By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel — Israeli Jews are the invisible terror victims.
Facts: The invisible victims of terror are Israeli Jews. The perpetrators of a Jewish genocide are Palestinian Arabs.
The cause of their terror is to destroy Israel and kill Jews in the name of Palestinian liberation and Jihad.
How do we prove these facts? As follows:
Mahmoud Abbas, on official Palestinian TV on September 16, infamously incited Palestinian Arabs with a call to spill blood.
“We won’t allow Jews with their ‘filthy feet’ to ‘defile our holy Al-Aqsa Mosque.’ We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean pure blood for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.”
This then is the Palestinian Authority President who hides behind a secular exterior.
His call was taken up by one of the main preachers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Khaled al-Mugrabi who, in a sermon, declared, “The Children of Israel will all be exterminated. The Anti-Christ will be killed, and the Muslims will live in comfort for a long time.”
Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, appointed by Abbas as the mufti of Jerusalem and the Muslim cleric supervising the Temple Mount, repeatedly claims that there was never a Jewish temple atop the Temple Mount, and Mahmoud al-Habbash, Abbas’s advisor on all things Islamic called Jews “evil” and Israel “a Satanic project.” He also called Jesus a “Palestinian,” yet another attempt to remove any Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the land.
Meanwhile, Article 7 of the Hamas Charter charges Muslims to kill Jews: “Oh Muslim! There’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come out and kill him!”
The Palestinian National Charter states in Article 9 that, “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy not merely a tactical phase,” while Article 19 clearly states that “The partition of Palestine and the founding of Israel are entirely illegal.”
How does the Jewish state make peace with an entity that is so completely drenched in Jew hatred to the point of calling for genocide?
Yet this is ignored by a disinterested world, disinterested when it comes to protecting the only liberal democracy in a region, a region whose hate spills over onto European shores.
While the world painted the colors of the French tricolor on their Facebook pages, Israelis were being killed on an almost daily basis at the hands of Palestinian Arabs. No blue and white face-overs on Facebook profiles in memory of our dead.
It was startling to see how many Facebook Jews identified with the Parisian outrages but failed to stand publicly with the murdered Jews of Israel.
It seems the overpowering phony Palestinian narrative has cowed even Jews into silence.
This narrative not only emanates from Palestinian and BDS propaganda sources. It resounds in media headlines that scrub Jewish dead while refusing to name Palestinian Arabs as the murdering terrorists. Headlines, such as this of the BBC, seem to deliberately alter facts to hide the truth: “Palestinian shot dead as Jerusalem attack kills two.”
This BBC World News headline is callously typical of a media cover-up of Palestinian crimes.
No one would know from reading this headline that the Palestinian shot dead was an Arab attacker who targeted Jews. Nor would they know that the two killed were his Jewish victims. Why the obfuscation?
Or Sky News coverage that “Palestinians shot dead in alleged knife attacks” makes it read that Palestinians were victims of a shooting when, in fact, they were the attacking terrorists hunting for Jews to kill and that the knife attacks carried out by Palestinian Arabs were far from “alleged” but very real, leaving Israeli Jews bleeding and hospitalized.
In every case, editors twist themselves into pretzels to avoid telling the truth.
They have an undeniable agenda to present Palestinian Arabs as victims, a right that cannot be granted to Israeli Jews even as they are being attacked, wounded and killed by murderous Palestinian Arabs. It spoils these editors permanent story line. Every story must be portrayed to represent the best interests of the Palestinians, and present the worst of those pesky Israelis.
The deliberate protection of the ugly face of violent Palestine ends up neutralizing the story, leaving no room for sympathy for Israeli victims.
When it happens regularly you know there is an editorial issue at work here.
To prove this point let’s reverse roles.
Can you imagine the global reaction if Arabs had been stabbed, mown down in vehicular attacks, shot, or injured and killed by rock-throwing Jewish Israelis?
Can there be any doubt it would not have made headline news around the world, especially if it were occurring daily, as it is to Jews in Israel?
Does anyone think that the noise level of reaction against Israel would not have been deafening?
Is there any denial that international bodies would have been calling for criminal investigations and punishing condemnations of Israel, rather than the individual perpetrators?
Would anyone attempt to justify the resultant Arab deaths and injuries as an excusable reaction to ongoing violence against a fearful population?
Of course not! But when it happens the other way round, it’s nothing more than a yawn. Not worth spilling editorial ink.
So why the double standard? Why hasn’t the media, the international diplomatic community, taken the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas to task for the clear and public incitement to violence that is anchored in blatant anti-Semitism?
Incitement to genocide is an international crime. Why is this not being called out?
Tolerating a Palestinian Authority that calls for a world without Israel as they murder Jews is intolerable, particularly when that toleration is practiced by liberal democratic countries.
The statements made by Western leaders have been heinous. I use that word deliberately.
American Vice President, Joe Biden, described as “heinous” terrorist attacks, naming Paris, Beirut, Iraq and Nigeria. He forgot to mention Israeli terror victims. No doubt he will call it a slip of the tongue. He was not alone.
It is particularly galling when Western policy-makers attempt to twist an emboldened Palestinian terror campaign that leaves too many Israeli Jews dead and injured into a false narrative of Palestinian “despair” and, further, link it to Islamic attacks in Paris as did the inexcusable Swedish Foreign Minister and the leader of the Dutch Socialist Party. Or US Secretary of State, John Kerry, who blamed settlements for rampant Palestinian killers, responding to the incitement of their Palestinian and Islamic leaders to kill Jews.
This dangerous Western thinking and rhetoric is wrong. It has to end!
It is time for misguided influence and opinion makers to own up to the truth.
The truth is that Israeli Jews are being targeted and killed for being Israeli Jews.
The truth is a Palestinian ambition not to live in peace alongside Israel but to destroy Israel and kill Jews.
The truth is that the false language expressed by diplomats and the Western media makes them complicit in encouraging further Palestinian violence against Israeli Jews and a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
The truth is they are sanitizing anti-Semitic incitement and attacks.
The truth is they are emboldening a Palestinian leadership who sees Western intellectuals mouthing their narrative and closing their eyes to their crimes.
As long as Israeli Jews remain the invisible victims of terror, victims of an invisible malevolent Palestinian agenda, do not expect Israelis to offer gestures or concessions for peace.
We, the invisible victims and targets of Palestinian terror, are too busy trying to stay alive.
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Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also the author of Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism. He founded the Netanya Terror Victims Organization when Palestinians targeted his hometown for suicide attacks, car-bombing and shootings that killed over 50 and injured hundreds.