Abbas packaged these falsehoods with outright bigotry and incitement to murder.
By MELANIE PHILLIPSUpdated: OCTOBER 16, 2015 02:19Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 69th United Nations General Assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York, September 26, 2014(photo credit: REUTERS)
With Israelis being steadily picked off for murder by knife, stone, bomb or bullet, many in the world have Jewish blood on their hands.Beyond the attackers themselves, the bloody trail first leads to those inciting them to murder: Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and that terrorist group’s state backer Iran, whose supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has called for the “arming of the West Bank.”Abbas and his henchmen have repeatedly incited, sanitized and glorified the current attacks on Jews. They have been whipping up religious hysteria by promulgating the inflammatory lies that Israel will allow Jews to pray on Temple Mount and even that it intends to destroy al-Aksa Mosque.Abbas packaged these falsehoods with outright bigotry and incitement to murder.“Al-Aksa Mosque is ours’, he ranted. “They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet... We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”His adviser, Sultan Abu al-Einein, called upon Fatah members to “carry out widespread public uprisings.”In a Gaza mosque, Sheikh Muhammad Sallah told worshipers: “Jerusalem is the code word... This is where the soldiers of the Prophet Muhammad are. Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews.” Then, brandishing a knife, he raved: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!... We don’t want just a single stabber. Oh young men of the West Bank: attack in threes and fours. Some should restrain the victim, while others attack him with axes and butcher knives. Attack them in groups. Cut them into body parts.”The veil has finally been lifted. Israel is under the onslaught of Islamic religious war.All the delusional beliefs, that the “Middle East conflict” is about land boundaries and that it could be solved if only Israel would stop building settlements to enable a state of Palestine, now stand exposed for the wishful thinking they always were.Jews in Israel are not being murdered because their attackers, who could have had a state of their own decades ago, are so “desperate” they have no alternative but to smash rocks onto motorists and cut the throats of Jewish children. They are being slaughtered simply because they are Jews.All Jews in Israel are “settlers” and thus legitimate targets. And that is because Islam claims as a religious precept that anywhere that has ever been conquered by Muslims must remain Muslim for all time.
The Jews, the only people for whom Israel was ever their national kingdom, must therefore be expunged from their own land and their history denied and falsified, crushed underneath the fantastical edifice of Islamic mythology just like the Jewish Temple lies buried under al-Aksa.Because the whole point of al-Aksa is to symbolize the dominance of Islam and the subjugation of the Jews, and to deny their claim either to the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism, or to Jerusalem itself.But the trail of blood does not end at the Palestinian Arabs and the Muslim world. For complicit in this murderous incitement stand the Western media which recycles Arab falsehoods, blood libels and conspiracy theories, presents Israel not as the victim of psychotic violence but as the instigator of injustice and oppression, and thus acts as a lethal echo chamber for the derangement that drives mass murder.Predictably, the Western media ignored the hundreds of attacks on Israeli Jews these past few weeks. It waited until Israel started killing terrorists. Then it sprang into action to portray the Israelis as brutal oppressors driving helpless Palestinians to desperate measures.In American and British newspapers, on CNN and the BBC, the focus was on the Palestinians who had been killed with their Israeli victims added as an afterthought.The New York Times excelled itself in its twisted anti-Israel reporting by peddling an absurd theory – which every expert dismisses as utter rubbish – that the “explosive historical question” was whether the two Jewish Temples had ever stood on the Temple Mount at all.On BBC TV’s Newsnight, presenter Evan Davies tried to insist that measures Israel was taking to deter further murderous attacks were “reprisals” – in other words, revenge attacks. Then he suggested that the most likely reason why these young, “post-Oslo” Arabs believed Israelis should be killed was that they had been “provoked” by Israel’s behavior.Such remarks betray total ignorance of the Arab pogroms against Jews, the frenzied butchery and the very same incitement and lies about al-Aksa that have being going on in the Land of Israel for almost a century.Even more important than the malice of the media is the part played in Arab incitement by Israel’s supposed friends and allies.The American, British and European governments give the Palestinian Authority hundreds of millions of dollars every year.A significant proportion of this money is used, through official media and education programs, to promulgate hatred of Jews and Israel and incite terrorist attacks. It is also used to reward mass murder by paying generous “salaries” to convicted terrorists.American, British and European taxpayers are thus the unwitting accomplices to incitement to murder Jews.Far from calling the Palestinians to account, Western politicians echo and amplify their mind-bending manipulation of reality. They parrot the lies that the Palestinians have a legitimate claim to the land, that Israel is in illegal occupation, that Jerusalem is not part of Israel at all. Earlier this week, US Secretary of State John Kerry blamed a “massive increase in settlements” in recent years for stoking Palestinian “frustration” and violence.But since Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, there has been less construction activity in the settlements than since 1995. So not only had Kerry blamed Israel for its own victimization, but he had done so on the basis of a tendentious misrepresentation of reality.The State Department then accused Israel of using “excessive force” to quell the violence.Since this force has clearly been restrained and proportionate, this amounted to criticizing Israel for defending itself at all.In Britain, the Middle East minister Tobias Ellwood condemned the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem but said the government was “also concerned by the use of force by Israeli security personnel in response to protests and security incidents, which has resulted in several deaths and thousands of injuries.”“Thousands” of Arab injuries? And since when was terrorist murder “protest”? Ellwood takes us straight back to pre-Israel Palestine, when the British sanitized, sided with and appeased Arab terrorism and punished its Jewish victims. And it is this century- old rewarding of Arab aggression which continues to drive the endless war of extermination against Israel.Worse horrors are happening elsewhere in the Middle East and developing world.But over nowhere other than Israel does the Western liberal or government minister or official parade his conscience by sanitizing, excusing or supporting murderous bigotry and demonizing its victims.In no other conflict does the West indulge aggression and hang its victims out to dry.The blood of Israeli Jews spilled by religious fanatics is therefore on Western hands, too.Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK).