PA Daily claims Israel is a "racist state of thieves who steal our heritage”
Excerpt of a column by Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for the official PA daily
Headline: “The racist ‘state of thieves’ steals our heritage”
“When the Israeli racist occupation system demonstrates in the worst way what ugliness is, while feigning to honor human beauty from all the world’s states (apparently refers to 2021 Miss Universe contestants visiting the Tafadalu: Rahat Bedouin Experience where they wore Bedouin clothing; despite there being no claim it was Israeli, Palestinians falsely claimed this was “heritage theft” -Ed.), it is an awful thing that only ‘a state of thieves’ is capable of doing! [This is a state] that stole and robbed – and that continues to steal and rob – the Palestinian people’s land, and to give it to criminal settlers who lack an identity, culture, and heritage (sic.)…
The first Zionist invaders of our land thought that they were able to dictate the fate of the Palestinian people, like the fate that the European invaders dictated for the Indians in North America…
They attempted to ignore the fact that was known to them… and it is that the Palestinian people has a history and cultural heritage that was dictated thousands of years before the first tribe that always would cross borders and did not dwell permanently was formed (sic., the Palestinians have no history prior to the modern period; apparently refers to the Jews “not dwelling permanently” during the Jewish diaspora, ignoring the Jewish kingdoms in ancient Israel). The historians have documented for human memory only the land of Palestine and its people who dwells permanently, which has increased in it since the dawn of history.
These invaders, the pawns of the forces of imperialism, understand that they do not have – not even at a minimal level – the cultural elements that formulate the identity of any people (sic.), and therefore they stole the Palestinian heritage after they had already stolen most of the historical and natural homeland of the Palestinian people…
We think that the least that any state that participated in the Miss Universe competition that took place in the [occupation] system needs to do to preserve its dignity is to hurry and punish ‘the government of Israel’ and the organizing body, and this is for one reason: stealing the Palestinian people’s heritage is a crime that completely contradicts the values of beauty connected to knowledge and culture, and also the values of physical beauty that these international competitions are based on. We had hoped that the participating states would boycott [the competition] because the organizing body is a state of thieves and terror, and evidence of this is found in its racist laws and the resolutions of the UN and its organizations, foremost among them UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) and the [UN] Human Rights Council.
These are resolutions that the beauty queens should have had to study before agreeing to participate in the crime of stealing the Palestinian heritage, as beauty is a complete contradiction of occupation, racism, state terror, settler terror, [ethnic] cleansing, uprooting, and history falsification.”