Imagine if the United States government announced that, to celebrate International Women’s Day, it would be honoring Lizzie Borden, Bonnie Parker, and Hermine Ryan.
Imagine if these were the women whom our country’s leaders held up as the role models for society—the 19th century axe murderer, the “Bonnie & Clyde” gangster, and the New York housewife who turned out to be a fugitive Nazi war criminal.
Imagine if they were the women whose character traits we are all hoping our daughters will emulate. As the father of four daughters, the thought gives me chills up and down my spine.
I think we can assume that every feminist group in the country would be up in arms. How awful to celebrate such vile people! And how much more painful to do it on, of all days, International Women’s Day, when we should be celebrating righteous and admirable women, not serial killers, gangsters, and torturers.
So why the silence when a foreign government, one which is heavily underwritten by U.S. taxpayers’ money, did exactly that?
Not a single major American feminist organization protested when the Palestinian Authority celebrated International Women’s Day last month by honoring and glorifying the most notorious female Arab Palestinian mass murderers in history.
Awdah TV, which is run by Fatah, the main faction of the ruling Palestinian Authority, broadcast a video showcasing three of their “heroines” to show “appreciation for the effort and sacrifices Palestinian women have made.”
The introductory text to the segment read: “Palestinian women have led in all fields of the struggle, have made sacrifices, and with their greatness have written the letters of Palestine’s identity.”
The three women whom Fatah chose for the honor were Dalal Mughrabi, leader of the gang that murdered 37 Jews, including 12 children, in the barbaric 1978 Tel Aviv Highway massacre; Theresa Halsa, one of the hijackers of a Sabena flight in 1972; and Fatima Barnawi, who planted a bomb in a Jerusalem movie theater in 1967.
It should be noted that 13 of the Jews who Mughrabi and her fellow-gangsters slaughtered were women or girls. So, when the PA honors Mughrabi, it is not only honoring a woman who committed mass murder—it is honoring a woman who massacred women.
Mughrabi’s photograph was also displayed in a Women’s Day segment on official Palestinian Authority TV called “The Palestinian Women, a History Full of Sacrifice,” as the reporter declared that Palestinian Arab women “are an icon of resolve and defiance.”
In another Women’s Day segment on PA television, called “Stories from Palestine,” the narrator lauded “the acts of heroism by the Palestinian women,” singling out Mughrabi, Barnawi, bombmaker Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, Afula marketplace bomber Zakiya Shammout, and airplane hijacker Leila Khaled. A commentator in the segment, Fatah activist Jihad Zneid, also praised suicide bomber Wafa Idris.
The PA’s prime minister, Muhammad Shtayyeh, celebrated International Women’s Day by praising Palestinian Arab women who are “the mothers of the Martyrs and the prisoners.” According to the official PA daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Shtayyeh singled out Um Nasser Abu Hmeid, the mother of six terrorists who carried out the murders of at least ten Jews (four of her sons are serving multiple life sentences in Israeli prisons; the other two were killed while carrying out terrorist attacks). She is “an example of a women who is fighting and standing firm,” the PA prime minister declared.
And because no PA celebration of terrorists would be complete without naming some public site after them—one of the regime’s favorite activities—International Women’s Day was marked in the PA town of Ya’abad, near Jenin, with the inauguration of Prisoner Mothers Park. At the opening ceremony, speakers named various women terrorist prisoners, including Iran Al-A’war and Attaf Jaradat. Town officials “planted flowers and a seedling named after each of these female prisoners,” PA television announced.
If the Palestinian Authority was some obscure regime on a desert island somewhere, perhaps one could understand why nobody pays attention when it glorifies terrorists. But, in fact, the PA is a major recipient of American aid. It has received more than $10-billion in U.S. aid since 1993, and billions more from the rest of the international community. It is currently receiving over $350-million annually from the United States. Every single American taxpayer is, in effect, helping to underwrite the PA regime.
And don’t forget about the political and diplomatic support that the PA receives from America. The Biden administration has declared that it is committed to creating a sovereign state of “Palestine,” which would be ruled by this regime which thinks that women who have carried out mass murders of Jews are the women whom we should celebrate and admire.
Regimes that glorify mass murderers should be treated as evil pariahs, not coddled and subsidized. And regimes that glorify women murderers on International Women’s Day remind us just how evil they are.
Stephen M. Flatow, is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”