RUTHFULLY YOURS

ROBIN SHEPHERD: THE BRAZEN CHEEK OF PALESTINIAN RACISM

Posted By Ruth King on August 1st, 2012

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1471/brazen_cheek_of_palestinian_racism_charge_against_mitt_romney

They’re at it again. Fresh from telling the International Olympic Committee it would be spreading “racism” if it held a minute’s silence at the London Olympics for the Israeli athletes murdered by Palestinian terrorists in Munich, the “moderate” Palestinian leadership has now lashed out at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Apparently, he’s “racist” because on his recent trip to Israel he suggested that wealth differences between Israelis and Palestinians are largely explained by cultural factors.

In general terms, the notion that cultural practices are the most important determinant of economic success is not controversial. Indeed, recognition of culture’s importance is often the best antidote to truly racist arguments that some races and peoples are genetically programmed to be poor, so we might as well give up on them. Culture can change and adapt. Race cannot.

But the Palestinian leadership, as per usual, is totally uninterested in a reason-based discussion. They simply slammed Romney as a racist because he’s pro-Israeli and because he didn’t indulge their victim complex by attributing Palestinian economic and social woes to the “occupation”, which is only partial and is in any case directly attributable to the Palestinians’ point blank refusal to accept peace offers for a two-state solution going back as far as 1947 if not further.

Given that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s “PhD” was a piece of Holocaust denial, and given that the current Palestinian leadership’s racism against Israelis extends to glorifying terrorists who slaughter Israeli civilians merely because they are Israeli civilians, they’ve got a brazen cheek using the word “racist” in the first place.

Only today, a new report from Palestinian Media Watch shows the Palestinian Authority describing Israel as “an octopus… [with] flames shooting out between its fangs”. This was featured in a monthly periodical from the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education. Does this animal imagery attributed to the Jewish people amount to racism? Probably not to Western media outlets, who fail time and again to report such things. But racism it certainly is.

Then again, the Western media they are aiming at in their attempt to smear the Republican candidate will never hold them to account, at least not in Europe. The BBC report on the subject obviously failed to mention any of this sort of context. But that’s not surprising since the BBC remains enamoured of Barack Obama and instinctively hostile to the State of Israel.

This was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone — they get to slam the Republican candidate precisely for his praise of the Jewish state. They must have been loving it.

To be fair, the wider media, including most of the more enlightened parts of it on the centre-Right, are little better. The Palestinian narrative is largely given a free pass right across the board, which is a key reason for the predominance in (west) European countries of their delegitimisation agenda.

Very basic facts about the conflict, which would radically undermine the Palestinian position, are simply never aired leaving most people with default assumptions that are profoundly anti-Israeli.

There is nothing especially new in all this. It is just that as every year goes by it all sinks deeper and deeper into our political culture to the point that it seems quite normal, for example, for the BBC to write a profile of Hamas that air brushes out any reference whatsoever to anti-Semitism. That’s a little bit like writing a profile of the Scottish National Party without mentioning Scotland.

Anti-Semitism is so central to the Hamas agenda that a profile of the group that doesn’t mention it is effectively worthless propaganda that will mislead you about what Hamas stands for rather than enlighten you. But the BBC profile of Hamas has now been up for years, and they’ve always refused to change it to reflect reality.

As regular readers will be aware, we at The Commentator will have nothing to do with a Palestinian agenda which is largely based on bigotry, hypocrisy, inversions of the truth and outright deception. It’s just a pity that so many others seem totally in thrall to it.

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