After the recent horrific terrorist attack that left five members of an Israeli family dead, it is high time to shed light on the pervasive atmosphere of incitement and glorification of terrorism that infects every level of Palestinian society. This is a story that the Western media usually ignore or report on sporadically at best.
But it is an important story. When children grow up in schools named for terrorists and play soccer in tournaments named after terrorists, what else besides admiration can they feel for these figures? When one examines the messages that Palestinian children receive — often given with the full blessing of the Palestinian Authority — brutal terrorist attacks are hardly surprising. As the Jerusalem Post reports:
As Israel on Sunday was mourning the slaughter of the five members of the Fogel family in Itamar, members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction named a town square after Dalal al-Mughrabi, the leader of the 1978 bus hijacking in which 37 Israelis were killed and 71 were wounded.
“We stand here in praise of our martyrs and in loyalty to all of the martyrs of the national movement,” Fatah member and Abbas adviser Sabri Seidam said at the unveiling of a plaque showing Mughrabi cradling a rifle against a backdrop map of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The square was festooned with Palestinian flags.
But there are more examples showing an even clearer encouragement of terrorism. Consider this example from the Prime Minister’s Office:
On March 9, 2011, Abu Mazen’s advisor Sabri Saidam, delivered a speech in which he emphasized that Palestinian weapons must be turned towards Israel.
In other words, a top official in the PA urged Palestinians to turn their weapons against Israel and several days later that’s exactly what they did.
It is simply shocking that such an important story has been ignored by the likes of the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and many, many others. While all these news outlets reported on various condemnations of the attack by PA President Abbas, none of them reported that one of his top advisers had only days before encouraged such attacks.
This story is now out on the Internet and the more attention we can draw to it, the harder it will be for the media to continue pretending that PA incitement does not cause terrorism.
