Reality of Sectarian Conflict. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, October 14, 2015. Mead: Amnesty
International has accused Kurdish forces fighting in northeast Syria of war
crimes, charging the Kurdish YPG militia of targeting civilians in Hasakah and
Raqqa provinces. The human rights watchdog spoke with residents of Syria’s
Kurdish-controlled Rojava region and heard consistent tales of forced eviction
at gunpoint. One woman’s representative story recalls the destruction of her
village in the north of Syria:
They
[the YPG] said, “Stay in your homes. We won’t bother you. We have come to
liberate you [from Isis]. We just want the names of the people that are wanted.”
But then they wouldn’t even let us take our clothes out of the house. They
pulled us out of our homes and began burning them. Then they brought the
bulldozers.
Ethnic
(and religious) cleansing is an inevitable element of identity wars like the
ones raging in Syria today. Tens of millions in Europe and Turkey went through
the anguish and agony of being driven from their homes—or fleeing in panic from
them—over the last 150 years. The only way to stop these terrible cruelties and
crimes is to prevent them: to maintain international order and to prevent the
state meltdowns that leave ethnic and religious communities in a state of
nature. The so-called “international community” and the world’s community
organizer-in-chief have failed in that; now the grim consequences are appearing
one by one.
Syria
and Iraq are becoming Greater Lebanon as their inhabitants turn on one another.
The law of the jungle is the only law left when communities are fighting, or
believe they are fighting, for their survival. Shi’a against Sunni, Kurd against
Arab, perhaps soon Kurd against Turk…once these wars get going, they rarely end
quickly. The bitterness and above all the fear—existential fear for the
survival of your kind—remain, ready to flare into new rounds of hideous
violence. These
are the demons that have been unleashed in the Middle East; it is hard to see
now how they can be tamed.
We, the Terrified. By Kevin D. Williamson. National Review Online, October 13, 2015. Williamson: Have a
little sympathy for the Sanders set.
Following Bernie Sanders around Iowa earlier in the season, I got a pretty good idea of
who he is and what he is about: He is a man with a palpable desire to punish,
to make them pay, a fellow who read Discipline
and Punish back in the 1970s and cheered for the jailers at the Mettray
Penal Colony. He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” but we know the kind
of socialist he is: Stefan Löfven on the stump, Mao Zedong in his heart. You
can see that from a mile away, and his performance on the stage tonight only
confirms that. His politics are driven by hatred.
Senator
Sanders I get, and I got in a minute, in that anybody who knows a little
history knows the type. But the Sandersnistas mystified me. I think I’m
starting to understand them.
Outside
the Democratic debate tonight, on the Vegas Strip in front of the Wynn (perfect
venue for the Democrats’ presidential debate, incidentally, full of daft old
decrepit white people in thrall to base fantasies and willfully ignorant of the
fact that the numbers are always against them) my personal two-minute survey
found the Sanders signs outnumbering the signs for Herself 53 to 19. Most of
the people I spoke with were (you will not be surprised) unionized government
and health-care workers, but Vegas’s big kahuna, Culinary Union Local 226, was
not to be seen. (Culinary historically has no love for Herself, and endorsed
the other guy last time around, but hasn’t endorsed yet in this primary.)
Sanders already has won the endorsement of National Nurses United, and there
was a big nurses-for-Sanders to-do before the debate.
The
nurses all told basically the same story: They are doing fine for the moment,
with a good union that secures for them good paychecks and good benefits. But
they worry that the day after tomorrow something could suddenly change, that
their hospitals and clinics will go under or be sold to evil hedge funds and
that the terms of their employment will change radically for the worse, that
their houses will for some reason be foreclosed on even though they’re current
on all their payments, that college tuition will triple between now and the
time their kids finish up at UNLV, that something bad is going to happen.
That’s
the Sanders voter, and, I think, the Democrat at large: terrified.
It
isn’t just them. I was speaking with Sanders supporters almost literally in the
shadow of a giant gold tower bearing the name “TRUMP” on the side—it is
something of an achievement to create one of the tackiest things in Las Vegas—and the Trumpkins, like the
Sandersnistas, are terrified: The big Mexican is gonna come and get them, the
scheming Chinaman is gonna take their jobs, the surly Negro is leering at the
white women. At both ends of the spectrum, we see terrified—terrified—Americans
praying that Big Daddy will provide for them and smite their enemies. With
sometime messiah Barack Obama having failed to deliver the goods, they’re
turning to Government As God the Father Himself.
Over
and over again: Sanders is on our side, Sanders will make them pay. Sanders
hates who we hate.
The
United States isn’t really a winner-take-all society. Life’s actually pretty
easy in the middle here, and nobody is sleeping in the street or going hungry
because of economic failure. (Failure of the mental health care system, yes,
economic failure, no.) But, as I have been arguing for a while now, not
everybody is temperamentally cut out to be a clever, constantly adapting player
in the 21st century economy. Those old factory jobs in the 1950s that everybody
is so nostalgic about paid crap in real terms and were dreary and
soul-crushing. But they were—or they seemed—stable. Those nurses for Bernie are
living well. But they’re afraid that their good times will come to a sudden
end.
The
conservative who can figure out a way to address that without unnecessarily
impoverishing the United States (which is what trade restrictions do) or
creating new classes of public wards will have a real weapon in his hands. It
won’t get these Vegas union drones to pull the “R” lever—they’ll vote as
they’re told to vote—but it’s a big country.
Clueless About a Religious War. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 12, 2015. Tobin: After
another day of stabbings and other attacks of Israelis by Palestinians is
making it harder to pretend that a third intifada has not broken out. As the Times of Israel notes, Palestinians are calling this surge of terrorism the “hibat al-Quds” or the “Jerusalem
awakening.” That is significant and not just because it recalls the way
Palestinians referred to the second intifada as being about the “al-Aqsa”
mosque on the Temple Mount. While the narrative about this latest outbreak of
violence from critics of Israel is that it is all about the sins of the
“occupation” and Israel denying hope to the Palestinians, what we hearing from
them is a very different story. Read any of the accounts of the motivations of
the people going into the streets to stab random Jews they encounter or the
mobs in the West Bank who are seeking to set off confrontations with Israeli
troops, and you don’t hear much about frustration about the peace process. The
same applies to clips from Palestinian television that Palestine Media Watch
provides. What you do see are accounts of Muslim religious fervor that is
drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate.
This is
significant and not just because most of the popular notion that the violence
is caused by the failure of Israel to make enough concessions in negotiations
to bring peace. If Palestinians are engaged in an intifada that is, at its
core, a religious war rather than a protest movement about Israeli policies or
a desire for a Palestinian state, then everything that the Obama administration
and even many of Israel’s American supporters think they know about the
conflict is just plain wrong.
This
is, after all, the same administration that is engaged in a war against
Islamist terrorists that it claims has nothing to do with religion. Even though
jihadis throughout the Middle East are driven to try to kill Americans and
their allies by their faith, the president, and his foreign policy team have
been consistent in refusing to admit that there is any conflict with the form
of Islam that has produced these enemies.
Part of
that stubborn denial of reality is rooted in common sense. The U.S. doesn’t want
or need a war against all Muslims. It is only fighting adherents of a variant
of Islam that we have come to call Islamism. So differentiating between
ordinary peace-loving Muslims in the United States or elsewhere and those who
wanted to wage an unending war of annihilation on the West is smart. But
pretending that those people that we are fighting have nothing to do with Islam
is stupid. They may not represent all Muslims, but backers of ISIS, al-Qaeda,
and other terror groups are not a tiny minority in the Middle East. In fact,
though the number of active fighters is relatively small, those who sympathize
with them make up a significant proportion of the Muslim population. The reason
for that is that, although President Obama poses at times as an expert about
what is and is not Islam, large numbers of Muslims disagree with his rulings on
that question.
This
failure to acknowledge reality is a major obstacle to the faltering U.S.
efforts to deal with the rise of ISIS and other terror groups. It stands to
reason that if you don’t know what you are fighting or why your opponents are
so dedicated to your destruction, you’re not likely to defeat them.
The
same rule applies to evaluations of the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians and hopes for renewed peace talks.
If the
struggle between Jews and Arabs over the same small country were merely about
whether it could be split to grant both peoples a share of sovereignty, then
the century-long war between them would have ended many decades ago. Though partition
plans were offered before World War II and then again prior to Israel achieving
independence, the Arab answer was always “no.” Since the 1967 Six Day War in
which Israel came into possession of the West Bank and unified Jerusalem, the
conventional wisdom was that if only the Jews gave up the “occupied
territories,” peace would come. This ignores the fact that the “occupied
territories” before June 1967 was Israel itself. Even today, Hamas and most
other Palestinian groups, and at times the supposed moderates of Fatah, refer
to all of Israel as “occupied.”
What
those who keep saying that more concessions from Israel that will give hope to
Palestinians don’t understand is that for those who go into the streets to seek
martyrdom while killing Jews, the location of a future border between Israel
and a state of Palestine is irrelevant. After all, Israel offered the
Palestinians independence and statehood in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza,
and a share of Jerusalem in 2000, 2001 and 2008. And even Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu offered them the West Bank in 2010.
But if
the goal of the Palestinian leadership and the angry mobs with knives, rocks
and gasoline bombs in the streets don’t care so much about statehood as they do
about destroying Jewish rule in any part of the country, then this conflict is
about religion and not land. That’s not a message most Israelis, who would like
nothing better than a compromise that would bring them peace, want to hear. But
that is the message of the hibat al-Quds that is coming through loud and clear.
The
focus on saving the mosques on the Temple Mount from a mythical Jewish threat
or the notion that, in the words of PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, “filthy Jewish
feet” are present at holy sites in Jerusalem is a clear sign that faith is what
is driving Palestinian anger. Unfortunately, that faith is not so much one of
peace, as we would like to believe, as it is one that regards a Jewish state,
no matter how much land it possesses, as anathema.
Those
who blame Israel for what is happening aren’t merely wrong about the nature of
the conflict. They are blaming the victims and mistaking jihadist intentions
for a desire for peace. Protests about land and negotiations can be met with
diplomacy. Religious wars that seek to spill the blood of infidel Jews must be
with decisive force, not talk. Those Americans who don’t understand this are
part of Israel’s problems, not advocates for a viable solution.
The Consequences of Mayhem. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 13, 2015. Tobin: As bad
as the situation in Israel seemed yesterday, Tuesday began with even more Palestinian terror that sent shock waves through the country. A pair of
terrorists entered a Jerusalem bus and stabbed and shot passengers, killing two
and wounding many more until police stopped them. Elsewhere in the city another
Jew was killed by a Palestinian terror attack that drove a car onto a crowded
sidewalk and then attempted to finish his victims off with a knife. There were
also more stabbings in the city of Ra’anana. But while the details of the
attacks vary, the dynamic is clear. These are for all intents and purposes
suicide attacks that are motivated by religious fervor. The Palestinian
Authority leadership’s false charges about Israel — broadcast on their official
media — about Israel’s supposed intent to harm the mosques on the Temple Mount
has set off a wave of religiously-inspired terror attacks that it can’t
control. The question now is what comes next? Will the Palestinians eventually
come to their senses and stop the madness? Or will this situation continue to
spiral out of control with lives lost? Yet whatever the answers to these
questions turn out to be, there is no question which side in the conflict will
come out the loser from this disastrous turn of events.
What PA
leader Mahmoud Abbas may be about to learn is the same hard lesson his
predecessor Yasir Arafat absorbed during the second intifada. While it is
clearly in the interests of Abbas interests to keep a lid on the violence lest
he lose complete control of the situation, it’s a lot easier to start a holy
war than to stop one. Abbas sought to compete with his Hamas rivals by sounding
bellicose against Israel and seized on a perennial favorite of Palestinian
leaders: inciting hate and fear about Jerusalem. But having convinced ordinary
Palestinians that Israel intended to interfere with the Temple Mount mosques or
to desecrate them with their “filthy Jewish feet,” Abbas can’t be surprised
that many of them are undertaking personal terror attacks on Jews.
What
Abbas wanted was to bolster his image among ordinary Palestinians as a tough
opponent of the Jews. An ineffectual and corrupt leader of kleptocracy serving
the 10th year of the four-year term as president of the PA to which he was once
elected, Abbas has little credibility with Arabs or Jews left. Yet even now
that he sees the disaster that is unfolding that could threaten his rule, Abbas
can’t stop the incitement. He doubled down on it by speaking today of some of the terrorist assailants of Jews as innocent victims who were gunned down by
Israeli oppression. Nor has he stopped the talk about the danger to the
mosques.
But
while this new wave of terror has shocked Israelis and made ordinary life
difficult in areas with mixed populations such as Jerusalem, it is the
Palestinians who will be the big losers here just as they were during the
second intifada. The loss of life and the sense of fear inspired by these
horrifying incidents have shaken Israelis. But they know that if their nation
could survive the horror of the second intifada, which took the lives of over
1,000 Israelis and far more Palestinians, this episode won’t defeat their
country.
On the
other hand, the consequences of this mayhem for Palestinians will be terrible.
If, as happened during the last intifada, Israel is forced to close the borders
with the West Bank in order to stem the violence, it is the already shaky
Palestinian economy that will collapse, not Israel’s. As much as doomsayers
continue to tell Israelis that they can’t go on with the status quo, Israel has
gotten economically stronger in the last generation while the Palestinians,
mired in corruption and still refusing to make peace, lag far behind. War,
especially the kind of low-level terror that Palestinian society has embraced,
will do to them what the second intifada did, and erase years of economic
progress while also making cooperation with more prosperous Israel — the key to
any hope for their advancement — simply impossible.
Abbas
and many of his people may be counting on the usual dynamic of the conflict to
work to their advantage abroad and in international forums. The current strife
may deepen Israel’s diplomatic isolation. The more Palestinians embrace
terrorism, the more likely much of the world will be to condemn all Israeli
measures of self-defense. They will likely also buy into the false notion that
Palestinians are acting out of hopelessness rather than as part of a religious
holy war that is inextricably tied to their century-long struggle against
Zionism.
UN
resolutions, even those unfairly condemning Israeli self-defense, won’t change
the status quo on the Temple Mount that is defended by the Israeli government
that already discriminates against Jews. Yet more condemnations of Israel won’t
do a thing for the Palestinians. If we are to assume that Palestinians really
do want a two-state solution (and based on the PA’s consistent refusal to
accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn,
there is no reason to believe that they do) this new terror surge is exactly
the wrong way to go about it. Israelis already were worried that a withdrawal
from much of the West Bank (something that every Israeli government has offered
to do — including Netanyahu’s — in the last 15 years) would duplicate Ariel
Sharon’s disastrous experiment in the pullout from Gaza. But now that Abbas has
whipped up the kind of hate that has Palestinians seeking to slaughter Jews
they see on the street or on buses, further withdrawals seem utter madness.
By
embracing terror, Palestinians have deepened the divide with Israelis while
making even left-wingers less likely to trust them. Stern measures intended to
prevent more terror attacks will have widespread support from right to left.
Nor will many Israelis, even those most likely to want to believe in the idea
that Abbas is a man of peace, soon forget the way he stoked hatred and
needlessly caused so much loss of life. If
Palestinians want prosperity and peace, they need to drop the hate and start
learning to accept Israel as a fact of life that will continue even if they
attained statehood. But so long as their quest for sovereignty is bound up with
holy war, they’ll get neither. As with past unnecessary conflicts they started,
the Palestinians will be the ones who will suffer most from this one.
A
spokesman for the Obama administration Tuesday refused to identify Palestinians
as the perpetrators of a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks that have left
dozens of Israelis dead and wounded in the past weeks.
Associated
Press reporter Matt Lee pressed the State Department spokesman to explain why
the administration says it delivers the same message to both Israeli and
Palestinian leaders when only Palestinians are carrying out terrorist attacks.
“Does the United States believe–does the administration believe–that Israel is
inciting or not condemning violence?” Lee asked.
Spokesman
Mark Toner replied, “I think what we’ve been very clear about saying is that we
want to see both sides take affirmative steps.”
“So the
U.S. – the administration sees both sides at fault here, is that correct?” Lee
asked.
“Both
sides need to, as their leaders need to express the fact that both sides need
to decrease the tensions that are leading to ongoing incidence of violence. But
you know, you’re asking me to assign blame and I don’t think that’s the case,”
Toner said.
“Well,
I mean, if the secretary is calling up both Abbas and Netanyahu and has the
same message for both of them, it would suggest that you think that both of
them need to do more to that,” Lee said. “I’m just trying to figure out what is
it you would want the Israelis to do more in condemning the violence.”
“For
one thing, upholding–for one thing, as I said upholding the status quo in Haram
al-Sharif and Temple Mount,” Toner said.
“But
has there been suggestion that the status quo is going to be changed?” Lee
asked.
Toner
then changed the subject. There has been no change in the status quo on the
Temple Mount, nor any consideration given by the Israeli government to changing
the status quo there. Palestinian leaders have spread the unfounded claim that
Jews are threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, sparking
Palestinian rioting there.
Lee
then pressed from a different angle.
“Do you
think the Palestinian Authority, President Abbas, needs to do more to combat
incitement and condemn violence?” he asked.
Toner
replied, “I think that both leaders need to – need to convey that message.” Toner
later called the past month’s wave of unprovoked Palestinian terrorism “the
cycle of violence that’s currently taking place.”
Transcript: In an October 9 Friday sermon delivered at
the Al-Abrar Mosque in Rafah, the Gaza Strip, Sheikh Muhammad Sallah “Abu Rajab”
brandished a knife, calling upon his brothers in the West Bank: “Stab!” “Oh
young men of the West Bank: Attack in threes and fours,” he said, and “cut them
into body parts.”
Following are excerpts:
Muhammad Salah “Abu Rajab”:
Brothers, we must constantly remind the world, and everyone who has forgotten…
The world must hear, via these cameras and via the Internet: This is Gaza! This
is the place of trenches and guns! This is the West Bank! This is the place of
bombs and daggers! This is Jerusalem… Jerusalem is the code word… This is
Jerusalem… Much can be told about Jerusalem. This is where the soldiers of the
Prophet Muhammad are. This is the grace of Allah. The soldiers of the Prophet
Muhammad are here. Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the
Jews. We recall what He did to them in Khaybar.
[…]
Today,
we realize why the [Jews] build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles,
but to prevent the slitting of their throats.
[…]
“Abu Rajab” brandishes a dagger and makes
stabbing motions
My
brother in the West Bank: Stab! My brother is the West Bank: Stab the myths of
the Talmud in their minds! My brother in the West Bank: Stab the myths about
the temple in their hearts!
[…]
Today,
we have declared a curfew [in Israel]. Listen to what the Jews are saying to
one another: Stay at home, or go outside to your death. They have no
alternative. Oh men of the West Bank, the first phase of the operation requires
stabbing in order to bring about a curfew.
[…]
Now, we
are imposing a curfew with daggers, and in the next phase, which is Allah
willing, about to be realized… We shall not send you back to Russia, Bulgaria,
the Ukraine, or Poland. We shall not send you back there. You have come here…
The Islamic military court has ruled… This court, presided over by the Prophet’s
Companion Sa’d Ibn Mu’adh, has ruled… Sa’d Ibn Mu’adh has reappeared – in the
West Bank. Sa’d Ibn Mu’adh is now in the streets of Jerusalem, Afula, Tel Aviv,
and the Negev. The Islamic military court has made the divined ruling: You will
get nothing in our land except for slaughtering or stabbing. Why? The world
will say that we are terrorists, that we incite. Yes! “Oh Prophet, sufficient
for you and for whoever follows you of the believers is Allah. Oh Prophet of
Allah, incite the believers to fight” Why? Oh America, oh Crusader
aggressors, oh Arab Zionists, oh Zionists from among the criminal Jews: Are we
aggressors? You have come of your own volition to be slaughtered on our land.
[…]
“When
the promise of the Hereafter comes, We shall gather you from various nation.”
Allah has brought the Jews, His enemies and the enemies of humanity, who have
destroyed our homes in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and everywhere.
[…]
Oh
people of Al-Abrar Mosque and the people of Rafah – from this mosque of yours,
you have the honor of delivering these messages to the men of the West Bank:
Form stabbing quads. We don’t want just a single stabber. Oh young men of the
West Bank: Attack in threes and fours. Some should restrain the victim, while
others attack him with axes and butcher knives.
[…]
Do not
fear what will be said about you. Oh men of the West Bank, next time, attack in
a group of three, four, or five. Attack them in groups. Cut them into body
parts.
If
you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that
“violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed
As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed
radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be
shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”
Read
further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is
perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli
Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza
Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.
Such
was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began
when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children
in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two
Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a
2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and
killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the
chest and back.
Other
Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an
assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli
man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his
car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks
have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.
Regarding
the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have
resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the
peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just declared
the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray
atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has
barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary
“cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one
and the same time.
Left
out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to
say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa
Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.”
And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and
pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”
Then
there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall
today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or
Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop
missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”
Then,
brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”
Imagine
if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about
African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting
it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it
comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and
implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his
country has been stolen from him?
And
would this be supplemented by the usual fake math of moral opprobrium, which is
the stock-in-trade of reporters covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In
the Middle East version, a higher Palestinian death toll suggests greater
Israeli culpability. (Perhaps Israeli paramedics should stop treating stabbing
victims to help even the score.) In a U.S. version, should the higher incidence
of black-on-white crime be cited to “balance” stories about white supremacists?
Didn’t
think so.
Treatises
have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story
of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so
many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal
psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children,
soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral
fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please.
It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother
making for themselves.
Above
all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when
it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially
when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it
when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically
good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of
empathy.
Today
in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death,
one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to
serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.
Ali Abunimah on Twitter: .@majornewstweets
I don’t have any control, but killing of innocents, Jewish or Palestinian, is
always wrong. Zionism is the root cause.
