Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah movement he co-founded which controls the PA, have honored Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese Shia cleric belonging to the terrorist group Hizballah, whose name was on the U.S. list of wanted terrorists. Abbas dispatched a personal emissary to visit the dying Fadlallah in hospital and after his death sent condolences to his family.
Shortly before his death, Fadlallah issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) sanctioning suicide bomber attacks on U.S. troops and Israel. The U.S. government holds Fadlallah responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing that destroyed the barracks of U.S. Marines during a peace-keeping mission in Lebanon in which 242 U.S. servicemen were killed. Reportedly, when asked while dying in hospital if he had any request, Fadlallah replied, “I ask for nothing except that the Zionist entity should pass from the world.’”
The official PA newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, reported last week that, prior to Fadlallah’s death, “President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday sent the PLO representative in Lebanon, Ambassador Abdallah Abdallah, to the Bahman hospital in Beirut to inquire about the health of the great religious scholar and legal authority, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, and wish him a speedy recovery and good health. Ambassador Abdallah met with the great religious scholar’s son, Ali Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, and with a group of his followers, who expressed their appreciation for the noble gesture by President Mahmoud Abbas. They expressed their great excitement, conveying to Ambassador Abdallah their best wishes to the President and to the Palestinian people, and wishing him victory and success” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 4, 2010, translation courtesy of Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, ‘Abbas honors terror leader
Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah,’ Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin, July 11, 2010).
Last week, Abbas told Arab journalists that “If [Arab states] want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor.” A few days earlier, Abbas praised Muhammad Daoud Oudeh (Abu Daoud), the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics seizure and subsequent murder of Israeli athletes as “a wonderful brother, companion” and phoned Abu Daoud’s family to express his condolences on his recent death. A few weeks before that, senior veteran Fatah official Nabil Shaath said that Hamas, the genocide-seeking terrorist group that has controlled Gaza since violently seizing the territory in 2007, need not recognize Israel, nor stop murdering Jews in Israel, nor meet any other demands laid down by the Quartet (the U.S., European Union, Russia and the United Nations).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “There has been an astonishing amount of recent, stark evidence of the unreconstructed extremism, glorification of terrorism and non-acceptance of Israel by Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in recent months and weeks.
“When one surveys this evidence, it is evident that the Abbas/Fayyad/PA talk about peace alongside Israel in a Palestinian state is a sham. They neither want peace nor work for it. They simply want to obtain from Israel through negotiations – because they can’t wage a successful war to destroy Israel – what they cannot obtain through war, without making peace.
“As with his statement openly favoring a general Arab war with Israel last week, it is highly significant that Abbas says this publicly. Abbas knew that this statement, like other anti-peace statements he has made, would be picked up, translated and become more widely known. But he doesn’t care. He knows from experience that no-one will hold him to account, that no one will take note and alter their policy towards him. He knows he will pay no price. He can speak the ugly, vicious truth about Palestinian and Arab aims, knowing there will be no consequences. This underscores the complete fraudulence of the PA and the so-called peace process President Obama is keen to revive.
“The ZOA renews its call for both Israel and the U.S. to cut ties with Abbas and the PA and cease all diplomatic and financial support to it until and unless Abbas publicly recants these statements, arrests terrorists and end the incitement to hatred and murder within the PA-controlled, media, mosques, schools and youth camps that feeds terrorism.”