NEW YORK- In blatant violation of President Bush’s Road Map, the web site of the official Palestinian Authority Press Center continues to post cartoons inciting hatred and violence against Israel.
Morton A. Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), said: “Ten years ago, in the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Arabs promised to end their incitement. In President Bush’s June 2002 speech, he again demanded they halt their incitement. More than five weeks ago, President Bush proclaimed the Road Map, which again demands a halt to incitement. Yet every day, the vicious anti-Israel and anti-American incitement continues in the official PA media, school textbooks, speeches, summer camps, and religious sermons. Ten years of broken promises, ten years of vicious incitement—incitement that continues at the very moment PA prime minister Abu Mazen is claiming that the PA is stopping its incitement.”
One anti-American cartoon was quietly dropped from the web site recently. On July 1, 2003, the Israeli news agency IMRA interviewed the web site’s cartoonist, who identified himself as “Yasser,” who said he had been ordered by the director of the PA Information Service- International Press Center, Fathi Tobail, to remove the anti-American cartoon “for editorial reasons.” Yet the PA has evidently decided to keep the anti-Israel incitement on the site, because these cartoons are still there:
#1 – Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, wearing a bloody shirt and brandishing a blood-drenched butcher knife over a bleeding Arab baby. The scene is a butcher shop, with two bodies hanging on meat hooks. One sign reads: “Palestinian Blood”; the other sign reads “Sale.”
#2 – Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, with blood dripping all over him, holds a knife dripping blood. Veteran Labor Party leader Shimon Peres holds a mop to wipe up the blood on the floor.
#3 – Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon holds a whip, aimed at an Arab tied to a post. Sharon is saying: “You must stop the violence.”
#4 – Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, wearing an army uniform, holds a list and a pencil. Next to him is an Israeli soldier holding binoculars and asking “We’ve killed 80 Palestinian, is that enough?” Sharon replies: “Just 19 more…”
#5 – A Palestinian Arab woman holding a PLO flag in one hand throws a rock that bounces off the helmet of one of two Israeli soldiers in a tank. One soldier tells the other” “I told you before, all of them are terrorists.”
(Courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch)