As reported in the last HonestReporting communique (https://honestreporting.com/skewing-the-death-tolls/), 185 “suspected collaborators” have also been killed in the latest round of Palestinian bloodletting — either executed following make-shift “trials” conducted by the unaccountable courts of the Palestinian Authority, or murdered in a vigilante prison raid, or simply slaughtered in the street and hung from their heels in the city square.
Below we attach two articles giving very different views about “collaborators.”
Writing in The American Prowler magazine (“The Middle East War Nobody Knows”), Lawrence Henry points out that these so-called “collaborators” are helping the democratic forces of Israel in their fight to prevent terrorist acts against Jewish civilians. Countless massacres are prevented by advance tips given to Israeli intelligence.
Henry suggests that history will remember these Palestinians not as “collaborators,” but as brave souls who tried to stop their own people’s slaughter of Jews — much in the way that “good Germans” during World War Two tried to save Jews from their fellow countrymen.
Henry writes: “Heroes are dying here, heroes who have braved the insanity gripping their people to fight for real freedom — freedom from the thuggish tyranny of the terrorist gangs, freedom from ignorance and hatred… Perhaps some historian of the future will tell the story of these heroes. Except in passing, no reporter today is doing it.”
The full article is online at:
http://www.theamericanprowler.org/article.asp?art_id=2002_7_15_23_3_11
Meanwhile, a very different account of “collaborators” is given by Catherine Taylor of the Christian Science Monitor: “How Israel Builds Its Fifth Column: Palestinian Collaborators Face Mob Justice, and Fuel a Culture of Suspicion.” She suggests that the “collaborators” don’t act because they actually want to save innocent lives (whether Israeli or Palestinian), but solely because they are motivated by fear or greed. She suggests that Israel is so conniving and all-powerful that it even takes photographs “of female relatives [of “collaborators”] undressing in fashion store changing rooms” and then threatens that “the images would be circulated unless they agreed to collaborate.”
However, the Christian Science Monitor does apportion blame to the PA: “Many suspected collaborators are simply gunned down in the street by vigilante groups. The PA turns a blind eye. The label is sometimes used as an excuse for extra-judicial killing designed to settle old scores… The tactics contravene agreements signed by the PA. Oslo II, for example, states, ‘Palestinians who have maintained contact with the Israeli authorities will not be subjected to acts of harassment, violence, retribution, or prosecution.'”
The full article is printed below, or online at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0522/p01s04-wome.html
Comments to:
[email protected]
HonestReporting members are urged to write to your local media (and also the Christian Science Monitor) asking them to run a report focusing on genuine resistance against the undemocratic forces of the PA, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah and PFLP — by ordinary Palestinians who want to live in co-existence with Israel.
Thanks to Tom Gross for this important communique.
