Monday, October 23, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
The Washington Post markets its “World Views” column
as “smart analysis of the most important news,” and when you hover over
“Analysis,” a pop-up tells you it means “Interpretation of the news based on
evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based
on past events.” But Ishaan Tharoor’s recent
column about “Palestinian Gandhi” Issa Amro is just lazy journalism promoting
the kind of Palestinian propaganda that can be read on countless websites for
free: like other journalists before him, Tharoor made do with telling his
readers what Amro told him – all backed up by what supporters of Amro would
say…
So I decided to do the research Tharoor couldn’t be bothered
to do, and you can check out the resulting documentation
at Legal Insurrection. It is, admittedly, a longish post, but the title
gives it all away: “Issa Amro is no ‘Palestinian Gandhi.’”
As the documentation shows, Amro has longstanding and close
relations with several notorious professional anti-Israel activists who earn
their living by promoting the 21st century version of the Nazi slogan “The Jews
are our misfortune” – which is: “The Jewish state is our misfortune.” Moreover,
Amro has apparently never condemned Palestinian terrorism, and he enjoys the
full support of activists who are not only outspoken apologists for Hamas, but who
have repeatedly voiced support for the terror group. Amro himself has issued
repeated predictions and calls for another intifada. Particularly noteworthy is
the timing of his call for an intifada in May 2014, just four weeks before the
abduction and murder of three teenaged Israeli students by Hamas terrorists from
Amro’s hometown Hebron. Back then, Amro boasted about having a ‘secret plan’
for a “smart intifada.” Then there is his reported defense of a member of
Hebron’s Qawasmi clan – which is prominently associated with Hamas and includes
two of the perpetrators of the 2014 kidnapping and murder case. In addition, there
is quite a bit of evidence indicating that Amro’s group Youth Against Settlements
(YAS) is supportive of terrorism and is eager to incite Muslim religious
passions that are often an important motivation for Palestinian terrorists.
I think it’s unlikely that the Washington Post’s “Foreign
Affairs Writer” Ishaan Tharoor would be surprised by any of this. Given the
focus of his writings, he is presumably aware of the fact that so-called
“pro-Palestinian” activism is more correctly described as anti-Israel activism,
because the goal of most groups and campaigns is the replacement of the world’s
only Jewish state with yet another Arab-Muslim majority state.
This makes the title of Tharoor’s piece so devious: he
pretends to explain “Why a leading Palestinian activist isn’t fixated on a
Palestinian state” – but could he name any Palestinian or “pro-Palestinian”
activist who is “fixated” on a Palestinian state that would peacefully coexist
with a Jewish state of Israel? Indeed, it seems Tharoor didn’t even bother to
ask Amro directly if he would support a negotiated two-state solution – or
maybe he did, and Amro’s emphatic “no” is reflected in Tharoor’s opening
paragraph, where he sneers at the failure of Washington’s “diplomats, politicos
and wonks” to realize that “on
the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories, the two-state solution is a
mirage.” [Bold original]
And of course,
it’s all the fault of the “right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu” and “Israeli settlers” who “continue to expand across the
West Bank.” Since Tharoor’s “analysis” is supposedly “based on evidence,
including data,” he surely knows that this relentless expansion “across the
West Bank” over five decades has resulted in settlements that take up about 2%
(according to data) to 4% (estimate) of West-Bank territory.
Then there’s this
astonishing passage – with the first sentence bolded in the original:
“The repeated refrain from Netanyahu and other Israeli officials is that
the main obstacle to peace is Palestinian violence. But that argument falls short with
people like Amro, whose tactics include sit-ins and the monitoring of settlers
and Israeli security forces with video cameras. ‘They see us as the main
enemy,’ he told me. ‘They don’t know how to deal with nonviolence.’
‘It is particularly people like him that Israel is most uncomfortable with,
more than the militant carrying the weapon,’ said Yousef Munayyer, executive
director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. ‘People often ask, 'Where
is the Palestinian Gandhi?' You’ll often find many of them either in Israeli
prisons or shot or killed or otherwise oppressed from engaging in activism.’”
Right, of course:
the Palestinians are really a people of Gandhis, all imprisoned or shot or
killed for no reason whatsoever by a monstrously vicious Israel – “evidence, including data,” about Hamas and
longstanding broad popular support for terrorism among Palestinians be damned.
So let’s conclude
by looking at how Tharoor ends his piece:
“’It’s not about two states. It’s not about peace,’ Amro said, referring to
the aims of Netanyahu and his allies. ‘They believe that it’s all for them.’”
Well, here’s a
clue about what Amro believes: in a recently posted tweet, Amro’s group YAS claimed that “40,000
Israeli settlers storm into Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.” They repeated the same
claim a day later, linking in both tweets to an article
on the Islamist website MEMO, which often serves as
a mouthpiece for Hamas.
The article features a photo of a religious Jew accompanied
by a few children – which is presumably meant to illustrate how the “40,000
Israeli settlers” storming the “Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron” looked. Why
religious Jews with children would want to “storm” any mosque is probably not a
question that bothers the audience cheering Amro and YAS; but Amro and his
group know of course that long before there was an “Ibrahimi Mosque,” the site
was revered by Jews as the Cave
of Machpelah (Tomb of the Patriarchs), and it is considered Judaism’s
second holiest site after the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet, most of the site
is controlled by a Muslim body (waqf), while Jewish access to the site is
severely restricted.
As is to be expected, the MEMO article Amro’s group
links to is trying very hard to present the Jews visiting the site to mark the
Jewish holiday of Sukkot as desecrating a holy place that rightfully belongs
only to Muslims. According to MEMO, “The Director and Head of the
Ibrahimi Mosque, Sheikh Hafthi Abu Esnaina, condemned the incursions. He
stressed that Israel is encouraging the Judaisation of Palestinian religious
sites. ‘The Ibrahimi Mosque will always be a holy site for Muslims only,’ he
insisted.”
Sounds an awful
lot like “They believe that it’s all for them.”
