Monday 24 June 2013

A tale of Palestinian nonsense.

A tale of Palestinian nonsense.
Original Thinking by Barry Shaw.



Mohamoud Zahar, the ugly Hamas spokesman with a wart on the end of his nose, set everyone laughing at the beginning of 2012 with a nonsense statement that Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from demonstrating peacefully  because there are no Jews in Gaza to protest against. That is why, he explained, they have no choice but to resort to violence. No, don’t laugh! He was being serious. You couldn’t make this up. Not surprisingly, to those who follow and support the Palestinian narrative, this insanity is perceived as a logical and reasonable argument. It appeals to the Israel haters who accuse Israel of human rights abuses for “occupying” Gaza from the outside rather than the inside. Don’t even try to figure this out. You’ll only tie yourself up in a Gordian knot of maddening Palestinian illogicality.
This endless nonsense is promoted by pro-Palestinian public relations groupies with an inexhaustible amount of funding from wealthy individuals, or from mindless European Governments for whom the mantra “Solve Human Rights Abuses and you Save the World” is pre-eminent. Funding also comes from malevolent sources, such as  Arab and Islamic regimes, who have transposed the “Arab-Israel War” into the more appealing “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” This new definition allows bleeding heart liberals to side with the underdog and lose sight of reality.
Let’s be honest. The world has bought into the Palestinian narrative of victimhood to the extent that, for decades, it has thrown billions of dollars into a lie. Anyone with any legal sense will conclude that if you repeatedly extract money from someone based on a falsehood you eventually risk being dragged into court for fraud. And, if you add violence to your extortion, you will, more than likely, be found guilty of both fraud and assault and be thrown into the slammer.  Not so with the Palestinians. They can be as corrupt as they like, they literally get away with murder. They are feted, patted, sympathized with, by an international community that is so blind it cannot see past its tears to see the truth. The Palestinians have been flavor of the month for decades while the rest of the world’s genuine basketcases are ignored. The universal publicity machine endlessly pumps out money for the Palestinian schnorrers. The rest go begging for scraps.
The world has bought into this nonsense so deeply and so intensely that they cannot admit the truth any more. When the Hamas spokesman (yes, the one with the wart) announced that Gaza was no longer “occupied”, the United Nations persisted in declaring the Gaza Strip as still being under Israeli occupation. They continue to perpetrate a lie that even Hamas denies.
In truth, the Palestinians control every aspect of their society. Hamas, in Gaza, runs the courts, the police, the jails, the schools, mosques, the media, and the social services. It has its own economy and banking. It regulated its business activities. It levies taxes. It even imposes Shariah law on its citizens. As Abraham Bell and Dov Shefi, two international legal experts, wrote in a 2010 research paper, Hamas runs “a functioning and fully independent local civil government, buttressed by armed forces.”  The Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank is middle class and successful compared to many Arab regimes. Yet, the world still accepts the victimhood fraud.
This tale of victimhood helps sell newspapers. It is the stuff of poor and biased journalism. It keeps career diplomats in clover. Western societies continue to pump money they don’t have, or can ill afford, into the fiction mill. The Palestinians are building an industry on it.  Many are getting wealthy on the false tale of victimhood. They fly from one conference to another. They see the success of this narrative. It serves them well. So well, in fact, that they don’t want to change, don’t want to reach a solution. It’s rather like the guy who drives his big car from his suburban home to the town center, parks his vehicle, takes out a pair of crutches, limps into town, and starts begging and crying. The naïve and sympathetic throw notes and coins into his lap until it’s time for him to drive home and put his feet up at the end of a good days work.
Why should they change, these Palestinians? They’ve got it down to a fine art, and it works for them. They are occupied, they are oppressed and abused by a heartless, brutal, racist, Nazi, regime. Why spoil it by being forced into a negotiating room in which they could end up with an independent state and have to be truly accountable to their people?
Their fiction appeals to the heart, not to the head, and the heart is not easily dissuaded, especially if you can knock up some emotive pictures to strengthen your argument. Public opinion is easily swayed by a good sob story.
Just as people, who abuse the social services of a welfare state, lose the desire to find work and become productive citizens, so the Palestinians are enjoying the status they have achieved as the world’s most appreciated victim. They exploit their inferiority to the extent that they cannot, or will not, escape their inferiority. It works for them; therefore they are trapped in it. Nobody has demanded they become a more pragmatic, open, liberal society, especially not the Western pragmatic, open, and liberal societies. They are the ones who persevere with the nonsense of this false narrative. They simply continue to throw their money at them as you do to a beggar on the street. Nobody has conditioned their funding on the Palestinians discarding their lies and get real, to make biting concessions and put an end to their tale of discontent.
But how can they do that? To do so would put an end to the lies they have spun to their own people. Lies like the holy duty to destroy Israel, lies like how they will eventually possess all the land. To accept a rump state alongside the Jewish state of Israel would be exposed as an ignoble failure of leadership. It would force them to buckle down to real nation-building, instead of looking with greed and envy at Israel’s flourishing land.
The Palestinians and their supporters have taken the nonsense of victimhood and have deliberately prevented progress. They have wrapped the Islamic cloak around their victimhood. This enables them to play both sides of the deck. They are both victim and hero. They glorify their most heinous acts of terror. Their jihad allows them to turn the most inhumane acts of murder into glorious tales of valor. Their narrative turns mass murder into praiseworthy heroism to be rewarded in this life or the next. It produces a culture twisted into a brutal and resentful society. They are trapped in their negative stew of victimhood and brutality. It finds expression in the nonsensical statements of people like Zahar, and those who accuse Israel of being an “Apartheid” and “Nazi” state. Their nonsense, to them, makes sense. Sad tales have their impact. The emotional tale of victimhood is their only power. They can twist every expression they can find to make a point that drips with emotion and useful sound bites, but they fail the test of truth every time.
Basically, the Palestinian narrative is a tale of nonsense.

Barry Shaw is the author of “Israel Reclaiming the Narrative” www.israelnarrative.com
He is also the Special Consultant on Delegitimization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue Center at Netanya Academic College

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