Thursday, December 03, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
Vic Rosenthal's weekly column
The headline story in today’s Israel Hayom is about how the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorists tortured and mutilated their Israeli hostages.
I didn’t bother to read it. I don’t need further reinforcement about the degree to which the Palestinian movement is all about hate. Mahmoud Abbas, who organized the financing for the Munich attack, and Yasser Arafat, who approved it, went on after Oslo to create a hate-education apparatus probably matched only by Pol Pot’s indoctrination of child soldiers. While Israel changed its school curricula to “educate for peace,” de-emphasizing Zionism and emphasizing the new ‘reality’ of coexistence brought about by Oslo, the Palestinian Authority went full speed in the opposite direction, teaching their students that ‘Palestine’ would be redeemed from the Jewish usurpers by their blood.
In the 22 years since Oslo, the PA/PLO hasn’t backed off one iota in its campaign to make its children candidates for martyrdom, despite agreeing to stop numerous times. That’s why today Arab teenagers in Jerusalem go looking for Jews to stab as an after-school activity.
The diverse Arabs that have called themselves ‘Palestinians’ since the 1960s talk a lot about their cultural traditions. But what are they, in addition to the Arab culture they brought to the land from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Yemen, and other places, mostly after the beginning of Zionism? The unique Palestinian part of their culture is the mythic presumption of victimhood at the hands of the Jews, their burning hatred of us, and their intention to get revenge. Their heroes are terrorists, and the most important qualification for a Palestinian politician is how strongly he opposes Israel (and how many Jews he has personally murdered). Their founding fathers were pogromist and Nazi supporter Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Yasser Arafat, a man responsible for several wars and countless acts of terrorism.
The rest of the world has consistently made wrong decisions in its relationship with them, and as a result massively increased the number of Palestinians, fed their grievances and encouraged them to continue their conflict. And it paid the price. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Palestinian terrorism was international in scope; the PLO was not the first group to hijack airplanes for political purposes, but it popularized this form of terrorism, as well as attacking airports and even cruise ships. In 1968, a Palestinian terrorist named Sirhan Sirhan even assassinated American presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
Literally billions of dollars every year are pumped from the pockets of Western taxpayers into the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA and EU initiatives, out of alleged humanitarian concern. Most of this money pays the salaries of thousands of policemen, teachers, bureaucrats, and soldiers whose primary function is to support the Palestinian movement to destroy Israel and only secondarily to provide services to the Arab refugees and the populations of the territories. Much of it is siphoned off to support the various terrorist militias and the lavish lifestyles of the leadership.
Palestinians are the only group of people in the world for whom refugee status is hereditary. By providing per-capita welfare payments to them, UNRWA insures that the dependent, disaffected, frustrated, angry and often murderous population will continue to grow over the years. As a result, the number of Arabs with refugee status has increased from about 700,000 in 1948 to about 5,000,000 today. The total number of ‘Palestinians’ in Israel, the refugee camps and the rest of the world is claimed to be more than 12 million! Meanwhile, the millions of non-Palestinian refugees from WWII were resettled within about 10 years, as were the 850,000 Jews forced out of Arab countries after 1948.
The UNRWA educational system is no better – probably worse – than that provided by the Palestinian Authority. This isn’t surprising, because many of its employees are members of Hamas.
This is a sick society, a very sick society, which openly worships death and sends its children out to die in the service of its hatred. And yet, the West has coddled it, supported it, fed it and helped it grow – and then come back time and again to pressure Israel, the target of Palestinian hate, to give up land, to release murderers that it has imprisoned to protect itself, and to pretend that Palestinians are a normal people, not a hate-filled fanatical cult whose reason for being is to kill the Jewish state.
The Palestinians have found an effective strategy to attract left-wing support, which is to claim that Israel is guilty of every social ill that is opposed by progressive people anywhere. So they claim absurdly that Israel is a racist and apartheid state, that it oppresses women and children, and that it is an environmental polluter. Recently, Mahmoud Abbas told the climate summit in Paris that Israel was “destroying the Palestinian environment.”
Palestinians often falsely accuse Israel of precisely the crimes that they themselves commit. The world ignores the facts that the PLO’s and Hamas’ essence is anti-Jewish racism, that they wish to establish a Jew-free state, that Palestinian Arabs are often guilty of honor killings and sexual violence against women and children, and that the Palestinians massively pollute their environment (funds given to them to mitigate environmental problems have been stolen by corrupt officials or used for military purposes).
One of their favorite accusations is that the IDF deliberately targets Arab children. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but what is true is that there have been numerous Palestinian terrorist attacks aimed at Israeli children, schools, nurseries, school buses, outings, and young peoples’ clubs. For a Palestinian, a Jew is a Jew and a child is a soft target.
Palestinians inject their Israel-hatred everywhere. Palestinians have even assimilated the grievances of the Ferguson, MO protests to their movement, claiming that both are “fighting a common system of injustice, control and racism.” Regardless of the absurdity of their claims, Western academics, religious leaders, trade unions, and other organizations eat them up and pass resolutions to boycott or divest from the Jewish state.
Why does the most of the world consistently take their side? There are multiple reasons, including some brilliant PR decisions – to appropriate the anti-colonialist mantle from the Jews, to claim to be an oppressed indigenous people seeking national liberation, to turn the racism/apartheid label around and apply it to the Jews – and some practical tactics, like intimidating the West with terrorism. And of course there is always the advantage that they have the right enemy, the Jew among nations.
But in any event, it is stupid for the West to continue feeding this monster. And it is even stupider for Israel to do so.
I would like to see Israel publicly denounce the fake Palestinian historical narrative, and refute their claims to be the original indigenous people of this land. I would like Israel to officially end the farce of the Oslo ‘peace process’, shut down the Palestinian Authority, outlaw the PLO, throw its leaders out of the country and dismantle the indoctrination system established by Yasser Arafat. I would like to see Israel assert its historical, moral and legal rights of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
Now everyone will come up with reasons why this is impossible. How can we rule over these Arabs? Do we give them citizenship? Do we administer a loyalty oath and kick out the ones who don’t sign it? Where to? Nobody wants to do reserve duty in the territories. And on and on and on.
I don’t have the answers. But this is what we need to do. We can’t cooperate with the monstrous culture of cruelty whose reason for being is to destroy our state. We can’t let them keep getting stronger while we pretend that some day we will be able to live at peace with them.
Nothing has changed since 1972 except now they have produced a generation of children who can stick a knife in a Jew as easily as kicking a football.
It won’t get better. The lesson we should have learned since 1972 is that ultimately it’s going to be them or us. Let it be us.
