Jewish World Update Jan/Feb 2024

Nothing But Lies
(JNS)—Senior Hamas terrorist Ali Baraka openly admitted recently how Hamas duped Israel and the United States into complacency while planning its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. But Hamas is not the only entity that uses deception. So does the so-called moderate Palestinian Authority (PA).

“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” Baraka told RT, Russia’s government-owned television network. “In the past couple of years,” he said, “Hamas has adopted a ‘rational’ approach. It did not go into any war and did not join Islamic Jihad in its recent battle.”

Hamas pretended to be a credible partner for peace negotiations and pointed to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, its Iranian-founded spin-off, as the problem. Yet, the entire time, Hamas was planning the rape, torture, immolation, and kidnapping of Jewish babies, children, women, and men.

Hamas’s deception is nothing new. Lying forms an integral part of Islamic jihadist doctrine, going back to the days of Muhammad.

Yet, in his speech on October 10, U.S. President Joe Biden intimated that Hamas isn’t representative of the Palestinians. The subtext was clear: Hamas is the bad guy. The PA is the good guy. And U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s decision to meet with PA/Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas made the point clear.

Five days after the massacre, Abbas released a milquetoast condemnation of it, while he and the rest of Palestinian society did nothing but celebrate and defend Hamas’s atrocities, blaming Israel for crimes Hamas perpetrated against its own people.

For five days, Abbas did nothing but praise Hamas and condemn Israel. As Palestinian Media Watch reported, Abbas issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas; and Fatah’s Central Committee praised Hamas for its slaughter and called for national unity between Hamas and the PA. Fatah also called for all Palestinians to join Hamas’s jihad against Israel.

Fatah posted Quranic calls to jihad on its Telegram pages that are indistinguishable from Hamas propaganda: “Strike the sons of apes and pigs. . . . Slaughter everyone who is Israeli.”

PA crowds greeted the news of Hamas’s atrocities with jubilation. Celebrations, victory marches, and public parties were held from northern Samaria to the South Hebron Hills. Palestinians mocked the Jewish victims on social media and celebrated their mass murder.

Abbas’s condemnation of the atrocities was clearly fake. But it convinced Blinken that it was reasonable to meet with him and continue to base U.S. policy on the fiction that the PA represents a moderate force within Palestinian society that is willing to coexist peacefully with Israel.

Abbas’s lies and deceptions are his modus operandi, just as they were the modus operandi of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. In the PA’s early days in the 1990s, Arafat routinely condemned Hamas terror attacks in English, but in Arabic he called for the Palestinians to slaughter the Jews.

Israel and the United States refuse to acknowledge that the PA duped them the same way Hamas did. Like most of its predecessors, the Biden administration wants to believe the deception because it wants to believe Israel is to blame for the violence waged against it.

The lie of Israeli culpability undergirds 50 years of U.S. Middle East peacemaking efforts. The lie of Palestinian moderation undergirds 50 years of near-continuous U.S. pressure on Israel to concede territory to the Arabs, and it blocks any effort by Israel to defeat the Arabs on the battlefield.

The October slaughter isn’t a political conflict. It is an existential one. And it isn’t only between Israel and Hamas. It is between Israel and the vast majority of the Palestinian people and the entirety of the Palestinian leadership, who actively seek Israel’s physical annihilation and the genocide of world Jewry—particularly those Jews who seek to live in peace and freedom in the Jewish State of Israel.

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