PA daily op-ed: PA, Abbas support peace; Israel has “unique connections” with terror org Jabhat Al-Nusra

Excerpt of an op-ed by Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for the official PA daily

Headline: “The culture of peace – from the [PA] president to Saber Murad”

“Several days ago [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas said that our hands are still extended to peace, although he has briefed the Palestinian people on the leadership’s decision to stop upholding the agreements with ‘the Israeli side,’ in other words the occupying force according to the international legal definition. In many speeches from international podiums, the loftiest of which was the UN General Assembly podium, he has said that Palestine has counter-terror agreements with 83 states in the world, and that this agreement with Washington is still firm and valid, despite the severing of contact with American President Donald Trump’s administration…

From the perspective of the Palestinian people’s leadership, the war on terror was not a political tactic or a temporary choice, but rather a strategy relying on a historical, contemporary, and future cultural infrastructure of the Palestinian people – not only because the Palestinian people is the number one victim in the world of state-terror (Israel’s terror) [parentheses in source], but also because the humaneness that composes the Palestinian people’s collective and individual culture was the force that pushed the president of peace, the human president, Mahmoud Abbas, to go far in all that is connected to these agreements with all the world states that are prepared to fight terror. He did not do this in order to achieve political gains, but rather out of complete faith that terror is the opposite of humaneness, just as war is the opposite of peace, and ignorance is the opposite of knowledge…

President Mahmoud Abbas showed interest in the heroism of the Palestinian Saber Murad from Tripoli in northern Lebanon, who nearly paid with his life to save Lebanese civilians and soldiers in the Lebanese army when he used his car to block Abd Al-Rahman Mabsout, a terrorist and native of Tripoli who opened fire indiscriminately on civilians in a crowded street (Murad threw himself in the path of a terrorist's bullets on June 3, 2019 –Ed.)…

The Palestinian Saber Murad was born in Tripoli to a Lebanese mother. Mabsout was also born in Tripoli, but the Palestinian Murad – the person who absorbed the culture of peace – prevented the terrorist… from completing his crime and taking additional victims. The terrorist was a member of the organization Jabhat Al-Nusra (a branch of the Al-Qaeda terror organization; see note below –Ed.) that has unique connections with the Israeli occupation authorities, which are also racist and terrorist. We all know Israel’s military borders policy – Syria’s border with occupied Palestine (i.e., Israel) is open to Jabhat Al-Nusra activists, and its activists are treated at the hospitals in Safed in northern occupied Palestine (i.e., a city in northern Israel). But what is not known to some of us is that ‘One of these terrorists used to go to the West Bank and Gaza – also through easements of intelligence and secrecy by the occupation authorities – to travel to Jordan and afterwards to return to where he had come from, until he was exposed’…

We believe that the culture of peace has Palestinian roots that are planted deep in history, and this is natural in a holy land where the messenger of love and peace, Jesus son of Mary, was born, and to which the messenger of love and peace, Muhammad son of Abdallah, travelled [in his Night Journey].”

Jabhat Al-Nusra is a branch of the Al-Qaeda terror organization operating in Syria and Lebanon, formed in January 2012. It is an Islamic Sunni, Jihadist group fighting against the Syrian government forces in the Syrian civil war, in order to establish an Islamic state in Syria.