Fatah, the party headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, boasted on its Facebook page on Tuesday that it “has killed 11,000 Israelis.”
The post also gives Fatah credit for having “sacrificed 170,000 martyrs” and noted that hundreds of its members are incarcerated in Israeli jails.
“Israelis and Palestinians have long accused each other of incitement to violence,” The New York Times noted in its coverage of the Facebook post and its aftermath. “But in Israeli eyes, Palestinian leaders starting with Yasir Arafat, the father of Palestinian nationalism who helped found Fatah in 1959, have had a habit of saying one thing in Arabic and another in English.” For example, during the Second Intifada in 2002, Arafat led crowds in Ramallah chanting, “To Jerusalem, we are going, martyrs in the millions!” days after writing a Times op-ed titled The Palestinian Vision of Peace.
Although Abbas claims to support only nonviolent resistance to Israel, the Fatah movement has “historically championed armed resistance,” the Times observed.
“President Abbas’s party boasts about committing mass murder and yet it is called ‘moderate’ by many,” David Keyes, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told The Times. “Imagine if Palestinian leaders spent their time praising coexistence instead of terror.”
The post was likely meant to boost Fatah’s fortunes in the upcoming Palestinian municipal elections, when it will be challenged by the terrorist organization Hamas in many cities in the West Bank.
Palestinian Media Watch, which originally publicized the Fatah Facebook post, noted that the post also included the claim “Fatah was the first to fight in the second Intifada.” This echoes a claim made in a movie uploaded to the Fatah Facebook page two years ago, which called the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades “triumphant brigades [that] began their military operations during the second Intifada.” The movie also claimed that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades still has its “finger on the trigger.”
Facebook pages associated with Fatah have frequently celebrated and encouraged violence and terror against Israel. In February, the official Facebook page called three Palestinians who killed an Israeli policewoman “role models.” A month later the page celebrated the terrorist who stabbed U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force to death, calling him a “holy martyr.”
In January 2015, Fatah’s Facebook page celebrated the first terror attack it launched against Israel by publishing a number of images glorifying violence, including one depicting a Palestinian flag flying from a rifle over a pile of skulls marked with Jewish stars. The following month, it exhorted Palestinians to fire rockets at Israel.
In 2013 the official Facebook page of Fatah’s Enlistment and Organization Commission hailed convicted mass-murderer Abdallah Barghouti as a “brave prisoner.”
[Photo: Issam Rimawi / Flash90 ]