For foreign journalists in the Holy Land, the festive season usually arrives with a missive: an email invitation to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s annual Christmas dinner.Just to ensure that everyone knows that Saeb Erekat's record of lies remains at 100%, the current stabbing spree is completely religiously motivated - the youthful stabbers all say they are "defending Al Aqsa" from Jewish visitors. It is the Palestinians who are turning this into a religious war.
The event is an opportunity for Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the PLO, to spread Christmas cheer, toast the New Year, and make predictions about 2016 over plates of maqluba, a Palestinian chicken-and-rice dish.
Erekat said he had nothing against Jews, calling Judaism “one of God’s great religions,” but he warned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau was quickly turning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a religious war.
Then he brought up another group of religious warriors: the Islamic State. Erekat’s proposal for beating the group was simple: “The first thing we need to do to defeat ISIS is to end this occupation.”
“Two-thousand sixteen will mark how this region will go for the next part of the 84 years remaining in this century,” he said in conclusion. “Do we enter in the vehicles of democracy and peace or do we enter it in the vehicles of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” — the head of the Islamic State — “and Benjamin Netanyahu?”
As far as a comparison of which people support ISIS more, in a recent Pew poll, 94% of Israelis had a "very unfavorable" view of ISIS, while only 69% of Palestinians felt that way. All of the Israelis who had a favorable view of ISIS were Arabs.
And it is funny that Erekat is calling Israel undemocratic, since he has not been elected to his current position and his boss is entering the 11th year of his four year term leading a government that lost its last election.
