The greatest threat to Palestinian Arab youth
On May 19, The Hill, a Washington-based newspaper covering Congress, other governmental agencies and related activity, published a one-sided, anti-Israel Op-Ed entitled “Obama must act to protect Palestinian youth” by Brad Parker of Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-PS). Parker claimed a special envoy for Palestinian children would “ensure that Palestinian children’s rights are not abused.” His commentary obscured the greatest threat to Palestinian Arab youths: manipulative Palestinian leaders promoting anti-Jewish incitement.
Parker claimed “recent violence” is due to “hopelessness” Palestinian youth feel over Israel’s “violent military occupation.” He omitted the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian-Israeli violence since September 2015 has consisted of Arabs attacking Israelis, including children, with rocks, vehicles, knives and guns.
Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group ruling the Gaza Strip and whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and genocide of Jews, disagrees with Parker’s assessment.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said as much in a speech at a rally on Jan. 19: “This intifada is not the result of despair. This intifada is a jihad, a holy war fought by the Palestinian people against the Zionist occupation,” meaning Israel, which unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
Parker failed to tell Hill readers that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is the result of its successful defense in the Arab-initiated 1967 Six-Day War and subsequent 1973 Yom Kippur War. The territory’s final status, per U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 (1968) and 338 (1973), is to be determined in negotiations with Israel, which Palestinian leaders have refused to conduct in good faith or rejected outright. So Israel remains the obligatory occupying power under international law, though Hamas runs Gaza and the Palestinian Authority administers daily life for more than 90 percent of the West Bank’s Arab population.
Excusing Palestinian anti-Jewish violence as the result of “despair” over the lack of a Palestinian state, Parker omitted that Palestinian leaders have consistently rejected U.S. and Israeli offers of a “two-state solution,” in 2000 at Camp David, 2001 at Taba and 2008 after the Annapolis conference. More recently, on March 9, Abbas rejected a “two-state” initiative presented by Vice President Joe Biden.
Instead, the P.A. and Hamas have continued anti-Jewish incitement, frequently encouraging children to perpetrate violent acts. The Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a nonprofit organization that translates Arab media in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, has documented Palestinian children’s TV shows teaching “there is no Israel” and Jews are the “most evil among creations, barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs.”
PMW reported that in an Oct. 27, 2015 broadcast on official P.A. TV, Palestinian official Tawfiq Tirawi praised his 2-year-old son for singing, “Daddy, buy me a machine gun and a rifle, so that I will defeat Israel and the Zionists.”
In its March report entitled “Educating the Next Generation,” the Mideast Freedom Forum, a German-based think tank, found that Palestinian school textbooks “consistently portray Jews in a strongly negative manner,” deny the existence of Israel and are awash with anti-Semitic stereotypes.
In an article professing to advocate on behalf of Palestinian children, Parker evaded any mention of this systemic indoctrination. Similarly, he failed to acknowledge the use of Palestinian children as human shields by groups like Hamas, which an April 2015 U.N. inquiry, in one example, concluded that stored weaponry used to attack Israel in an elementary school. Instead, Parker focused on Israel detaining children, who perhaps having read their school textbooks, listened to their leaders and watched their TV shows, not surprisingly have sought to attack Jews.
Not content with bias by omission, Parker propped up his Hill commentary with a distorted quote from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, he claimed, “promised a ‘harsh offensive’ in response to protests [emphasis added] against Israel’s occupation and violence.” In fact, as The New York Times noted on Oct. 4, Netanyahu said he would wage a “harsh offensive against Palestinian Islamic terrorism [emphasis added].” Parker apparently considers terrorist attacks, such as the Oct. 12, stabbing of a 14-year old Israeli boy riding his bicycle by 13- and 15-year-old Palestinian boys a form of “protest.”
Parker’s Hill op-ed was dubiously self-referential, citing his own group as a source. NGO Monitor, a nonprofit organization that promotes accountability by such groups, has noted that Defense for Children International-Palestine has published inflated lists of children it claimed were killed in the 2014 Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip — later admitting that for many “no reliable evidence could be gathered.” NGO-Monitor revealed that an op-ed by DCI-PS director Rifat Odeh Kassis for the extremist website Electronic Intifada (which itself has been caught inventing quotes) promoted “the anti-Semitic canard of [Jews’] dual loyalties” against a Dutch foreign minister. What is more, DCI-PS is a supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to delegitimize and eliminate the Jewish state.
Sean Durns is a media assistant for the Washington, D.C., office of CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
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