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Source: https://jcfa.org/the-barghouti-myth-how-the-world-is-being-asked-to-canonize-a-dynasty-of-violence/
The Barghouti Myth: How the World Is Being Asked to Canonize a Dynasty of Violence
(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Rawan Osman - There is a campaign sweeping through Western celebrity culture calling to free Marwan Barghouti - a moderate "man of peace" - in one of the most audacious historical fabrications of our time. It demands the release of a man convicted of five murders, for which he was sentenced to five life terms plus forty years by a court of law. While the campaign likens Barghouti to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Barghouti was convicted of planning terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada that killed Israeli civilians at a restaurant, gas station, and hiking trail. He has consistently endorsed armed resistance from prison and refused to renounce violence, while Mandela renounced violence to lead his nation through a peaceful transition. The Barghouti extended family includes Abdullah Barghouti, a Hamas master bomb-maker responsible for the Sbarro pizzeria massacre in Jerusalem in 2001, which murdered 15 people, including seven children, and a string of other attacks that killed dozens of Israeli civilians. Omar Barghouti is co-founder of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), who built a career telling universities, artists, and corporations around the world to sever ties with Israel. Palestinian political culture has for decades been organized around the elevation of resistance over governance, of symbolic defiance over institutional competence, of the prisoner and the martyr over the builder. Again and again, maximalism and the romance of armed struggle have trumped the possibility of a state. Releasing Barghouti and crowning him the savior would not break this cycle. It would consecrate it. Celebrities who would never sign a letter celebrating a convicted murderer in any other context enthusiastically do so here, because the framing - colonialism, apartheid, and resistance - activate a moral reflex that bypasses factual scrutiny. The Israeli civilians murdered in the attacks he orchestrated are edited out of the narrative entirely. Marwan Barghouti is the embodiment of a political culture that has sacrificed Palestinian welfare on the altar of permanent resistance. His family is a case study in how violence, hypocrisy, and the manipulation of Western guilt can be packaged and sold as heroism.