Israel Matzav

Palestinian Media Watch fact checks Gingrich

Palestinian Media Watch has fact-checked the claims made by Newt Gingrich regarding the 'Palestinians' in last week's Republican candidate debate.

During the ABC News Republican presidential candidates’ debate (December 10, 2011), Gingrich said that the PA does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. He said that “the Palestinian Authority ambassador to India said last month, ‘There is no difference between Fatah and Hamas. We both agree Israel has no right to exist.” This quote, taken from a PMW bulletin, is precise and is very significant, elaborating one of the most important and yet relatively unnoticed principles of PA ideology.

The PA Ambassador to India, Adli Sadeq, wrote in the official PA daily: “They [Israelis] have a common mistake or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist.” (Al- Hayat Al-Jadida November 26, 2011)

The point of the PA ambassador was the following: The PA differentiates between recognizing that Israel in fact exists – and its unwavering denial of Israel’s legitimacy, that is, Israel’s right to exist. The PA educates its children with this dual message that Israel exists but has no right to exist, as expressed in a PA schoolbook for grade 12: “Palestine’s war ended with a catastrophe that is unprecedented in history, when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and established the State of Israel.” (Arabic Language, Analysis, Literature and Criticism, grade 12, p. 104)

Defining Israel as being created after “Zionist gangs stole Palestine” is the definitive expression of denying Israel’s right to exist. Significantly, this rejection of Israel is not just found in Palestinian schoolbooks but is a central part of the ongoing Palestinian discourse.

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Newt Gingrich’s second critique of the PA, which presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann likewise mentioned in the ABC debate, was of the PA schoolbooks which he said teach children to be terrorists. Gingrich said: “These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid money.”

Here, Gingrich was correct in principle but his example was not. The PA schoolbooks do not include that particular math question. Instead the PA Ministry of Education does something far worse: It glorifies murderers and terrorists. The PA Ministry of Education has two of its schools named after Dalal Mughrabi (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 23, 2006), the woman who led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history, the Coastal Road massacre bus hijacking in which 37 civilians were killed.

What exactly is the PA message to its children regarding terror? When the Ministry of Education makes children study in a school that venerates a terrorist who killed 37 civilians, its message is very clear: Terror and killing Israelis is not only justified but is even worthy of honor.

He may have misstated a detail, but Gingrich definitely got it right. Who will try to answer him?

Labels: Newt Gingrich, Palestinian people, Palestinian terrorism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:45 AM