Palestinian “Moderates” Boast of Killing Thousands of Jews

In the liberal narrative, West Bank Palestinians are governed by the moderate Fatah, led by the moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s Partner For Peace of the moment. Gaza, on the other hand, is ruled by Hamas extremists. In practice, however, it isn’t easy to tell the “moderates” without a scorecard.

Currently, elections are going on in the West Bank and Gaza, the first in ten years. How is Fatah appealing to Palestinian voters? By boasting of violence against Jews:

In an effort to appeal to Palestinians ahead of hotly contested elections, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas listed one of its main achievements as having “killed 11,000 Israelis.”

The party, Fatah, made the incendiary claim on Tuesday in an Arabic-language post on one of its official Facebook pages.

“For the argumentative … the ignorant … And for those who do not know history,” begins the Facebook post, “The Fatah movement killed 11,000 Israelis.”

Fatah also claimed to have “offered 170,000 martyrs,” and hundreds of its followers, it said, were in “Israeli occupation jails.”

Mahmoud Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian Media Watch was, I believe, the source of the story, having translated the Fatah Facebook post. There is more than the New York Times, linked above, quoted:

“To those who argue [with Fatah], to the boors, and to those who do not know history:

* Fatah has killed 11,000 Israelis

* Fatah has sacrificed 170,000 Martyrs (Shahids)…

* Fatah was the first to carry out operations [i.e., terror attacks] during the first Intifada [i.e., Palestinian violence and terror against Israel, 1988-1993], and it was the first Palestinian faction to reach the nuclear reactor in Dimona [i.e., 1988 murder of 3 working mothers on way to the Dimona plant].

* Fatah was the first to fight in the second Intifada [i.e., PA terror campaign 2000-2005] (Baha Al-Sa’id, an officer in the Preventive Security Forces, infiltrated an Israeli settlement on the border with Gaza) [parenthesis in source]…

* Fatah was the first to defeat the Zionist enemy (Battle of El-Karameh) [parenthesis in source]…

* Fatah led the Palestinian attack on Israel in the UN.

Only in the upside-down Arab world is this the platform of a “moderate” party. It seems blindingly obvious that Fatah is no more a “partner for peace” with Israel than Hitler was a partner for peace with Germany’s Jews.

Most disturbing, of course, is the fact that Fatah’s Facebook post is campaign literature. The way to win Palestinian votes is to be as bloodthirsty as possible, evidently. No wonder Israel has more or less given up on the Palestinians (my interpretation) and is moving forward on its own, leaving its Arab neighbors centuries behind.

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