Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Gingrich versus the Palestinian Authority

Uhm, Gingrich sembra aver imboccato la strada giusta per la vittoria: 
solleticare la parte più reazionaria della diaspora americana.
 
Certo, fa senso veder descrivere i palestinesi come tormentatori di 
Israele, nel momento in cui Israele tiene il suo stivale sopra alla loro 
testa: qualcosa si ribella dentro le anime non corrotte.  Ma, per quanto 
possa sembrare incredibile, c'è un sacco di gente programmata a vedere 
Israele come vittima e i palestinesi come carnefici.
 
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Gingrich versus the Palestinian Authority
By ITAMAR MARCUS AND NAN JACQUES ZILBERDIK
12/15/2011 23:16
 
"The American congressional candidates were correct in criticizing the 
PA for promoting terror."
 
US presidential candidate and the former speaker of US House of 
Representatives Newt Gingrich said this week that the Palestinian 
Authority does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and that 
Palestinian schoolbooks teach children to become terrorists. Gingrich 
cited what he said were PA sources to back up his remarks.
 
However, the PA has rejected his statements as “groundless.”
 
According to the British daily The Guardian: “Palestinian officials said 
Gingrich’s allegations were based substantially on material produced by 
an Israeli organization, Palestinian Media Watch, which has published a 
long list of entries on its website (
palwatch.org
) under the heading 
‘Promoting Violence for Children.’ An article from 2007 describes 
Palestinian textbooks paid for with US aid money that deny Israel’s 
right to exist.
 
“But Xavier Abu Eid, a senior adviser to the Palestine Liberation 
Organization, said the website and Gingrich’s allegations were 
groundless.” (December 11, 2011)
 
Certainly the PA’s rejection of the US candidate was expected, as his 
charges contradict what the PA has been telling Western countries for years.
 
This is not merely an irrelevant distraction and rhetoric of a 
presidential campaign. It is these issues – PA nonrecognition of Israel 
and its support of terror – that are at the heart of the peace process 
and constitute a major impediment to its success. Therefore, it is 
critical to determine who is correct – Gingrich or the PA.
 
What exactly was said about the PA?
 
During the ABC News Republican presidential candidates’ debate (December 
10, 2011), Gingrich said that the PA does not recognize Israel’s right 
to exist. He said that “the Palestinian Authority ambassador to India 
said last month, ‘There is no difference between Fatah and Hamas. We 
both agree Israel has no right to exist.” This quote, taken from a PMW 
bulletin, is precise and is very significant, elaborating one of the 
most important and yet relatively unnoticed principles of PA ideology.
 
The PA Ambassador to India, Adli Sadeq, wrote in the official PA daily: 
“They [Israelis] have a common mistake or misconception by which they 
fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the 
right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes 
them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They 
ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] 
enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist.” (Al- Hayat 
Al-Jadida November 26, 2011)
 
The point of the PA ambassador was the following: The PA differentiates 
between recognizing that Israel in fact exists – and its unwavering 
denial of Israel’s legitimacy, that is, Israel’s right to exist. The PA 
educates its children with this dual message that Israel exists but has 
no right to exist, as expressed in a PA schoolbook for grade 12: 
“Palestine’s war ended with a catastrophe that is unprecedented in 
history, when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and established the 
State of Israel.” (Arabic Language, Analysis, Literature and Criticism, 
grade 12, p. 104)
 
Defining Israel as being created after “Zionist gangs stole Palestine” 
is the definitive expression of denying Israel’s right to exist. 
Significantly, this rejection of Israel is not just found in Palestinian 
schoolbooks but is a central part of the ongoing Palestinian discourse.
 
When a fire raged in northern Israel last year and the PA sent a team of 
firefighters to join international forces trying to put it out, it was 
justified by a regular columnist in the official PA daily as follows: 
“Even if an aggressive foreigner occupies our home and steals it, we 
don’t wish for the home to burn.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 5, 2010)
 
Even the official PA daily, when reporting on sporting events, uses 
political language that tells its readers that it rejects the legitimacy 
of Israel. The official PA daily reported on a ceremony honoring an 
Israeli Arab soccer team and its success in moving up to Israel’s top 
division Premier League. Yet when the story was reported in the PA daily 
it was described as “the team’s rise to the national league in the 
homeland occupied in 1948.” (Al- Hayat Al-Jadida, June 18, 2010)
 
It did not report that it was the “national league in Israel.”
 
In the article in the official PA daily that Gingrich quoted, the PA 
ambassador to India explained this central duality of the PA ideology, 
whereby they recognize Israel’s existence as a fact of history, but 
reject Israel’s right to exist, as does Hamas.
 
In a different part of the article the PA ambassador explained this 
explicitly: “There are no two Palestinians who disagree over the fact 
that Israel exists, and recognition of it is restating the obvious. But 
recognition of its right to exist is something else, different from 
recognition of its [physical] existence.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, November 
26, 2011) Clearly, Gingrich was correct.
 
Similarly, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself has promoted this dual 
message. In his speech at the UN asking for recognition of Palestine as 
an independent state, Abbas stated to the international community: “Let 
us build the bridges of dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of 
separation, and build cooperative relations based on parity and equity 
between two neighboring states – Palestine and Israel.” (Speech at the 
UN, September 23, 2011)
 
However, on the very next day, Abbas’s own government- controlled PA TV 
as part of its UN statehood campaign broadcast a map that included PA 
areas as well as all of Israel, wrapped in the Palestinian flag, 
symbolizing Palestinian political sovereignty over all of Israel. This 
visual statement was another blatant denial of Israel’s legitimacy.
 
Newt Gingrich’s second critique of the PA, which presidential candidate 
Rep. Michele Bachmann likewise mentioned in the ABC debate, was of the 
PA schoolbooks which he said teach children to be terrorists. Gingrich 
said: “These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their 
schools. They have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine 
Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks 
through our aid money.”
 
Here, Gingrich was correct in principle but his example was not. The PA 
schoolbooks do not include that particular math question. Instead the PA 
Ministry of Education does something far worse: It glorifies murderers 
and terrorists. The PA Ministry of Education has two of its schools 
named after Dalal Mughrabi (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 23, 2006), the 
woman who led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history, the 
Coastal Road massacre bus hijacking in which 37 civilians were killed.
 
What exactly is the PA message to its children regarding terror? When 
the Ministry of Education makes children study in a school that 
venerates a terrorist who killed 37 civilians, its message is very 
clear: Terror and killing Israelis is not only justified but is even 
worthy of honor.
 
Fatah has a women’s club at Palestinian universities called Sisters of 
Dalal, honoring the same terrorist Mughrabi. Two summer camps for 
children this past summer had groups named after her, and one of the 
camps was sponsored by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The entire 
environment the PA has created for its children envelopes them in 
glorification of terror.
 
The PA, it seems, learned that the world would no longer permit it to 
directly call to kill Israelis, for to do so would cause it to lose 
American and European funding. So instead of promoting the terror, it 
glorifies the terrorists; instead of Palestinian children learning that 
they must kill Israelis, they learn that whoever kills Israelis will 
become a Palestinian hero.
 
When the American congressional candidates criticized the PA for 
promoting terror among Palestinians they were absolutely correct. When 
they accused the PA of denying Israel’s right to exist they were merely 
exposing authentic PA ideology.
 
The time is approaching for the PA to make some hard choices. Is it 
going to change and take the path of peace or is it going to continue on 
the path of deception?
 
Itamar Marcus is director of Palestinian Media Watch (
www.palwatch.org
). 
Nan Jacques Zilberdik is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch.
 
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?ID=249675&R=R1
 
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 
 

 is the definitive expression of denying Israel’s right to exist.
 
eh gia'.