What Drives Palestinians
O no, I’m pretty sure that Palestinians don’t hate Jews but Zionists. Look, for instance, at this: “Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”
That was in the Katib Wilayat mosque in Gaza.
At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.
Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.
Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.
Now now, lets face it. If people visit MEMRI every now and then, they can see for themselves whether Fatah has stopped inciting people, but that as an aside.
What’s so important about this article is that it, finally, shares with the big public how Palestinians think about Jews. Not just Zionists. But Jews.
More:
Intended to indoctrinate the young to its brand of radical Islam, which combines politics, social work and military resistance, including acts of terrorism, the programs of Al Aksa television and radio, including crucial Friday sermons, are an indication of how far from reconciliation Israelis and many Palestinians are.
Hamas’s grip on Gaza matters, but what may matter more in the long run is its control over propaganda and education there, breeding longer-term problems for Israel, and for peace. No matter what Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agree upon, there is concern here that the attitudes being instilled will make a sustainable peace extremely difficult.
You can say that again. “Extremely difficult” is putting it mildly. How about “impossible”?
if someone says Jews sucks, it is a crime against humanity, but if the same person says Muslims sucks, one can bring hundred reasons for thinking so. I think Palestinians have more than hundred reason to think that Jews sucks, given the hostile actions of Israel(ie, Jewsih state).
If Islamophobia can be justified using the fear that Muslims(who form less than 5% of the total population) will take over Europe, ant Semitism of Palestinians is quite understandable.