There are no innocent Palestinians

By Ted Belman (10/22/03)

Itamar Marcus, founder of Palestinian Media Watch released a poll today taken of Palestinians, Israeli Jews, and Israeli Arabs. JPost reports that

Fifty-nine percent of Palestinians believe that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad should continue their armed struggle against Israel even if Israel leaves all of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem, and a Palestinian state is created, a new survey shows.

Similarly, 80 percent of Palestinians say that, under those circumstances, the Palestinians should not give up the “right of return.”

Ninety-six percent of Israeli Jews say the people who piloted the planes on September 11 were terrorists, while 37 percent of Palestinians share that view.

Slightly more than one in four – 26 percent – of Palestinians believe Israelis planned the 9-11 attacks.

Forty-two percent of Palestinians and 61 percent of Israeli-Arabs stated that they support the people who are attacking Americans in Iraq.

Zero percent of Israeli Jews said they did.

Marcus said he believes such opinions are “not coming from a vacuum” and that the survey demonstrates a “connection between Palestinian media and education and Palestinian beliefs and opinions.”

During the Iraq war, Palestinian Authority-sponsored television glorified the killing of American soldiers, a theme that has continued until now in various media, Marcus said.

This poll confirms the view of the Right, that the Arabs and Palestinians must suffer a total defeat before negotiation. Unfortunately it won’t register on the Left who continue to ignore history after Oslo or blame the Jews for Oslo’s failure.

This poll further buttresses my arguments in my recent post “There’s no distinction” with Frank Gaffney’s Jr.’s recent article. He advises us of a disinformation campaign by the Islamists

“Its main thrust is that anyone who dares to point out the threat posed by the Islamists is a racist, bigot or ignoramus. Why? Because, we are told, such observations impugn all Muslims.”

That is the PC response and the propagandists play on it. He goes on to say

This is, of course, absurd. Law-abiding and tolerant Muslims first and foremost understand that there are real differences between themselves and the Islamists — so much so that the radicals view their peaceable co-religionists with at least as much hostility as they do people of other faiths.

While it is definitely true that the Islamists force conformity on their co-religionists and purport to speak in their name, what is also true is that Muslims in general should be impugned, as should Islam.

Daniel Pipes takes great pains to assert that the problem is the Islamofascists and the solution is the moderate Muslims.

President Bush constantly refers to Islam as the religion of peace and the enemy as terrorism rather than Islam.

The ACLU actively comes out against profiling as discriminatory and the Left in general wants to treat Muslims like they were just like us.

This poll suggests otherwise as does every poll taken amongst Muslim’s thought the world. The speech by the PM of Indonesia and the standing ovation he got suggests otherwise.

Irshat Manji, self described as “not a self-hating Muslim”, in her book “The trouble with Islam” takes great pains to describe the extent of anti-Semitism in Canada among Muslim’s, let alone the world, and says Jew hatred among Muslims is deep, long standing (1000 years), pervasive and institutionalized. We see daily examples of its propagation by Muslim media, mosques and governments.

The world allows that Israel may go after terrorists, but God forbid, it should kill any innocent Palestinians. Innocent Palestinians?

When a country declares war on the US, we consider it fair game to fight the country and do not concern ourselves with the small minority in the country who were against the war. War is war. This is true whether the country is a democracy or a dictatorship. The people in such countries must take responsibility for the actions of their government whether or not elected.

The world keeps telling Israel that it must negotiate with Arafat because he is the democratically elected leader of the Palestinians (never mind that Israel can refuse to negotiate with anyone whether elected or not) and therefore acts in their name. But this argument stops there for them. Whenever the duly elected leader, Arafat, uses terror to advance his goals and those of the Palestinians, as represented by this poll and many others, Israel is told that the Palestinians are “innocent”, meaning in no way responsible for the terrorism. Sorry, this doesn’t wash. There are no innocent Palestinians. They elected their leader, support terrorism and protect terrorists. They must be held responsible.