Lethal lies
Directly inflaming passions, Nabil Abu Rudaineh, spokesman to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, declared on Tuesday that 15-year-old Hassan Manasrah (who gravely wounded an Israeli 13-year-old and stabbed another passerby in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood) had been “cold-bloodedly executed” by Israelis.
PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah chimed in: “Israeli occupation forces assassinated in cold blood the child Hassan Manasrah and his innocence and calls for help did not help.”
PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat vowed to seek the prosecution of Israel’s leaders at the International Criminal Court for ordering “extrajudicial executions.” He embellished his accusations with provocative descriptions of martyred Palestinians being shot in the streets “like dogs” for no reason and left to bleed as they are cursed and brutalized.
The PA media similarly spin tales about every single stymied terrorist attacker of recent days – whether the attacker was killed to halt the killing spree or disabled in the act.
In the PA even Ala’a Abu Jamal was glorified as a martyr felled for no fault of his own out of capricious Israeli malice. Abu Jamal, the Bezek technician gainfully employed in Israel, used his company vehicle to ram into passengers at a Jerusalem bus stop and then proceeded to hack them with an ax. He was shot to prevent him from taking more lives.
In the isolated cases of Israelis attacking Arabs – i.e. Baruch Goldstein in 1994 and Eden Natan-Zada in 2005 – they were bludgeoned to death by local Arabs (Natan-Zada was already arrested and bound when he was killed). Yet the summary justice was not condemned in Israel.
It is hypocritical that Arabs who confer the right upon themselves to extract vengeance even long after the original pretext – be it true or false – proscribe lesser rights to Jews. This is one of the most galling aspects of the current spate of Arab homicidal assaults on Israeli civilians. The blatant and blanket denial to Israelis of the right to self-defense becomes the PA’s undisguised stratagem.
Self-defense is defined as the inalienable right of an individual or a group to fight back when there is an imminent threat of bodily harm to oneself and likewise to others nearby while the threat is ongoing – especially in the case of an obvious deadly threat.
This right is enshrined in law almost universally. It is born of an instinct to preserve and protect life.
But in the eyes of all too many Arabs – especially in the PA and regrettably in the Arab sector inside withinthe-Green Line Israel – what is an elementary natural premise everywhere does not apply to Jews.
The upshot are systematically fraudulent contentions that knife-wielding, gun-toting, rock-throwing or firebomb-lobbing assailants – who are brought down mid-attack – are actually hapless casualties of arbitrary Israeli villainy.
Mind-blowing as this is to us, such impudent, in-yourface distortions go over big abroad and are amplified by inimical opinion-molders who would never think to criticize French troops for terminating the Charlie Hebdo shooters but who hold Israel to a different standard.
Arab and pro-Arab propagandists do not shrink from outright lies in the service of their inexorable efforts to blacken Israel’s image. But this is not merely an exercise in perverse PR. It is an intentional stoking of the flames of so-called “anger” which is proclaimed as a license to kill Jews.
In other words, this is incitement to mass murder via deliberate calumny.
Lies become part and parcel of the continuous indoctrination of Palestinian opinion – already inundated with deception and disinformation in the PA’s controlled media, its school system and the mosques under its aegis.
Portraying the perpetrators of atrocities as martyred innocents is no less incendiary than the deceptive campaign alleging an Israeli conspiracy to change the status quo on the Temple Mount, raze the mosques there and erect a Jewish shrine in their stead.
Fabrications can cynically feature, in and of themselves, as lethal weapons of war.