09-Jun-14: Cold-blooded lying and the Saeb Erekat saga

Saeb Erekat on BBC's HardTalk, February 8, 2011, announcing
yet another resignation [Image Source]

Some ten days ago, the man universally known to the media as the Chief Palestinian Negotiator, said about Israel that it

seeks to destroy the two-state-solution and replace it with a one state solution with two different systems; the apartheid regime...

Saeb Erekat went on. Not content with blaming Israel for single-handedly destroying something ("the two-state solution") that was never actually implemented, and comparing it to South Africa's apartheid regime for good measure, he picked up steam and launched into a more concrete, credible-sounding allegation. Referring (it seems) to the period commencing August 2013, Ereket trumpeted a claim that Israel had

killed, in cold-blood, more than 66 Palestinians... among other measures.

You can see the published text in a news report on the WAFA news agency web site. WAFA is owned and controlled by the Palestinian Authority. The lines it takes can safely be regarded as the positions of the moment being promoted by the Mahmoud Abbas regime.

Not every analyst would get as hot and bothered as we do about systematically extravagant, exaggerated and hateful claims by Arab leaders. One who does is a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs whose work we and many others greatly admire. He went off and looked coolly and closely at the facts behind the deaths that Erekat - whose work we certainly do not admire - cites. His name is Jonathan D. Halevi and his findings are published in a paper released earlier today.

From Halevi's own research, it turns that the 66 Palestinian Arabs who died in cold blood at the hands of apartheid-minded Israelis included (in our words)

• 1 from the Mujahideen Brigades, the group that was spun out of Fatah; 
• 2 terrorists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; 
• 2 Hamas "operatives", stopped while attempting to damage a section of the border fence dividing Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
• 3 members of the Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen terror group connected to Al-Qaeda, which declares violence against Jews as a Moslem religious obligation that brings those who do it closer to their god; 
• 5 Fatah men who were engaged in shooting and stabbing when neutralized; 
• 6 Hamas terrorists who belonged to its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades; 
• 7 Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades terrorists - they are the military wing of Fatah; 
• 8 terrorists of the Al-Quds Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad's so-called military wing (do jihadists do anything that's not military?). 

That leaves 9 who were evidently not affiliated with any of the hostile organizations we just listed, though how can anyone ever be certain that you do not belong to something? Still, of the 9,

• 1 had just fired a gun at IDF service personnel; 
• 1, a female, was killed when IDF shooters fired back at a source of gunfire coming in their direction from Gaza; 
• 3 were fired on as they approached an IDF outpost near the Gaza border fence; 
• 3 were engaging in acts described as "violent disorders".

We won't waste readers' time by asking rhetorical questions like "What kind of cold-blooded killing is it when almost all of the dead are actual terrorists, and/or actively engaged in lethal activity directed against our country's population and defense forces?"

Instead, we ask this. How is it that Saeb Erekat - a man who has comically resigned no fewer than 8 times from his role as head of the PLO's negotiations function over the last two decades, only to bounce back afresh each time - still has any credibility left at all in the eyes of the ever-critical global news media?

What bothers us as much as, and maybe more than, the way Erekat wipes all mention of Palestinian Arab terror from the narrative, is how the Palestinian Arab dead, in the Erekat lexicon, are uniformly innocent victims caught up in an ideologically inspired wave of killings by homicidal Israelis.

How hugely absurd that is can be seen from the non-stop campaign Erekat has been waging, especially this year, to cloak the child-killing jihadists of Hamas as something legitimate, disciplined, heroic and even noble. We expressed this in a recent post ("8-Apr-14: When PA's "peace" negotiator says Hamas savages are not terrorists, what does this say about "peace"?") where we quoted a Turkish think-tank called SETA:

Erekat has a long history of saying one thing and doing the other... Erekat's incoherence mirrors the lack of harmony between what the PA says it is doing and what the PA is actually doing. This cognitive dissonance is perhaps the greatest burden on the Palestinian people today..." ["The Cognitive Dissonance of Saeb Erekat", March 15, 2014]

In that same April post, we quoted Erekat saying 

"Hamas is a Palestinian movement, is not and will never be a terrorist organisation".

As for is not and will never be, Erekat forgets (or ignores) being quoted in the Wikileaks papers and in our blog, expressing his contempt for the Hamas savages in 2007 when he told a European politician “I can’t stand Hamas." 

Undeterred, just a month ago on May 8, 2014, Erekat told the Al-Shams radio station that 

“Hamas is a political, not a terrorist, movement.” [YouTube]

The reality is that Hamas proudly took full credit for the massacre at a central Jerusalem pizza shop that erased the lives of fifteen innocent victims in 2001. Since one of those victims was our daughter, Malki, we are in a position (as we originally wrote here) to invite anyone who wants text or video of the numerous celebrations by Hamas of that achievement to be in touch with us. 

And if anyone seriously doubts that pure, unadulterated terrorism is what Hamas teaches Arab children in the formal, informal and summer educational programs carried out in the terror-infested Gaza Strip in its name, we are ready to oblige.

Erekat knows these truths no less well than the rest of us do. It's clear he doesn't mean to dispute them. He's comfortable with them. 

For a man with his his moral flexibility, factual dexterity and political chutzpah, terrorism in the name of a cause for which he is deeply sympathetic is simply not terrorism. 

None of that is the actual problem; the issue is not with Erekat. As the Turks said, he is a man of "incoherence", and they were being polite and restrained. The problem - the far greater problem - is with all those editors, analysts, politicians and civil servants who deal with this disgraceful man as if he were the genuine article, as a man seeking peace. It's not possible they are unaware of the truth. 

So what makes them keep propping up this empty suit and allowing his often-nonsensical pronouncements to be heard as if they were respectable, sober and factual?