Yesterday I noted the speech of Palestinian Authority President for Life Mahmoud Abbas, referring readers to the Times of Israel account of the speech and Times of Israel editor David Horovitz’s column on it. Abbas had given his speech this past Sunday to the PLO Central Council. My post, however, lacked the text of the speech.
Now the invaluable MEMRI provides us a 17-minute video of excerpts posted here and a companion transcript. MEMRI introduces the excerpts with the explanation that Abbas responded to President Trump’s recent tweets threatening to cut Palestinian aid by saying: “To hell with you! When have we ever rejected negotiations?” Readers with a long memory may recall that Abbas rejected negotiations during the Obama regime despite the imprecations of Secretary Kerry.
In his lengthy address broadcast by the Palestinian Authority TV channel, MEMRI adds, Abbas gave a historical review in which he claimed that conspiracies to settle the Jews in the Middle East had begun in the 17th century with Oliver Cromwell, and continued throughout the centuries, and that the Zionist movement “constitutes a colonialist enterprise that has nothing to do with Judaism.” (I’m embedding the brief excerpt posted by Palestinian Media Watch that I note in the update below. Go to the MEMRI link above for its 17-minute video with translation.)
What is going on here? Bloomberg’s Eli Lake provides a thoughtful and sober take on Abbas’s speech here. Eli helpfully recalls Abbas’s rejection of negotiations with Israel under the friendly auspices of Barack Obama and tactfully suggests the representative nature of Abbas’s mania among the Arabs with whom Israel is supposed to parley.
Noah Pollak checks in on Abbas’s speech in the free-swinging Free Beacon post “The New York Times won’t let Mahmoud Abbas have his YOLO moment.” Pollak helps us get inside the meaning of this particular moment with Mahmoud. Pollak also notes the mission in which the New York Times persists to keep up appearances for Abbas when Abbas wants to let it all hang out (“the Times left out all the good stuff–the rank anti-Semitism, the crazed conspiracy theorizing, the threats of violence, the glorification of terrorists. The Times never got the YOLO memo, and is still working off an Obama administration-era script”). Highly recommended.
UPDATE: Via email this morning we are advised that Palestinian Media Watch has posted a Special Report by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik with video here in a related bulletin. Like MEMRI, PMW provides an invaluable service in letting us see the reality underlying the public relations performed by the New York Times and so many others in the media.
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