What is Fatah Actually Celebrating?
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H/T Israellycool
As Hadar Sela noted, the BBC erroneously reported that Fatah celebrated its 48th anniversary, at a huge rally in Gaza on Friday, when, in fact – as the group was founded in 1959 – 2013 marks 54 years since the birth of the Palestinian group.
However, it has indeed been 48 years since one particular event in Fatah history.
Sela wrote:
“What Fatah is in fact celebrating is the 48thanniversary of its first armed attack on Israel which took place on January 1st 1965.”
Interestingly, while other news sites also curiously got the political math wrong, the Guardian got it right, before getting it wrong, in an Agency report titled ‘Mass rally in Gaza to support Palestinian President’s Fatah faction‘, Jan. 4.
First, there was this:
“Throngs camped out overnight in a downtown Gaza square to ensure themselves a spot for the anniversary commemoration of Fatah’s 1959 founding, and tens of thousands marched early Friday, carrying yellow Fatah banners.”
Later in the same piece, there was this:
“The demonstration marked 48 years since Fatah’s founding as the spearhead of the Palestinians’ fight against Israel.”
Indeed, in only 48 (or 54) years, Fatah has achieved so much.
Per CAMERA:
“Fatah’s armed units such as the Tanzim, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Force 17 have organized, coordinated and carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks against civilians.
During the second intifada, Fatah Tanzim and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for over 300 attacks in which civilians were killed, and according to Israeli authorities, Fatah-linked groups have attempted or carried out more than 1,500 attacks. (International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT)”
Sela noted that among those terror leaders praised by the “moderate” Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, “were Hamas founders Ahmed Yassin and Abed Aziz al Rantissi as well as the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Fathi Shiqaqi“.
The frequently shrill, often unserious and increasingly hysterical warnings about Israel’s supposed dangerous move to the right – parroted most recently by the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland - is almost entirely devoid of context regarding a sclerotic Palestinian political culture which hasn’t even marginally moved beyond the glorification of violence and demonization of Jews.
It’s truly baffling why so many sensitive souls who advocate on behalf of Palestinians don’t recoil in the face of such political pathos, and evidently can’t empathize with the large majority of Israelis who hesitate to midwife a new state on its eastern border which will, in all likelihood, continue to be compromised by such a reactionary, racist and terrorist ethos.
Visits CifWatch.com.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Adam Levick serves as Managing Editor of CiF Watch, an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), and is a member of the Online Antisemitism Working Group for the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism. Adam made Aliyah from Philadelphia in 2009 and lives with his wife in Modi'in.
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As the child of parents who survived the concentration camps I have dedicated a my academic career and my clerical calling to educate the next generation to learn the lessons of the Nazi horrors. The first lesson of the holocaust is that the murder of6 million Jews in 21 nations did not begin with an edict to cast the Jews into the ovens. It began with a policy of demonizing the Jews as if they were less than human. Throughout WWII, the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, operated out of Hitler's bunker and broadcast and rantings that called for the murder of the Jews on Nazi radio, in the Arabic language, a daily radio message that was beamed to the middle east, while the Mufti actively recruited Arabs to join SS units that systematically rounded up and executed thousands of Jewish families in the Balkans.
Last Friday, on January 4th, 2013, Mahmood Abbas, the leader of what the UN has defined as the State of Palestine, issued a speech in which he praised the legacy of the Mufti of Jerusalem and of slew of Arabs who have murdered Jews over the past generation. To ignore Abbas's message is ignore the first lesson of the holocaust, which is that anyone who glorifies hose who murder Jews is to be held culpable in the advocacy of mass murder/.
It is therefore incumbent on every person of conscience to condemn Abbas and to break off all relations with him and the entity that he represents.
I await a response from the representatives of every Jewish organization and from every responsible cleric.
There is a adage in the Talmud which is that SILENCE IS AGREEMENT. RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG