Yesterday (“Cycle of stupidity at LA Times“) I quoted an editorial in that birdcage-liner thus:
Anyone who follows the news is familiar with how this cycle works. It might begin with a Palestinian child dying while stopped at an Israeli army checkpoint on his way to the hospital.
I suggested that the story of the Palestinian child was probably made up. But as a matter of fact, a Palestinian child did die recently:
Mohammed Nabil Taha, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, died this week at the entrance to a Lebanese hospital after doctors refused to help him because his family could not afford to pay for medical treatment.
Taha’s tragic case highlights the plight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon and who are the victims of an apartheid system that denies them access to work, education and medical care…
Can anyone imagine what would have happened if an Israeli hospital had abandoned a boy to die in its parking lot because his father did not have $1,500 to pay for his treatment? The UN Security Council would hold an emergency session and Israel would be strongly condemned and held responsible for the boy’s death…
Last year alone, some 180,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip entered Israel to receive medical treatment. Many were treated despite the fact that they did not have enough money to cover the bill.
In Israel, even a suicide bomber who is only (!) wounded while trying to kill Jews is entitled to the finest medical treatment. And there have been many instances where Palestinians who were wounded in attacks on Israel later ended up in some of Israel’s best hospitals.
Here’s another ironic coincidence:
IDF forces and local paramedics helped save the life of a Palestinian woman and her newly born infant Wednesday, at the settlement where Fogel relatives are sitting Shiva for the five Israelis brutally murdered last week.
Just as IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz arrived in Neve Tzuf to offer his condolences, a Palestinian cab raced towards the community’s entrance. In it, soldiers and paramedics discovered a Palestinian woman in her 20s in advanced stages of labor and facing a life-threatening situation: The umbilical cord was wrapped around the young baby girl’s neck, endangering both her and her mother.
The quick action of settler paramedics and IDF troops deployed in the area saved the mother’s and baby’s life, prompting great excitement and emotions at the site where residents are still mourning the brutal death of five local family members. — YNet
Ironic indeed. But here’s a ‘coincidence’ that’s not ironic at all:
One day before the terror attack in the town of Itamar in which five members of an Israeli family were murdered in their home, PA TV broadcast a program honoring Ahlam Tamimi, the woman accomplice who drove the suicide terrorist to the Sbarro pizza restaurant in August, 2001. 15 people were murdered in the attack, 7 of them children.
One week before the terror attack in Itamar, PA TV honored another accomplice to a suicide attack. Fahami Mashahara drove a suicide bomber to Gilo in Jerusalem in 2001 who killed 19 and injured more than hundred. His daughter was invited to perform a song on PA TV…
Visiting Tamimi’s home, the PA TV crew interviewed her relatives, who expressed their longing for her and their hope for her release. The PA TV camera focused on a certificate awarded by Fatah to the terrorist accomplice, calling her “the heroic prisoner.”
PA TV honors Sbarro attack driver Ahlam Tamimi (courtesy Palwatch.org)
The award is decorated with photographs of Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, the Fatah logo, and a photograph of Tamimi herself.
Mahmoud Abbas says that the PA does not engage in incitement:
RAMALLAH: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday rejected Israeli accusations that the Palestinian Authority (PA) allows incitement against Israel in its mosques and schools…
On Sunday, Netanyahu said that “alarming incitement in Palestinian schools, mosques and media†had prepared the ground for the Itamar attack that led to the killing of five members of a Jewish settler family. [my italics]
Abbas said that there is no incitement. He added that the Palestinian Ministry of Waqf and Religious Affairs has decided that all mosques should deliver the same sermon, distributed by the ministry.
But… he didn’t say TV! Gotcha!
Does it mean anything that Abbas condemned the terror attack at least in international media? Does it mean anything that there are efforts to claim that there is no incitement? or that there is going to be one sermon distributed in the mosques in area under Palestinian Authority control?
What I am asking really is if our response to their efforts however feeble to deny and reduce incitement should be totally negative? Perhaps they are responding to American pressure but it seems to me there is a difference between their leaders Abbas and Fayad condemning the act and their celebrating it, which they once did.
Abbas finally came out and made a serious condemnation of a terrorist act — because the people that pay his salary told him he had to.
We have been talking to the Palestinian Arabs since Oslo about stopping incitement. It was in the Road Map. Bibi has talked about it since the first time he was PM. And go look at palwatch.org and see what they are doing.
The thing about incitement is not only that it engenders terrorism, but that it shows us that they will not stop even if they get everything they say they want.
If you were a young man exposed to that kind of indoctrination, would you?