Ongoing incitement

Such remarks reflect Abbas’s true attitude toward a peace settlement with Israel. It is the latest escalation of the incitement of terrorism that has become a trademark of his rule, now in the eleventh year of a four-year term.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
Abbas addresses European Parliament (photo credit: screenshot)
Abbas addresses European Parliament
(photo credit: screenshot)
The standing ovation European parliamentarians last week accorded Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s shameless blood libel against Israel was startling, but not unexpected. The Palestinian leader’s technique of making vile anti-Semitic slurs about the Jewish state, then cynically and insincerely retracting them after they have done their damage, is well known.
Such remarks reflect Abbas’s true attitude toward a peace settlement with Israel. It is the latest escalation of the incitement of terrorism that has become a trademark of his rule, now in the eleventh year of a four-year term.
One of the obligations the Palestinian Authority has consistently failed to meet under the Oslo Accords is to eliminate the anti-Israel incitement it has cultivated throughout its official institutions and civil society.
When Abbas glorifies terrorists who murder innocent Israelis by referring to them as “holy martyrs” and naming streets and public institutions after them, it is no wonder that Palestinian culture reflect this – and that so many young Palestinians are incited to commit acts of terrorism.
Palestinian opinion surveys have revealed broad support for terrorist attacks coexistent with negative perceptions of Jews. A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that more than half of Palestinians support a new violent uprising against Israel and that the Hamas terrorist group would win a presidential election if it were held today.
Dan Polisar, the provost of Shalem College, wrote recently in Mosaic that these polls reveal the extent to which “Palestinian perpetrators of violence reflect and are acting on the basis of views widely held in their society.”
Such incitement is the context of the dozens of stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks that have killed 34 Israelis and two foreigners since September 2015. Some of the worst examples, as compiled by TheTower.org: • The PA’s UN representative accused Israel of harvesting Palestinian organs. Envoy Riyad Mansour wrote that Palestinians shot by Israeli security forces “were returned with missing corneas and other organs, further confirming past reports about organ harvesting by the occupying power.”
• The PA condemned Israel for shooting two terrorists who carried out stabbing attacks in Jerusalem. It failed to mention that Fadi Aloon and Muhannad Halabi were killed by security forces after Aloon stabbed to death an Israeli teenager and that Halabi was shot while murdering Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Banita, and wounding Banita’s wife and their two-year-old baby.
• The Palestinian village of Surda-Abu Qash in the West Bank named a street after him, the mayor declaring him “a pride and badge of honor for the whole village.” The PA Bar Association awarded him a law degree posthumously.
• Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Football Association, called a shooting attack in Beersheba that killed two and wounded 11 an “act of heroism.” He told Palestinian media on October 19 that he was proud of Palestinian stabbing attacks: “I am proud of them and congratulate all those who carried them out.”
• Mahmoud al-Habbash, an adviser to Abbas and a Supreme Shari’a Court Judge, called Israel “Satan’s project” on PA television on October 23: “This is a conflict between two entities, good and evil, between two projects: Allah’s project vs Satan’s project, a project connected to Allah, which is his will – true and good – and a project connected to oppression and Satanism, to Satanism and animosity, occupation and barbarism.”
• According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and The New York Times, popular Palestinian social media hashtags include “Poison the Knife before You Stab” and “Slaughtering the Jews,” as well as violent images and how-to guides to commit terrorist attacks.
Violent songs, including “Stab, Stab” and “Run Over, Run Over the Settler,” have become West Bank sensations. In October, the Times reported one of the most popular tracks was “Stab the Zionist and say God is great.”
• Abbas referred to all of Israel as “occupied Palestinian territory” before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on October 28, citing “holy sites which have been desecrated every other second again and again for seven decades now, under an occupation that does not quit killing, torturing, looting and imprisoning.”
By “seven decades” Abbas was referring, of course, to the birth of Israel in 1948, not June 1967 – when the Arab world rejected the original two-state solution.