Palestinian Media Watch Director Itamar Marcus spoke about PA Antisemitism at several events last month. One was a panel discussion “From East to West: The Export of Antisemitism from Arabic Media,” hosted by PMW and CAMERA Arabic at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. Marcus also spoke at a live-streamed conference organised by Pulse of Israel called “Unmasking Jew-hatred within the Palestinian national movement.”

The following are excerpts of two articles summarizing Marcus’ talks and his and PMW’s findings on PA Antisemitism:

The Jewish News Syndicate:

How antisemitism in Arab media infiltrates the West

English language editors are often unaware of the hate their platforms publish in Arabic

 

By Rachel Avraham

Palestinian schools, mosques, media outlets and social media have long been hotbeds of antisemitic discourse. The same has been true in much of the Arab and Muslim world.

In the West, many still believe that the Palestinian Authority is a partner for peace. However, the official Fatah Facebook page tells a different story.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, the page proclaims that “the Jews allied with Nazis to accumulate wealth,” “the Jews established ghettos in order to separate from other people out of arrogance and disgust of non-Jews” and “Jews were hated because of their racism and filthy behavior.” The list goes on.

Furthermore, P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas once proclaimed: “The Jews who migrated to Eastern and Western Europe were subjected to massacres by some state every 10 to 15 years from the 11th century until the Holocaust. Ok, but why did this happen? The hatred of the Jews is not due to their religion, but rather due to their social role that was connected to usury and banks and so forth.”

P.A. ideology

PMW director Itamar Marcus said on June 13 that one of the fundamentals of Palestinian antisemitism is the assertion that the Jews are not only hated by Palestinians but by “all of humanity, and for good reason. They refer to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ as an accurate, authentic document.”

Marcus was speaking at a panel discussion titled “From East to West: The Export of Antisemitism from Arabic Media,” hosted by PMW and CAMERA Arabic at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.

According to Marcus, the P.A. leaders and media outlets claim that the Europeans supported the establishment of the State of Israel “because the Jews are so terrible” and they did not want them in their borders.

“This is central to Palestinian Authority ideology. They believe that Jews brought antisemitism onto themselves,” he explained.

Furthermore, he noted that the P.A. media outlets claim that Jews around the world today continue to play the same negative role that “caused Europe to vomit them out. Thus, Israel exists because Europe vomited us out because of our negative political, economic and social role, and we deserved to be kicked out, so they sent us here. That’s why Israel exists. That is why Israel has no right to exist, because we are a colonial invention. These are the messages coming from the Palestinian Authority,” he said.

Marcus noted that Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs, the P.A.’s top Islamic legal authority, Mahmoud al-Habbas, claimed: “Jews are humanoids. They are creatures that Allah created in the form of humans. They are cursed descendants of apes and pigs.”

Marcus asked, “Could you imagine what would be the reaction if the chief rabbi of Israel had gone on TV and told Israelis that the Palestinians are not human? All of the media all over the world would have gone crazy. But here you got Abbas’s adviser on Islam telling his people on official P.A. TV that Jews are not humans but humanoids.”

When Jews are dehumanized in this manner, it is very easy to call upon the Palestinian people to wage jihad against the “thieving Jews,” he said.

According to Marcus, this leads to the justification of killing civilians. He referred to a Palestinian terrorist attack in April, in which Lucy Dee and her daughters Rina and Maia were murdered: “A month after they were killed, the terrorists were tracked down and killed by Israel. Then, the P.A.’s Prime Minister [Mohammad Shtayyeh] wrote on his Facebook page, ‘Glory and eternity to our righteous martyrs.’ So, the people who did these murders are heroic jihad fighters,” he said.

[The Jewish News Syndicate, 18 June, 2023 ]

The South African Jewish Report on PMW lecture “Unmasking Jew-hatred within the Palestinian national movement”, a conference of Pulse of Israel:

Palestinian antisemitism is systemic
and should be exposed

By Steven Gruzd

“The image that Palestinians portray in the English media is very different from the messages they send to their own people in Arabic,” Itamar Marcus said. “Incidents of Palestinian antisemitism aren’t isolated examples; they are systematically disseminated by the Palestinian Authority (PA).” Jewish leaders have been criticised for not bringing enough attention to this reality, and Western governments have been castigated for continued support for the Palestinians in spite of their Jew-hating racism.

Marcus is the founder of Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli non-governmental organisation that monitors incitement and extremism – usually in Arabic – in Palestinian media and schoolbooks. He was speaking at “Unmasking Jew-hatred within the Palestinian national movement”, a live-streamed conference organised by Pulse of Israel on 25 June.

Marcus showed several examples, including from PA President Mahmoud Abbas, of Palestinian political antisemitism that propagates the myth that Jews are evil, threaten humanity, and have brought hatred on themselves by their actions and character. The PA also posits that Israel is an illegal, alien, settler-colonial implant in “Palestine” with no right to exist, created by Europeans who wanted to solve their own “Jewish problem”. Abbas has claimed that Zionists fabricated the Holocaust, and were in cahoots with the Nazis.

Marcus also gave examples of Palestinian religious antisemitism. Leading Palestinian Muslim clerics have declared on television that Jews are apes and pigs, cursed, and subhuman. Those who murder Jews are celebrated as heroes, martyrs, and role models.

[The South African Jewish Report, June 29, 2023]