Editor’s note: This article appeared in print under the title, “The U.N. Plan For ‘Palestine’ and its Aftermath (Third of Four Parts).” Find part one here, and part two here.
The Genocide Convention is not the only authoritative criminalization that can and should be invoked against the interminable and illegal Palestinian calls for the mass murder of Jews in their own state.
The1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination could also be brought productively into play. This treaty condemns “all propaganda and all organizations which attempt to justify or promote racial hatred and discrimination in any form,” obliging – at Article 4(a) – state parties to declare as “an offense punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination as well as all acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any race or group of persons.”
Article 4(b) affirms that state parties “Shall declare illegal and prohibit organizations, and also organized and all other propaganda activities, which promote and incite racial discrimination, and shall recognize participation in such organizations or activities as an offense punishable by law.”
Still further authority for curtailing and punishing Palestinian calls for the genocidal destruction of Jews can be found at Article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”
By definition, of course, all terrorist groups emphasize violence and the use of force, but the Palestinian groups are distinctive in several important ways. Most significant of all is that, for the Palestinians, violence is sometimes its own reward. Often rejecting more demonstrably instrumental views of force, Hamas, PA, and other movement organizations have on occasion come to celebrate and justify terror violence as an end in itself. The doctrinal root of this dark sentiment lies in their common and fundamentally religious hatreds.
President Obama and other leaders still do not understand that Israel is despised by Palestinian populations because it is Jewish. In fact, Israel’s occasional capitulation to Arab terror tends to elicit even greater Palestinian loathing, as such surrender behaviors merely confirm the prevailing Islamist view of the Jew as coward. When Haj Amin al Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, spoke together with Hitler on Berlin Radio in 1942, he cried out: “Kill the Jews – kill them with your hands, kill them with your teeth – this is well pleasing to Allah.”
Today the P.A./Fatah/PLO calls for annihilation of Israel, always denied publicly by the allegedly moderate Abbas whenever he speaks with the Americans, still remains undisguised at assorted P.A. websites and publications. The Hamas Covenant,of course, still calls insistently for the “realization of Allah’s promise: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, killing them.’ ”
In the final analysis, for the Palestinians and for the Arab/Islamic world as a whole, the “Zionist Problem” is merely a surface manifestation of what is, for them, truly intolerable: This is the “Jewish Problem.”
Recently a prominent Palestinian “intellectual” wrote in Al-Ahram:
We are all,once again, face to face with the Jewish Problem, not just the Zionist Problem; and we must reassess all those studies which make a distinction between ‘The Jew’ and ‘The Israeli.’ We must redefine the meaning of the word ‘Jew’ so that we do not imagine that we are speaking of a divinely revealed religion…. we cannot help but see before us the figure of the great man Hitler, may God have mercy on him, who was the wisest of those who confronted this problem, and who, out of compassion for humanity, tried to exterminate every Jew, but despaired of curing this cancerous growth on the body of mankind. In all world politics, but especially in the Islamic Middle East, the ultimate form of power is power over death. Directed toward Jews, the violence of Palestinian terrorism is always “sacred” violence, and it is always oriented to eternal life for the terrorist. Unlike most other terrorists, the Palestinian movement fighters openly aspire to immortality. Paradoxically, that is why they enthusiastically commit uniquely homicidal forms of “suicide.”