Chicago Sun Times cites PMW in article about PA incitement as the biggest obstacle to peace

Years of efforts to find a way out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have floundered time and again on the failure of the world, and specifically the Obama administration for the last two years, to hold the Palestinian authorities accountable for their ceaseless flogging of hateful passions among their people.

A case in point was the weekend slaughter of an Israeli family of five in a community in the disputed West Bank. Terrorists invaded the family’s home in Itamar at night and knifed to death Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, and three of their children, ages 11, 4 and 3 months. Internet images of the butchery of the parents and children are stark testimony to the debased, evil character of these barbaric terrorists.

The White House, the State Department and the Middle East Quartet — the group of America, the U.N., the European Union and Russia — issued statements to condemn “in the strongest possible terms” the murders.

Unmentioned in the statements was the barrage of incitement of hate for Israelis and Jews that is common in Palestinian media and schools. Ending this campaign of hate has been a first-stage step — never achieved — in virtually every plan to settle the conflict. […]

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the flow of hate in Palestinian schools and media, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas responded that the territory he rules is the “only place in the Arab and Muslim world” where the government pre-approves sermons in mosques.

Maybe so, but that misses the point of the larger problem so well documented by the Palestinian Media Watch organization. Just one day before the massacre in Itamar, an Abbas aide declared that “weapons must be turned towards the main enemy,” Israel, and urged the naming of a square in a West Bank town honoring the leader of a 1978 bus hijacking that killed 37 Israelis.

A few days ago, the Fatah party, the main power in the Palestine Liberation Organization Abbas heads, honored suicide bombers during Yasser Arafat’s 2000-2005 terror war on Israeli civilians. Last month, Palestinian TV aired a show including praise for terrorists who murdered three students at the high school in Itamar in 2002. Abbas closed out 2010 by awarding $2,000 to the family of a pipe bomb- carrying terrorist killed trying to attack Israeli soldiers. School textbook maps don’t show Israel. […]

Typically, the State Department that was silent over Palestinian incitement quickly denounced the new construction. I’ve said it before and it bears repeating, it is not settlements but Palestinian intransigence — exemplified by an unending campaign of hate — that is the overriding obstacle to peace.