On Sunday, the official spokesman for the Palestinian president, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, claimed "the extremist Israeli government" is "fully responsible for the dangerous escalation against the Palestinian people, their land and sanctities."
He gave two examples.
One was "the burning of the house of citizen Ahmed Maher from the town of Sinjel in Ramallah by extremist settlers," and the other was "the Israeli occupation forces stormed the Al-Qibli prayer hall in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and assaulted those who were in i'tikaaf (staying in the mosque all day and night, usually done in the last days of Ramadan.)
Both of them are lies.
The baseless, evidence-free accusation was enough for Arab media to repeat the lie as truth and for a government recognized by most of the world to make this baseless claim publicly.
The other incident has a grain of truth - Israeli forces did remove, without violence or incident, a number of Muslims who were staying in the Al Aqsa Mosque over night Saturday night. But what the anti-Israel media isn't reporting is that the people were breaking a long-negotiated deal between Israel and the Waqf:
According to police, the stay of Palestinians overnight in the mosque went against agreements made with the Waqf, adding that mosques outside the Temple Mount had been prepared for those wanting to stay overnight. Police attempted to get those barricaded inside to leave on their own accord, but most refused to leave.Police stated that they removed the Palestinians as some of them were planning to conduct riots on Sunday morning during the dawn (Fajr) prayers and during visits by Jewish visitors.
Arabic language media confirms that Palestinian religious leaders called publicly for all Palestinians to perform i'tikaaf at Al Aqsa, specifically to confront and stop Jews from visiting the Temple Mount through the entire month of Ramadan.
Since 1967, there has only been one time that Palestinians attempted to spend the entire Ramadan in Al Aqsa - that was in 2015, and then the reason again had nothing to do with religious devotion but to attempt to stop Jews from ascending to Judaism's holiest site.
This attempt to have i'tikaaf for all of Ramadan is a violation of the status quo, which Jordan and the Palestinians pledged to keep during Ramadan this year in the joint communique issued at the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.
We also know there was a deal between Israel and the Waqf not to allow the i'tikaaf in Al Aqsa because there was no objection by the Jordanian government, which controls the Waqf, when Israeli forces removed the worshippers. Normally, the Jordanians are in the forefront of accusing Israel of violating Al Aqsa's sanctity, but here the police walked inside the mosque itself and removed people without a word from Jordan.
Even though Jordan knows about the deal to not allow i'tikaaf, it didn't say this publicly. Jordan wants to be known as the defender of Al Aqsa and admitting that they made this deal to tamp down violence would make them look weak to Palestinian and Jordanian Islamists. What this means, in effect, is that the most violent and extremist Muslims set the agenda and the Palestinian and Jordanian "moderates" follow the lead of the crazies to stay in power.
Here is yet more evidence that the Palestinian Authority, including Mahmoud Abbas' own office, regularly lies in their own press releases and statements, multiple times in a single day.
The Palestinian leaders have no disincentive to lie, because the world media doesn't call them on it. At best, the media might do a "he said, she said" version of events, and not bother to spend the slightest amount of time refuting the lying side.
These lies turn into incitement, the incitement turns into violence, and the violence turns into deaths. If the media would do its job, the Palestinians would be shamed to stop their lies and lives would be saved.
However, deep down, the reporters think that showing that the Palestinians are lying would be somehow "Islamophobic" or a demeaning of their culture. And they are complicit in the resulting violence.
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