RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Palestinian Authority (PA) finally found a terrorist act committed by a Palestinian against an Israeli from which it wishes to disassociate. The horrific rape and knife murder of 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher prompted Qadura Fares, head of the PA-affiliated Prisoner’s Club to say, “From our perspective, this (rape) becomes a criminal case. We’re against the idea that anyone who commits a criminal act can then try to cloak themselves in the nationalist flag.”

A senior Fatah official said, “Even if there was no rape, a murder like this is unacceptable. The victim wasn’t a soldier, and this wasn’t wartime. If you want to be a hero, you don’t go and murder an innocent woman who went into the woods to read a book.”

No go, guys. In the world of the PA, everyone is a soldier and every day is wartime. You own this and you own Arafat Irfaiya.

Irfaiya is 27 years old, just about the same age as the Oslo Accords. In 2006, when Irfaiya was just a boy, the PA, aware that it could not field an army to go to war against Israel’s army, adopted a strategy of “popular resistance” (i.e., popular terrorism) at the 6th Fatah Conference. Seemingly unplanned low-tech attacks (car ramming or stabbing) against Israelis and Jews were described after the fact by Palestinian leadership as “heroic actions” and “the natural response to Israel’s crimes.”

In 2015, Mahmoud Abbas, PA strongman, instigated the “ramming and stabbing intifada” by calling on Palestinians to “defend” the al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

“Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. [Jews] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem. Each drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid [martyr] will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.”

There are earthly rewards as well, codified in “Amended Palestinian Prisoners Law No. 19, which predates the 2015 violence. The law mandates free tuition, health insurance, and professional training for Palestinians released from Israeli jail.  It talks about salaries “linked to a cost-of-living index.”  In 2013, the law was amended to give released prisoners “priority in annual job placements in all State institutions.”

Although the Taylor Force Act cuts American money to the PA for such salaries, Hassan Abed Rabbo, PLO head of the Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners’ Affairs, disapproved, “It is the right of all of the prisoners and martyrs who have struggled and sacrificed for Palestine to receive their full salaries from the PA.” Palestinian prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, said inmates are “prisoners of war” and that “their cause is the cause of all of us.”

No exclusion for rape. No exclusion for Irfaiya.

Everyone is a soldier; every day is a battle.

Irfaiya didn’t stand a chance. He was marinated in the demonization of Jews and the illegitimacy of Israel. Anyone under the age of 35 had at least a substantial part of his/her education in PA schools designed to promote the war. Just last week, Congressmen Scott Perry and Lee Zeldin wrested from classification part of a U.S. State Department study of Palestinian schools under the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) that called the schools “damning.”

Even math was “problematic” and “not aligned with UN values.” The report explained, “A specific math problem using the number of Palestinian casualties in the first and second intifadas (uprisings) was clearly objectionable.” There was “material that ignores Israeli narratives, includes militaristic and adversarial imagery, and preaches the values of resistance.”

And while UNRWA did produce additional materials that slightly corrected the scales, said the report, it acknowledged that those materials were not distributed and Palestinian teachers went on strike rather than receive and use them.

The list of “heroes” selected for Palestinian children to venerate and imitate is a list of terrorists. High among them is Dalal Mughrabi, mastermind of the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 37 Israeli bus company employees on holiday and their families — and one American — were killed.

A women’s center was named for her, two schools, a  PA summer camp for children, a town square and more than one soccer club. Actually, Al Quds University has soccer squads named for her and for Yaha Ayyash (The Engineer) considered the “father” of suicide attacks; PFLP’s Ghassan Hanafani; and Fatah’s Ziyad Da’as, commander of a squad that planned an attack on a Bat Mitzvah in which gunmen killed six people.

Everyone is a soldier; every day is a battle. No exception for Arafat Ifaiya — a product of his culture and his education and owned by the people who raised him.