PMW report details analogies: "Jewish state did more evil and more horrifying things than Auschwitz."
By ARIEL BEN SOLOMONA NAZI image from the Fatah Facebook included in the report by Palestinian Media Watch.(photo credit: FACEBOOK)
The Palestinian Authority and the Fatah Party constantly used Nazi and Holocaust analogies to demonize Israel during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, according to a forthcoming report by Palestinian Media Watch titled “Holocaust desecration and abuse by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah during the 2014 Gaza operation.”An advance copy of the report was provided to The Jerusalem Post containing numerous quotes by PA and Fatah officials and media.The following are examples of Holocaust comparisons used by PA and Fatah leaders and official news outlets:• Israel’s operation was a “Holocaust unlike any that has been recorded in history”• The incursion in Gaza was “reenacting the Holocaust”• Binyamin Netanyahu is a “descendant of the Nazis”• Israel is “the new Nazis”• “Nazi Israeli mentality”• “Israel, the rogue state, which is still blackmailing Germany, Europe, and humanity with the Holocaust” Fatah MP and former PA minister of prisoners Issa Karake was quoted by the Palestinian news agency Ma’an on July 25 as saying, “[Israel] did more evil and more horrifying things than what happened in the Nazi crematoria.”“Binyamin Netanyahu is a descendant of the Nazis, worships Hitler’s ways, and imitates him in all the Holocausts he has perpetrated,” said Yahya Rabah, a Fatah leader and columnist for the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, on August 3.
Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub said on the Awdah independent Palestinian TV channel on July 14: “[Israel is committing a] mass extermination as the Nazis did in Europe in the 1940s.”“[Gazans are] undergoing the Holocaust of the 21st century by the barbaric occupation, which takes pride in murdering children,” Ramallah District Governor Laila Ghannam was quoted as saying by Ma’an on July 31.“The Palestinian Authority has a political need to compare Israelis to Nazis,” Itamar Marcus, the author of the report and the director and founder of Palestinian Media Watch, told the Post.“The PA, even today, presents the murder of Israelis as heroic. The killers of the five members of the Fogel family [in 2011] and all other Palestinians jailed for murder are receiving monthly PA salaries because they are heroes,” said Marcus.Marcus explains that the PA seeks to rationalize the murders of Jews by comparing them to the Nazis, which not only justifies past atrocities, but also motivates future violence.PMW has been documenting PA desecration of the Holocaust for years, says Marcus, adding that the recent wave during the recent Gaza war is unprecedented because of its “intensity and quantity.”PMW monitors and analyzes Palestinian society through its media and textbooks.“During the Gaza war, PA Holocaust abuse went from background categorization of Israel to a foremost motif,” he said.Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which fights against anti-Semitism and seeks to instill the lessons from the Holocaust for future generations, told the Post that the PMW report, which focuses only on PA and Fatah sources, and not Hamas, should be required reading for all policy makers in the US, Europe, NGOs, and the media.“This study points to a deeply embedded propaganda onslaught that insults the memory of dead Jews and demonizes live ones,” said Cooper.“US leaders should lead in the condemnation of this sickening tactic and demand real change before handing over billions more in aid to PA coffers.”The report also refers to a statement released by Yad Vashem on July 24: “As an institution dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, we are also gravely concerned by the demagogic abuse of Holocaust imagery and language which distorts the past as well as the current reality for political purposes.Exploiting these terms from the Holocaust, in order to incite and inflame hatred, desecrates the memory of the Holocaust.”
