Posted Oct 14, 2015 by Michael L. Brown
The scene is shocking. A Palestinian teenager lies on the ground bleeding from the head, looking terrified, as Israeli soldiers stand around him. A passerby shouts out angrily, wishing for him to die. And Palestinian media fills in the details: He was shot in cold blood by the Israelis then denied medical attention until he died. He is now being hailed as a martyr. That is the popular narrative being spread on social media. The facts are that this teenager, himself just 13, attacked a 13-year-old Israeli boy riding his bike, stabbing him with a knife, at which point he was shot by Israeli forces, then brought to a hospital where he was treated. He is alive, not dead. He tried to kill an innocent Israeli and was shot as a result. He was not “executed,” as some reports claimed. He is an attempted murderer, not a martyr. Welcome to the world of Palestinian propaganda. In 2001, Izz Al-Din Al-Masri “detonated himself in a Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem, killing 15, 7 of them children. 5 members of one family were killed in the attack.” For these murderous acts, he was honored by the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, and when his body was transferred to the PA last year, “both the PA and Hamas took the opportunity to honor the murderer once again. Reporting from the official military funeral, PA TV News called him a ‘Martyr,’ the highest religious level a Muslim can reach.” Already in 2001, within months of the bombing, “Palestinian university students at the An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus created an exhibition celebrating the first anniversary of the Second Intifada. The exhibit’s main attraction was a room-sized re-enactment of the bombing at Sbarro. The installation featured broken furniture splattered with fake blood and human body parts. The entrance to the exhibition was illustrated with a mural depicting the bombing.” The exhibit was eventually shut down by Yasser Arafat. Even for him, this was not politically correct. But this has been the tragic pattern, repeated over and again: A Palestinian carries out a murderous act against innocent men, women, and children and is hailed by state TV and official media as a hero (or heroine), as an example to follow, as a martyr. Instead, these terrorists should be condemned as murderers. In 2010, Prime Minister Netanyahu slammed the PA for naming a street after “an infamous Hamas arch-terrorist,” the bomb maker Yihyeh Ayyash, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis and apparently assassinated by Israel in 1996. Netanyahu said that, "Right next to a Presidential compound in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority has named a street after a terrorist who murdered hundreds of innocent Israeli men, women and children,” calling it an “outrageous glorification of terrorism.” Weeks earlier, “the PA cancelled a ceremony, ahead of a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, at which a square in Ramallah was to have been named for Dalal al-Mughrabi, a terrorist who killed 38 Israelis in the so-called Coastal Road massacre of 1978.” Not far from where I live, there are major thoroughfares named after Martin Luther King and Billy Graham. Can you imagine what kind of society would names their highways after mass murderers? In 2013, after Israel released 26 imprisoned terrorists as a negotiating concession with the PA, President Mahmoud Abbas said, “We welcome our brothers the heroes coming from behind the bars to a world of freedom and liberty.” Among the “heroes” were “Kassem Hzem Shabir, who murdered Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Rotenberg with an axe; Issa Abed Rabo, who murdered Israeli students Revital Seri and Ron Levy near a monastery south of Jerusalem in 1984; and Rahman Abdel Hajj, who stabbed to death Genia Friedman as she was walking with her father and friends in 1992.” Is it any wonder that little Palestinian children sing songs and recite poems – some of them which they wrote themselves – expressing their desire to follow in the footsteps of these “heroes” and “martyrs”? Or that a children’s program on Hamas state TV – and I mean for little children – features a bee that encourages the kids to kill the Jews? It is true that there are Jews who celebrate the memory of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded another 125, and it is true that there are Jews who praise Yishai Schlissel, who stabbed three participants of a gay pride rally in Jerusalem in 2005 and then, immediately after his release from prison, stabbed 6 more at a similar rally this past July. But these acts – and individuals – are universally condemned by Israel’s leadership and by the vast majority of the populace, and it would be unthinkable – no, it would be downright inconceivable – to imagine that Israel would name a street after either of them. This remains a fundamental difference between the two cultures, reminding us that a natural peace solution (as opposed to a supernatural peace solution) is all but impossible. We should also pity these Palestinians who are raised in an environment so saturated with hate-filled propaganda. In a very different way, they are victims as well, victims of a corrupt and exploitative leadership which does them more harm than good. Those who pray for Israel should pray for them too.

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