- Sept. 11 awakened Americans to the anti-American vitriol
in the state-controlled media of such apparently friendly states as Egypt
and Saudi Arabia. We are just beginning to understand how a daily diet
of hatred fed through schools and the media -- a hatred quietly incubating
for years -- found its most perfect expression in the slaughter of Sept.
11.
We have failed, however, to see how a similar campaign of hate has laid
the groundwork for the orgy of murder-suicide the Palestinians are now
engaged in. A mother appears on videotape proudly sending her 18-year-old
to his death just so he can kill as many Jews as possible. This is unprecedented.
Before the Oslo peace accords of 1993, suicide bombing was a practice almost
unheard of among Palestinians.
And it is not as if they had no grievances before 1993. On the contrary.
The advent of suicide bombing coincides precisely with the era of Israeli
conciliation and peacemaking: recognition of the PLO, repeated concessions
of territory, establishment of the Palestinian Authority, acceptance of
an armed Palestinian police -- all culminating in the unprecedented offer
of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in a shared Jerusalem.
It is precisely in the context of the most accommodating, most conciliatory,
most dovish Israeli policy in history that the suicide bombings took hold.
Where, then, did they come from? During the past eight years -- the years
of the Oslo "peace process" -- Yasser Arafat had complete control
of all the organs of Palestinian education and propaganda. It takes an
unspeakable hatred for people to send their children to commit Columbine-like
murder-suicide. Arafat taught it. His television, his newspapers, his clerics
have inculcated an anti-Semitism unmatched in virulence since Nazi Germany.
When U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross stepped down last year, he acknowledged,
to his credit, that a major error of diplomacy in the Clinton years was
turning a diplomatic blind eye to the poisonous incitement in Palestinian
media. Just as Osama bin Laden spent the '90s indoctrinating and infiltrating
in preparation for murder, Arafat raised an entire generation schooled
in hatred of the "Judeo-Nazis."
This indoctrination goes far beyond expunging Israel, literally, from Palestinian
maps. It goes far beyond denying, indeed ridiculing, the Holocaust as a
Jewish fantasy. It consists of the rawest incitement to murder, as in this
sermon by Arafat-appointed and Arafat-funded Ahmad Abu Halabiya broadcast
live on official Palestinian Authority television early in the Intifada.
The subject is "the Jews." (Note: not the Israelis, but the Jews.)
"They must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight
them: Allah will torture them at your hands.' . . . Have no mercy on the
Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you
are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."
The rationale offered for such murderousness is Jewish villainy as taught
not just in Palestine but throughout the Arab world. On March 10, for example,
an article in the official Saudi newspaper al-Riyadh described in rich
detail how the Jews ritually slaughter Christian and Muslim children to
use their blood in their holiday foods. With almost comic pseudo-scholarship,
it explained that for one holiday (Purim) the Jew must kill an adolescent,
but for Passover the victim must be 10 years or younger.
When the article achieved wide notoriety in translation, the editor apologized
under pressure. He said he had been out of town when the article appeared.
An odd excuse, given the fact that this elaborate blood libel ran as a
two-part series.
A precondition for peace is to prepare your people for peace. Egypt's Anwar
Sadat did that after signing his peace treaty with Israel. The Israelis
did that after signing Oslo. They changed their textbooks and altered their
civic culture to recognize and accept the Palestinians. On the 50th anniversary
of Israel's independence, for example, Israel Television aired an epic
multipart historical documentary that offered a view of the Palestinians
that was deeply sympathetic and understanding.
While Israeli leaders, both political and intellectual, were preparing
their people for peace, Arafat was preparing his people for war -- the
war he unleashed two months after rejecting Israel's Camp David peace offer
of July 2000 -- with an unrelenting campaign of anti-Semitic vilification
carried out by every organ of his media. And how he has succeeded. When
Arafat's state-controlled media glorify a "martyrdom operation,"
it is not just a commendation of the murderer, it is a vindication of their
own pedagogy. We now see its fruits in the streets of Jerusalem, where
the blood from the latest suicide bombing graces the third floor of surrounding
buildings.
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- © 2001, Washington Post Co.
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- Comment
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- From Chris
Ivel29@aol.com
3-29-3
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- Did you have to post "Arafat's Harvest of Hate"??
I understand 2 sides to a story, but for Christ's sake, I can just log
on to CNN for that kind of Zionist bullshit!
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- Chris
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