Palestinian Journalist Behind on Palestinian Affairs
Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab apparently doesn’t keep up with the Palestinian media. Writing in the International Herald Tribune last week (Jan. 25), he insisted that “Abbas has rejected all forms of anti-Israeli violence” and that Palestinian television has been “cleaned of anti-Israeli incitement.”
Yet, as reported in the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida one day earlier, Abbas spoke in favor of an Arab war against Israel, stating: “I have said more than once that if the Arabs want war – we are with them.”
Yet, even if Kuttab missed the paper that day, it stretches the imagination to believe that he missed all of the following: At a rally marking the five year anniversary of Yasir Arafat’s death, Abbas praised the “noble” resistance, in which “we combined armed struggle with political activity.” Similarly, speaking at a 2007 Fatah rally, Abbas declared: “We have raised our rifles against the occupation [ie, Israel] and that is a legitimate right.” Likewise, Abbas was quoted in Jordan’s al-Dustur in 2008, “At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different.”
It seems that Kuttab is also not a regular viewer of the “cleansed” Palestinian television, which recently ran broadcasts glorifying Dalal al-Mugrabi, the ringleader of the 1978 hijacking of an Israeli bus, in which terrorists massacred 37 civilians. One music video refers to the killers as “heroes… who shook the land, brought down mountains,” and another praises them for having “no fear of death or the darkness of prison.” A separate music video on the Fatah-controlled channel in December proclaimed: “By Allah, we won’t throw down our weapons. We treat the rifle as a brother.”
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