A senior official from Fatah, the party led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said Europe only paid attention to the conflict in Syria when it impacted the continent directly, and asked whether Palestinians needed to “hijack your planes and destroy your airports again” to make Europeans care about the Palestinian cause, The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday.
Speaking during a segment on a PA-backed television station last week, Nabil Sha’ath, a former Palestinian negotiator and member of Fatah’s Central Committee, made the association between the Syrian civil war and Palestinian terrorism after discussing the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe.
“If the Syrian problem had not been exported to Europe through the refugees, on the one hand, and terrorism, on the other – the Europeans would not have cared even if the entire Syrian people had died,” said Sha’ath. “But when all of a sudden, there were four million Syrian refugees in Europe… and when this was accompanied by ISIS operations in France and elsewhere… this started a debate about racial transformation in Europe… This is what made the Syrian problem the most pressing from their perspective.”
He then pivoted, saying that after discussing Syria and ISIS, he always asks Europeans, “Do we have to hijack your planes and destroy your airports again to make you care about our cause? Are you waiting for us to cut off your oil supply? You always wait for things to reach a boiling point and explode causing you harm before you intervene to end the crimes and violations.”
Earlier in the segment, Sha’ath also expressed his disdain for the United States, claiming that it was not an “honest broker” of peace negotiations between the PA and Israel, and called for a limited international conference to help Palestinians achieve statehood.
A video of the broadcast, posted to YouTube on Sunday with a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), is embedded below.
Marcel Gyr, a Swiss investigative journalist, wrote in his latest book that Switzerland made a deal to support the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1970s after suffering a series of deadly terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinian groups in 1969 and 1970. The Swiss government reportedly pledged to support the PLO diplomatically in exchange for being spared from Palestinian terrorism. Accordingly, while Palestinian terrorist groups continued attacking targets across the rest Europe during the 1970’s, Switzerland never again experienced an attack.
The PA, which was formed after the PLO and Israel signed the Oslo Accords, continues to demonstrate support for Palestinian terrorism against Israel, with Abbas meeting twice in the past week with families of terrorists. The first of these meetings took place just hours after a 19-year-old Israeli policewoman was gunned down in Jerusalem by three Palestinian men.
[Photo: MEMRITVVideos / YouTube ]