Leo Rennert
See if you can guess what the following events have in common:
--June 16--Mahmoud Abbas's official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper attacks Judaism as a "distorted, corrupted, falsified religion." Jews are "evil." Creation of Israel a "malignant, cancerous growth."
--Jun 9--Mahmoud Abbas's PA TV --"If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem" was a Crusader expression "usurped by the Zionists." The expression actually appears in a Hebrew psalm dating back to the Babylonian exile -- some 1,500 years before the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land
June 5--Hafez Barghouti, the editor-in-chief of Mahmoud Abbas's daily newspaper writes about the enthusiastic reception Prime Minister Netnayahu received during his address to a joint session of Congress. The lawmakers were "riff raff" with "idiotic manners" who engaged in "shameful standing ovations." They stood applauding as if they had "hemorrhoids and Zionist impaling stakes on their backsides."
May 27--Mahmoud Asbbs's PA daily: "Jews have no connection to the Palestinian-Arab land." A thousand-year Jewish presence is "nothing more than invention and falsification."
May 14--Mahmoud Abbas, in an address to a Palestinian audience --When Jews claim 3,000-year ties to the land, "we say that the nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7,000-year history BCE. Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history."
May 13--A song on Mahmoud Abbas's PA TV claims that "Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, Nazareth, Ramle, Lod, Jerusalem, Safed are ours." The song's narrative essentially wipes Israel.off the map.
May 3--Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the terrorist wing of Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah politcal party, mourns Bin Laden. He died a "shadid" (martyr). His death "will not deter the resistance fighters from the path of jihad."
If you say that these Palestinian declarations have a common theme of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incitement, with gross distortion of history to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in the Holy Land, along with an agenda for a ''one-state" solution from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, resulting in the total elimination of the Jewish state, you are partially correct. If you guess that Abbas plays a duplicitous game, spewing hateful anti-Israel incitement when speaking in Arabic to his own people, while cultivating a "moderate," peace-loving image to the outside world, you're also partially correction.
Along with these common threads, there is another very telling and important one -- None of this was reported by the Washington Post. It is, however, available on the website of a media-monitoring group, Palestinian Media Watch, www.pmw.org.il
But even as the Post maintains a total silence about Abbas's real beliefs and intentions that totally disqualify him as a peace partner, the Post runs the following AP story in its June 25 edition under a headline reading: "Netanyahu's son disparages Muslims"
The AP article reports that Netanyahu's 19-year-old son -- a military spokesman -- "posted derisive comments about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page, drawing a slap on the wrist from his superiors."
It turns out that the younger Netanyahu, prompted by a Palestinian attack on a West Bank settlement that resulted in the deaths of five members of an Israeli family, posted that Muslims "celebrate hate and death" and that "terror has a religion and it is Islam."
The comments of Bibi's son were removed from the Facebook page within two hours of a request by an Israeli newspapers for a response from the prime minister.
So here we have some defamatory comments about Arabs and Islam not by Netanyahu mind you, but by his son that Post editors nevertheless deem sufficiently newsworth to warrant comverage in their World News digest. But when a steady stream of far more hateful vitriol and incitement is perpetrated not by an Abbas offspring but by Abbas himself and the media under his control, the Post averts its eyes and remains totally silent.
My beef is not with the AP story about the comments made by Bibi's son. My beef is with the Post's double standard -- that it uses a sharp aggressive lens when it reports on Israel, but switches to a sympathetic, benign, soft-color lens when it deals -- or fails to deal -- with what the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas is really up to.
This is selective, biased reporting of the worst kind.
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