Fatah praises terror attack (and may be behind it.) What will it take for the EU and US to call Fatah a terror group?

This morning,  terrorist killed 3 Jews and injured others in Ariel.

The Palestinian Amad news site and others identify the terrorist as Muhammad Murad Sami Souf, 19. It says that he is a member of Fatah and his father was a leading Fatah figure who had been released from Israeli prison.

 Fatah has not yet taken responsibility, but it has praised the attack.

This heroic and courageous operation is a natural response to the orgy of the occupation soldiers and settlers and their daily crimes against the Palestinian people, their land, and their Islamic and Christian sanctities.This heroic and qualitative attack confirms the continuation and escalation of the resistance act in the occupied West Bank, and that our Palestinian people are fully aware that resistance is the only way to protect the land and sanctities, and that it is capable of raising the cost of the occupation and defeating it.

Significantly, only yesterday Fatah issued a statement that incited Palestinians to violence, saying "independence and achieving sovereignty over the land of the Palestinian state is a legitimate right of our Palestinian people, and it is a goal that we will continue to struggle with determination and determination to achieve, regardless of the sacrifices."

Fatah has taken credit for numerous other attacks this year, issuing many "martyr posters."

There has been no difference in rhetoric or actions between Fatah and other terror groups like Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the PFLP during the current wave of attacks. 

Yet the West still pretends that Fatah is somehow more "moderate" than the other groups. Only the Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are designated as a terror group by the State Department, but not Fatah itself. 

This is because the world wants to maintain the fiction that the PLO - which is dominated by Fatah - is a peace partner, and it would be awkward to say that Abbas is a man of peace but that the political party he heads is a terror group.

The US, EU and PLO play into the fiction that these terror attacks have nothing to do with Fatah, making a distinction between rogue Fatah elements and official Fatah positions. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center describes this ambiguity:

To understand the connection between Fatah and the Al Aqsa MArtyrs Brigades [AAMB,] a distinction has to be made between “official” Fatah, which is always conflicted because of the need display “resistance” activities while violating the ground rules agreed on with Israel, and Fatah operatives or security force operatives who ignore the official commitment. That duality is reflected in the inconsistent, diverse statements about the AAMB made by members of the Fatah movement. Some occasionally express reservations, and others publicly support, identify with and praise the armed “resistance,” while local Fatah branches support and openly aid it (al-Jazeera, August 9, 2022). 

The duality of the PA’s approach is also reflected in the way it responds to terrorist attacks for which the AAMB claim responsibility. Publicly, some of the senior PA figures condemn the attacks, primarily those carried out inside Israel territory, but often praise those who carry them out and represent them as role models and heroes who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the Palestinian people. The PA also issues mourning notices for them and senior Palestinian figures attend their funerals and go to the mourning tents to offer condolences. In the case of Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, AAMB leader in Nablus, Fatah even named its summer camps after him.

There's another reason why the West is reluctant to call out Fatah's clear support for these terror attacks. If every single Palestinian faction supports terror so explicitly, then Israel really cannot be blamed for concentrating on defending itself and its citizens - but the West wants to maintain the fiction that Israel is equally responsible for the violence, that it is a "cycle of violence" and not Israel responding to terror.

In the end, it is all politics and optics, and the West doesn't want to admit that the two state solution they want so desperately cannot work as long as one of the states is committed to destroy the other, one Jew at a time. 

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