Palestinian Authority Antisemitism: A Fundamental and Lethal Component of PA Ideology Transcript

Sarah: Good afternoon, and welcome to yet another extremely important, extremely topical, and timely AMET webinar. Since September 13th, 1993 the date of the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House Lawn. For nearly the last three decades, we have been having our state department’s foreign policy predicated upon ‘land for peace’ and premised upon the belief that Fatah or the Palestinian Authority, or the good cop WA HAMAS, Palestinian, Islamic Jihad, the Lion’s Den, and recently the Janine brigades are the bad cops. However, upon any sort of cursory examination, we see that the West has consistently closed our eyes to the lethal amount of anti-Semitism that the average Palestinian has been constantly and consistently exposed to. This anti-Semitism has been permeating their textbooks, their television programs, their sports meets, the newspapers, and the summer camp, all under the direct supervision of the PA.

How does sweeping this vile Jew-hatred under the rug affect all of Palestinian society and affect the susceptibility of a Palestinian child to want to engage in acts of terrorism? To what degree does this kind of sweeping under the rug of the West contribute to the inability of us to examine whether or not our premises are correct to our flawed foreign policy when it comes to the entire Palestinian issue and to anti-Semitism in the United States that’s been permeating through our US College campuses? We’re honored to have with us today, Itamar Marcus, who just testified about these issues last week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, subcommittee on Global Health, human rights, and global international organizations. Itamar is the founder and president or director of Palestinian Media Watch. For the last 20 years, he has consistently researched the PA world and has written hundreds upon hundreds of reports and articles on PA activities, statements, and their educational system, their sports, their culture, and other frameworks the PA controls, as it relates to the peace process such as it is.

Itamar was appointed by the Israeli government in 1999 to represent Israel’s negotiations with the PA on Incitement and the Trilateral Anti-Incitement Committee, and that had been shared by the United States. Itamar makes regular presentations as he did last week to legislators, governments, and other decision-makers about the PA and he works constantly with politicians across the political spectrum. Itamar has made numerous presentations to members of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress and gave testimony at a hearing in the Senate appropriation subcommittee of Labor Health, Human Services in Education. In 2023, Itamar had met with and made presentations to members of Parliaments from Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, and the EU. His book, Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, was a claim by the founder of Human Rights Watch. Robert Bernstein has quote one of the most important books you can read in your life. So, without further ado, I’m going to bring the podium over to you, Itamar, and can you talk to us a little bit about what you deem the two kinds of anti-Semitism, the political, and the theological anti-Semitism?

Itamar Marcus: Thank you very much, Sarah, and thank you to AMET for inviting me to do this presentation. I’m going to share my screen. Okay. Do you see the screen? Everything is good? I studied authority anti-Semitism. I call it the elephant in the room that the US, the EU, and the United Nations want to ignore. I say this just having spoken last week in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House, and that exactly was a sentence that I said to them as well. There is so much evidence of the fundamental problem of Palestinian anti-Semitism, that it’s incredible that all these actors in the so-called peace process, United States, EU, UN, they’re always talking about territory. They’re always complaining about what Israel’s doing, and rarely do we get a mention of anti-Semitism, and if we do, it’s as if it’s a side issue. What I want to show you today is how fundamental this issue is to the Palestinian authority, hate ideology, as well as its insistence on the justification of killing Jews and Israelis.

In addition, and this is just something that came up after the hearing. A number of people at the hearing last week talked about the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and everybody’s so excited that the United States adopted it. I want to show you also today, there’s a report that we’re working on and I’ll give you sort of a preview of that report, how the United States claims to be adopting the IHRA definition. Well, if you adopt it on paper but ignore all the violations, then what’s the point? It’s got to be a function. It’s got to say something about your policy. You can’t just say you’re adopting it, and you can’t say you’re adopting it for everybody in the world except the Palestinian Authority. I’m going to show you exactly how Palestinian authority which clauses in IHRA, the PA is violating with their anti-Semitism and we’re going to relate something there.

They’re violating virtually every clause in IHRA. So now I’m going to start with a quote from Hannah Rosenthal. I’m doing this because I’m talking about how the United States has been ignoring Palestinian anti-Semitism. Hannah Rosenthal was appointed by Hillary Clinton. She was the first special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, and soon after she was appointed, I met with her in the State Department. This is of course when Clinton was Secretary of State. I met with her at the State Department, and I showed her what was going on in the Palestinian Authority world, the anti-Semitism. I showed her the videos, I showed her the messages. She was significantly horrified. At the end, I said “Okay, what can we do?” “How can we help you?” “What can we do to fight this?” and her answer was “Well, right now I can’t do anything because I have jurisdiction. I’m responsible for monitoring anti-Semitism everywhere around the world, except in the Palestinian authority”.

That was a shocker to me at first, but later on, I realized when I thought about it, of course, the State Department won’t allow anti-Semitism of the PA to be studied or exposed because that would mean that they are the problem. The state department’s ideology was that the territory is the problem, Israel is the problem. As soon as you recognize that it’s anti-Semitism, you’re shifting the blame to the PA. Anna Rosenthal was fantastic. I worked with her the whole time that she was there. I kept sending her materials, she kept trying to do things.

I have no idea if the United States has changed this policy when she was there or since then but in any case, that’s what it was then. The United States just wanted to hide Palestinian anti-Semitism from the world, and I’m hoping that they’ve changed their policy. In any case, I want to show you today how the IHRA definition is being violated and how the United States is really doing nothing about it. IHRA definition number two talks about making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, stereotypical allegations about Jews, such as the power of Jews as a collective, a myth about a world Jewish conspiracy. I want to give you a couple of examples of this. Ask the question, where is the United States about this? First, I want to show you something that Fatah produced. This is an educational documentary that Fatah produced for its people, describing the role that the Jews played in Europe.

Male Speaker 1 in Video: [Foreign Language]

Itamar: The Jews went into ghettos in Europe in order to plan there to subjugate humanity. They were warehouses of hate and exploitation. That’s what the ghetto was. Of course, this is turning history, the Jews were forced into ghettos. The non-Jews didn’t want them around them, and here it’s saying the Jews didn’t want to be around the non-Jews. In other quotes from this documentary, the Jewish tribe led the project to enslave humanity. Talk about the conspiracy theories. The Jews allied with the Nazi’s to accumulate wealth. Jews say, only we are people. The key is Jews were hated because of racism and filthy behavior. I want to show you another example of this. This is just now on Palestinian TV. The official PA TV broadcast is three times already this year. So you know how important this message is for them. Listen to this Palestinian researcher, three times already in 2023 on Palestinian TV.

Male Speaker 2 in Video: [Foreign language]

Itamar: This is the fundamental of Palestinian authority, political anti-Semitism. They also have religious anti-Semitism. This is their political anti-Semitism. What is it? The Jews were so hated around the world because of their evil behavior, that the non-Jewish world decided to establish a Jewish state because they wanted to get rid of them. I want to show you how important this is for Palestinian ideology. First of all, clearly, we have a clear violation of IHRA definition number 2, dehumanizing, demonizing statements about the Jews, and the power of Jews as a collective Jewish conspiracy. All of this is in there. So here’s a clear violation of this in up-to-date statements that the PA is presenting. Look how important this political ideology is. This is an influential Palestinian on TV, and here she’s explaining the whole PA ideology of why Israel exists.

Female Speaker 1 in Video: [Foreign Language]

Itamar: I would say this is the most important part of all of the Palestinian authority ideology because this is how they deny Israel’s right to exist. The Jews were hated everywhere. The Europeans had to get rid of them. They could have sent them anywhere, but they had this brilliant idea. We want to control the Arab world. We want to plant a foreign body in the Arab homeland so that we can control them and they can be a colonial implant in the Middle East, and that’s why the Europeans, they say, stole Palestine from the Arabs and gave it to the Jews. That’s the only connection that the Jews have to the land. The Jews have no history in the land. This is the fundamental of the Palestinian authority ideology, and you’re hearing it again and again, and we hear it all the time. We’ve been hearing it for years from the Palestinian Authority. Here’s another example just from last month, the Jews controlled the money in Europe. Europeans wanted to expel them to Palestine. Constant messaging coming from the PA and listen to Mahmoud Abbas speaking at the UN. May 15th, just a month and a half ago, listen to what he said.

Mahmoud Abbas: [Foreign Language]

Itamar: Okay, two birds with one stone, one, they had colonialist purposes, and they also wanted to get rid of the Jews. It is this ideology that enables the Palestinian authority to define the Jews as a colonial settler state with no right to exist because we have no history. The colonial has put us here. We have no right to exist in the same way all the other colonial states had no right to exist. This is Mahmoud Abbas. It comes from the top, and it is the fundamental to the Palestinian Authority’s ideology. Let’s go to the Holocaust. The IHRA definition includes a number of clauses about the Holocaust. I’m going to show you how the PA violates this in vicious and disgusting ways. This is June 2023. Earlier this month, listen to what Palestinian authority put on their television.

Male Speaker 3 in Video: [Foreign Language]

Itamar: Hitler and the Zionists cooperated, he says and in his original words, a fabricated Holocaust that truly fabricated. What’s IHRA definition number 4? Denying the facts, escape mechanism, or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazi’s of World War II. Clear violations. It’s a regular [inaudible] on PA by the Palestinian Authority. We’ll see constantly the Palestinian Authority is in complete violation of the IHRA. The number 10 in IHRA is drawing comparisons between what Israel does today and what the Nazi’s did now. This is a particularly significant one because the person who spoke here is the head of the Palestinian Authority Teachers Union. He represents the 60,000 teachers in the PA, which means this is a message that goes out through the education system, and I’m not going to play the whole thing, it’s very long.

But I want to read some of these things that he said in this interview on TV last year, he said, massacres have happened to the Palestinian people that were worse than the Holocaust. Again, this is the Palestinian top educator that were worse than the Holocaust. The Palestinian Holocaust has not ended, daily measures are a Holocaust that renews every day. Israel attempts to do to our Palestinian people what the Nazi’s did to the Jews in Germany. Palestinian people have been subjected to massacres more than the Jews in Germany, and then finally, Abbas wrote about Nazi’s and then the Zionism, that they are two sides of the same coin, exactly. IHRA’s definition number 10, comparing Israel to Nazi’s, again, another violation. Terrible, terrible demonization of Israel by the Palestinian Authority that we are killing them just like the Nazi’s did to them.

I just have to add something here. I mentioned that it’s not just the United States that’s ignoring this. It’s also the Europeans. When this message was given on TV by the head of the Palestinian Teachers Union, he told Palestinian TV that everything that he was saying was included in the letter that he wrote to the head of the Teachers’ Unions in Germany. What did we do? We wrote to the German government, and we said “Listen, look what’s going on. Your teachers in your country are getting this horrific hate message from the Palestinian Authority, from the head of their Teacher’s Union. The European Union is funding the Palestinian Authority Education. Can you send out some kind of condemnation of this statement and rejection in the name of your teacher’s union?”

The German government responded to us, and this is what they wrote, “Respecting human rights and basic freedoms, and a strong civil society, our fundamentals of German development cooperation, the German government’s stance on the Holocaust is absolutely unequivocal”, and it goes on and on. “We speak out clearly and unmistakably against any attempts by anyone to relativize or even deny these events. We condemn every move to question the historical facts of the Holocaust, and then he writes together with other donors, Germany, supporting the educational sector in the Palestinian Territories”. Not a word about the horrific Holocaust denial, not a word about comparing Israel to the Holocaust. We’re going to continue funding Palestinian education with no reference and no disciplinary action being taken against the head of the teacher’s union that’s teaching this horrific Holocaust denial.

One other example of the Holocaust, coming from none other than Mahmoud Abbas himself. Here he is speaking on TV at a Pan Arab event and listen to what he said, “The Jews who migrated to Europe were subjected to massacres by some states every 10 to 15 years from the 11th century until the Holocaust.” Why did this happen? The hatred of Jews is not due to religion but due to their social role. The Jewish problem is due to their social role, connected to usury, banks and so forth. The Jews are responsible, Abbas is saying for the Holocaust, because of our social role, because of usury, banks, so forth, other things as well. We’re responsible for everybody hating us and for killing us throughout all of European history. 11th century till the Holocaust, massacres all the time, Jews are responsible.

What is IHRA definition number three? Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real, or imagined wrongdoings committed by a single Jewish person or group, or acts committed by non-Jews. Maybe there were some Jews who did usury or maybe there were some Jews who were involved in banks. He accuses the entire Jewish people of being responsible and therefore, likewise responsible for all the massacres and all the Holocaust. This is Mahmoud Abbas. I’ll give you one other example of this kind of demonization and I don’t know which category. It’s just pure Bible but because Golda Meir is such an icon in Israeli ideology, and this is so recent, just in May, listen to what Fatah spokesman said on TV about Golda Meir.

Fatah Spokesman: [Foreign Language]

Itamir: A complete, complete fabrication. Golda Meir never said anything like this or close to this. I hope that one day I’ll wake up and not a single Palestinian child will be alive. What did Golda Meir say that they’re probably building on? Golda Meir said that we’ll have peace when the Palestinians love their own children more than they hate our children. That’s what she said. It had nothing to do with killing Palestinian children. This is the kind of demonization that comes with all their anti-Semitism. Basically, the message of all this demonization that you’ve seen under the category of anti-Semitism, the message of the PA to its people is you have a right to hate Jews and Israelis because everyone hates Jews and Israelis. If you think that they’re a problem, the whole world thinks they’re a problem.

We’re not the only ones. Everybody’s on our side in our war against the Jews. That is their message to their people. Golda Meir is just another example like this. You have a right to fight and kill them because that’s exactly what Israelis are trying to do to you. That’s the message. PA tells its people that this hatred or these evil activities of the Jews that endanger all of humanity continue until today. I’ll just give you a couple of examples of this. This is on Palestinian TV. They have an expert on Israeli affairs. He’s on TV every day talking about Israeli affairs. Listen to this statement that he made.

Male Speaker 4 on Video: [Foreign language]

Itamar: The more despicable thing is it’s an invention of the Jewish mind. If something bad is happening, something despicable in the world, it’s the Jewish mind that’s causing it. The Jews are responsible for world events. IHRA number two, making dehumanizing, demonizing allegations about the Jews, regular messaging on official policy leaders. Here as well, it’s continuing today to threaten humanity. This is January of this year, Fatah [inaudible]. We, meaning the Palestinians are defending the honor of all humanity against the Neo Nazism that does not stop at the borders of Palestine but also threatens international peace at all levels. The Jews threaten international peace at all evils because we are like the Nazi’s. We have this also in the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, the danger of this Israel Jewish system reaches all parts of the world.

The Jews are continuing to fulfill the same negative social, economic, and political role that caused societies in Europe to vomit them out. Why does Israel exist? Because Europeans vomited them out because of their evil role, social, economic, and political, and they’re continuing to do the same thing all around the world. The message is that Jews are a danger to us Palestinians, but we’re in the same boat with everyone else. The whole world is endangered by the Jews and therefore, everybody’s on our side in fighting Jews. These are the messages coming from the Palestinian authority. Has this political anti-Semitism been effective? This is really striking. This poll, Palestinians are asked in the ADL global poll in 2014, they were asked, true or false, People hate the Jews because of the way Jews behave, and what was the response? 87% of Palestinians say it’s probably true or true.

The entire population, close to 90% believe that people hate the Jews because of the way they behave. What we’re seeing here, and this is something that’s very important for us at PMW, we’re constantly arguing that what the Palestinians teach their people in their school books, in their educational programming, in their official media, and in their social frameworks, trickles down to the people and impacts on the way they see the world. This is exactly what’s happened here. PA for years has been saying the Jews are hated because of the way they behave and look, almost the entire population. This was taken in 2014. I am assuming that this figure today is much higher and much worse because there has been nothing good said about Israel since then.

And there’s been endless hate demonization. It’s probably way over 90%, maybe 95% by today. But even this number itself shows the tremendous success of the Palestinian authority, political anti-Semitism, and now we go to the second part which is the Palestinian authority’s religious anti-Semitism. What’s so significant about the religious anti-Semitism is it’s giving God’s stamp of approval, Allah’s stamp of approval to all the hatred that the PA is telling their people from the political side, they’re saying the same thing now but God agrees with you, Allah agrees with you, which means it can’t be wrong and it also means you can’t disagree with it. I’m going to show you just a couple of examples of this. This is Mahmoud Abbas on Palestinian tv. He’s the most important religious figure in the PA. Abbas appointed him as his personal advisor on Islam. He also pointed him to the head of the Islamic courts. Listen to what he said on TV about Jews.

Mahmoud: [Foreign Language]

Itamar: What are Jews? Jews are humanoids, people that Allah created in the form of humans, creatures that Allah created. It’s just an incredible statement. Who could have believed? A lot of haters and people who spread anti-Semitism throughout the centuries said that the Jews were evil. They damaged humanity. They hurt humanity. Here, you’ve got the top Palestinian religious figure saying, Jews aren’t even humans. We aren’t even humans. We’re humanoids that Allah created in the form of humans. He goes on to say that Allah cursed us. They made us apes and pigs, descendants of apes of pigs. We are not even humans. That’s the message from the top religious figure in the Palestinian authority. Another time on TV, he went even another step, and this is so critical, he literally said that the Quran, meaning Islam, meaning Allah, wants you to kill Israelis, and this is what he did. He goes on TV, and I’ll just play the video.

Mahmoud: [Foreign Language]

Itamar: He said three times to kill them and the Quran, kill them again. Yes, kill the transgressors, Allah doesn’t like the transgress, and then what he does is he defines 10 categories of transgressions that are worthy of being killed. What are they? If someone attacks your home, your land, your homeland, your property, your honor, your existence, family rights, these are all things that the PA fundamentally blames Israel for. They say we’ve stolen the land, we’ve taken their rights, we’ve taken their homeland, and he’s saying that Allah wants you to kill them. He’s quoting the Quran, kill them.

He is saying here that every single Israeli man, woman, and child has the right to be killed because of this, and then he ends with another quote from the Quran “And kill them wherever you find them”. It is just an unbelievable, when you’re dealing with a Palestinian population, which is very religious, and all polls, 95% or more, say religion is important to them and then the top religious figure says “Here, I don’t want you to kill them”. Is anyone surprised that Palestinians are going out and killing men, women, and children, and celebrating it and glorifying it and awarding it? Of course not, because here they’re saying that Allah is giving his stamp of approval for the killing of every Israeli.

The Mufti said the same thing on TV. He was asked about the necessity to fight against the feeding Jews, and he said, the texts clearly say if an inch of Muslim land is stolen, jihad is a personal religious commandment for everyone who is capable. It is Sharia law. In other words, since he defines all of Israel as Muslim land, jihad fighting every single Israeli becomes a personal religious commandment. Personal religious commandment is the highest kind of commandment in Islam and that’s what he’s saying here which is missed sometimes. This is a very high commandment to fight, to liberate, and we also get this on TV. Allah delights us with the extermination of the evil Jews. This is on Palestinian TV.

Nothing of course happened but they’re talking literally about killing and even exterminating the Jews. The number one definition is IHRA, calling for aiding or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or extremist views of religion. This is the PA by one leader, another leader, another leader and dozens of other leaders. We’ve heard the same thing. Another clear violation of probably the worst clause in the IHRA definition is the number one clause. Here, you have an obligation to go and, and kill the Jews. Finally, just to show you, United States is also being targeted by the PA very regularly. This is a senior person in the Ministry of Religious Affairs. He’s in charge of teaching preachers, preacher training, and what did he say about it on TV?

He talked about how important Jerusalem is in the history of Islamic wars, that they had many, many successes in Jerusalem. He says the following, “The end of all the oppressive tyrants was in Palestine, that’s one of Jerusalem’s blessings. Allah willing the end of the Jews and America that supports the Jews will be in Palestine”. Top religious figure, salary paid by the PA, he’s training all the other imams how to give lessons and probably some of that money has come from the United States. Here he’s praying that Allah willing the end of the United States and Jews will be in Jerusalem. Finally, we get the religious justification but we also get the political justification. A political leader, a professor [Inaudible] University on TV.

He said that international law prohibits Israel from stopping terrorists in their attacks. He says resisting Israel because it’s occupied, he says it’s legitimate, whether individuals or groups, and even while carrying out an action against the occupation, every action against the occupation is legal according to the conventions of international law. Israel is prohibited, he’s telling them, from stopping terrorists, from killing them because they’re allowed to kill us. Again, it’s an inversion of law, an inversion of history. Everything’s inverted in this Palestinian authority world, and it’s all disseminated to the people from everything they control. The final poll I want to show you here, I started with this poll before, the Palestinian Authority is by far the worst, most anti-Semitic population in the entire world. This is that same poll from 2014. I’m sure it’s worse.

The ADL rated all the countries in the world on how they answered all the different questions that they asked them and the Palestinian authority came out the worst in the world with 93% of the Palestinians answering probably true to the majority of the anti-Semitic stereotypes, which is higher than Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Kuwait, Jordan, all the other Arab countries were here and were bad. 80%, 78, Saudi Arabia, only 74%. But the PA, the Palestinians are the worst. We see here, again, the input and the output. The Palestinian Authority has input all of this poison into its population, and the output Israel is facing the most anti-Semitic population in the world that believes that not only is it right to kill Jews, but that the Quran actually wants them and justifies the killing of Jews. This is the anti-Semitism that the United States, Europe, and the UN are sweeping under the rug. It’s the elephant that must be dealt with, or we won’t have any chance of ever making progress toward any kind of case. Thank you.

Sarah: Thank you, as we know, first of all, Mahmoud Abbas, although he just went to China is old and is in his 19th year of a four-year elected term. According to the polls, which I’m sure you review as regularly as we do from [Inaudible], from the Palestinian Centre of Survey and Research in Ramallah. Fully 80% of Palestinians say that they’re against the surrender of their arms to the PA. They do not trust the PA, he said that they had a right to resist the PA and 73% of the public say they were in favor of forming armed groups such as the Lion Dens and the Janine Battalion. So there doesn’t seem to be a long lifeline for the PA.

I think you’re arguing that the PA has set the stage. If I were a young child who sees things in blacks and whites, and you get this kind of education constantly, you want to take it to the next level. You’d say, join Hamas, join the Janine Brigade, join the Lion’s Den, use your lessons. While the Palestinians have sometimes cooperated with the Israeli army, and other times, this is what they’re teaching their children. How would a Palestinian child react to this kind of education? What do you predict, Itamar, is the future of the Palestinian Authority?

Itamar: You had a few questions there.

Sarah: Right.

Itamar: As I said, the Palestinian Authority has completely adopted this ideology. Palestinians support wholeheartedly, all the terrorists who end up in jail are considered Palestinian heroes. All the terrorists who are killed while killing Israelis become superheroes, super martyrs. When they’re killing Israelis, their pictures are all over the place and they have these funerals with many hundreds of people and it’s on TV and everybody glorifies them. The entire population glorifies them. In the poll you’re referring to, I think it was 87% or 78% of Palestinians who don’t want the PA to stop these armed groups from having their arms, to take away their arms. Which means that they want them to continue having these terror attacks against Israel.

That’s it. There have been a success. What’s significant? I would say over the last year and a half, two years, there’s been a change in the PA world. Until then, we were able to connect all of the terror waves that Israel suffered to the Palestinian authority. They would constantly incite hatred and then when they needed a terror attack for the political purposes, they would actually send out messages, now we need attacks, we need more violence, now we need more killing. What’s happened now is they’ve been so successful in poisoning the minds of the Palestinian population that right now they have no control. They completely lost control. These groups are forming on their own. Many of them are members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is Fatah. I didn’t go further. We’re about to release a bulletin.

I don’t know if it’s today or if it’s tomorrow, but all of your listeners should be on our email list. We’re going to be releasing a bulletin. It might have been today already, that talks about Fatah, who is bragging. On TV, they were giving statistics that 65% of those people arrested in the last year and a half were members of Fatah. Most of them were members of the Palestinian Authority Security Services. The Palestinian Authority not only have they been successful, but their people, the Security service members aren’t even preventing terror anymore. They’re actually joining. They’re leaving the terror. That was the message. You can check it on our website. I think it’s there today already, otherwise, it’ll be there tomorrow. What does this mean for Israel? You said that sometimes the PA fights terror.

That is the greatest misconception. There is what is called security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority in Israel and the Palestinian Authority has notified Israel many times when Hamas terrorists, when they were aware that Hamas terrorists were going to do a terror attack, or when they were aware that a new Hamas terrorist cell was being formed. Why were they doing this? Because they’re not strong enough to defeat the Hamas militarily or arrest them. So they want Israel to do it, and why do they want Israel to do it? Because Hamas wants to take over Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian areas, the same way they did in Gaza, and they would be strong enough to do it. The majority of the population in Judea and Samaria supports them in areas A and B. According to the polls, they would’ve won the last election, had Abbas not canceled the election.

People support Hamas. Hamas is militarily stronger. Abbas needs Israel. The security cooperation is for him. It’s not for us. Israel benefits as well because many terror attacks have been stopped. But I don’t see him stopping the terror attacks that are being done by the Palestinian Authority policeman. If he were to notify Israel about a terror attack being planned by Fatah or the PA police, he would be in big trouble. His people would view me against him. You’ve been telling us to kill them all along, why are you stopping us? This has to be understood. There is no security cooperation for Israel’s benefit. It’s only in order to save the Palestinians.

Sarah: To save their own skin. Let’s switch a little bit to the United Nations. As you know, the UN General Assembly in 2022, passed 15 resolutions condemning Israel, as opposed to 13 resolutions for the entire rest of the world, including Iran, Syria, and Russia, after its invasion of Ukraine, North Korea, and Afghanistan which each received just one condemnation, whereas, Israel received 15. To what extent is the Palestinian authority responsible for the hatred of Israel and the virulent anti-Semitism that we find within the United Nations?

Itamar: That’s an interesting question. Is the PA responsible for their anti-Semitism? I would say it’s almost the opposite. I think all of these bodies are inherently anti-Semitic, and because they’re anti-Semitic, they support the Palestinian authority. I think any country that would be in conflict with Israel, these countries would be supportive. What happens is because these countries hate Jews inherently, even though they’ll of course, deny it, the Palestinian authority benefits because they happen to be in conflict with Israel. If the Palestinian Authority was in conflict with, let’s say, Jordan, let’s say they wanted a state from Jordan or from Egypt, Do you think anyone in the world would support them? Of course not. It’s because they are fighting against Israel that they have international support. The world doesn’t hate Jews because of the PA, the world supports the PA because they hate Jews.

Sarah: That’s very encouraging. Let’s switch topics again. It’s now summer and our American kids and European kids. Kids in most of the world are in summer camps learning to swim, learning how to play well together, and get along with others. What are Palestinian kids doing in summer camp, and to what extent is the PA responsible for this?

Itamar: Every year, Palestinian Authority shows what’s going on in their summer camps, and they haven’t shown those films yet. I’m assuming the kids, the young kids are still in school but the coming July, they’ll all be in summer camp. I’ll just give you examples of what they published last year. For example, a lot of the camps deal with military training for little kids. You see, 13 and 14-year-olds, in one of them, they had over a hundred children, and I say children and young teens pose in front of these gigantic pictures of Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafat, and they posed in the middle of it, and each one of these kids was holding a collection of rifles with a clip inside. I don’t know if there’re bullets in the clip but each one of them had the same picture.

And then they post it, all of these pictures on the Facebook page of the Palestinian Authority Youth and Sports. All these pictures of all of these kids being trained to essentially grow up and to be terrorists. Another message that was repeated during the summer camps was the message of the importance to die as a martyr. There was one which was shocking, the child in this particular item in summer camp, the child looked like he was seven years old, and he was leading a chant, and the chant included a whole bunch of things about Palestine. Then he said “Palestine, Palestine, we will die and it will live” and the children answered “Palestine, we will die, and it will live”. 7-year-old and then all the kids are responding.

We had another one of young girls who were probably aged 11 or 12, and they were all also chanting about going off on the way to martyrdom. So Palestinian children in summer camps and the educational magazines that we’ve reported on Wad, for example, on a website, you can find that, a very important report. Palestinian kids are taught that the best thing they can do in life is to be a martyr. Fatah once put on its Facebook page just a couple of years ago, a video of a young girl telling a story about a boy. The message from the mother of the boy to the boy is, you are destined for martyrdom because Islam is our weapon and the children are the ammunition. Children are ammunition. This is what Fatah told its children. You want to know what they’re doing in summer camp. They’re learning why it’s important to kill Israelis. They’re learning to hate Israelis and Jews, and they’re also learning how important it is to not fear death and to be a Palestinian hero and die as a martyr.

Sarah: Speaking of Martyrdom, Itamar, you and Palestinian Media Watch did the world a tremendous service when you uncovered the schedule of payments, the inducements for martyrs, families of Martyrs, and the Prisoners’ Pensions Fund. Under President Trump, the payment, the Palestinian Authority was eliminated. Do you know what has happened? And this was because of the Taylor Force Act which we worked very hard for. Sandra Gober really gets the lion’s share of the credit for discovering this and promulgating this, and Robbie and Stuart, of course, Taylor’s parents have worked incredibly hard for what’s going on now with the Taylor Force Act today.

Itamar: First of all, just in terms of history, we discovered this and we brought it to Congress already in 2011 and then we brought it to Europe and already in 2015, believe it or not, under the Obama administration we convinced the Congress to pass the resolution, not to cut off, to deduct from American funding the amount that the Palestinian party were spending on terrorists and prisoners. The Obama administration continued to fund and ignored it. And then I met with Sandra Gerber and showed him this material and he went to members of the Congress, he knew the senators and he brought the [Inaudible] involved, and then they were able to get another legislation. And because of the publicity, the United States couldn’t ignore it and then of course cut off all the funding to them. That was a very fantastic success. But when I tell you how many years we had to work on that, and how many times I had appeared in front of Parliaments and Congress. The wheels of justice very often go very slow. As I said, even after we passed it the first time, the Obama administration ignored it.

Sarah: And the money, as far as you know, today?

Itamar: Today, the Palestinian Authority has made it very clear that they’re not going to stop paying salaries to terrorists but you just have to realize what’s going on. It has cost them so much money to have the loss of American money, and then, of course, Israel passed a similar law that we’re cutting off from our tax transfers to the PA. The amount that they pay to terrorists comes out to about 50 million checks a month now that they’re losing, they can’t pay their salaries, the Palestinian Authority. It’s been about two years now, and every month it’s a little different. Palestinian Authority gives either 70% of the salaries, or 80% this month they just announced they’re doing 85% of the salaries. Their people are suffering terribly.

There was a teacher strike just now in the Palestinian Authority for two months and the PA tried to keep silent and not talk about it. For two months they had no education. Why? because the teachers weren’t getting paid enough. Why is this? Because the PA feels that the most important thing they can do is reward terrorists. It just shows the incredibly thick values of the Palestinian Authority leadership, that they’re willing to make their own people suffer, not have enough money but they want to continue paying the salaries to prisoners in jail who certainly don’t need the money when they’re in jail and the families of the martyrs, they absolutely don’t need this money.

Sarah: We know that just recently our government has released $235 million more to IHRA because of the teacher’s salaries, but without any kind of prohibition of the vile teaching of hatred in the textbooks and prohibition against hiring known terrorists to be the teachers of young children. So this is very, very dangerous. I feel terrible because there are only 10 minutes left. And I’d love to turn this over to my really wonderful, esteemed colleague Hussein Aboubakr Mansour who will read some of the questions that came in.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Thank you very much, Sarah, and thank you very much for all our audience who tuned in and sent us all of these questions, and thank you Itamar for such a wonderful presentation, as usual. You’re wonderful. The subject is not so wonderful, and I want to thank all of those who sent some of these questions. As Sarah said, unfortunately, we have only 10 minutes so I don’t think we’ll be able to get through all of the questions we received. We received actually a lot of excellent questions. The first one is asking you, you go to EU and US Congress officials and you talk to them about these issues and you make these presentations. How do they respond? What actions did they take in order to respond to this problem?

Itamar: Just in terms of quantifying in terms of dollars and cents, what this impact has had, we’ve been talking about this for many years, and in 2011 is when we first exposed the salaries to terrorists. In 2011, the EU, because we stopped paying money directly to the PA and only started funding projects. All of the European countries started giving less. The Netherlands stopped completely from funding, Australia stopped completely from funding, and the US under Taylor Force stopped funding. In 2011, the Palestinian Authority was getting $1.3 billion a year from foreign donors. This past year, they got $300 million. We’ve essentially cost them a billion dollars by now, a billion dollars a year in lost international funding because we’ve shown the world who it is that they’re funding. When we show the members of Parliament, it’s not just the salaries, it’s everything.

It’s everything that we show them. They say these people aren’t worthy of funding, so they continue funding a little bit symbolically, but as I said, they’re down getting this year a billion dollars less per year than they were getting when we really had the big breakthrough when we discovered the salaries. In addition, we’re working now on a project in parliaments around the world and with members of Congress to have the Palestinian Authority, to have resolutions passed in these parliaments and in Congress declaring the Palestinian Authorities child abusers because they send their children to be martyrs. I don’t want to mention names but we have a Republican and a Democrat both working on this, hopefully finalizing the language. We have people in parliaments, like I said, in probably already 10 parliaments.

We have members who were waiting for the final language. I’m going to wait for Congress and then we’ll send them the final language. We want to eventually get to 20 parliaments that are going to vote to declare the Palestinian authority child abusers. Like everything else I said, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of convincing. Two weeks ago and one week I was in three different parliaments in Europe. We have to keep showing them, get them on board. What I want to do here is beyond cutting funding, I want to brand them around the world as child abusers. I want all the NGOs to stop referring to the child, whenever they refer to the PA, to be able to write the child abusing PA. The PA has successfully done this with the libel.

They have people around the world who are writing Apartheid Israel. It’s false since it’s true that the PA is child abusers. I want that label to be attached to the Palestinian Authority, the child abusing Palestinian authority. That is the goal of this campaign. It’s not just to have the legislatures pass this or vote on it. I want them to be stigmatized as people who are so evil, they’re willing to even kill their own children for political gain.

Hussein: Thank you. I’m going to combine a number of questions that we actually received specifically about the religious aspect of this. The particular interpretation of Islam that so anti-Semitic, that the Palestinians are being indoctrinated into it. we received a number of questions, basically asking if this is all that there is, and isn’t there any alternative to this inside the Palestinians. Is there anybody, even maybe within the PA that doesn’t support this interpretation of Islam? How about the Abraham Accords country? They seem to be now shifting away from this particular form of Islam and anti-Semitism. Can’t you go there and find a sympathetic audience?

Itamar: There are numerous ways to interpret Islam. I’ll just mention someone who’s been a hero for a number of years, so long before the Abraham Accords and that is Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, who is the head of the Italian Muslim community. I met him first when I was speaking at a conference in Paris, and he was speaking at the same conference, and he was quoting all the sources in the Quran that prove that the Quran and Islam recognize Israel’s right to exist and that any good Muslim is going to support Israel’s right to exist. That’s the interpretation and there are plenty of sources, that’s the interpretation that ultimately is going to have to win out for there ever to be peace with the Palestinian population.

Right now all of their religious figures, again, with instructions from their own political leaders are giving this line that these Jews are these evil forces in the world. You have to kill them. They don’t have a right to the land. All of this for their political reasons, they’re telling the religious figures, this is the Islam that they have to present. Sometime down the line, will there be a charismatic religious figure in the PA who will be able to come and be able to say “This is wrong”? We’ve distorted Islam. Islam recognizes Israel’s right to exist. Islam prophesizes the Jews returning, there’s a verse in the Quran that talks about the Jews coming back to their land. Abdullah [Inaudible] says, this is a prophecy about the state of Israel. Israel can’t impose a religious interpretation on the Palestinians, but hopefully, there will be some religious figures in the PA who will accept this and be able to create enough support before they are killed by the people who hate them.

Hussein: Thank you. We have a couple of questions, it’s actually about the issue of IHRA. So while you’re doing your presentation, you mentioned that this part isn’t according to this part of IRHA. The White House recently announced its strategy about anti-Semitism, and in it, it recognizes another alternative definition of anti-Semitism, the nexus definition of anti-Semitism. Here’s the question, in this part of Palestinian education, Palestinian indoctrination, they just presented to us. Are these still going to be anti-Semitic under the Nexus definition?

Itamar: Absolutely. We’ve checked it through, and in fact, the report that we’re preparing is going to show, I know a lot of people are upset that the United States also accepts that nexus. When it comes to the Palestinians, it is irrelevant when it comes to the Palestinian authority. If I remember correctly, I think there were four major categories, they violate I think three of them in any case of the nexus, and they violate, like I said, almost all the IHRA. We’re going to put that together and show where the violations are, and how central they are to the Palestinian Authority ideology. Like I said, it doesn’t matter, nexus or IHRA. Palestinian authority is anti-Semitic to the core.

Hussein: Thank you. For our last question, I’m actually going to combine, again, a few number of the questions I received. I’m gonna add a little bit of my own. Recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel is not one of the Palestinian Authorities to collapse and it’s an Israeli interest to maintain the Palestinian authority. For now, we’re all trapped, kind of, we’re all captured in this situation or in which we have to make sure that the Palestinian authority survives by security cooperation or by facilitating a certain amount of funds. At the same time, this Palestinian Authority is going to continue to indoctrinate the next generation of Palestinians into this anti-Semitic ideology. Is there any way out of this trap or are we just basically now between a rock and a hard place? It’s either the Palestinian authority collapses and Hamas comes in and this becomes just a sea of terrorism in the West Bank, or we let the Palestinian authority continue with anti-Semitic indoctrination.

Itamar: That’s a great question because the Palestinian authority is evil, and not only is it evil but they should also be declared a terror organization just like Hamas. There are nuances of differences, but the fundamental message is that you have a right to kill and you should kill, and they glorify the killers and they reward the killers, they are a terrorist organization. The United States and as you said, Israel is afraid of the Palestinian authority collapsing. My personal feeling is that it’s a very shortsighted view. Palestinian media watch has been warning about the evils of the Palestinian Authority since we were founded. We were in before they started their terror war in 2000, which they called Antifada. We were in one week before the so-called Antifada started.

We published a report and the opening sentence was the atmosphere in the Palestinian authority media today is the eve of the outbreak of war. So we saw it, we saw that they were changing to war funding and it came out, we lost 1200 people. During that period also we didn’t try to destroy the Palestinian authority. I think because of that, by now, we’ve already lost more than 2000 people. Palestinians whom I work with and I’m working with Palestinians or Palestinians who meet with me together with members of parliaments, they want the Palestinian Authority to collapse. A member of the European Parliament asked the Palestinian who was with me “Will things get better if there was a Palestinian state?”

And his response was “Oh no. Don’t create a Palestinian state. I’ll never be able to live in that state. There’ll be an evil anti-Semitic corrupt state, we need something completely different”. Palestinians who are decent and there are [Inaudible] Palestinians, they don’t want a Palestinian Authority state, and they don’t want the Palestinian Authority to survive. He was begging Europeans not to support the PA. There’s going to have to be a period of turmoil where the Palestinian authority ends up choosing different leaders. I think the Palestinian Authority community leaders, their Mukhtars, their village leaders, the family leaders, these are people who care about the people. These are leaders who care about the people more than the PA. PA cares about their political power. Somehow those people have to be quietly supported by Israel to create an alternative leadership to this terrible leadership that’s there.

A lot of these people that are working with Israelis. Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria are working with them. They’re giving jobs to Palestinians and the villagers, the village leaders know this. They’re happy that it’s happening. There is this cooperation happening at a people-to-people level with the heads of the villages with the Mukhtars, and I think that has to be the future leadership of the Palestinian Authority. There’s going to have to be some kind of turmoil, some kind of transition but the future will never be peaceful as long as the PA exists.

Sarah: All right. On that grim note, I want to thank all of our listeners.

Itamar: There are not grim. There are these people who we could make these with.

Sarah: There are few of them. Let’s hope we find them and we give them a lot of protection. I want to thank Itamar Marcus very much for two decades of this relentless work. Our [Inaudible] at AMET is varied between the insanity of what has been happening over the years in college campuses between the existential threat of Iran and between what’s going on with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and Palestinian Islam [Inaudible]. But you have a steady diet and it must be excruciating to get up every day for more and more of the same. We’re very grateful for the good work of Itamar Marcus and Palestinian Media Watch. Please go onto their website atpmw.org, support this organization, and sign up for their newsletter. They do excellent work.

Itamar: I’m sorry, pal watch.

Sarah: I’m sorry. Palwatch.org. They do extremely good work. Also, as you know, AMET is on the hill every single day fighting the good fight. We really work our guts out. One of the things that we have been working very hard for is to codify the IHRA definition which no other organization is due. So there will be one federal definition of anti-Semitism, not varying from state to state, but that will really help our children on US college campuses. We need this and we need your support to get this done. That’s extremely important, and of course, we have been working and watching every move which this government is making behind closed doors with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. We do need your support and whenever any Israeli comes in, they call on us first to help take them around Capitol Hill such as Itamar Marcus, and it’s an honor and a privilege to do that.

So please, we need your continuous support if you’d like us to continue our good work. I ask you to please support us at ametonline.org. At ametonline.org, and next week we’re going to have Richie Goldberg from another great organization, the Foundation for Defensive Democracies, and he’s going to bring us up to date about the mini deals that the White House seems to be establishing with the Islamic Republic of Iran. We’ll see you next Wednesday at the same time. Itamar, thank you so much for your excellent work.

Itamar: Thank you for inviting me.

Sarah: Thanks. [Inaudible]

[END]

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