By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
May 24, 2005
After long years of putting up with Yasser Arafat, the Bush Administration seems so intent on finally being able to push forward Middle East peace efforts that it is going out of its way to paint the arch-terrorist's longtime partner-in-arms, Mahmoud Abbas, as the region's great hope and a man who cares for nothing but peaceful coexistence.
In this vein, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Monday told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy conference that a ?delicate? and ?precious moment? exists to forward the cause of peace, as Israel prepares to withdraw from Gaza and Samaria and realizes it has a genuine, emerging partner in Abbas.
Playing to the home crowd, Rice did insist Abbas's PA ?dismantle all terrorist networks in its society.?
But Abbas has repeatedly rejected to do just that, brushing off the PA's decade-old commitment to eliminate the threat of anti-Jewish terror as irrelevant since, in territories under his control, there are no terrorists, only ?resistance forces.?
During his election campaign in December 2004, Abbas explained that the killers of Jewish men, women and children were ?neither criminals nor murderers. Rather they are fighting for the honorable lives of their Palestinians brothers.?
In March, Abbas told reporters that members of Islamic Jihad and Hamas were his ?brethren,? and earlier this month his security chief, Rashid Abu Shabak, said the PA ?won't touch the weapons of the resistance groups.?
Abbas said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post that the demand that he fight terror was born out of an Israeli desire ?to see Palestinian blood being spilled, and this is completely unacceptable; we have red lines.?
Nevertheless, Rice suggested that unlike Arafat, Abbas values Israel's security, and is therefore worthy of meeting with President George W. Bush, who shunned Arafat for four years.
Contradicting Rice's assessment is the fact Abbas's state-run media continues to lionize those ?Palestinians? who engage in acts of violence against Israeli Jews.
When a 22-year-old Palestinian Arab was shot dead in an attempt to stab IDF soldiers at a checkpoint in Samaria this month, Voice of Palestine radio praised the deceased would-be killer as a ?heroic martyr.?
Terrorists who were killed while taking part in last week's shelling of Gaza Jewish communities were also labeled ?martyrs? by official PA media.
Most troubling of recent examples was an official televised PA sermon on May 13
th
, in which Imam Ibrahim Mudayris spoke glowingly of the coming extermination of all Jews that Islam looks forward to.
?...Israel is a cancer that spread in the body of the Islamic nation...the Jews are a virus similar to AIDS, from which the entire world is suffering,? Mudayris told his listeners.
He went on to assert that centuries of Western persecution of the Jews was a legitimate retaliation for all the many woes the Jews had inflicted upon society, including ?provoking the Nazis so the world would go to war against [Germany].?
?A day will come when all shall rest from the Jews, even the tree and the stone, which have suffered from them,? promised Mudayris, referencing an Islamic passage that speaks of a day when even trees and stones will call out to Muslims to kill the Jews hiding behind them.
Hardly the behavior of a peace partner that values the Jews' safety.