Days after praising Jew-killer Habash
All three newspapers controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) have glorified the two suicide bombers who struck in Dimona on Monday. One suicide bomber detonated his belt, killing one Israeli and wounding 11 others, while the second bomber, injured by the blast of the first, was killed by an Israeli security officer before he could detonate his belt. The daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida said that, “The perpetrators of the operation died as shahids [glorious martyrs] … an Israeli was killed and eleven were wounded in the Dimona operation” (Feb. 5), while the dailies Al-Iyam and Al-Quds also defined the bombers as glorious martyrs (‘PA glorifies Dimona terrorists,’ Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2008).
Mahmoud Abbas issued a rare condemnation of the terror attack approved by his own PA-controlled newspapers, but only in the context of condemning an earlier Israeli counter-terrorist strike in on Palestinian terrorists in the Palestinian village of Qabatiya. Both Abbas and the PA media have praised terrorists killed in attacks or in Israeli strikes. Two Palestinians who attempted to murder Israelis in Kfar Etzyon’s Makor Haim High School several weeks ago were also recently described as shahids in the Palestinian media. This, and the latest incidents of praise for terrorists, shows that that while Israel has renewed negotiations with the PA, the PA is continuing to honor terrorists.
Previous examples of PA glorification of terrorists and their deeds:
- PA president Abbas ordered three days of mourning and Pa flags to be flown at half mast at the death of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFL) founder George Habash (USA Today, January 26, 2008).
- The PA Radio station, ‘Voice of Palestine,’ referred to a suicide bomber who murdered several people as having been being “heroically martyred” (Jerusalem Post, December 29, 2005).
- While Abbas made a weak criticism of a Palestinian terror attack which killed an Israeli couple (not serving the “Palestinians’ interests”), his PA-controlled media hailed the two attackers as “martyrs” and “resistance fighters” (Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2005).
- PA renamed the main square in the city of Jenin in honor of the Iraqi bomber, who murdered four American soldiers in a suicide car bomb attack on March 27, 2003 (Haaretz, March 30, 2003).
- The official PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah published an article commemorating the 25th anniversary of the March 11, 1978 massacre of 37 Israelis on the Tel Aviv coastal highway and the murder of American nature photographer Gail Rubin, niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), stating, “On the morning of March 11, 1978, a woman Palestinian fighter, Dalal Mughrabi, created a legend that would be taught for many years, when she and her Fedayeen unit infiltrated the Palestinian coastal plain near Tel Aviv… Twenty-five years after this heroine’s death as a Shahida [Dying for Allah], many Palestinian women are following in her footsteps every day. Examples include Wafa Idris, [First woman suicide bomber] and Ayyat al-Akhras, [second woman suicide bomber] who performed acts of Shahada- Seeking during the blessed al-Aksa Intifada to protect the homeland. The Shahida Dalal Mughrabi shall remain one of the symbols of the Palestinian national struggle.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah March 11, 2003, translation courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)
- The Palestinian Union for Culture, Sciences and Development named its summer youth camps The Shahid Al-Amarin, named after the founder of the Fatah terrorist organization, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, killed in 2002.
- A student organization at the PA’s Al-Quds Open University in Tubass, is named “the Shahida Wafa Idris Cell,” after Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide bomber, whose attack in Jerusalem on Jan. 27, 2002, murdered one person and wounded over 150. (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 11, 2002).
- A school in the PA-controlled town of Al-Shuyukh, near Hebron, was renamed “the Dalal Mugrahbi School,” also named in honor of terrorist Dalal Murgrabi. (The school receives U.S. funding through the ANERA organization, whose spokesman, Peter Gubser, claimed on August 11, 2002 that the school’s directors had agreed to revert to the school’s original name; yet on August 16, 2002, the official PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah again referred to it as “the Dalal Mugrahbi School in Al-Shuyukh.” (Palestinian Media Watch).
- An official PA Television broadcast asserted: “Dalal is a symbol for the Palestinian nation” (PA TV, August 30, 2000)
- The PA affiliated newspaper Al Ayyam called the 1978 Tel Aviv coastal massacre “one of the greatest successes of the struggle” (Al Ayyam, March 9, 2000).
- The Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah reported that the PA-sponsored soccer tournament in the PA-ruled city of Tulkarm was named “the Tulkarm Shahids [Martyrs] Memorial soccer championship tournament of the Shahid Abd Al-Baset Odeh.” Odeh was the suicide bomber who attacked a Netanya hotel on Passover last year, massacring 30 people, including a 90 year-old U.S. citizen, Mrs. Hannah Rogen. (Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, January 21, 2003, translation courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)
- In February 1996, the PA named a public square in Jericho after Yiyhe Ayyash, the master-bomb maker whose bombs killed scores of Israeli civilians. The U.S. State Department has named him as a prime suspect in the August 21, 1995 Jerusalem bus bombing in which Connecticut schoolteacher Joan Davenny was murdered. (Peace Watch Annual Report 1996; New York Daily News, April 22, 1998).
- In December 1996, the PA named a street in the town of Beit Lahiya after Yiyhe Ayyash. (Jerusalem Post, December 17, 1996).
- A pro-PLO newspaper provide a photograph of a street in PA-controlled Al-Bireh named after Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf), a PLO leader involved in planning many attacks, including the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, in which 12 people were murdered (Jerusalem Times on September 25, 1998).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “Abbas’ PA’s long and shocking record of glorification of terror and terrorists demonstrates, as little else can, why he and his Fatah-backed PA are neither moderate nor peace partners. It should come as no surprise that this glorification of terror and terrorism continues when Abbas Fatah calls to this day in its Constitution for the destruction of Israel (Article 12) and the use of terrorism as an essential element in the campaign to achieve that goal (Article 19).
“The record shows that within the PA, few opportunities are missed to glorify a terrorist, celebrate a suicide bomber, or inculcate Palestinian youth into worshiping cold-blooded murderers. The record also shows that all aspects of PA life — the schools, youth movements, sports teams, newspapers, TV, even the names of streets — are made vehicles for honoring and praising terrorism. This in turn breeds more terrorists and bloodshed.
“Given this shocking record, we call upon the Bush Administration to desist from ignoring the incitement to hatred and murder within the PA and to insist in talks with Abbas and other PA officials that the PA takes immediate action to comprehensively end this hate propaganda. Only when Palestinians reject the idea that it is a religious and national duty to murder Jews will there be any prospect of peace.”
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