“If your citizens were being routinely attacked by terrorists, which of you would tolerate a reward system that compensated the attackers for their crimes?”

That is the question United States Middle East peace envoy Jason Greenblatt reportedly asked members of the United Nations Security Council earlier this month. “The Palestinian Authority’s institutionalization of support for terrorism is unacceptable and must be called out, unequivocally by all of us. The time has come for everyone to stop looking the other way,” he told them.

The events that precipitated Greenblatt’s remarks were as follows: For years, it’s been known that the Palestinian Authority has incentivized terror by providing payments to terrorists who kill Israelis or tourists in Israel. If the terrorist dies during the attack, the payment is provided to his family. The size of the monthly payment increases with the length of jail time. In other words, the more serious the crime, the higher the payments.

In response to this policy, the U.S. passed the Taylor Force Act in 2018. The act is named for West Point graduate Taylor Force, who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist in 2016. It cuts off some (but not all) U.S. funding to the PA as long as the PA continues paying terrorists. Recently, the Israeli government decided to take similar action by withholding a small percentage of the tax money it collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf due to this pay-to-slay policy.

In response to the Israeli government’s decision to withhold $11 million, the PA decided not to accept the remaining $150 million that Israel is willing to transfer, worsening its own budget crisis.

The Palestinian Authority and several members of the UN Security Council, per usual, blamed Israel for the PA’s dysfunction.

In a March 10 op-ed in Haaretz, Saeb Erekat, the Secretary General of the PLO, dishonestly calls the terrorists “political prisoners” and the payments “a welfare system.” He writes of a “colleague” who was recently released from Israeli prison. That colleague, Khalida Jarrar, is a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terror organization known for airplane hijackings.

Erekat repeats the talking point that a high conviction rate of Palestinians in IDF courts is indicative of a “kangaroo court;” CAMERA debunked that point two years ago, pointing out that prosecutors only bring indictments in cases with extremely strong evidence. Erekat calls the Israeli tactic of withholding partial payment “gangster-style,” but it is the Palestinian Authority that effectively has a contract out on every Israeli.

Most importantly, in the op-ed, Erekat freely admits that these payments to terrorists are more important than the welfare of Palestinians living under PA rule. “Will this affect the functioning of our government?” he asks. “Yes. But this is a price that we are willing to pay for the dignity of our nation… .”

In covering the story, some in the media have downplayed the cash-for-kill policy. This makes it hard for readers to understand the nature of the Israelis’ and Greenblatt’s objections, and easier for the Palestinians to portray themselves as the victims.

For example, in a March 8 article about the UN session, Reuters called the payments “financial support to families of militants jailed in Israel,” and “stipends the PA pays to families of Palestinian militants killed or jailed by Israel.” There is no mention in the article of the crimes that were committed by the recipients of these “stipends.” Omitting the reason these attackers were killed or jailed makes them sound like they are the injured parties.

Even more surreal was a March 8 article in The New York Times, which characterized the PA’s payments as the “Palestinian Authority’s policy of paying stipends to Palestinian prisoners in Israel and to the families of Palestinians killed or wounded in confrontations with Israelis.” Confrontations? This could mean almost anything and is a convenient way of eliding the fact that the payments are for murder, that the more people killed, the higher the payments.

The Times writes that “the Trump administration’s Middle East envoy, Jason D. Greenblatt, accused Palestinian leaders of offering the stipends as a reward for acts of terrorism” (emphasis added). As noted above, the official PA policy provides that the longer the jail sentence — that is, the more heinous the crime — the higher the reward. By calling Greenblatt’s accurate observation a mere “accusation,” the Times implicitly calls its veracity into question, dodging its responsibility to tell the truth directly.

It’s odd, too, that the Times has so quickly forgotten how it was embarrassed less than a year ago when it claimed that such policies did not exist at all and were a far-right conspiracy theory. In April of 2018, it was forced to run a correction stating, “Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.” Less than a year later, the Times is once again unable to forthrightly acknowledge the true nature of these payments.

Barely a week and a half after Greenblatt’s comments, on Sunday, another terror attack killed two more Israelis, Rabbi Achiad Ettinger and Sgt. Gal Keidan. As Greenblatt pointed out, the family of the 19-year old suspected assailant will also likely be the recipients of these payments.

It’s apparent that the suffering of the Palestinian people is entirely acceptable to Palestinian leaders if that suffering can be used to make Israel look bad. Unfortunately, some in the media are happy to assist with this effort. In this case, the PA’s refusal of $150 million in tax transfers that Israel is willing to provide is sure to negatively affect Palestinians. The fact that the PA is doing so to take a stand on its ability to continue to pay murderers ought not to generate any sympathy for it.

[Photo: MEMRI TV Videos / YouTube ]

On the last Saturday in October, Robert Bowers shot and killed eleven members of the Pittsburgh Jewish community, physically injured six other people, including law enforcement officers, and created distress and turmoil for the entire American Jewish community. He’s been indicted in federal court on 44 counts, and may face the death penalty.

Bowers killed eleven Jews solely due to his annihilationist anti-Semitism, which was of the neo-Nazi variety. He provided a political cover – he wrote that he didn’t like the political positions held by some other Jews (not the ones he killed), who support certain immigration policies in this country. But as Alana Newhouse noted in Tablet Magazine, the truth was simply that “he had reached the end point of a brain-eating disease called anti-Semitism.”

One day after these brutal murders, Linda Sarsour once again put herself in the spotlight. She did so while attempting to portray herself as a defender of Jews.

While Sarsour denounced Bowers, she has, in the past, embraced a different unrepentant killer of Jews, Rasmeah Odeh.

Many of us, by now, may have forgotten about Odeh. However, just over a year ago she was deported from the United States, after admitting that she lied on her citizenship application. Odeh also killed two Jews, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, who were students at Israel’s Hebrew University in 1969. She was convicted in a trial that was observed and deemed fair by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is a Marxist-Leninist group that “advocates armed insurrection and perpetrates media-oriented attacks, particularly the hijacking of planes.” In 1968, the year before Odeh committed her double murder, the PFLP hijacked an Israeli plane.

Like Bowers, Odeh was motivated by annihilationist anti-Semitism, while using political reasons as a fig-leaf for her crime. In her case, her anti-Semitism was of the anti-Zionist variety. As Allister Heath recently explained in The Telegraph, anti-Zionism is “obsessed with delegitimising the world’s only Jewish country (and no other), in the full knowledge that its existence is what protects its people from persecution, misery and even death.” Both Bowers and Odeh targeted their victims for one reason, because they were Jews.

In April of 2017, before Odeh was deported, at a conference of Jewish Voice for Peace, Odeh and Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour embraced, and Sarsour gushed to the audience about feeling “honored and privileged to be here in this space, and honored to be on this stage with Rasmea.”

In addition to this connection with Odeh, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-leaders have embraced Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan’s numerous anti-Semitic statements include, most recently, calling Jews “termites.” In the month of March, when the Farrakhan connection came into focus, there was widespread condemnation of the Women’s March leaders, yet that apparently did not prompt any introspection on their part. Sarsour and the March have not disavowed their support for either Farrakhan or Odeh.

Yet, on Sunday, one day after Bowers’s heinous crime, there was Linda Sarsour protesting outside the White House against the anti-Semitism that motivated Bowers – the very same Linda Sarsour who has literally embraced Rasmea Odeh. The Women’s March, which Sarsour leads along with three others, tweeted, “We’ve gathered outside the @WhiteHouse with @jewishaction and communities of faith to echo the call: #WeWillOutliveThem.” Sarsour spoke at the rally, supposedly in defense of her Jewish “sisters and brothers.”

That such a group would purport to speak for Jews in the aftermath of what the ADL has called “the largest attack on the Jewish community in US history” beggars belief. It’s hard to see this as anything other than opportunistic and self-serving.

Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest hatred. It unites the fringe right and the fringe left. As the Wall Street Journal observed, “All good Americans stand in solidarity against anti-Semitism.” You can’t, however, pick and choose. There is no difference between Robert Bowers and Rasmea Odeh that goes beyond semantics. Both want to kill Jews, just for being Jews. If you embrace Odeh, your stance against Bowers is meaningless. As long as Sarsour and the Women’s March stand with annihilationist anti-Semitism, they cannot also stand against it.

[Photo: Stop the Lies / YouTube ]

“We will maintain peace and we will arrive at our independent state through peace because God is with us, our issue is just, our people sacrificed a lot and you all are supporters of peace,” said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last month at the United Nations General Assembly. These are superficially nice words from a man who promised in July to “never stop” paying terrorists and their families. However, one doesn’t even have to go outside the text of his UNGA speech to see why the words are a sham.

For instance, Abbas called Israel a “colonial occupation,” revealing much about his ideology. Using such terminology to describe Israel denies facts and history. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, and the Jewish connection to the land dates back thousands of years.

He also said that, “Israeli settlers and even the Israeli army trample daily on the holiness of holy sites including the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.” The mosque to which he refers, of course, is located on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, which he doesn’t acknowledge. When Jews visit it, according to Abbas, they are apparently “trampling” their own sacred site.

One part of his speech, however, stood out, even among the many distortions and falsehoods. Abbas insisted that all of what he referred to as “East Jerusalem” become his capital, and that without it – all of it – there would be no peace.

Peace in our region cannot be realized without an independent Palestinian State, with East Jerusalem as its capital and with all of its holy sites. There are many people who try to outsmart us. They say that your capital is in East Jerusalem — no, that is a manipulation of words, no — meaning Abu Dis, here or there and the areas surrounding Jerusalem. Our capital is East Jerusalem and not in Jerusalem. No one outsmarts us. Abu Dis and I do not know where — they say. No. East Jerusalem that was occupied in 1967 is our capital.

There is no peace otherwise.

When Abbas says that peace will never happen until Palestinians have exclusive control over all sections of Jerusalem that Israel captured in 1967, he is in fact dedicating himself to violence and terror, because he knows full well that Israel will never cede all of those neighborhoods of Jerusalem. When he insists on a condition that he knows is impossible, he is in effect saying that he chooses to continue the conflict instead of providing his people with a homeland of their own.

Jews’ holiest sites – the Temple Mount, the Kotel (Western Wall), and the Mount of Olives – are all located in the territory that Abbas demands as a prerequisite for peace. When Jordan controlled these areas for 19 years, Jews were denied access to them. When Jews visit them now, Abbas calls those visits a defilement. In contrast, today, while under Israeli rule, Muslims have full access to their holy sites subject only to security regulations. Muslims, in fact, have greater rights to the shared sites than Jews do, as Jews are barred from prayer on the Temple Mount.

Jerusalem, including eastern Jerusalem, is the holiest city of the Jews, and it was the capital of the ancient Jewish kingdoms. While Abbas has already rejected an Israeli proposal in 2008 that would have provided for shared control over the holy sites, the idea of turning them entirely over to Palestinian rule is a non-starter.

Moreover, there is no basis for his claim, as the city Abbas seeks for his capital has never in history been under Palestinian rule, and it’s never been an Arab capital. During the short period that eastern Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule, the city and its holy sites were “largely neglected.”

The message of this demand is yet again refusal to end the conflict. Just as Yasir Arafat would never sign on to an end-of-conflict at Camp David and Taba in 2000-2001, so his successor rejects compromise, and perpetuates violence and hatred.

Abbas made the choice to continue the conflict in 2008, when he rejected then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s statehood offer, and he made the choice to continue the conflict in 2014, when he rejected parameters proposed by the Obama administration. So it should be no surprise that his speech last month again reflects an unwavering commitment to conflict.

Abbas ensures that peace, as well as the state that he claims to want, remain out of reach while he mouths transparently hypocritical words of peace. His speech was, for anyone with even a partial memory of the recent past, a call to continue violence and bloodshed.

[Photo: United Nations / YouTube ]

Reem’s Bakery in Oakland serves “Traditional Arab Street Food Made with California Love!” It’s also decorated with a huge mural of Rasmeah Odeh, who was convicted by an Israeli court for her role in the terror attack that killed two Jewish students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner. (Her trial was observed by the International Red Cross and deemed fair.)

Last month I wrote on CAMERA’s website about Food and Wine magazine’s decision to award Reem’s bakery with the honor of “Restaurant of the Year.” The article was sent to CAMERA’s members, and many of them responded with letters to Food and Wine, demanding to know whether the magazine understood that Reem’s honors an unrepentant terrorist. Editor Hunter Lewis responded that, in fact, Food and Wine was well aware of Odeh and her conviction, and that the decision to bestow this honor on Reem’s was made only after Restaurant Editor Jordana Rothman “discussed with our editorial team the controversial mural of Rasmea Odeh painted on one of the bakery’s walls.”

Food and Wine is primarily a cultural publication, and should have little to do with politics. However, it would be unthinkable to honor an establishment with a mural of, say, Dylann Roof, or the San Bernadino shooters. Yet, Odeh didn’t raise eyebrows at that publication.

It’s difficult to understand how Food and Wine took seriously proprietor Reem Assil’s claim that she “wanted to cultivate understanding in the most humane way possible,” when the editors knew there is an image of a killer staring down on Assil’s customers. And Lewis’s characterization of the mural as a “polarizing distraction” downplays what is really happening at Reem’s – that is, the glorification of terror directed at Jews. “Justifying the killing or harming of Jews,” was one example of contemporary anti-Semitism in the definition adopted by the Obama administration. Yet, Food and Wine looked the other way at just that, and bestowed its honor on Assil.

Unfortunately, the Food and Wine award is not an isolated incident.

When Linda Sarsour first rose to national prominence last year for co-chairing the January 2017 Women’s March, her critics were mostly dismissed or ignored outside of Jewish organizations and Jewish media. Sarsour, along with her co-leaders, was honored by Time and by Glamour. This was despite Sarsour’s literal embrace of Rasmeah Odeh in April of 2017.

In March of this year, Sarsour’s co-chair Tamika Mallory’s close ties with Louis Farrakhan were exposed. All of the Women’s March leaders’ affiliations with anti-Semites came under scrutiny, and widespread condemnation followed. In The Atlantic, John-Paul Pagano wrote, “that the [Women’s March] group refuses to be accountable for a high-level alliance with an open anti-Semite disqualifies it from ranking among today’s movements for social justice.” Refinery 29 featured a headline that asserted, “Women’s March Leaders Have An Anti-Semitism Problem — Maybe It’s Time To Leave Them Behind.” The article that ran under that headline criticized Mallory for her association with Farrakhan and Sarsour for a past collaboration with Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and for her failure to denounce Farrakhan’s antisemitism in the wake of the revelations about Mallory.

Yet, barely two months after these calls to move on from the March’s leaders, Sarsour was included on CNN’s list of “25 Influential American Muslims.” (Others recognized include Rep. Keith Ellison (D – Minn.), who also has a troubling history with Farrakhan, and Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, a blogger who has been described as having a “history of anti-Semitism.”) CNN, with half a billion visitors on its site, is obviously influential.

Sarsour was called “The Fighter,” and CNN wrote, “often outspoken, Sarsour has faced criticism for aligning with questionable characters and sharply denouncing Zionism. But many Muslims say she is the kind of uncompromising, unapologetic leader their community needs right now.” Like Food and Wine with respect to Assil, CNN was well aware of the criticisms of Sarsour, but decided that they weren’t important.

What are American Jews to take away from these two mainstream outlets lauding individuals who have made no effort to hide their support for the likes of Odeh and Farrakhan? Such associations, it would seem, are no longer disqualifying. Under criticism, Food and Wine doubled down on its decision. And CNN’s designation of Sarsour was met with little or no pushback from the mainstream media. Two major media organizations have decided that the Jewish community’s complaints of antisemitism just don’t matter.

The willingness of the media to overlook blatant anti-Semitism mirrors growing tolerance of anti-Semitism in the public sphere. Regarding the recent sidelining of the ADL by Starbucks at the urging of Sarsour’s co-leader Mallory, David Gemunder wrote, “it is crystal clear that Americans need to recognize that antisemitism is just as vile as racism, sexism, homophobia, and other religious or ethnic persecution. It cannot be tolerated from the right or the left. Those should be obvious statements. That they somehow are not self-evident in our time should anger and concern everyone.”

The same holds true for the accolades being bestowed on Reem Assil and on Linda Sarsour. With these awards, both of these publications are participating in the mainstreaming of antisemitism. That should anger and concern everyone.

[Photo: Matthew Finkelstein / YouTube ]