Mahmoud Zahar, the ugly Hamas Spokesman, he’s the bearded idiot with a wart on the end of his nose, opened the new year of 2012 with the nonsense that Palestinians in Gaza are prevented from protesting peacefully because there are no Jews in Gaza to demonstrate against. That is why, he explained, they have no choice but to resort to violence. This is true. You couldn’t make this up. Not surprisingly, to those of us who follow the Palestinian narrative, this insanity is perceived as a logical and reasonable argument to Palestinians and their supporters. It appeals to Israel haters who can use this excuse to accuse Israel of human rights abuses inflicted on Palestinians for occupying Gaza from the outside, rather than the inside. Don’t even try to figure it out. You’ll only tie yourself up in A Gordian knot of maddening illogicality.
This endless nonsense is promoted by pro-Palestinian public relations groupies with an inexhaustible amount of funding from wealthy individuals or mindless European Governments for whom the mantra “Solve Human Rights Abuses and you Save the World”. Their funding also comes from malevolent sources, such as Arab and Islamic regimes, which have successfully transposed the Arab-Israeli War into the more appetizing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This new definition allows bleeding heart liberals to side with the underdog and lose sight of reality.
The world has bought into the Palestinian narrative of victimhood to the extent that, for decades, it has thrown billions of dollars into a lie. Anyone with any legal sense will conclude that if you lie to someone repeatedly to extract money based on a falsehood you eventually risk being dragged into court for fraud. And if you have added violence to your lie of victimhood to your crime you will, more than likely, be found guilty of fraud and assault and be thrown into the slammer. Not so with the Palestinians. They are feted, and patted, and sympathized, with by an international community that cannot see past the tears to get to the truth. They have been flavor of the month for decades while the rest of the world’s genuine basketcases are ignored. The money goes to the Palestinian schnorrers with the universal publicity machine.
Their tale of victimhood helps sell newspapers. It is the stuff of poor and biased journalism. It keeps career diplomats and academics in clover. The moneyed societies continue to pump money they don’t have or can ill afford into the fiction mill. The Palestinians are building an empire on it. Many are getting wealthy on the false tale of victimhood. They see the success of this narrative. It serves them well. So well, in fact, they don’t want to change. It’s rather like the guy who drives his big car from his suburban home to the outskirts of the town centre, parks his vehicle, takes out a pair of crutches, limps into town, and starts begging and crying. The naïve and sympathetic of the town throw notes and coins into his lap until it is time for him to drive home and put his feet up at the end of a good days work.
Why should they change? They have gotten their tale down to a fine art, and it works for them. They are occupied, they are oppressed, they are exploited, and they are abused by a heartless, brutal, racist, regime. Such emotional outpourings cannot be challenged by cold facts. Their story appeals to the heart, not the head, and a heart is not easily dissuaded especially if you can knock up some emotive pictures to strengthen your argument.
Just as people who abuse the social service of a welfare state lose the desire to find work and become a productive citizen, so the Palestinians are enjoying the status they have achieved as the world’s most appreciated victim. They exploit their inferiority to the extent that they cannot escape their inferiority. It works for them; therefore they are trapped in it. Nobody has demanded that they become a more pragmatic, open, liberal society. Nobody has conditioned their funding on the Palestinians discarding their lies and nonsense, or on them accepting generous and permanent peace arrangements that would offer them a better life. They have rejected that. They know by accepting this responsibility they must become a normal, functioning, society, offering freedom to its entire people. They cannot accept that solution. It would expose the lies that they have been indoctrinating their people, that they have a holy duty to destroy Israel, their enemy, and possess their land. To accept a small state alongside Israel would expose the truth that they have overspent on corruption and destructive ventures and not enough in developing a normal, open, society. It would expose a real sense of inferiority to a people who see the success story of Israel.
They have taken the nonsense of victimhood and have deliberately prevented progress. They wrapped the Islamic cloak around their victimhood. It enables them to play both sides of the deck. They are both victim and hero. Their jihad allows them to turn the most inhumane acts of murder and mayhem into some sort of positive glory tale. Their narrative turns mass murder into praiseworthy heroism to be rewarded in this life or the next. They are trapped in their negative stew of victimhood and brutality. It finds expression in the nonsensical statements of people like Zahar, or those who accuse Israel of being an Apartheid state. Their nonsense, to them, makes sense. Sad tales have had their impact. The emotional tale of victimhood is their power. Focusing on the “oppressed” will win out every time. They can twist every expression they can find to make a point that drips with emotion and useful sound bites, but they fail the test of truth every time.
Basically, the Palestinian narrative is a tale of nonsense.