Senior PA official: 'Do we have to hijack planes for you to care about our cause?'
Nabil Sha'ath suggests that being moderate does not turn heads and that the West only reacts to extremism.
By JPOST.COM STAFFUpdated: FEBRUARY 7, 2016 14:53Nabil Shaath on International Peace Conference in Feb. 2016: Anything is better than US-led Israel and Palestinian peace negotiations
A senior Palestinian Authority official has suggested that the West ignores the Palestinians when they maintain security, rhetorically asking if they have to resort to "hijacking planes" and "destroying airports" to garner Western support for the Palestinian cause.In an interview translated by MEMRI on the PA-backed station Awdha TV last week, Nabil Sha'ath asserted that being moderate does not turn heads.He sought to substantiate his claim by drawing attention to the ongoing refugee situation in Europe: "If the Syrian problem had not been exported to Europe - through refugees, on the one hand, and terrorism, on the other - the Europeans would not have cared even if the entire Syrian people had died."Sha'ath stated that the European decision to finally deal with the Syrian crisis was not motivated by good-willed humanitarianism, but rather by a fear that the massive influx of "non-Anglo-Saxon" refugees would alter the composition of the population."But when all of a sudden there were four million Syrian refugees in Europe, and when this was accompanied by ISIS operations in France and elsewhere...it started a debate about racial transformation, the entrance of non-white, non-European races," he said in the interview.The former lead PLO negotiator also discussed a proposal for an international peace conference, saying that while he would prefer something smaller, anything was preferred over American-mediated peace talks.Sha'ath charged that the US has never been "a reliable, honest broker" of efforts toward peace, attributing Washington's incompetence as a mediator to its position as "the strategic ally of Israel."