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The Media War on Palestinian Free Will

(Commentary) Sohrab Ahmari - Palestinian Arabs are possessed of free will, agency, and the natural capacity to reason like any other people. Yet our media and foreign-policy establishment has apparently concluded the opposite. On Monday, Palestinians attempted to infiltrate en masse the barrier fence that separates Israel from terrorist-run Gaza. By the Western media's dim lights, the blame for Hamas' criminal stunt and the casualties it caused lay with anybody and everybody but Hamas and the Palestinians. The juxtaposition of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu celebrating in Jerusalem while Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians at the Gaza border proved irresistible to reporters. The Palestinians' more sophisticated friends understand that young men whipped into a frenzy by Hamas, an organization that exists to destroy world Jewry, per its charter, aren't exactly latter-day Freedom Riders. But they think that the Palestinians can't help themselves. While they expect Israel - a state encircled by hostile populations and threatened with nuclear extinction by the Iranian mullahs - to behave like Norway, of the Palestinians they have the most dismal, if any, expectations. There are desperate people all over the world who never translate their frustration into suicide bombing, border-rushing, and violent "Days of Rage." It does the Palestinians no good to treat them as children entitled to tantrums, as permanent wards of the international community or, worse, as wild men bereft of reason. The writer is a former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.
2018-05-15 00:00:00
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