[{"news":false,"author":[{"name":{"he":"","en":"p. david hornik"},"citeName":{"he":"","en":"Hornik, P. D."},"about":"","id":104}],"published":true,"title":"Condemnation of Palestinian Authority Mufti's hate speech by Americans for Peace Now was \"disingenuous\"","id":3495,"description":"\"Last week Palestinian Media Watch revealed that the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, top cleric of the Palestinian Authority, had approvingly quoted a hadith calling for the genocide of Jews... That Americans for Peace Now could not bring itself simply to condemn a call for genocide of Jews and leave it at...\"","authorId":[104],"lang":"en","tagIds":["190","193","1035","1036","1039","1045","1242"],"contentType":"Article","imageUrl":"","tags":[],"indexId":"index15","content":"

‘Peace Now’ Faults Israel
\nfor Palestinians’ Genocidal Urges

\nP. David Hornik Bio

\n
\nLast week Palestinian Media Watch revealed that the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, top cleric of the Palestinian Authority, had approvingly quoted a hadith calling for the genocide of Jews. Hussein, who was appointed to his post by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, did so at a ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the Fatah movement. The moderator at the ceremony chimed in that “Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs [i.e., Jews] is a war of religion and faith.” As for Mufti Hussein, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s attorney-general to investigate him for incitement.
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\nPalestinian Media Watch now reports that the mufti’s words have drawn international condemnation. This, actually, doesn’t amount to much—far less than, for instance, the typical round of condemnations when Israel announces plans to build homes in parts of Jerusalem that the enlightened world thinks should be Judenrein.
\n
\nAlistair Burt, the UK minister for the Middle East, said: “I condemn the inflammatory words used by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others…. To refer to the Jewish people in such a way and to talk of killing Jews is anti-semitism, pure and simple.” More surprisingly—seemingly—Palestinian Media Watch also offers a quote from Americans for Peace Now. This organization, founded in 1981 to drum up support for its Israeli parent-organization, Peace Now, states that it
\n

\nstrongly condemns the belligerent anti-Jewish comments made by the Palestinian Authority’s Mufti of Jerusalem at a public event in the West Bank earlier this month…. "We are appalled by these comments, coming from the most senior Muslim cleric on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll," said Debra DeLee, APN’s President and CEO. DeLee added, "What we find particularly disturbing is that these vile comments were broadcast on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel, amplifying their inciting [e]ffect."
\n

\nI was surprised by those seemingly unequivocal words, and checked the original statement on APN’s website.
\n
\nIndeed, the context reveals that they weren’t unequivocal at all. Immediately after her above-quoted words, DeLee said further:
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\n

People in positions of religious authority, on all sides, bear a heavy responsibility of avoiding incendiary rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute between two national movements with conflicting claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Clerics on both sides must prevent this conflict from being perceived as a religious conflict and from becoming one.
\nDeLee, then, quickly turned her censure of the mufti’s words into an admonition to “both sides.” The problem is that, presumably, neither she nor the organization she represents could be so ignorant as not to realize that this is disingenuous.

\n
\nIncendiary statements about Palestinians by Israeli rabbis are rare, confined to a fringe, and heavily denounced by the mainstream—if not leading to arrest, as in a case last year involving a rabbi who wrote a preface to an obscure book arguing that non-Jews could be killed in certain situations in wartime. Mufti Muhammad Hussein is, as mentioned, the governmentally appointed religious leader of the Palestinian Authority, and made his statement on official PA TV. Still more significant is that his words were hardly a fringe phenomenon but, instead, a standard and typical part of the PA’s comprehensive campaign, through media, mosques, and schools, of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement.
\n
\nThat Americans for Peace Now could not bring itself simply to condemn a call for genocide of Jews and leave it at that, is actually what one would expect.
\n
\nThe parent-organization, Israel’s Peace Now, was established in the spring of 1978 about nine months after Israel had, for the first time in its history, elected a right-of-center government. As Kenneth Levin noted in an article exposing Peace Now’s intellectual and moral corruption, the group launched its political life by criticizing Prime Minister Menachem Begin for purportedly “not moving fast enough or being forthcoming enough” in his negotiations with Egypt. Since then Peace Now has always held the Israeli side responsible whenever its panacea of “peace” receded in bloodshed.
\n
\nAs Levin observes, it was “under the banner of Peace Now” that Israel embarked on the disastrous Oslo process in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, with the corpses from terror attacks already piling up, the group kept loudly demanding “peace now” in rallies attended by tens of thousands in Tel Aviv. And it kept demanding “peace now”—of Israel—even in the next decade when the terror attacks of what was called the Second Intifada reached even more horrific proportions.
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\nThe difference, though, was that by then Peace Now could no longer organize mass rallies and was rapidly shrinking in membership. Today, with the bulk of the Israeli population sobered by two decades of suicide bombings and rocket attacks, Peace Now is reduced mainly to harassing Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria. It petitions the left-leaning (until recently) Supreme Court to declare some of their communities illegal, and releases annual reports on Israeli construction in those areas that relate to it as a criminal enterprise.
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\nPart of the corruption of Peace Now is its making of “peace” into an ideology. Peace can be a conclusion; that is, one could legitimately maintain at a particular time that one of Israel’s neighbors (or at least its leadership) was ready to lay down the hatchet. (Even then, experience has shown—with Egypt a dramatic recent case—that such situations are temporary.)
\n
\nBut according to the Peace Now ideology, peace is always, prima facie, available; Peace Now said so in 1978, it says so today, and it will say so ten or twenty years from now no matter what the mere reality on the ground. Given the premise, then, the only logical inference is that the failure to pluck this shining apple of peace is Israel’s, and always Israel’s.
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\nHence Peace Now, and its U.S. affiliate, is not capable of reacting appropriately to an outrage like Mufti Muhammad Hussein’s officially televised call to genocide. No sooner had President and CEO DeLee seemingly done so than she turned it into an opportunity to sternly warn “both sides,” the jihadist Palestinian Authority and democratic Israel. It’s yet another shameful display by a deplorable organization.","date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1327622400,"nanoseconds":0},"thumbnail":""},{"author":[{"name":{"he":"","en":"p. david hornik"},"id":104,"about":"","citeName":{"en":"Hornik, P. D.","he":""}}],"published":true,"tags":[],"title":"Divided Jerusalem?","description":"\"Palestinian Media Watch has done the critically important work of informing the world that this year, to mark 9/11, the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published cartoons celebrating the attack—and just this Tuesday the same PA newspaper published and illustrated a prayer calling for the...\"","date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1192147200,"nanoseconds":0},"lang":"en","id":852,"tagIds":["190","193","1035","1036","1039","1045","1242"],"news":false,"authorId":[104],"contentType":"Article","imageUrl":"","content":"Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus in the West Bank, a Jewish holy site where some believe the biblical Joseph is buried, was in the news early in the Second Intifada when a Palestinian mob ransacked it after an Israeli troop withdrawal. These days Joseph’s Tomb is doing even worse, having been turned by the Nablus Palestinians into a garbage dump.
\nSuch treatment should not surprise anyone who knows the fate of the Old City of Jerusalem while it was under Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967: Israelis were denied access to the Western Wall and the Mount of Olives, gravestones on the Mount of Olives were used to make latrines in Jordanian army camps, and 58 Jerusalem synagogues were ruined or destroyed.
\nLike the present nominal Fatah leadership of the West Bank, the Jordanian regime in those years was not considered Islamist or fundamentalist: it simply followed a basic Muslim-supremacist agenda that often transcends facile Western distinctions between religious and “secular” Muslims.
\nYet Jerusalem, united under Israeli rule since 1967 with free access for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to all their holy sites (except the Waqf-dominated Temple Mount itself, where access for Christians and Jews is limited), is now again on the chopping block as part of the latest peace push leading up to the Annapolis conference in November.
\nThe Palestinians, as always, say Palestinian rule over East Jerusalem is a bedrock demand and that it has to include the Temple Mount—unarguably the holiest site in Judaism while enjoying a questionable status as the “third holiest site” in Islam. Do not look to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or her boss President George W. Bush to say in reply:
\n“Muslims have full control over Mecca, Medina, and many other Islamic shrines, sites, and cities from Morocco to Indonesia. We hardly see it as unacceptable that Muslims should continue to live and worship freely in East Jerusalem under benign, democratic, pluralist Israeli rule.”
\nInstead Olmert and his deputy prime minister Haim Ramon are reportedly conferring with PA president Mahmoud Abbas on plans to cede the heart of Jerusalem to Islamic rule—just as then prime minister Ehud Barak offered then PA president Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000 as part of a “peace” package that Arafat refused by igniting the murderous Second Intifada instead.
\nThe current Israeli-U.S., Western persistence in pursuing the same blind path amazes on many counts:
\n* It ignores the sequence of events beginning with Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in August 2005. Opponents argued that the retreat would strengthen Islamism among the Palestinians, enable massive weapons transfers into Gaza, and subject southern Israel to intensified rocket barrages. It all came to pass: in January 2006 the Palestinians elected Hamas to leadership; weapons and explosives keep streaming into Gaza in unprecedented quantities; just last Sunday, in a new escalation, a Soviet-made Grad-type Katyusha rocket hit the Israeli town of Netivot 11 kilometers from Gaza.
\nThe conventional wisdom was that Olmert, who in the early aftermath of the disengagement campaigned on his “convergence” plan for further territorial withdrawals, had dropped “convergence” under the impact both of the post-disengagement Gaza debacle and the war with Hezbollah in summer 2006, which also resulted from an Israeli retreat under fire.
\nNow, though, Olmert, under a big push from Bush and Rice, has again put everything up for grabs—Jerusalem, the entire or nearly-entire West Bank. As if none of the above had happened, as if the Palestinians since August 2005 had been peacefully developing Gaza and showing their appreciation to Israel.
\n* Even now, the allegedly moderate Abbas is a figurehead who does not even rule the West Bank. As DEBKAfile reports, his
\n“West Bank rule is confined to parts of Ramallah; not just in Gaza which fell to Hamas in June, but on the West Bank too, neither he nor [Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad ever sets foot in the main towns. They are controlled by a coalition of Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades, Hamas, Jihad Islami and the radical 'Fronts,’ which are united by their dedication to his overthrow and war on Israel.”
\nIndeed, the Israeli press offers almost daily accounts of gun battles between Israeli forces and Fatah and other terrorists on the West Bank. In the latest incident, early on Wednesday morning IDF forces killed a Fatah al-Aqsa terrorist and wounded another in Nablus. The injured gunman, Sudian Kandeel, was one of 200 Fatah operatives recently granted amnesty by Israel—per Abbas's request—as part of the “peace” machinations.
\n* The Palestinian Authority—still nominally under Abbas’s rule, still pre-Annapolis, pre-“peace” solemnities—remains a source of hate propaganda including anti-American hate propaganda. Palestinian Media Watch has done the critically important work of informing the world that this year, to mark 9/11, the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published cartoons celebrating the attack—and just this Tuesday the same PA newspaper published and illustrated a prayer calling for the killing of Americans.
\nAmerica, Israel, and the world: should you pay attention to this, or ignore it?
\nSince it is inconceivable that Bush, Rice, and the State Department have no knowledge of the above facts—the deteriorations in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon after Israeli withdrawals; Abbas’s lack of power in any case; virulent PA jihadism and hate propaganda—American motives in pushing this “peace” are suspect and may boil down to bald appeasement of Saudi and other Arab power without regard for Israel’s fate.
\nOlmert’s “motives” probably combine submission to U.S. dictates and remaining temptations of the Israeli “peace” ideology that took hold in the early 1990s with such dire consequences. Apart from the Left-dovish Ramon, other cabinet ministers from Olmert’s own centrist Kadima Party like Avi Dichter, Shaul Mofaz, and Ehud Barak himself
\n—each of whom has held top-tier security positions—have registered deep reservations about the impending conference.
\nAs for those whose motives toward Israel are based on a sincere desire that it survive and flourish, the time has come to express opposition to this latest “process” of inexcusable appeasement and blindness to reality.
\nP. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.","indexId":"index3","thumbnail":""},{"tagIds":["190","193","1035","1036","1039","1045","1242"],"news":false,"title":"Condi on a Learning Curve?","contentType":"Article","imageUrl":"","author":[{"name":{"he":"","en":"p. david hornik"},"id":104,"about":"","citeName":{"he":"","en":"Hornik, P. D."}}],"lang":"en","authorId":[104],"indexId":"index2","content":"During Condoleezza Rice’s three-hour meeting with Mahmoud Abbas last week in Ramallah, she reportedly “employed a threatening tone.” A Palestinian Authority official said that “We’ve never seen her in such a bad mood.” Later at a press conference after meeting in a Jerusalem hotel with Abbas and Ehud Olmert, she “briskly walked into . . . the hotel’s main ballroom, gave a vacuous 90-second declaration and unceremoniously left, taking no questions.”
\nRice was angry with Abbas for having earlier signed an agreement in Mecca that officially makes his Fatah movement a junior partner of Hamas. Abbas is said to have protested that “the only two options facing me were civil war or national unity, and I chose the second.” Rice apparently didn’t buy it.
\nRice’s anger suggests that she has sincerely believed that Abbas is a constructive force who is worth American coddling and encouragement—even to the extent of funding, training, and equipping his militia. The anger, in other words, seems to be a case of empiricism catching up with delusion and denial. It must especially sting that it was the Saudis—whom Rice, the State Department, and the U.S. generally are always trying to impress by demonstrating their tenderness toward the Palestinians—who pressured Abbas into formally capitulating to Hamas and further enshrining the latter as the Palestinian standard-bearer.
\nIt’s hard, after all, to see why Rice—ostensibly a conservative and not a fluttery-hearted liberal—got so disappointed in her Palestinian charge. There has always been much information available showing his lack of moderacy and total lack of interest in complying with the road map.
\nThere is the fact that, since becoming PA president in January 2005—a year before the elections that swept Hamas to victory—he has never lifted a finger to “arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis” as the road map requires.
\nEven under Arafat’s rule terrorists were sometimes arrested and jailed before being let out through the revolving door. Under Abbas, not even that much. Instead, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade of his Fatah movement remains a central and active component of Palestinian terror. Just last January 29 it openly took credit along with Islamic Jihad for the suicide bombing in Eilat.
\nWhen Abbas made statements in recent weeks like “We should put our internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only against the Israeli occupation” and “We must unite the Hamas and Fatah blood in the struggle against Israel as we did at the beginning of the intifada,” Abbas-opponents who still thought facts played any role in this debate hoped some of the Abbas-backers—Rice, for instance—would take heed. But she didn’t, and so is outraged that he not only signed the deal in Mecca but, when she confronted him, defended it.
\nShe could, instead, have taken more seriously the content of Palestinian education under Fatah and Abbas. After two years of Abbas’s presidency, Palestinian Media Watch reports that “in many respects, [the] new books for Grade 12, written by Fatah-appointed Palestinian educators, are the worst of the textbooks produced by the Palestinian Authority since 2000.” These books “deny Israel’s right to exist, anticipate its destruction and define the conflict with Israel as religious, not merely territorial.” They “teach World War II without the Holocaust.” Now why would this—the cultivation of Palestinian anti-Israeli hatred for generations to come—still be happening, and even have intensified, under Abbas’s presidency if he’s a moderate?
\nOf course, one is not even supposed to mention in polite company Abbas’s own 1983 opus The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement, which maintains that “only a few hundred thousand Jews” were killed in the Holocaust and those mostly through collusion between the Nazis and the Zionists. But do Rice and so many others like her think that Holocaust-denial denial comes with no price attached?
\nWould Rice herself vote for a public figure—even a candidate for small-town mayor—who had written such a book? Do such people gain legitimacy in the United States at all? Does Rice believe that Abbas’s being a Palestinian absolves him of such moral standards and that, having been absolved, he would never disappoint her?
\nWhat, after all, was Abbas doing in all those years before he became a cherished “moderate” of the Palestinian Authority? He was working right alongside Arafat, the cardinal terrorist of the twentieth century. He cofounded Fatah with Arafat and may have financed the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. At the very least, he stayed with Arafat all the way through the airplane hijackings, the brutal murder of American diplomats in Khartoum, the Coastal Road bloodbath in Israel, the slaughter of Christian communities in Lebanon—the list goes on and on.
\n
\nAmerica is supposed to be fighting a War on Terror. Would it openly embrace as an ally someone who had worked in close cahoots for years with Bin Laden or Hassan Nasrallah? Would it expect such a person to behave peaceably and responsibly and then be shocked when he openly formed an alliance with other terrorists?
\nWhatever the extent of Rice’s frustration, it is not yet great enough for her to kick the Abbas-habit. She told the “traveling US press” that “both the U.S. and Israel want to deal with [Abbas’s administration] for as long as they can, in the hope that it will eventually bring about a change” in the Hamas-dominated government and legislature. Olmert, for his part, said “both he and his staff would keep meeting Abbas and his staff.”
\nOne wonders what Abbas would have to do for Rice and Olmert finally to see him differently. Meanwhile, the ongoing Abbas-delusion is a large part of why a U.S. administration sworn to fight terror keeps encouraging the weakest tendencies in Israel, why the jihadist buildup in Gaza continues undisturbed, why Israel keeps living in hair-trigger peril with suicide bombings thwarted almost daily. Does this policy at least influence Washington’s “Arab allies” toward what it views as moderacy? Ask the Saudis.
\n
\nP. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv.","published":true,"tags":[],"id":709,"description":"\"After two years of Abbas's presidency, Palestinian Media Watch reports that 'in many respects, [the] new books for Grade 12, written by Fatah-appointed Palestinian educators, are the worst of the textbooks produced by the Palestinian Authority since 2000.'\"","date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1172620800,"nanoseconds":0},"thumbnail":""}]