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The Weekly Standard uses PMW documentation to refute Abbas' claims of Israeli incitement

Elliott Abrams  |
Abbas’s Tired, Old U.N. Rhetoric

by Elliot Abrams

On September 27, the chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas (who is also president of the Palestinian Authority and chairman of the Fatah Party) spoke to the U.N. General Assembly.

While he reiterated his support for the two-state solution, Abbas used his time at the podium mostly to revile Israel in terms we associate more with Hamas than with the Palestinian Authority. Here, in the order in which he employed them, are Abbas’s words about Israel.

First, Abbas warned of “the catastrophic danger of the racist Israeli settlement of our country,” and “terrorist militias” of settlers making “relentless waves of attacks against our people” who have become “fixed targets for acts of killing.” Settler attacks are “fueled by a climate of incitement in the Israeli curriculum” which is “rife with hatred.” This is an astonishing statement given the way Israel is treated in Palestinian textbooks and in the PA’s own broadcasts (see Palestinian Media Watch’s account of how Jews and Judaism are presented on the Palestinian airwaves here and an analysis of new textbooks here).

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