As Abbas Denies Palestinian Incitement, US State Department Attests to Phenomenon
On Sunday, Mahmoud Abbas insisted that the latest wave of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis is a natural consequence of despair. “Don’t trust those who say there are efforts to push them or incite them,” he said of Palestinian attackers. “Rather, they have lost hope.”
This argument, which shifts responsibility for Palestinian violence away from the attackers and toward the victims, is favored by some journalists and activists (even when the facts show something else).
But only days before Abbas’s comments, a U.S. State Department notice announcing sanctions on a Hamas terror leader attested to the alarming reality of Palestinian incitement. The notice focused on Fathi Ahmad Mohammad Hammad, who is responsible for, among other terrorist activity, inciting the next generation of Palestinians to hate and kill.
According to the State Department, Hammad “established Al-Aqsa TV, which is a primary Hamas media outlet with programs designed to recruit children to become Hamas armed fighters and suicide bombers upon reaching adulthood.”
No wonder Hamas officials have dismissed the idea that Palestinian attackers are driven by despair. They work hard to inspire anti-Jewish terror attacks and, unlike their Fatah counterparts (who also incite attacks and also focus on indoctrinating Palestinian youth), are not shy about publicly admitting it.
CAMERA has previously faulted the news media for ignoring or downplaying Palestinian incitement. After John Kerry pointedly said incitement was to blame for the murder of Jews praying at a synagogue, for example, New York Times journalists initially reported on the Secretary of State’s newsworthy comments, but then scrubbed all reference to them from their article. And a recent article by AFP pitted “analysts,” who according to the wire service don’t name incitement as relevant to Palestinian violence, against “Israel,” which claims it is — this despite the fact that plenty of analysts agree that incitement fuels violence.
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