Israel revoked the VIP status of the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, after he compared Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the leader of the Islamic State (ISIS), Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
According to a report in Haaretz, the coordinator of government activities in Judea and Samaria, Yoav Mordechai, informed his Palestinian counterparts Monday that General Adnan Damiri’s VIP pass had been cancelled, according to a senior Israeli official.
Damiri had been warned a few months ago to moderate his statements against Israel, which bordered on incitement, the official said.
Monday’s step against Damiri is extraordinary because Israel has refrained from invoking sanctions against senior Palestinian security officials in recent years, noted Haaretz.
According to the Israeli official, however, Damiri’s most recent statements were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Revocation of his VIP status will make it more difficult for him to move through Judea and Samaria, as well as in Israel.
Damiri said, according to the report, that Prime Minister Netanyahu was more dangerous than ISIS leader Al-Baghdadi during a press conference in Ramallah a few days ago, following the light rail attack in Jerusalem.
He also said that “Israeli racism toward the Palestinian people is more dangerous than ISIS,” and called Israel a “Jewish ISIS.”
Damiri also told reporters that the light rail incident was a traffic accident and not a terror attack.
In response to the decision to cancel his VIP pass, Damiri told Haaretz that he doesn’t regret his statement and still sees Netanyahu as being as dangerous as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, because Netanyahu, he charged, is leading the region into a religious conflict.
“Netanyahu gives backing to Israel’s worst extremists, and they’re leading to escalation and incitement and to turning the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict into a religious one,” Damiri charged. “And I, as a spokesman for the security services, was speaking on the basis of fact.
“Since the start of the year, this government has been responsible for killing 10 Palestinian children, including nine by live fire. It demolishes the houses of Palestinians who haven’t been put on trial, but it hasn’t destroyed the houses of the murderers of the child Mohammed Abu Khdeir,” he continued, referring to the Jerusalem teen murdered by Jews in July in what was apparently a revenge killing for the murder of three Jewish teens by Hamas terrorists the previous month.
“The Netanyahu government’s decision proves that it is a weak government that can’t cope with a journalistic statement by a Palestinian official whose job is to talk to the press,” Damiri told Haaretz.
Previous inciting statement by Damiri included a dissemination of a modern form of blood libel against Israel - by claiming that Israel deliberately distributes drugs to harm Palestinian Arab society.
Damiri reiterated this libel in February, stating that Israel "has spit up and vomited a shocking amount of drugs onto our land," according to Palestinian Media Watch.
He explained that the PA had even seized a lab "turning marijuana into heroin."
The Israeli government several months ago released its annual "Palestinian Incitement Index", which showed that incitement against Israel and the Jewish people is continuing on official media channels including - inter alia - by bodies that are very close to the PA Chairman and in educational and religious networks.
Such incitement ranges from the glorification of Nazism and the lionization of Adolf Hitler, to programs on official PA television featuring heavily-stereotyped Jews as villains (and encouraging violence against them), and various TV and radio shows which literally wipe the Jewish state off the map.
Israeli officials have stressed that in order to achieve peace, the PA must first stop its incitement against Israel, which includes educating young children towards hatred and terrorism.