Incitement - The engine Driving Global Terrorism

by Eli. E. Hertz

UN Security Council Resolution 1377 "reaffirms its unequivocal condemnation of all acts, methods and practices of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, in all their forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever committed."

Incitement is the Weapon

Political and religious incitement plays a crucial role in mobilizing and motivating Palestinian terrorism. After the horrendous 2002 suicide bombing of a Passover Seder in a Netanya hotel, Fouad Ajami, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University, wrote:

"The suicide bomber of the Passover massacre did not descend from the sky; he walked straight out of the culture of incitement let loose on the land, a menace hovering over Israel, a great Palestinian and Arab refusal to let that country be, to cede it a place among the nations, he partook of the culture all around him - the glee [that] greets those brutal deeds of terror, the cult that rises around the martyrs and their families."

Despite pledges to renounce violence against Israel, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas continue to incite, inflame and encourage Palestinian Arabs to pin every problem they face as individuals and as a society on Israel. This strategy of channeling frustrations into hatred and the desire for revenge against Israel is adopted both by Israel 's immediate Palestinian neighbors and Arab leaders throughout the Muslim-Arab world. Arab leaders and the European Union [EU] lend support to the Palestinian cause with money and a combination of anti-Israeli and anti-American messages from government-controlled media outlets and educational systems. Sermons that legitimize violence in the name of Islam are encouraged, delivered by extremists throughout Muslim countries and in free countries in the West.

The Effect of Indoctrination

These anti-Israeli actions have a profound impact on generations of Arabs fed a steady diet of poison-filled propaganda. Arab opinion polls find there is little desire for peace with Israel. Survey after survey shows that the majority of those polled believed the Arab-Israeli conflict should continue; and in most cases over 50 percent want Israel to eventually disappear from the Middle Eastern map. But those polls also signify more worrisome effects. Arab incitement, now broadened to include anti-Western sentiments, as well as anti-Israeli and antisemitic sentiments, is producing the greatest threat to the civilized world since World War II.

For non-Arabic speakers, it is hard to grasp just how pervasive the propaganda is in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority and throughout the Arab world. It is omnipresent: In state-controlled media outlets, in schools and mosques, at rallies, in speeches and articles.

Whether in print, music, religious sermons, or on the radio, television and walls, the propaganda that incites permeates the refugee camps, villages and towns on the West Bank and Gaza. It touches those in radical Islamic schools in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. All who watch Arab-controlled television and movies, read state-controlled newspapers and government-controlled schoolbooks are affected by hate-filled propaganda.

Terrorism against Israel and the West has reached epidemic proportions. Since September 11, not a day goes by when new terrorist attacks, failed attempts, or plots in Europe, the United States, Africa, and Asia go unreported. Those attacks have captured not just the imagination and support of the radical fringe, but of rank-and-file Arabs as well. Palestinian Arabs danced in the streets after September 11, just as they shouted with glee from the rooftops when Iraqi SCUD missiles smashed into Tel Aviv during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

A Culture of Hatred - Incited from Birth

Incitement is so prevalent in parts of the Arab world that it even permeates the cultural milieu. One proud Palestinian father celebrated his toddler's first birthday by strapping a fake suicide bomb to him and taking pictures of the child. As the shocking photo of the smiling "suicide" infant and his happy father made its way around the world, the baby's paternal grandfather dismissed the incident as a bad "joke."

The joke is the result of a vexing phenomenon. Schools controlled by authoritarian Arab regimes and Islamic extremists provide children everywhere in the Muslim-Arab world [including mosques in America and Europe] with textbooks that espouse a bitter hatred of Israel and the West. Maps of Israel show no such country. Instead, teachers within the Palestinian Authority teach their students that territory delineated by former British Mandate - from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea [including Israel proper] - is theirs. They say Israel is land that was "stolen" from the Arabs in 1948. A similar message is hammered home on children's television programs. From elementary school through high school, textbooks foster hatred towards Israel and the West, with Israel described as "a country of gangs, born in crime." Antisemitic expressions portray Jews as arrogant, sly traitors. Zionism is described as a racist movement and a "germ."

By second grade, the concept of jihad, or holy struggle - used by Osama bin Laden to characterize the September 11 attacks - is introduced and taught as an enshrined value. By the sixth grade, a child is encouraged to become a shahid [martyr].

When all is said and done, absent from the "texts" are the principles of normalization and co-existence with Israel.

For the entire article including footnote see: Incitement - The engine Driving Global Terrorism

For more on Incitement see: Palestinian Media Watch

Eli. E. Hertz

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.