Israeli media watchdog Itamar Marcus makes a career of following
the Palestinian press. His website
provides timely and accurate translations of the Arabic language
broadcasts and publications that are watched and read by the
Palestinian public on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the
Gaza Strip. It’s well worth our while as Americans to pay more
attention to what the so-called Palestinian Liberation Organization
(PLO) is doing. That’s because we American taxpayers are footing
the bill for much of it. President Obama and Sec. Hillary Clinton
have promised $900 million in U.S. funds to the PLO, our supposed
“peace partners” in the latest round of Mideast peace talks.
One story is typical of the PLO approach to peace. Late
last year, a 45-year-old rabbi, father of seven, was ambushed in
his car by four members of the Palestinian Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) located three of the killers and
killed them.
Here’s what our peace partner, the PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas,
did then:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared the killers “Shahids”
(holy Martyrs) and sent his personal emissary to visit the
families:
Secretary General of the President’s Office, Tayeb Abd
Al-Rahim, conveyed condolences on behalf of President Mahmoud Abbas
to the residents of Nablus and to the families of the three Shahids
[Martyrs] for the Martyrdom of their sons, who were assassinated by
Israeli occupation forces yesterday morning. He conveyed to the
fighting families letters of condolences from the President [Abbas]
and updated them as to [Abbas’s] decision to declare them as
Shahids [Martyrs] of the Palestinian revolution…”
Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim: “Without doubt, what the
[Israeli] occupation authorities have carried out is a wild and
barbaric act and a deliberate, malicious assassination in cold
blood.
Our tax dollars at work. Mahmoud Abbas and Tayeb Abd
Al-Rahim are part of the notoriously corrupt organization that runs
the West Bank. It’s called the Palestinian Authority, but it
remains to be seen how much authority it actually has. Abbas has
declined to hold scheduled elections, fearing that Hamas, which won
overwhelmingly in Gaza, would win on the West Bank, too. So, with
U.S. financial and diplomatic support, Abbas clings to
power.
He’s a regular and honored visitor to the Obama White
House. This is a man whose entire career was made as faithful
lieutenant to Yasser Arafat. Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize for
his famed “handshake” with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in
a deal brokered by then-President Bill Clinton. Arafat is the one
who invented airline hijacking for terror purposes. Soon after
shaking hands with Rabin, Arafat was up to his old
tricks.
He instigated yet another of his intifadas —
uprisings — sparked by Arab teenagers throwing stones, with deadly
accuracy, at Israeli soldiers. If the Arab boys are shot and killed
by the IDF soldiers defending themselves — so much the better.
Abbas has more “martyrs” to celebrate and the PLO gets some
favorable TV coverage in the credulous Western media.
The United States has been pursuing a phantom for more
than twenty years. We have bought into the fiction that the
Arafat-Abbas clique — this so-called Palestinian Authority— is
something other than what it is: a murderous and corrupt gang of
thugs.
The errors in U.S. foreign policy in this region are
bipartisan. It was the first Bush administration that sought to
extend an olive branch and an open hand of friendship to the
Arafat-Abbas gang in 1989. We were told then that if the PLO would
just give up its campaign of terrorism against the Israelis,
acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, then the United States
would help the impoverished Palestinian people with development
funds and sponsor their path to statehood.
The PLO never gave up its plans. To this day, the
destruction of Israel remains a goal of the PLO. The PLO “leaders”
can readily tell us they renounce terrorism because they don’t
consider the murder of Israeli citizens — in pizza parlors, in
schools, in hospitals — to be terrorism. They call it
resistance and they call those who are killed on these
strikes shahids —
martyrs.
It’s time for Americans to take a cold look at what twenty
years of takkiya — the Arabic word for deception — have
gotten us. President Reagan left office in 1989. He spoke about our
dealings with the then-Soviet Union. He hoped for peace, and he
said, “Trust, but verify.” He said one more thing we need to apply
to our role in the Mideast: “Don’t be afraid to see what you
see.”
I look at the latest round of bogus peace talks and I see
a discredited PLO boss sitting down to make promises to the
Israelis he has no intention of keeping. If he actually did keep
those promises, he would be murdered by his own cutthroat
followers.
I see American honor stained, American power diminished,
and American money wasted.
What do you see?
