The Popular Palestinians

If the Palestinians are merely engaged in a nationalist struggle for self-determination, then why are they inciting genocide of Jewry? In the midst of Operation Protective Edge, Hamas released a music video in Hebrew calling for the Palestinians to bomb Israel and kill all Israelis.

“Raze it [Israel] to the ground, exterminate the cockroaches’ nest, and banish all the Zionists,” the lyrics read.

Some human rights activists and lawyers may get a sense of déjà vu upon reading these words. Back in 1994, there were several radio broadcasts calling for the extermination of human cockroaches.

They were in Rwanda.

When the Hutus began their genocide of the Tutsis on April 6, 1994, the most popular radio station in the country was RTLM, owned by relatives and friends of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyrarimana.

That day, RTLM exhorted its listeners, “You have to kill the Tutsis, they’re cockroaches. All those who are listening, rise so we can fight for our Rwanda. Fight with the weapons you have at your disposal: those who have arrows, with arrows, those who have spears, with spears.

We must all fight. We must all fight the Tutsis. We must finish with them, exterminate them, sweep them from the whole country. There must be no refuge for them.”

RTLM continued to incite for genocide throughout the war. And as the invading Tutsi army came in from Uganda, RTLM staff fled to Zaire with a mobile radio transmitter to continue broadcasting.

After the war, several senior RTLM managers and journalists were convicted of inciting genocide, and conspiracy to carry out genocide and crimes against humanity. And all right-thinking people cheered.

But then, those were Hutus.

Even Palestinian officials acknowledge that their missile offensive that began last month is a crime against humanity.

In an interview with Palestinian Authority TV last week, Ibrahim Khreiseh, the PLO ’s ambassador to the UN Human Rights Committee admitted, “The missiles that are now being launched against Israel – each and every missile constitutes a crime against humanity whether it hits or misses, because it is directed at civilian targets.”

Khreiseh also explained that since Palestinians in Gaza have “appeared on TV and said that the Israeli army warned them to evacuate their homes before the bombardment… if someone is killed, the law considers it a mistake rather than an intentional killing because [the Israelis] followed legal procedures.”

Khreiseh then noted, “We never warn anyone about where these missiles are about to fall or the operations we carry out.”

In other words, the PLO ’s own representative said that Israel is innocent and the Palestinians are guilty of conducting acts of genocide.

But their Western supporters don’t care. Instead, their affection and commitment to the Palestinian campaign against Israel grows in intensity every time the Palestinians escalate their genocidal incitement and violence.

This support regularly involves anti-Jewish violence directed against local Jewish communities and pro-Israel activists.

Consider France. Since the beginning of the year, anti-Jewish violence and intimidation in France has reached levels not seen since the Holocaust. And things have only gotten worse since Palestinian terrorists in Hebron kidnapped and murdered Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrah and Gil-Ad Shaer a month ago. Life for Jews in France is becoming increasingly untenable.

Anti-Jewish attacks run the gamut from shouting “Death to the Jews,” and “Finish Hitler’s Work,” to delivering bomb threats to Jewish kindergartens and businesses, to vandalizing Jewish businesses, institutions and other property, to physically assaulting Jews of all ages, as well as Jewish institutions.

On Sunday, violent mass assaults on Jewish targets commenced just as a two-hour-long fanatically pro-Palestinian march was dispersing. Nearly 200 Jewish worshipers were trapped inside of the Don Issac Avrabanel synagogue as assailants, riled up from the march, threw bricks at the synagogue and attacked its Jewish defenders with metal rods.

In the US, levels of violence against Jews by supporters of the Palestinians continue to rise. In San Francisco, pro-Palestinian protesters showed their solidarity with the Palestinian goal of genocide by, among other things, calling for Israel’s destruction while wearing white gloves with red paint on the fingers and palms.

One of the most searing images of the Palestinian terror war against Israel was the photograph taken on October 12, 2000, of a Palestinian terrorist at the Ramallah police station standing in the window and holding up his blood-soaked hands to a cheering crowd below.

Inside, he and his war criminal comrades had torn apart two IDF reservists who got lost on the road and accidentally entered Ramallah. The blood on his hands was theirs.

In Los Angeles and Boston, pro-Israel demonstrators were physically assaulted and subjected to anti-Semitic vitriol. In Seattle, pro-Palestinian protesters held up placards depicting Jews eating Palestinian children and drinking their blood.

Street protests calling for the annihilation of Israel, expressing support for Palestinian terrorists, engaging in rank anti-Jewish incitement and violent assaults against Jews enjoy the intellectual support of the professoriate and the media.

This week, Daniel Mael, a pro-Israel activist at Brandeis, published excerpts from a previously secret listserv of nearly a hundred university professors. On it, the professors “express their fear and disdain on issues ranging from [US] foreign and domestic policy, the ‘American system,’ and ‘the Israelists.’” In other words, anti-Israelism is one of the causes that comprise the Leftist ideological litmus test.

Then there is the media. With rare exceptions, foreign reporting of the Palestinian assault on Israel has followed the script. Both sides are fighting. Israel is killing more Palestinians than the Palestinians are killing Jews.

Therefore Israel must stop defending itself.

And the diplomatic community – with the notable exception of Canada – has been similarly predictable.

No one admits what Khreiseh acknowledged about each separate rocket launch constituting a separate war crime.

No one mentions that Fatah terrorists joined Hamas in its missile campaign.

Then there are the leftist American Jews who claim that they are pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. The Palestinian rocket war makes them uncomfortable.

On the one hand, they cannot ignore the fact that 80 percent of Israelis have been targeted for slaughter by Hamas rockets over the past week and a half. But on the other hand, they define themselves by their criticism of Israel, not their criticism of the Palestinians. So, J Street, like Eric Yoffie from the Reform Movement, condemned both the Palestinians and Israel. The Palestinians are bad to shoot rockets to kill Israelis. The Israelis are bad because they continue to live in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem.

As Yoffie explained in a recent essay in Haaretz, to combat Hamas, Israel needs to quit Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, as it quit Gaza in 2005, because then Fatah will make peace with Israel.

Like the Israeli leftists they adore, neither Yoffie nor his fellow leftist Jews have ever explained how peace with Fatah will solve Israel’s problem with Hamas. They never explain how such a peace will pacify or otherwise tame Hamas, an organization committed to the commission of the genocide of world Jewry.

These are distressing times for Israel. For over a week, more than four million Israelis have been forced to run to bomb shelters to protect themselves from Hamas’s attempts to slaughter civilians with rockets in order to advance its ultimate aim of genocide.

And even as Palestinian officials acknowledge the nature of this war, rather than rethink their support for genocidal terrorists anti-Israel activists in the US and Europe redouble their support for the Palestinians, by among other things engaging in violent assaults on local Jews. In so doing, they demonstrate that they share the Palestinians’ ultimate objective.

These activists are in turn supported by the leftist academia.

Their efforts are buoyed by the media which, at a minimum, fail to report on the nature of the campaign against Israel and generally, actively strive to obfuscate it. Leftist Jews, while compelled to condemn Hamas rocket fire, (but not rocket fire by Fatah militias), nonetheless make clear that at a minimum, Israel is also to blame for the Palestinian assault because it doesn’t give other Palestinians its heartland and capital city.

Finally, as we see with US-led Western demand that Israel reach a cease-fire with Hamas without first defeating the Palestinian terror machine in Gaza, the activists, the professoriate and the media are joined by political leaders who all agree that inciting and acting on behalf of the genocide of Jewry is not a disqualifying offense.