Tradition! Abbas justifies honoring murderers

An interview that Mahmoud Abbas gave to Der Spiegel is filled with more of his outrageous lies:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In fact, Israel is plagued by a wave of Palestinian violence in months. The offenders are mostly very young and act spontaneously . Many speak of a "knife-Intifada".

Abbas: That's no intifada. We need to understand why these young people to perpetrate such attacks . This generation witnessed daily violence and humiliation of the occupation regime and experienced it as their land is occupied by more and more settlers. If Israel ceases thus, no child will go out with a knife.

As I've noted, in Arabic the reasons given for the knifings has never been "humiliation." It's been specifically because of Palestinian incitement of claiming that Jews are attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque (and then revenge for those killed while trying to murder in the name of Al Aqsa.) The idea that these attacks are because of "humiliation" is a lie that Palestinians tell the Western media, but not the reason they tell each other.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Netanyahu government accuses them of inciting the perpetrators. What's your response?

Abbas: I am against these attacks and say this again and again.

Not in Arabic. The only times I've seen this mentioned in Arabic is when Arab media quotes Abbas making these claims to Western media.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So you have no influence on the younger generation?

Abbas: If a young person has lost hope, then he does not care whether I condemn his actions.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You, however, meet with the members of this attacker and write condolence letters. Does this not send the wrong signals?

Abbas: If a Palestinian dies, we support his family. This does not mean that we support his actions.

Here's just one of many posters that had been published on Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party's official Facebook page:

We began with stones and we will end up with a state

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You call the killed attackers martyrs. Does this not imply heroism?

Abbas: We do not encourage our young people to violence. But if someone comes through the hands of the Israeli security forces to death, then we call him a martyr. This is our tradition.

However, Abbas' party also celebrate as "martyrs" people who were not killed by Israel - they celebrate suicide bombers, as recently as last week!

So Palestinian "tradition" is not to celebrate people killed by Israel as "martyrs," but to celebrate people who kill Israelis and die as a result.

And not only Israelis. Palestinians also celebrated the murder of 3000 Americans in the not too distant past.

Tradition!

There are lots of other lies in this interview, of course, like Abbas claiming that the conflict has nothing to do with religion when he was the one who incited his people to attack Jews with his two weeks before the outbreak of the most recent stabbing spree:

“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem... With the help of Allah, every shaheed will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward … Al-Aqsa is ours, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is ours, everything is ours, all ours. They have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet."

Lying to Western media is apparently another of those sacred Palestinian traditions that you must not question, because that would show a severe lack of respect for their culture.

(h/t Quintessenz)

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