Another Tack: Tall Tales From The Has-been Bunch

Sarah Honig
JPost
14 August 09

Anyone familiar with the Arabian Nights tales knows they depict a reality comprised of layer upon shadowy layer, one concealed behind another. Cloaked schemers abound, each exploiting another schemer, each duping someone for secret ends. Life is an interminable complex of nefarious conspiracies in which it's best not to trust anyone but suspect everyone.

In the Arab Middle East, one and all assume you're conning them, and you can never prove otherwise. Truth isn't only immaterial, it's downright undesirable. This after all is the region that regarded Gamal Abdel Nasser as a victor following his 1956 and 1967 debacles. This is the region that spawned the Palestinian persecution scam and which convinced its masses that Israel was behind the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers.

By such fanciful yardsticks, it's no stretch for unanimously reelected Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) to claim that he honors his undertakings to eradicate terror while making cozy affable deals with it and glorifying its perpetrators as role models to be emulated by the youths educated in his schools, indoctrinated by his media and preached to in his mosques.

His proven penchant for duplicity makes Abbas eminently worthy of the mantle of his predecessor at the PA helm, Yasser Arafat. Abbas assiduously toes Arafat's footsteps. This can be gleaned from the testimony of Muhammad Dahlan, Arafat's longtime sidekick who, like his boss, carefully cultivated a reputation for ostensible moderation. Singing Arafat's praises on a recent interview broadcast from Ramallah on PATV, Dahlan took pains to extol Arafat for "having never turned his back on the armed struggle" against Israel, his lip service to the Oslo process notwithstanding.

Arafat had condemned terror attacks "during daytime, but did the honorable thing at night," Dahlan stressed in his audience's own Arabic idiom. Proficient in their milieu's nuances, Dahlan's listeners understood that "the honorable thing" meant fostering terror and that "at night" meant surreptitiously. In other words, Dahlan profusely praised Arafat for saying one thing upfront while doing the precise opposite behind the backs of the international community and his peace partners.

NO LESS adept at subterfuge, Abbas postures as Israel's hapless victim. His heart is artlessly in the right place. He seeks to do the right thing - which he would sincerely do were it not for those obstructionist Israelis. The watching world voluntarily falls for Abbas's fabrications and encouragingly promotes the PA figurehead's pose. Seemingly in the enlightened vanguard of the global good-guy brigade, Abbas convinces willingly gullible saps that he substantially differs from Hamas warlords.

When there's nobody else to appoint as an interlocutor, it's facile to pretend that the supposed lesser evil is humanity's great hope for the greater good. After all, Abbas respectfully promises on every occasion to quell incitement within his latifundia, for example.

That's why no big deal was made anywhere of Abbas's choices last year to receive the PLO's highest medal of heroism, the Al-Kuds Mark of Honor. Five women - all behind Israeli bars - were named as "a humanitarian gesture," geared to highlight their "sacrifice and suffering as Israel's captives, to raise their morale and pay tribute to them."
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