opinion

West turns blind eye to Palestinian incitement

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Why do people find it so difficult to acknowledge Palestinian violence and bigotry against Israel and the Jews?

In April 2018, finally responding to concerns about anti-Israel incitement in Palestinian-Arab schools, the United Kingdom pushed the EU to commission a report on Palestinian textbooks from the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany.

In April last year, the Institute published what it called its “Inception Report.” This, it said, developed a framework for “an academically rigorous review” of “how peace, tolerance and an understanding of the other are incorporated into Palestinian textbooks.”

This initial report, however, was a farce, riddled with so many mistakes that the European Union ditched it. Bafflingly, however, the EU has continued to use the Georg Eckert Institute to finish the project.

Its final report is due out next month. Meanwhile it produced an interim report, which the EU is choosing to keep secret. But Marcus Sheff, chief executive of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, managed to obtain a presentation of this interim report and reports that it is “a comedy of errors from start to finish,”

Sheff says the researchers looked at the wrong textbooks, citing as praiseworthy textbooks used in Israel’s Arab schools — falsely presenting them falsely as part of the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum.

On the basis of this egregious mistake, the researchers have claimed that the Palestinians’ educational materials have been “transformed” for the better.

They make no mention of the vile language and images used in many Palestinian textbooks, such as describing the burning of Jewish bus passengers with Molotov cocktails as a “barbecue party,” or teaching Arabic through a story promoting suicide bombings and illustrated by a Palestinian gun- man shooting Israeli soldiers in a tank.

The incompetence seems hard to credit. Why do people in the West appear to find it so difficult to acknowledge Palestinian hatred and incitement against Israel and the Jews?

Clearly, they resist acknowledging anything that will undermine the narrative on which EU and UK foreign policy has been based for decades — that giving the Palestinian Arabs a state would end the “Middle East conflict.”

They ignore the Palestinians’ repeated calls for Israel’s destruction and support for the murder of Israelis, as well as the grotesque anti-Semitism that pours out of PA-backed preachers, publications and TV.

As painstakingly documented by Palestinian Media Watch and the Middle East Media Research Institute, the PA presents the Jews as possessing inherently evil traits. It regularly describes them as descendants of apes and pigs, treacherous, corrupt and allied with the devil, “thirsty for blood [of gentiles] to please their god.” And so on, and so on.

Palestinian supporters, quick to damn any Western figure suspected of the slightest connection with far-right movements, totally ignore the history of Palestinian Nazism.

In the 1930s, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj-Amin al-Husseini, made a pact with the Nazis and turned the Palestinian Arabs into Hitler’s army in the Middle East.

More than that, as detailed by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz in their book “Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” al-Husseini was no less committed than Hitler to the extermination of the Jews. He pledged to achieve that infernal aim throughout the Middle East and was influential in encouraging Hitler to adopt the specific extermination strategy of the Final Solution.

This still matters today. While the Palestinians in general shouldn’t be tarred with the Nazi brush, Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier, openly draws on the former Grand Mufti for inspiration.

So why are Western progressives so attached to the Palestinian cause that they ignore such evidence of its noxious characteristics?

One answer is the anti-Semitism that courses through the West itself. Another is the realpolitik that has caused Western leaders to cozy up to the Arab world.

There’s a deeper reason. Acknowledging the toxic reality of Palestinian Jew-hatred would up-end the entire moral and political universe that the left has constructed around the narrative of the “oppressive” West and those it has “oppressed.”

The Palestinians have been portrayed as oppressed victims by fiendishly effective propaganda that has rewritten a history of which the left remains almost wholly ignorant.

Moreover, the overriding preoccupation of progressives is never the actual condition of the oppressed for whom their hearts bleed. It is instead how noble and virtuous such support makes them appear, both to themselves and to others.

If they had to acknowledge that the Palestinian cause is inextricably intertwined with murderous anti-Semitism — and that its current leader hero-worships a man who had sought to achieve victory for fascism and the extermination of the Jews — then their entire moral and political universe would implode.

This is also why the same kind of people refuse to acknowledge the anti-white, anti-Jew, revolutionary agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement, telling themselves instead that it’s a noble campaign against racism.

When incontrovertible facts about Palestinian anti-Semitism or BLM are pointed out, not only do progressives deny this noxious agenda, but they smear as racist anyone who dares point out these inconvenient truths.

That’s because progressives believe they stand for everything that’s good in the world. So anyone challenging their position is assumed to be bad.

This is why support for the Palestinians is both symptom and cause of the West’s moral collapse; and both Jews and non-Jews are involved in its disintegration.