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Palestinians' Destructive Veneration of Terrorists

Richard Cohen - What can you say about a 19-year-old woman who participates in a terrorist attack in which 38 people, 13 of them children, are killed in cold blood? The answer, if the woman is Palestinian and the dead are Israelis, is heroine or martyr - and if she is Dalal Mughrabi, you name a school and a camp after her, and last week, a square in the West Bank town of El Bireh. If the term "confidence-building measure" is employed, what confidence can Israelis have in a people and their leaders who honor the 1978 murder of innocents, particularly children? To my knowledge, there is no square in Israel named for the mass murderers of civilians. Palestinian society, in contrast, honors all sorts of terrorists. The veneration of terrorists says something unsettling about Palestinian society. The adulation of Dalal Mughrabi and other terrorists is bound to give your average Israeli parent a certain pause: Is this the state we want next to us? The determination in the West not to hold Palestinians morally accountable for terrorism - as well as their commonplace anti-Semitism - is a repugnant form of neocolonial mentality in which, once again, the Palestinians are being patronized. I dare say the Brits would have reacted differently if a square in Belfast had been named for some IRA terrorist.
2010-03-16 09:27:09
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