Stop Honouring Terrorists....

The Palestinian Authority must stop its incessant honouring of terrorists...

The Palestinian Authority’s policy of naming schools, summer camps, sporting events, streets and ceremonies after terrorists fundamentally undermines the chance for peace, states a new report by Palestinian Media Watch.

The NGO released the new study, “From Terrorists to Role Models: The Institutionalization of Incitement,” on Monday at the Foreign Ministry Press Center.

The report sought to determine whether the Palestinian Authority’s naming of public locations and events after terrorists responsible for killing Israeli civilians represented capitulation to a fringe group within the society, or was PA policy. It found that honoring terrorists and their actions played a significant role in Palestinian society.

Among the PA officials the organization quoted was Culture Minister Siham Barghouti, who said in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam in January that “honoring them in this way is the least we can give them, and this is our right.”

The PMW report calls on the Palestinian leadership to convince their people that terror is wrong at all times, and concludes that peace will not have a chance until terrorists are ostracized as immoral outcasts, not immortalized as heroes and role models.

Itamar Marcus, PMW’s founder and director, showed a multimedia presentation illustrating the findings of the report he co-authored with Nan Jacques Zilberdik and Barbara Crook. Marcus articulated the process of incitement in four steps: promoting hate, redefining acts of terror as acts of resistance, calling to kill Jews, and glorifying murder and terror.

“When you call to kill someone, it’s all theoretical. Here, it’s a much worse statement. You’re saying that if you’ve killed a Jew, if you’ve killed an Israeli and that’s all you’ve done, then we will name infrastructures after you,” Marcus said.

Marcus’s presentation included a copy of a third-grade math textbook asking, “How many years have passed since the Palestinian state was declared in 1988?” He also showed a clip used in the Fatah memorial for the fifth anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death – a boy saying, “I don’t know what [he] died from, but I know it was the Jews.”