When the messages heard in the Palestinian Arab villages go unreported in the wider world

...That dull, grinding sound you hear in the background? It's the so-called peace-process, about whose actual contours and features (like the hate-filled, violence-friendly pro-jihad message of Mahmoud Abbas and his inner circle) most people know nothing. It's something to bear in mind when the reports of a fourth tranche of murderers, convicted and sentenced but being released from their Israeli cells under relentless US pressure, appear again in the news in the coming weeks.

Abbas' minister of religion and
government-controlled
sermonizing Al-Habbash 

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
15 January '14..

While the rest of us tend to 'hear' only a handful of voices emanating from the Palestinian Authority government - one of the two quarrelsome regimes purporting to speak for the Palestinian Arabs - the citizens living under the yoke of the PA hear many more.

Most of us recognize the name Mahmoud Abbas and more or less the things he stands for: the 'heroism' of those pathetic killers of elderly Jews and unarmed bus passengers, for instance. Some of us may know one or two of the names of PA cabinet ministers [here's a list]. But mention the name Mahmoud Al-Habbash and most observers of events in our neighbourhood will probably just give a shrug.

This is understandable but a shame. Al-Habbash, a Hamas member at an earlier stage in his career, is today a certified PA/Abbas insider, a cabinet minister who is more influential in the villages of the PA regime's fiefdom than most of its other politicians. This is because of what he does for a living: after earlier stints as minister of agriculture and minister of social affairs, he has served as minister of "waqf and religious affairs" since 2009. Or more accurately, one of the two such ministers since Hamas, naturally, has named its own man to the same post.

In a society where religion plays such a deadly important role, the influence of Al-Habbash is tremendous, even if most analysts and reporters are oblivious to it. (The dirty little secret about news reporting on what the PA stands for, wants, does and says is that it is based on the English-language versions of news releases put out by Abbas' bureau and by a handful of media outlets that play nice with the PA. The authentic Arabic-language messages are rarely reported other than by dedicated PA watchers like MEMRI and PMW. The work product of both is routinely ignored by most of the mainstream media most of the time.)

Palestinian Media Watch which specializes in just this kind of thing recently translated into English an Arabic-language press conference [here] in which the minister clarified to the citizenry the scope of his powers:

(Continue)

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