Mr. Qurei’s Israeli and American interlocutors remembered him as a trustworthy, creative, shrewd and often humorous negotiator.“Together we’ve tried to bring peace to our peoples in an understanding that it’s our responsibility to make a better future to our children,” Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli minister and peace negotiator, wrote on Twitter after Mr. Qurei’s death.Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy and the chief peace negotiator in the administrations of presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, recalled Mr. Qurei as “someone who was engaging and often brilliant as a negotiator.”“He knew how to acknowledge Israeli concerns about security to gain acceptance of Palestinian needs,” Mr. Ross wrote in an email.
There is no doubt that, compared to Palestinians in general, Qurei was a moderate. He spoke out against the second intifada's terror attacks (although not against the intifada altogether.)
Yet even his comparative moderation proves how immoral Palestinian leaders are.
If you read his words carefully, he - along with all other "moderate" Palestinian leaders - never objected to suicide bombings or blowing up pizza shops on moral grounds, even when he claimed he was.
This is from his quarterly report on his government's activity to the Palestinian Legislative Council on March 31, 2004:
We believe that the blood of [Hamas leader] Sheikh Yassin was not spilled in vain… The struggle against the crimes of the occupation was harmed because of the operations against Israeli civilians. These [operations] served as a pretext for the continuation of the [Israeli] aggression. We have condemned them [i.e., the operations], and we must oppose them morally. We stress again our opposition to these [operations] from this platform, because they harm the image of the [Palestinian] national struggle and create confusion and misunderstanding in the international community. These operations damage us economically and serve as a cover for the Israeli government to continue the settlements and the construction of the fence.
The opposition to operations [against Israeli civilians] comes not only because they contradict the road map option, but also because they contribute to the accumulated hatred, enmity, and lack of trust … and weaken the peace camp.
Even though he says "we must oppose them morally," in context even that means that they must oppose them for political and tactical reasons. Terrorism makes Palestinians look bad to the international community, it hurts their cause, it damages them economically, it weakens the Israeli peace camp. But he doesn't express the least bit of anger or horror at actually blowing up Israeli civilians.
And when it comes to his own Fatah faction slaughtering Israelis, he was an enthusiastic fan. Look how animated he is in this video, as he praises one of the comrades of Dalal Mughrabi and participant in her murder of 38 Israelis including 13 children, to great applause from the entire Fatah leadership at the 2009 Fatah Convention.
We have with us today the hero Khaled Abu Asba’, the hero from the [1978] operation of the martyr Dalal A-Mughrabi. We salute and welcome him, and [we say] to the martyred heroine Dalal: All glory to you, all glory to you. All our sisters here are the sister of Dalal.
Abu Alaa 'certainly had no moral qualms about that terror attack. He vigorously praised it.
This is the story that the Western media simply doesn't want the world to know. Just this past week we've witnessed this whitewashing of history in articles and obituaries about Jimmy Carter, James Abourezk and now Ahmed Qurei. (Not in the same league but equally antisemitic was the late Yossi Gurvitz.)
If they had said something explicitly racist, their obituaries would at least mention it; but when they have histories of antisemitism or support for terror against Jews - nothing.
For all the talk about how awful antisemitism is, the media sure works hard to sweep it under the rug when it comes from anyone who isn't politically on the Right.
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