01-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?

Mahmoud Abbas' official television station expresses what they want

us to know about the convicted and unrepentant killers

in our prisons [Image Source: PMW]

The Jordanian parliament is so keen to have Palestinian terrorists freed from Israeli prisons where some of them are serving multiple life-terms for hideous atrocities that they are seeking to expel Israel's ambassador and cancel the Israel/Jordan peace treaty if they can't get their way.

A report posted on a Jordanian government website last night (Sunday) says they are demanding that Israel

respect the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty and to respond to the Jordanian demands and release all Jordanian prisoners. They stressed that "soft diplomacy" with Israel can not solve the issue of prisoners, therefore, the government is required to use all political and legal papers its has to ensure the release of the prisoners. 

The notion that Israel must "release all Jordanian prisoners" because of "the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty" is nonsense. No such obligation has ever existed: not legally, not morally, not diplomatically. We are aware that the notorious "chief negotiator" for one of the two Palestinian Arab statelets, Saeb Erekat, claims it does. But as IMRA explains here, he achieves this only by twisting the plain words of the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum which in reality says something quite different.

So whom are the Jordanians so keen to free? Well, it's a long list, but it includes the man sentenced to the longest term of anyone in the Israeli prison system. 

We're speaking of a person about whom we have written in the past [see here]: Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti who is the self-confessed murderer of 66 people including 9 in the July 2002 bombing at the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; 11 in the March 2002 bombing of Jerusalem's Cafe Moment; 10 in the December 2001 triple-bomb outrage on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall; and 15 (most of them children, including our 15 year old daughter Malki) in the August 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in August 2001.

The judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. This is a not common occurrence in Israeli jurisprudence. The one time a death penalty was carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

From prison, Barghouti has done an exemplary job of reminding anyone listening of the bestiality that underpins his psychopathic nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world by CBS television's '60 Minutes' program, Barghouti famously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

To emphasize the point, in an Israeli court in 2010, he reiterated his dedication to killing more if (when?) he is freed again.

Hard to imagine anyone seriously trying to turn this sick killer of children into something heroic and worthy of emulation. But of course that is precisely what has been happening during the past decade.

Case in point - the official public television station of the Palestinian Authority headed by the 'moderate' Mahmoud Abbas. Just four days ago, it broadcast a program which Palestinian Media Watch has now translated to English and is streaming from its own site [here]. The host, a woman called Manal Seif, launches with visible enthusiasm into a paean of worhip and praise for three figures - all of them sitting in Israeli prisons, all of them convicted of acts of mass-murder. Let's listen:

I want to tell the Israelis that our prisoners are heroes and not terrorists. What I saw reminded me of an Israeli website called PMW or Palestinian Media Watch, a site that monitors the Palestinian media. Of course every visit that we film for a prisoner gets them angry. I was surprised a week ago that [regarding] brother Ibrahim Hamed (54 life sentences), brother Abbas Al-Sayid (35 life sentences), and brother Abdallah Barghouti (67 life sentences), they [PMW] objected, they were upset, they slandered these heroes and claimed that they are terrorists. If they see Abdallah Barghouti as a terrorist, Abbas Al-Sayid as a terrorist, Ibrahim Hamed and Nasser Awais (14 life sentences), if they see all these prisoners as terrorists, we see them as heroes... I salute you, all you heroic fighter prisoners, and of course I always wish you freedom. [PMW]

The good people at PMW told us that Manal Seif hosts a weekly PA TV program called "For You", where 'you' means 'prisoners'. Each week, she visits homes and families honoring/glorifying prisoners as heroes. She is a civil servant, paid a PA salary that is principally funded, as we keep reminding readers here, by the EU, Norway and the US. Without that funding, the hateful and distorted bile she delivers into the airwaves could simply not get there.

In those night-is-day, evil-is-good parts of the Arab world, Seif is not alone.

From a 2006 article on the Keren Malki website

• A December 2012 profile of Barghouti on a Palestinian website provides an astounding example of the self-delusion fueling the hatred industry in their world. Barghouti "was charged with organizing a series of attacks against Israel, which resulted in the death of up to 70 Israeli soldiers" they absurdly write. And so Israel "sentenced him to serve seven life sentences", which is also nonsense; he was sentenced to 67 life terms. In reality, there were few if any soldiers among those killed by Barghouti's bombs, all of which were deployed in deliberately mundane places: popular restaurants, mostly. The engineer of the Sbarro massacre, the woman called Ahlam Tamimi, makes plain that her explicit goal in delivering a Barghouti bomb to the center of Jerusalem was to kill and maim Jewish religiously-observant children [video]. Soldiers never came into the calculation. These people are terrorists, and that's how terror works.
• In May 2013 [source: PMW], mass-murderer Barghouti's family was honored with a media-drenched visit by a delegation of government officials from the Abbas regime headed by PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs Issa Karake and District Governor of Ramallah, Laila Ghannam. It was termed a 'solidarity' visit, from which we deduce (but of course we knew this already) that significant parts of the PA government feel solidly connected to the killer of our daughter.
• Ten days ago, in a post here ["21-Jun-13: In dark corners, remorseless killer of 66 innocents is called 'administrative detainee' and 'captive'"] we quoted reports that Barghouti has been on a hunger strike since May. He is being treated in Ha'emek Medical Center (aka Afula Hospital) in northern Israel. 

A report published today by another Palestinian Arab website, Alray, calls him a "Palestinian-Jordanian detainee", but not a Kuwaiti for some reason even though Kuwait is where he was born. It reveals that Barghouti is sadly now

"in a critical condition... Barghouti‘s heart rate is very weak; only 40 beats per minute and he suffers from a liver failure which might lead to liver cirrhosis. Doctors of Internal Committee of Red Cross expressed their concern over Barghouti’s health deterioration, warning that his heart might stop at any time." 

Some years ago, on the Keren Malki website we created to honour the memory of our daughter, a victim of Barghouti and of others like him, we wrote this at the time the CBS interview went to air:

As ugly and repugnant as the words of Barghouti will likely be to the viewers of "60 Minutes", we urge them and CBS not to focus on the man. He is irrelevant, except that he creates a context. Barghouti's evil deeds are the concrete expression of the desires of a government which wants to be accepted as an equal by the community of nations. The anger and revulsion which his interview creates should be redirected at them - at the terrorists in business suits who plot and scheme every day to increase Barghouti's 66 to the largest number they can think of.