Latest PSR Polls: What do the Palestinian Arabs want? What do they believe? What do they think? - by Arnold Roth

...There is literally no possibility of a deeply split society (which is what the Palestinian Arabs surely have) even starting the process of adjusting their expectations towards the compromise that peace necessarily demands. That will remain true so long as the leadership is steeped in personal and institutional corruption, a total unwilling to surrender power or even submit to elections and obsessively focused on the need for outsiders - the UN agencies in general and UNRWA in particular - to solve Palestinian Arabs' economic and development problems. Though they never seem to be asked about this by pollsters, what will it take for ordinary Palestinian Arabs to see that their collective destiny depends on them and their own initiatives?

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
16 July '18..

The last time we addressed the important matter of Palestinian Arab opinion polls ["04-Apr-18: Here's (one view of) what the Palestinian Arabs want"] we started this way:

Palestinian Arab polls of Palestinian Arab opinion can be valuable tools for understanding what they think at any given time. And no less importantly, how accurate the assessments of what they want for the future are. And to be blunt about this, they're invariably more valuable by far than media guesses about what the Palestinian Arabs think and want. Claims are made freely and often about Palestinian Arab aspirations. Very often, though, the data tell a story that's at total variance from what's being claimed about them. That's why we have chosen from time to time to publicize here the results of opinion polls conducted by relatively respected organizations within Palestinian Arab society.

We stand by every word of that.

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) has just posted the findings of its latest opinion poll conducted in "the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 25 June and 1 July 2018". PSR is headed by a respected professional, Dr. Khalil Shikaki. We know him only by his work and reputation; we have no personal connection. We have reported on his organization's past findings at intervals over the past four years...

The latest PSR Public Opinion Poll is Number 68 and was released yesterday. It's based on a survey sample of 2,150 adults interviewed face to face in 127 randomly selected locations. Margin of error is 2.5%. Some of the findings that caught our attention:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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They admit that anti-Trump protests were a bust - but you'll never guess who the Palestinians blame! - by Elder of Ziyon

...Palestinian Arabs would be far better served with jobs that actually contributed something to their society. NGO jobs do not give the same sense of pride that one gets from manufacturing or computer programming. But in the medium term, the desire to make money is a huge incentive in how Palestinians act. Which is the major reason why the PLO pays salaries to terrorists and their families.

Elder of Ziyon..
19 March '18..

Palestine Today admits that the anti-Trump protests and "days of rage" that followed the announcement of the US move of the Israel embassy to Jerusalem never reached any serious levels.

But you'll never guess who they say is to blame for that.

The article on the negative effect that NGOs have on Palestinian society that I've noted in the past couple of days, written for an Islamic Jihad newspaper, adds a very Palestinian twist:

The role of the Palestinian Authority in the field of security coordination and economic policies, as well as harsh Israeli measures, are usually used to understand the low frequency of confrontations in the occupied West Bank. However, the issue of foreign-funded institutions (NGOs), which have been deployed in the Palestinian areas since the beginning of the 1990s is no less a dangerous fasctor. Although it represents a source of income for thousands of Palestinians, in light of unemployment and poor economic conditions, these NGOs are subject to the conditions of the foreign financier, including the signing of a "document of renunciation of resistance and non-incitement" or rejection of "anti-Israel" activities.

...Little by little, a large number [of our young people] found themselves involved in these institutions controlled by the foreigner through the terms of funding, which provided the Israeli enemy with great services, which is to neutralize large numbers of young people from the arena of conflict with him, and their preoccupation with these projects. As a result, there is... a great void and a rift between the factions and the Palestinian society.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The pride of Palestinian Arab society: Monstrous mothers, sacrificed children

..In a speech delivered on November 7, 2015, she focused on what she termed the "uniqueness" of Palestinian women which differentiates her from the women of the world, as [only] she receives the news of her son's martyrdom with cries of joy.

Dr Al-Agha, the minister so proud of Palestinian
Arab mothers' cries of joy [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
01 December '15..

Some background to what's happening:

We posted earlier today (Tuesday) about the fact that three of today's crop of Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attacks were done by women.

Earlier still, this morning, we noted that yet again a knifing attacker turns out to be a child of sixteen (he was shot dead in the attempt).

Last Thursday, we wrote about how many of the "martyrs" and assorted other stabbers are children of 15, 14, 13, 12 and 11.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the government that is supposed to look after these women and children, praises their savagery and their deaths to the skies. As we wrote here an hour ago, this venal, power-drunk kleptocrat says he blesses "every drop of blood... spilled for Jerusalem". It's "clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah", this thug in a suit says to his people - in Arabic, but never in English. "Every martyr (the Arabic word is shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah..."

The depravity of the society over which this awful person presides was on display last week in another excellent Palestinian Media Watch analysis. It focuses on a speech made by the PA government's Minister for Women's Affairs, Haifa Al-Agha. As we review the barbarism this woman is busy marketing to her public, keep in mind (as Wikipedia discloses) that this disturbed politician is a graduate of Oklahoma State University where she earned a PhD in Educational Studies in 1991. And though she serves the Fatah-controlled "moderate" PA today, there was a time when she was a Hamas functionary, a minister in its Gaza-centred Islamist regime.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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Luxury Alongside Poverty: The Other Side of the West Bank Palestinian Story

In communities throughout the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, a surprising degree of luxury exists alongside the poverty. This study includes “A Photo Album of Palestinian Luxury in the West Bank,” offering a more complete picture of living standards there. The truth is that alongside the slums of the old refugee camps, which the Palestinian government has done little to rehabilitate, a parallel Palestinian society is emerging.

Researchers: Yael Kaplan, Ryan Hartney, and Andrew Felsenthal..
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs..
05 November '15..






...The Other Side of the West Bank Palestinian Story

There is more to this story, a side often overlooked. In communities throughout the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, a surprising degree of luxury exists alongside the poverty. After receiving billions of dollars in Western aid over many decades, major improvements are visible in the standard of living in the West Bank, as seen in newly-constructed buildings, late-model cars, and luxury items.

This study offers an often overlooked window into life in the Palestinian Authority. The empirical data, together with the photographic evidence sourced here, provide a more complete picture of living standards in the West Bank. The truth is that alongside the slums of the old refugee camps, which the Palestinian government has done little to rehabilitate, a parallel Palestinian society is emerging.

Marwan Asmar, a Jordan-based journalist with a PhD in political science from Leeds University in the UK, described this phenomenon upon returning to the West Bank after 30 years:

There has been a total transformation since I was last in Howara in the West Bank in 1985. One can see a buzz of activity at the shops, restaurants, offices and cafes. This wasn’t the sleepy village I saw long ago. Buildings, villas, mosques and rest areas have been constructed everywhere. There is even a swimming pool.

This was certainly not the picture I had in mind. This was not the picture the media presents – of Palestinians surviving on daily wages of $2 as pointed out by the World Bank, of high unemployment and pockets of poverty. The people I spoke to here said many worked as laborers in Israel and were paid high daily wages. This is how they could build their houses, they told me.

(Click here to read the full study)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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Fatah Day - Celebrating Five Decades of Violence and Bloodshed

...You can tell a lot about people by what they choose to celebrate, by the events of their collective past which they insist on highlighting and passing along to future generations. The fact that the Palestinian leadership, and much of Palestinian society, choose publicly to commemorate the birth of a terrorist organization, and its first attack on Israel, speaks volumes about the nature of their commitment to peace.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
05 January '15..

On December 31, the Palestinians provided yet another compelling example of why peace in the Middle East remains so stubbornly elusive.

Even as much of the world was preparing to celebrate the onset of 2015, Palestinian chairman Mahmoud Abbas presided over a ceremony in Ramallah with a decidedly less laudable goal: commemorating the 50th anniversary of Fatah's first terrorist attack against Israel.

That's right. The man who speaks to Western leaders and audiences about the need for reconciliation, the leader who visits foreign capitals and convenes press conferences to pose as a proponent of peace, spent his day celebrating five decades of violence and bloodshed.

And yet much of the international community still can't seem to understand why Israel won't give in to Abbas's demands for a state.

A quick history lesson: back on January 1, 1965, a group of Fatah terrorists infiltrated into Israel and placed an explosive device next to the national water carrier in an attempt to sabotage it. Fortunately, however, the bomb failed to explode.

Subsequently, Fatah began to carry out increasingly violent attacks against the Jewish state, including planting explosives on the railroad tracks to Jerusalem on July 5, 1965, and blowing up an Israeli home in Moshav Givat Yeshayahu, near Beit Shemesh, on November 7 of that year.

The group went on to dominate the Palestine Liberation Organization, and became the lead terrorist organization, carrying out some of the most horrific anti-Israel attacks. These included the assault on the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the March 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 21 Israelis were murdered after a bus was hijacked on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road, and countless others.

Ever since, Palestinians have looked back on January 1 as a watershed moment, commemorating the event annually. And this year was no exception.

In Bethlehem, dozens of Fatah members held a march which culminated in a flag-burning ceremony at which the national colors of the US, Israel and Great Britain were all set alight.

For Palestinians, suffering and sympathy for suffering is a zero-sum game.

...If the Palestinians aren't lucky enough to have an enemy engaged in genocide (and they aren't), they can at least make odious comparisons between Nazis and Jews on one hand, and Jews and Palestinians on the other.

Shoshana Bryen..
American Thinker..
30 April '14..

For Palestinians, suffering -- and sympathy for suffering -- is a zero-sum game. Sympathy used up on the Holocaust means less for Palestinians in the territories. Even among Palestinian groups, while thousands suffer and die in Syria -- most heinously starved in the Yarmouk refugee camp -- Israelis joined relief efforts while Abu Mazen and Ismail Haniya have said hardly a word, lest it detract from the sympathy needed to support Fatah and Hamas.

What accounts for Abu Mazen's denunciation of the Holocaust as "the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era"? First, it was designed to keep the sympathies of Secretary Kerry. It worked; although Abbas has done everything he could think of to scuttle the "peace talks," Kerry still sees hope -- and money -- in the pipeline. Second, it was to continue to appropriate Jewish history and Jewish suffering for the purpose of increasing sympathy for the Palestinians.

If the Palestinians aren't lucky enough to have an enemy engaged in genocide (and they aren't), they can at least make odious comparisons between Nazis and Jews on one hand, and Jews and Palestinians on the other.

Abbas is not, contrary to conventional wisdom, the only -- or even one of very few -- Arab leaders who have called the Holocaust what it is. And one of the things it is for Palestinians, is over. It is neither difficult nor forbidden for Palestinians to be sorry that people in some other time and some other space died, with two important provisos:

1. Jewish suffering in the Holocaust (then) must be made comparable to Palestinian suffering in the territories (now). Jews were victims of the Nazis and now the Palestinians are victims of the Jews. It is forbidden to study the Holocaust with an eye toward understanding the Jewish people. Last week, 27 Palestinian students paying a respectful visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the company of a Palestinian professor caused a ruckus at home. The visit was called "treasonous" by Palestinians and denounced by its sponsoring university for fear that students would discover sympathy for Jews.

But the students were well-trained before they got there. While they admitted they found sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, the comparison to Palestinian life today was high on their minds -- and on the pain-scale, Jewish suffering has nothing on Palestinian suffering. “It was confusing, because you can’t understand in three or four days that much pain -- millions … killed in the gas [chambers],” said one female student. "They saw echoes of their own suffering.' 'At the same time, as a Palestinian, I started to compare it or connect it to the conflict here. It’s a mixed feeling,' says Hani Smirat, a student at Al Quds. 'I need to feel as a human that what happened with Jews is not acceptable, and the other feeling that I face the same situation. So it’s a conflict between my story and the other story.'”

Too bad the stories are not, in fact, comparable.

New York Times, Who Exactly is Demonizing?

Will the Times be publishing a story going into tremendous detail about the trials and tribulations of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and children left behind by those, old and young, murdered by Palestinian terrorists? Are articles dedicated to the humanization of these Israeli victims off-bounds to Times journalists, lest they themselves become complicit in Israeli "demonizing" of Palestinian murderers?

Tamar Sternthal..
CAMERA Snapshots..
31 March '14..

The New York Times coverage today of released Palestinian prisoners embodies all that is wrong with Times coverage of Israel and the Palestinians ("Remaking a Life, After Years in an Israeli Prison,").

About Muqdad Salah, released seven months ago after serving 24 years for the murder of 72-year-old Holocaust survivor Israel Tenenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren writes:

Demonized as terrorists by Israelis and lionized as freedom fighters by Palestinians, prisoners like Mr. Salah have become a flash point in the troubled peace talks . . . (Emphasis added.)

Rudoren has constructed a very neat symmetry in which two sides possess their diametrically opposed perceptions, valid or not, of the Palestinian who murdered a 72-year-old security guard.

Yes, Palestinians do lionize murderers of innocent civilians like Salah and others as "freedom fighters." But when Israelis regard the murderer of an elderly man for nationalistic reasons as a "terrorist," is this "demonization"? Or is it just calling it like it is?

Who Would've Thought? Palestinians Condemned for Visiting Nazi Death Camps

..."We have politicized everything except for the embezzlement of public funds. Is it okay steal millions of dollars from the people but not okay to have an academic study mission?" — Reader, Al Quds.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
31 March '14..

A visit by Palestinian students to Nazi death camps has stirred controversy among Palestinians, with some condemning it as a form of "normalization" with Israel.

Some 30 Palestinian students from Al-Quds University and Bir Zeit University in the West Bank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau last week to learn about the Holocaust.

The visit is being led by Mohammed Dajani, professor of American Studies at Al-Quds University, who also heads the Wasatia movement of moderate Islam.

The visit to the Nazi camps has angered some Palestinians, prompting Al-Quds University to distance itself from the tour. The university and its outgoing president, Sari Nusseibeh, had often been criticized for promoting "normalization" with Israel.

In a statement, Al-Quds University announced that it had nothing to do with the Auschwitz-Birkenau visit.

The university said that this was a private visit by Professor Dajani and the students. "They do not represent the university," the statement said. "Professor Dajani is on leave and was not entrusted by the university [to arrange the visit]."

Al-Quds University went on to emphasize that it remains committed to a 2009 decision by its administration to cut off all ties with Israeli universities.

The Palestinian students travelled to the Nazi death camps as part of a joint program on "Reconciliation and Conflict Resolution" with the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, and Ben-Gurion University in the Negev.

As soon as "anti-normalization" activists learned about the visit, they launched a scathing attack on the professor and students on social media.

"I don't understand how the [Palestinian] students accept normalization [with Israel]," wrote a Palestinian journalist from Ramallah on his Facebook page. "This professor is the king of kings of normalization."

The leading Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, which reported about the controversial visit, triggered a debate among readers about the effectiveness of such tours.

The paper later had to delete some reader responses that accused the professor of treason and collaboration.

Walking Around Free, Enjoying Life and the Chances of Peace

...He’s now the picture of a successful Palestinian, but he’s got a couple of problems. One is that the no-show salary of $1,800 a month he’s collecting from the PA (which gave him $100,000 at his release) isn’t enough to live the life of ease he craves. The other is that his travel is restricted. And oh, yes: some Israelis are really mad about the fact that a terrorist with blood on his hands like Salah is walking around free and enjoying life.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
30 March '14..

The New York Times did a valuable public service today by profiling the life of Muqdad Salah. But the story, which demonstrated how unlikely peace between Israelis and the Palestinians is, wasn’t intended as an indictment of Palestinian society. Salah, 47, is, as the Times reported, doing his best to make up for lost time. You see, he lost 20 years of his life to a prison sentence in an Israeli jail from which he was liberated last year. To help ease his transition back to society, the resident of Burqa in the West Bank got a generous settlement from the Palestinian Authority, an honorary rank of brigadier general in the PA military, and praise from his neighbors and fellow Palestinians. In the seven months since he got out, he has married a much younger woman, remodeled a family home, and bought a business. He’s now the picture of a successful Palestinian, but he’s got a couple of problems. One is that the no-show salary of $1,800 a month he’s collecting from the PA (which gave him $100,000 at his release) isn’t enough to live the life of ease he craves. The other is that his travel is restricted. And oh, yes: some Israelis are really mad about the fact that a terrorist with blood on his hands like Salah is walking around free and enjoying life.

Although his profile would seem to be similar to the stories of those Americans who were wrongly convicted of murder but who are then released many years later because the courts have discovered that they are actually innocent, Salah wasn’t sprung from jail because of new DNA evidence or a witness who has recanted their testimony. There’s no doubt that it was he who took an iron bar and struck a 72-year-old Holocaust survivor over the head and murdered him in cold blood in 1993. The only change in the story is that while Salah claimed at his trial that he killed Israel Tenenbaum while he was sleeping, now he boasts that he had a grudge against the aged hotel security guard and killed him while he was awake.

Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren does a good job of amassing a lot of interesting detail about Salah’s life after prison and the way he and the dozens of other Palestinian terrorists who were released last year as part of the price Israel paid to get PA leader Mahmoud Abbas to return to peace negotiations. But she gives away the game when she attempts to strike a note of Olympian objectivity about the story when she notes that they have been “demonized as terrorists by Israelis and lionized as freedom fighters by Palestinians” but are just ordinary guys looking to “build apartments or start businesses, searching for wives and struggling to start families.” The problem here is not that these ordinary people are caught in the middle of a national struggle in which both sides distort the meaning of their actions. To the contrary, that most Palestinians consider a guy who brutally killed an elderly Jew is a hero worthy of a public subsidy (actually paid for by the PA’s foreign donors) tells us all we need to know about the chances for peace.

Man's body, 'withheld' 'retrieved', and what it reveals about the society that buries it

...while it's one thing to have a nation infested with individuals driven by the passion to murder defenseless others, it's another to celebrate the savagery of their terrorism as exemplifications of heroism and national greatness.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
10 February '14..

If a person were incredibly naive, the report below might sound like a kind of lost-and-found happy ending space filler. It's not, and we're not.

The story comes from the so-called "independent" Palestinian Arab news channel, Ma'an News Agency (principally funded by official Danish and Netherlands sources) which published it on its website late last night, Sunday, under the header "Israel returns body of man killed 12 years earlier". The full text of the report follows:

RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Israel on Sunday evening delivered the remains of Ahmad Ayid Faqih after years of withholding them from Faqih's family. A committee to retrieve remains of Palestinians held by Israel said Israeli authorities delivered the body after popular and legal pressure in the last few hours after it was announced that the delivery of the body was delayed. The campaign called for Palestinians to participate in Faqih’s funeral in his hometown of Dura, which will start with a military march in Hebron at 10 a.m.

That's all they want us to know.

But this Ahmad Ayid Faqih, the one whose body was "withheld" for a dozen years for undisclosed reasons and then "retrieved", is an individual whose name we know. He was one of two heavily-armed, blood-lusting thugs who burst into a post-high school Yeshiva academy in the small community of Otniel, south of Hevron, on the night of December 27, 2002, intending to carry out a massacre of young Jews and partly succeeding.

(Continue)

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Leibler - On distinguishing between good and evil

Palestinian children
recreate Ramallah lynch

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
27 October '11

http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=3698



Good deeds and the spurning of evil preoccupied us throughout the Days of Awe and the festival period, climaxing with the redemption of Gilad Schalit.

We live in times when concepts such as good and evil are deliberately blurred. For example, the mass murder of Norwegians in July by a demented neo-Nazi psychopath – a diabolically evil act – was globally exploited by far-left and Muslim groups to suppress legitimate condemnation or designation of extremist Islamic behavior as evil, even accusing critics of inciting mass murder.

Yet throughout the Arab world we are now witnessing the sickening elevation to hero status of some of the world’s most demented killers.

This is hardly a new phenomenon.

Can you recall the last time you had a serious discussion in which the word “evil” was mentioned? It’s unlikely, because employing such a term today is often regarded as politically incorrect and likely to lead to accusations of bias or bigotry.

During World War II, that the Nazis were evil was never in dispute. That knowledge did not imply that the Allies were pure. The Versailles settlement was unjust. Mistakes were made. There were undoubtedly degenerates in our ranks who committed crimes, and we were certainly conscious of the moral shortcomings of our Soviet allies.

But we unequivocally recognized that the Nazis represented evil incarnate and were willing to stake our lives in the struggle against the forces of darkness which sought to undermine freedom and civilization.

OVER THE past half-century, as post-modernism enveloped the new Europe, conflicts became increasingly viewed from the perspective of moral equivalency. Today, it is considered bigoted to define religious or nationalist crimes as evil.

Belzberg - Words of truth amidst a world of lies

Marc Belzberg
JPost
Op-Ed Contributor
18 October '11

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=242348

The killers we released are not deviants of Palestinian society. Rather, they are society itself.

Bassam Nasser’s op-ed in yesterday’s paper is a must read for every citizen of the world.

Nothing could better illustrate the truth about the Palestinian society of Gaza.

Nasser argues that it’s just not fair that we Israelis view the prisoners released in exchange for Gilad Schalit as terrorist murderers. After all, everyone in Gaza worships and idolizes them. We should understand that they are heroes, a source of pride and honor to their parents and families, the most eligible bachelors desired by every young Palestinian woman. Political and social organizations will seek out the released killers to advance their names and their agendas. They are not deviants of society, but rather society itself. They are lawyers, doctors, men and women, young and old, professors and illiterates.

The picture he so proudly paints of Palestinian society, glaringly clarifies to all that the leaders of Gaza and its citizenry as a whole comprise one of the most despicable and detestable societies in the history of man.No Hollywood studio has ever created a villain as evil as the likes of Khaled Mashaal, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or Hassan Nassrallah.

No Hollywood writer has ever written a script about an entire society of evil, millions of devout clones of a murderous, deviant ideology and eschatology.

The reality of Gaza today, and most of the Arab world, is too strange for fiction.

If you don’t believe me, take a five-minute stroll past the Hass Promenade in Jerusalem, one of the city’s most popular tourist stops, and you will witness a nearly unprecedented celebration in honor of the release 1,000 of the most despicable human beings ever born. Their supporters are dancing on cars, galloping through the streets on horses, shouting and screaming for joy. For what? To welcome the woman who planned and drove the suicide bomber to Sbarro and murdered 15 young Jews and wounded over 100, for the “crime” of eating pizza in downtown Jerusalem. Other idols of their society include the person who murdered the Dickstein parents and their nine-year-old son, Shuvael, leaving behind eight orphans, aged one-to-17 years old.

The Real Meaning of the Murders in Israel

Guy Millière
Hudson New York
06 April '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2023/murders-in-israel


So many tragedies and disruptions have fallen on Japan and the Middle East in recent weeks, a singular event went almost unnoticed: the extermination of a Jewish family in Itamar, Samaria.

Although this event could seem insignificant -- there were only five victims -- it was nevertheless indicative of what is at stake in the Middle East, and how the world views it.

Even though this was not the first time that Palestinians killed Israelis Jews only because they were Jews, it was the first time in years that murderers sought to kill an entire family, including a three month old baby, using butcher knives, with barbaric and blatant savagery.

It was also the first time that the Israeli government chose to release grisly crime scene photos of the slain.

Other photos were shown the same day of Palestinians celebrating, throwing candy up in the air, at the news of the murders.

Israeli officials might have thought that the disclosure of their nightmarish images would create a shock; that at least some people in the Western world would begin to comprehend the horror and cruelty under the threat of which Israeli Jews constantly live.

Israeli officials might have thought questions would be asked, such as:

What kind of society produces such an inversion of values -- not only urging people to slit the throats of babies, but then, instead of condemning that, treating the murderers as heroes and celebrating what they did?

How could a society with such a taste for blood, that the Palestinian leadership encourages every hour of every day, exist peacefully next to a democratic society?

More urgently: How could anyone even consider giving leaders with such values a "Palestinians State" – or any state?

Killing is not only tolerated in the "moderate" Palestinian Authority, it is cultivated there by the leaders, the media, the teachers, soccer stadiums, and summer camps, day in day out. For years, the so-called "moderates" "condemn violence" one minute, and urge it the next, in the most high-pressured way on its government-controlled television, newspapers, textbooks, and even crossword puzzles – all thanks to the bighearted taxpayers of the United States and Europe [for an avalanche of all of this, see www.palwatch.org].

Ending “the Occupation” Is Not a Palestinian Priority

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
16 November '10

In yesterday’s post, I explained why a settlement freeze decreases Palestinian motivation to make a deal by ensuring that foot-dragging entails no price. But conventional wisdom on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would counter that this argument has an obvious flaw. Surely, its advocates would retort, Palestinians already have the strongest of all possible motivations to sign a deal quickly — their burning desire to end the hated occupation?

In fact, no. As a new poll by the Ramallah-based Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre reveals, the occupation is nowhere near the top of ordinary Palestinians’ priority list — and neither are the settlements or Jerusalem.

The number-one concern for ordinary Palestinians is the economy, cited by a plurality of 22.4 percent. In second place is Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, at 18 percent. The hated occupation was relegated to third place, with 15.5 percent, followed by “the siege on Gaza” (9.4 percent). The settlements and Jerusalem trailed far behind, at 6.6 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively.

This means that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has no incentive to make any kind of deal because ordinary Palestinians don’t care enough about ending “the occupation” to make them willing to swallow the concessions a deal will entail.

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