"Jaw-dropping" report presented to Canadian Parliamentarians

The Ottawa Citizen Editorial Pages Editor, Leonard Stern, described the "chilling... hallucinatory libels" cited in the PMW report, calling the report "jaw-dropping."

Yesterday I posted an item about a small ray of sun in the otherwise long and dark night that has been Palestinian-Israeli relations for the past 60 years. Well, for every spark of reconciliation there's a bucket of hate to drown it.

This week Canadian parliamentarians got a glimpse at just how intractable the hatred can be. They had a briefing from Itamar Marcus, an Israeli researcher who specializes in monitoring Arabic media. His website Palestinian Media Watch is an invaluable tool for anyone seeking to understand what many Palestinians really think.

Palestinian clerics and other opinion-makers have long had a tendency of saying one thing to English-speaking audiences but saying something entirely different when speaking in Arabic to domestic audiences. Palestinian Media Watch allows non-Arabic speakers (western journalists and policy-makers, for example) to get an honest and candid sense of Palestinian attitudes.
Itamar Marcus and his North American colleague Barbara Crook ­- she lives in Ottawa, by the way ­- have produced a jaw-dropping report on the crazy things that, at this very moment, are being broadcast on Palestinian TV and printed in Palestinian newspapers. Most chilling are the hallucinatory libels ­ that Israel is deliberately spreading AIDS and drug addiction in Palestinian communities, that Israeli soldiers stab "the wombs" of Arab women so they can't reproduce, that Israel conducts Nazi-like experiments on Arabs.

Most bizarre is the libel, in circulation in the mainsteam Palestinian press, that Israel is using a breed of rats immune to poison and have set them loose in Arab neighbourhoods. Seems that the Jews have retained their Biblical power to control the elements and unleash supernatural plagues on their enemies.

And this:

Jews drink the blood of Muslims and believe that God wants Jews to hate Muslims, according to a Hamas TV skit. Performed before a live audience at the Islamic University in Gaza, the segment features actors playing a father and son, in traditional Hasidic Jewish garb, discussing their God mandated hatred of Muslims.

Or this:

According to Hamas, the Jews are responsible for all the ills of modern society - the French Revolution; the Communist revolution; the establishment of secret associations (Freemasons, Rotary and Lions clubs, B'nai B'rith) designed to help them gain control of the world by secret means. They control the economy, press and television; they are responsible for the outbreak of World War I, which they initiated in order to destroy the Muslim caliphates (the Ottoman empire), to get the Balfour Declaration and set up the League of Nations with the aim of establishing their state. They also initiated World War II in order to make a fortune from selling war materials; they use both capitalism and communism as their agents.

Sound familiar? Yes, some of it is taken directly from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and some, particularly the parts dealing with the world wars, is original.

Don't tell me that these are merely words and Hamas must not be judged only on the basis of its covenant. Would anyone dare say that if a similar movement were to arise in Europe or America and, in addition to statements like these, was busy killing Jews?

When you read this kind of information, you can no longer wonder at some of the more bizarre opinions one encounters on the Internet, like this one:

Once we have dumped Afghanistan, maybe the time has come to dump Israel. They have a nutso new government... Along with many others I have had a belly full of Israel.... I find myself very tired of Israel's inability or more accurately, unwillingness to find a solution to what has been going on since 1948. Enough already. . That does not mean I praise the Palestinians. I don't. I simply give them more slack because they aren't as industrious and don't have the wherewithall that the Israelis have. Basta!

Think about it. You'll see the logic of it. I still haven't found the words to explain how Palestinian pathologies of this type directly get translated into proof of Israel's illegitimacy and undesirability. But apparently they do. Maybe people cannot imagine that such hatred can actually develop on its own. No doubt it must be deserved. So the reasonable response is to "dump Israel", whatever this plea means in actuality. It's a bit like the Jews in Europe during WWII. They must have done something to deserve all that German hatred or else, why would they be so industrially exterminated? I was once actually asked this question, by a Canadian teacher. The comment I quoted was also made by a former teacher.