U.S. and EU-Trained Palestinian Official Blames West for Brussels Terror Attack

A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security sorces has blamed the United States and Europe for the March 22, 2016 Brussels, Belgium terrorist attack for which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility.

On the day of the attacks that murdered 31 people, PA security forces spokesman Adnan Al-Damiri wrote on his Facebook page:

“Those who prepare the poison will taste it themselves, and today Europe is having a taste of what it prepared with its own hands.”

Al-Damiri’s remarks were reported by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem.

After claiming to offer a brief perfunctory condemnation of “terrorist acts everywhere in the world,” al-Damiri’s Facebook post makes clear that he blames the West for Islamist terror. He claims that “we Arabs are the ones who have been most severely burned by the fire of terror, which has been created and exported by the US and Europe since the Arab Jihad fighters in Afghanistan, and before that by exporting the Jewish terror to Palestine, supporting it and justifying it. Today, Europe is being burnt by its [the terror’s] fire in its airports and squares.”

Al-Damiri conveniently overlooked that Arab terrorists fighting under the banner of Islam existed long before the United States and its allies, including Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, supported mujahiddeen [holy warriors] in the fight to repel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s. As CAMERA has previously noted (“Au Contraire, Prof. Picketty: Income Inequality Does Not Cause Middle East Terrorism,” Dec. 9, 2015), Islamist terrorism predates the period of Western involvement in the region. In addition, terrorist groups comprised of Arabs living in and near British Mandatory Palestine attacked Jews long before the recreation of Israel as a modern state in 1948.

Al-Damiri’s supposed condemnation of terrorism reads less believably when one considers that on Dec. 21, 2015 he called for Palestinian children to “water” the fight against Israel “with blood” (see CAMERA’s “Palestinian Security ‘Shares’ Call to ‘Water’ anti-Israel Fight ‘With Blood,’” Dec. 29, 2015).

PMW noted that the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, echoed the spokesman’s March 22 Facebook post with a cartoon depicting “a person whose head is the globe representing the Western world is shown attempting to blow up the Middle East, but inadvertently blows up himself.”

The United States, other Western countries and the European Union have supported PA security forces with money, training and equipment as a result of the 1990s Olso accords that resulted in the establishment of the authority and limited self-rule—provided that Palestinian leaders recognized and sought to make peace with Israel. According to a March 18, 2016 United States Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, U.S. Foreign Aid to Palestinians, that security aid is “aimed at countering” U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and “establishing the rule of law for an expected Palestinian state.”

Cooperation between Israeli and PA security agencies has helped prevent the West Bank from becoming an open terror base like the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

However, as CAMERA has noted (“Where’s the Coverage? Palestinian Official Shoots Israeli Soldier,” Dec. 9, 2015), some PA police and paramilitary have committed terrorist attacks against Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike—contravening professed reasons for the establishment of the PA and the funding and training of its forces.

When a spokesman for the PA security forces essentially blames the West for terrorism in Brussels, and his charge is reflected in the authority’s daily paper, shouldn’t donors to the PA to reconsider whether their aid money is being well spent?