Eye on the Middle East Jan/Feb 2016
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has revealed why he believes so many Israeli Jews are being stabbed, slashed, and shot by Arabs. It is due, he said, to Arab “frustration” and a “massive increase in [Israeli] settlements.” Really?
Kerry told a group at Harvard University in October, “Most people I talk to have a pretty…good sense of exactly what has to be done….It’s a question of making the judgments and having courage to go there.” Unfortunately, Kerry has no sense of what to do, is wrong about the settlements, and has overlooked the key factor in the violence.
“Kerry does not know what he is talking about,” wrote Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. “There has been a steady growth in settlement population, though the bulk . . . is in the major blocs—such as Ma’ale Adumim—that Israel will clearly retain in any final agreement….Does he mean there has been a massive increase in the number of settlements? That’s flatly false.”
Three months before the violence began in September, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) released a 57-page report titled Palestinian Authority Education: A Recipe for Hate and Terror. PMW (palwatch.org) showed how the Palestinian Authority (PA) teaches its children to reject Israel’s right to exist, encourages them to view Jewish people as evil, and directs them to embrace murderers as role models.
The PA also uses textbooks and media to teach Arab children that Jews are “monkeys and pigs,” “enemies of Allah,” “most evil of creations,” and that “Zion is ‘Satan with a tail.’” In addition, the materials teach it is forbidden to forge peace between Arab and Israeli children.
This situation is not a recent phenomenon. In 2007, then U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton labeled the material “a clear example of child abuse” that “profoundly poisons the minds of these children.” She proclaimed, “We must stop the propaganda to which Palestinian children are being exposed.”
But the abuse continues; and today many Arab schoolchildren who were nurtured on these materials have grown into violent, hate-filled young adults who are now unleashing a wave of terror on Jews whose only crime is being Jewish.
Two weeks before the terror began, PA President Mahmoud Abbas encouraged his people to spill their blood to take Israel from the Jewish people. His message was quoted almost directly from the PA propaganda young people read in their textbooks and see on PA television.
He called Jewish people “filth” who defile Jerusalem and said, “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem….Every martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded.” Not exactly a foundation for peaceful coexistence.
Days after his speech, the British online newspaper DailyMail.com posted a video of a little Palestinian-Arab girl wielding a knife, saying, “I want to stab a Jew because they stole our land.” Her father, filming his daughter, replies, “Allah willing, my dear.”
This same Abbas told the UN General Assembly in September that Palestinian Arabs desire “righteousness, justice, and peace.”
As for John Kerry, said Abrams, he is blaming the violence on the Israeli victims. “We…see what Kerry really appears to think. He seems to believe that the real culprits, when Palestinians stab Israelis to death, are people who build a new housing unit in a settlement.”
Hillary Clinton at least recognized the root of the problem, although she did nothing about it. The current administration refuses even to recognize it.
