Mideast Media Sampler 04/18/2011 (Where Does One Learn To Hate Jews Post-Oslo?)

An email from DG:

1) What moved him

The Israeli government released this information about one of the Fogel family's murderers.

Hakim Maazan Niyad Awad, born in 1993, a minor under Israeli law, was arrested on 5.4.11.  A high school student, he is affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).  He was involved in the October 2010 stabbing of youths from Awarta; the motive was a personal dispute.

It's not just his youth that's shocking. He is 17 or 18. Note the year of his birth. He was born the same year that the Oslo agreements were signed. Think about the influences he would have had.


He'd have had influence like Farfur the mouse.

And Nahoul the bee.

He might have watched a show hosted by Zeinab Ali Isa Abu-Salem.

Or he might have been influenced to martyrdom by Mohammed al-Dura.

Maybe he learned about Israel in school

Or maybe he went to camp.

The point is that for a child the hateful influences were abundant. And yet this is a child who was born in the era of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The media and diplomats have been dismissive of Israeli charges of incitement. Take for example, a few days after the Fogel murders, Isabel Kershner of the New York Times made efforts to minimize Mahmoud Abbas's invovlement in incitement in Abbas Condemns Killing of Jewish Family

The new focus on incitement against Israel, together with Israeli dissatisfaction over the Palestinian response to the brutal attack, seemed to pose a question about the Israeli government’s readiness to deal with Mr. Abbas as a serious peace partner — even though Mr. Abbas and Mr. Fayyad are widely considered moderates who have repeatedly said they would never resort to violence. Mr. Abbas rejected the claims about incitement in mosques, telling Israel Radio that the Palestinian Authority mosques have adopted a unified text for sermons, written by the minister of religious affairs. He called for a joint Israeli-Palestinian-American working committee to investigate claims that Palestinian Authority school textbooks incited violence. 

There was nothing new about Israel's focus on incitement. And Abbas's claim about the language used in sermons is dubious.

For 17 years Abbas has either been #1 or #2 in the Palestinian Authority. He has never taken a stand against incitement. True he was untouched by terror. Or at least not to the degree Arafat was. But he never took a principled stand against terror or incitement. (Nothing I've seen indicates that any principle motivates him more than staying in power.) Now we have a terrorist who has been raised on incitement.

Herb Keinon writes that despite the "birth certificate" for a Palestinian state, the Palestinians are still not ready for statehood.

True, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad unequivocally condemned the killings. But no sooner had Abbas done so, then Palestinian voices were heard claiming it couldn’t be a Palestinian who killed the family. A Palestinian couldn’t murder in cold blood like that – it must have been a disgruntled Thai worker who didn’t get his wages.
Even on Sunday, when reporters went to the village of Awarta, some residents on camera denied that the murders in neighboring Itamar even took place. It was all an Israeli lie, a giant conspiracy. What murders? 

For the Palestinians to say that their people could not carry out such a deed is simply to avoid any and all responsibility. And that degree of denial does not bode well for a functioning state.

Perhaps someone would compare the peace education curriculum that Daniel Viflic, z"l would have studied as compared to whatHakim Maazan Niyad Awad would have been exposed to.


2) Andre Aciman's Egypt

Yesterday's op-classic in the New York Times was a reprint of Andre Aciman's final Pesach seder in Egypt, In a double life

It never occurred to us that a seder in Egypt was a contradiction in terms. Now, when everyone speaks of Pharaoh at Passover, I think back to my very last seder in Egypt, on the eve of our departure for Italy in 1965, not under Ramses but under Nasser -- a long, mirthless, desultory affair, celebrated with weak lights and all the shutters drawn so that no one in the street might suspect what we were up to that night. After almost three centuries of religious tolerance, we found ourselves celebrating Passover the way our Marrano ancestors had done under the Spanish Inquisition: in secret, verging on shame, without conviction, in great haste and certainly without a clear notion of what we were celebrating. Was it the first exodus from Egypt? Or maybe the second from Spain? Or the third from Turkey? Or the fourth, when my family members fled Italy just before the Nazis took over? 

Chag Kasher v'Sameach!

Technorati Tag: Middle East and Fogel Family Massacre and Itamar.