Incitement: The Engine Driving Global Terrorism, Part II

​A Culture of Hatred – Incited from Birth

Incitement is so prevalent in parts of the Arab world that it even permeates the cultural  milieu.  One  proud  Palestinian  father  celebrated  his  toddler’s  first birthday by strapping a fake suicide bomb to him and taking pictures of the child. As the shocking photo of the smiling “suicide” infant and his happy father made its way around the world, the baby’s paternal grandfather dismissed the incident as a bad joke.[17]

The ‘joke’ is the result of a vexing phenomenon. Schools controlled by authoritarian Arab regimes and Islamic extremists provide children everywhere in the Muslim-Arab world (including mosques in America and Europe) with textbooks that espouse a bitter hatred of Israel and the West. Maps of Israel show no such country.[18]  Instead, teachers within the Palestinian Authority teach their students that territory delineated by former British Mandate – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean – is theirs. They say Israel is land that was “stolen” from the Arabs in 1948.[19]  

A similar message is hammered home on children’s television programs. From elementary school through high school, textbooks foster hatred towards Israel and the West, with Israel described as “a country of gangs, born in crime.” anti-Semitic expressions portray Jews as arrogant, sly traitors. Zionism is described as a racist movement and a “germ.”

By second grade, the concept of jihad, or holy struggle – used by Osama bin Laden to characterize the September 11 attacks – is introduced and taught as an enshrined value. By the sixth grade, a child is encouraged to become a shahid (martyr).

Absent from the texts are the principles of normalization or co-existence with Israel. Similar anti-Israel messages are broadcast on children’s television shows throughout the Arab world. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada, one of the most frequently broadcasted images on Arab television was the photo of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old boy who was caught with his father and presumably killed in the crossfire between Palestinian Arab gunmen and Israeli soldiers near Gaza. The image, as part of a propaganda video clip, shows the dead child calling on others to join him. Other television programs show parents praising their children’s death and enticing other youngsters to volunteer to become shahids or martyrs. Do these forms of incitement work?

A 13-year-old Palestinian boy armed with a kitchen knife was stopped and caught in a Jewish settlement, thwarting his desire to become a shahid. He would have been the youngest child at the time to succumb to the hero-seduction of the propaganda. This culture of violence permeates every aspect of Arab life, even sports.

A Palestinian Arab soccer tournament was named in honor of the suicide bomber who killed 29 people and injured 140 during that Passover Seder in Netanya.[20]

Incitement is pervasive in the Arab-controlled media. From political cartoons to crossword puzzles, from the sermons of radical clerics to the MTV-like videos that cater to teens, it is hate content, all the time. Words and pictures in the mass media are powerful tools for shaping popular opinion. Images and words can mobilize masses for war or peace.

Throughout the Muslim-Arab world, newspapers and television news programs are used as government vehicles to control the population, and journalists are expected to play by the rules. Rumors and lies are widely published, and media outlets are awash with anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-American reports. Political  cartoons  routinely  portray  Israeli  leaders  as  stereotypical  caricatures with long beards and hooked noses. During the Intifada, Palestinian Authority- controlled television regularly broadcasted programs inciting violence to champion suicide bombing to fuel the fighting. In one live Palestinian Authority television broadcast from a Gaza mosque, a member of the Palestinian Authority Fatwa Council proclaimed:

“Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them.”[21]  In another broadcast, a young Palestinian Arab woman demonstrator calls upon Arab countries to “give us weapons, and we, on our own, will prevail. We’ll kill them on our own, murder them, slaughter them, all of them.” [22]

According to a “60 Minutes” documentary, the Internet is another tool used for spreading incitement and instantly ‘bestowing legitimacy’ on inaccurate or false stories.  Among  the  rumors  and  falsehoods  spread  across  the  world  via  the Internet were stories that said the attacks on September 11 were part of a Jewish conspiracy orchestrated to defame the Arabs,[23] and pulled off by U.S. and Israeli Special Forces.[24]

An investigation by the well-regarded e-zine Slate illustrates how the Internet can be  used  as a weapon to incite. Following the  September 11 attacks, a rumor spread throughout the Arab world that 4,000 Jewish employees from the World Trade Center failed to go to work on September 11. Slate Magazine traced the source of the false report to a Lebanon-based television station affiliated with the terrorist group Hezbollah.

As it turns out, the Israeli government released a report saying that the whereabouts of some 4,000 Israelis living in or visiting New York were unknown immediately after the attacks.

That information, reported on a U.S. website, was later embellished, rewritten and picked up by the Middle East media, then spread by e-mail until the information was so distorted that the Arab world reported the ‘news’ as “4,000 Jews (not Israelis) had not shown up for work at the World Trade Center.” Internet users throughout the Arab world said they had no reason to doubt the false information because, after all, it came from the Internet.

“When you see something on the computer, you tend to believe it,” said an editor of The Nation in Islamabad, Pakistan.[25]   A busy Hamas website has a special online children’s magazine that vilifies Americans and Jews, charging that Americans’ hatred and insensitivity “are caused by the Jewish filth … inspired by the Jews’ cruelty, heresy and barbarity.”[26]  The same website has a page of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Someone wanted to know whether a woman considering a suicide attack needs to wear the required head covering mandated by Islamic law to maintain her modesty, knowing she will draw attention if the attack is attempted in Israel. Yes, she must, is the reply; however, she is also permitted to disguise herself as an Orthodox Jewish woman.

Even normally apolitical crossword puzzles in the Arab press are used to market anti-Semitism and anti-Western attitudes. For example, the clue for Yad Vashem – the Holocaust memorial and research facility in Jerusalem – is “commemorating the Holocaust and the lies.”

Terrorism  is  fueled  by  wealthy  Arab  states  that  support  terror  in  words  and deeds.  They  offer  huge  rewards  to  families  whose  members  become  shahid suicide bombers.

In a West Bank ceremony, the names of 47 Arabs who blew themselves up were called  out,  as  supporters  announced  that  then-Iraqi  leader  Saddam  Hussein would pay $25,000 “to the family of each suicide bomber as an incentive for others to volunteer for martyrdom.”[27] Other Arab countries also provide financial support.  Saudi  Arabia  is  one  of  the  worst  offenders  –  it  has  been  known  to support terrorism through funds funneled via so-called ‘charity organizations’ to terrorist groups that have a ‘welfare wing,’ such as Hamas.

Under American pressure, in December 2002 the Saudis promised the State Department they would better monitor their “charitable generosity.” The State Department considered the funding “well-intentioned donations.”[28] Yet, documents seized by Israeli forces in PA offices show direct aid to Palestinian Islamic terrorist groups for terrorist activity – itemized payments to specific families of suicide bombers and key persons in the terrorism networks killed by Israel or killed in bomb- making ‘work accidents.’ These documents indicate that the US has been misled in regard to Saudi lack of ‘complicity'.[29]

The genuine scope and depth of Saudi complicity has been investigated and exposed in “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism,” a book written by former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dr. Dore Gold – today, the director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The volume describes how Saudi Arabia serves as both the ideological and financial fountainhead for global terrorism, begetting, nurturing and sustaining Islamic extremism through a vast infrastructure whose roots go back to the birth of Wahhabism, an historic extreme form of Islam that developed in Saudi Arabia and now serves as the prototype ideology for all violent Islamists.

Many Arab leaders, most of them autocrats, refuse to thwart terrorism because they use it to stay in power. Faced with the challenges posed by Western society, Arab leaders nurture a culture of hatred toward the West and Israel in order to deflect attention from their own failures and the poverty of their citizens.

Many observers of the Middle East stress that incitement is instrumental and contrived by leadership to draw attention away from them. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Professor Barry Rubin, the director of the Global Research for International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), said:

“It is not just, or even mainly, a response to actual U.S. policies – policies that, if anything, have been remarkably pro-Arab and pro-Muslim over the years ... Animus is largely the product of self-interested manipulation by various groups within Arab society … as a foil to distract public attention from other, far more serious problems within [their] societies ... For years now, anti-Americanism has served as means of last resort, by which failed political systems and movements in the Middle East try to improve their standing ... By assigning responsibility for their own shortcomings to Washington, Arab leaders distract their subjects’ attention from the internal weaknesses that are their real problems. And thus rather than pushing for greater privatization, equality for women, democracy, civil   society,   freedom   of   speech,   due   process   of   law,   or   other   similar developments sorely needed in the Arab world, the public focuses instead on hating the United States.”

As video and audiotapes from Osama bin Laden demonstrate, terrorists who operate out of the militant, extremist Islamic world often make no distinction between their anti-Israeli, anti-Western and anti-American hatred. Indeed, America and Israel, despite their differences in size and population, often are paired together as “the enemy.”

There  is  an  important  distinction  here,  one  that  must  not  be  forgotten:  The hatred that fuels Islamic terrorism is not a direct result of America’s support of Israel – support that is a natural outgrowth of their shared values. A more complex parallel extends beyond Rubin’s observations that make hatred a useful tool.

The portraying of America as “the Big Satan” and Israel as “the Little Satan” reveals a far deeper motivation behind Islamic extremism. Both are singled out because they epitomize the success of Westernism. Both are singled out because by their very nature they stand as beacons that challenge the prevailing culture and regimes of the Middle East – America globally, Israel regionally.[30]

The reason Israel was targeted decades ago stems from the fact that it lies in the Middle East. Radical Islam’s targeting of America came as a result of the communications revolution and the influx of Middle Eastern students who increasingly traveled to the U.S. to study. These two factors, in effect, brought America closer to the Arabic world. The students’ experience with the Western world sparked a sense of revulsion and envy that fuels a love/hate relationship like a “Lethal Attraction.”

Palestinian Arabs manipulate the Western media and its standards of objective reporting, taking advantage of tight deadlines that impede fact-checking. The effect is to incite violence by spreading unadulterated lies. News reports of terrorist acts are sanitized by neutral language; they personalize the perpetrators and turn the victims into mere statistics – thus making the media an indirect accomplice to terrorism.

Leaders of the Arab world, including Palestinian Arab leaders, understand the workings of the Western media, where journalists and publishers are expected to present  a  balanced  picture  and  report  the  views  of  both  sides  in  any  given conflict. That principle of “equal time,” however, is being exploited, leading major news organizations to report outlandish accusations under the guise of fair reporting. Extremists and terrorists get valuable airtime or newspaper space to justify   their   actions,   as   if   barbarous   acts   can   be   legitimized   by   logical explanations. This is compounded by the “If it bleeds, it leads” school of journalism that stresses sensational context over facts. This, in turn, leads to gross misreporting that feeds into Arab propaganda campaigns against the U.S. and Israel.

The media’s hunger for inhuman interest is fed by Palestinians willing to provide gruesome pictures of casualties, real and invented. Those pictures slant stories, because Israeli emergency units shield Israeli victims from the press in order to protect their privacy. There is thus no “equal time” for bloody street scenes. In addition  to  Palestinian  politicians  and  Intifada  activists,  Palestinian professionals, including physicians, willingly serve as propaganda mouthpieces. Though they lie on a regular basis, as they did during the “Jenin Massacre” which never took place, the international media treats them as reliable sources and thus spread exaggerated or totally untrue stories.[31]

Consider Jenin – the press, particularly the European press, quickly accepted Palestinian reports of a massacre and accused Israel of war crimes. The reports generated criticism and international calls for an investigation, including one by the UN.[32]

The willingness of Palestinians at all levels, including physicians and hospital administrators, to inflate or fabricate stories for the media and lie to human rights activists was exposed in “On the Way to Jenin,” a documentary released in April 2003 by French filmmaker, Pierre Rehov. Those who were so quick to accuse Israel of genocide were slow to admit they had been duped, and often continued to accept Palestinian reports at face value, using tight deadlines as an excuse.33

The Western press prefers to remain ignorant of the history and context of the conflict, even when reporting terrorist acts that target civilians. Journalists and editors use neutral terms instead of the loaded word “terrorist.” They use “militants,” “assailants,” or “gunmen” for those who shoot at or blow themselves up in crowds, as if they were cases of random urban violence instead of a political entity’s  organized  terror  attacks  directed  at  a  specific  people  for  political purposes.

On March 30, 2003, the Washington Post published an Associated Press report about a suicide bomber in Netanya. The story noted the horrific Passover Seder attack a year earlier at a hotel in the same town, where 29 people were killed. The report described the 2003 suicide bomber as “an assailant,” not a terrorist. It described terrorist acts as “bombings” and part of “fighting” by an “Islamic militant group,” not acts committed by extremist Islamic terrorist groups.34  On March 12, 2003, National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” moderator, Terry Gross, equalized the targeting of Hamas handlers by the IDF and the deaths of Israeli civilians from Hamas’ suicide bombers as “tit-for-tat murders.”[35]

On April 29, 2003 terrorists attacked a Tel Aviv pub near the U.S. Embassy just hours after Abu Mazen was sworn in as Palestinian prime minister. The media labeled the terrorists as “breakaway militias” even though they were under the direct personal command and control of Yasser Arafat and Abu Mazen.[36]

When journalists focus on the perpetrators, victims become secondary, mere statistics; when terrorists are sympathetically portrayed, this simply adds insult to injury.

In July 2001, Lee Hockstader, a reporter for the Washington Post described Aziz Salha – the 20-year-old Palestinian who proudly waved his bloody hands out the window of a Ramallah police station after a brutal lynching of two Israelis – in a compassionate psychoanalysis:

“The young man was very ill when he was a baby, he stuttered, he was shy … maybe it really wasn’t him photographed in the window … people’s emotions were boiling over because of Palestinian teens shot by Israeli soldiers.... Israel’s settlements and occupation were on Salha’s mind … he was calm, good-natured and athletic.”

The  FBI  defines  terrorism  as  “the  unlawful  use  of  force  or  violence  against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

It is a straightforward definition that leaves no room for dodging moral prerogatives or letting perpetrators pose as victims. Attacks against Israel clearly fall within its parameters. Yet, the media refuses to call a spade a spade, and it refuses to identify terrorism as terrorism in the name of journalistic objectivity. And although those standards do not amount to incitement per se, they indirectly aid and abet terrorism by sanitizing terrorists’ crimes.[37]

Beyond the role played by so-called objective journalism, there is the role that blatant vitriol plays, particularly within the European media. According to Margaret Brearley, advisor on the Holocaust to the Archbishops’ Council in England,[38] the  British  press  described  Israeli  anti-terrorist  actions  as “executions”  or  “assassinations”  carried  out  by  “death  squads”  or  in  “killing fields,” while Palestinian suicide bombings were sometimes portrayed sympathetically as retaliations for “Israeli aggression.”

That kind of terminology peaked after the Israeli incursion into Jenin, when the British press accused Israel of engaging in “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes.” The Swedish press spoke of “Old Testament-style vengeance,” and the German press equated Israeli anti-terror operations with Nazi behavior in occupied Europe.

Deliberate or not, the impact of the Western media’s portrayal of the Arab-Israeli conflict extends beyond the role it plays in Western public opinion. It fuels the conflict no less than PA television and Al Jazeera coverage does. For many Arabs – those in the streets and the political leaders – the source of information is the independent foreign media, particularly CNN, reportedly Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s “most trusted source of information.”[39]

Israel is not the only country caught in the web of media bias. All too often, the United States finds itself in the same situation. Despite American power (and perhaps because of it), America’s leaders have found themselves facing an onslaught that parallels the Israel-bashing in the media, especially since the war in Iraq began in 2003.

The  democratically  elected  leaders  of  Israel  and  the  U.S.  are  vilified  and slandered, the very real threats to their national security are ridiculed, and their despotic enemies are defended. Both nations are full of intellectuals and opinion makers who accept at face value unsubstantiated charges that U.S. and Israeli armed forces commit atrocities. Leaders of both nations must also grapple with shortsighted allies who argue that appeasement and undermining legitimate responses to violence are the solution for peace in the region.

Israel is no longer alone in its fight against terrorism. The U.S. finds itself at war against al Qaeda and suffers from a vicious media image overseas. Professor Barry Rubin [40] asks if Israel’s situation can be blamed on ineptitude in presenting its case.

“Deeper, systematic problems about how governments, media and intellectuals function, and how they view the world can work against anyone, or at  least anyone who deals with the Middle East. The image battle – the ‘war of words’ – is unwinnable, not because of ineptness but because Arab and many European governments, all of the Arab and most of the European media, and a large part of the world’s intellectual class will not give you a fair chance.

They will quickly declare your intentions bad, your leaders dishonorable, your plans unworkable, and your efforts unsuccessful.”

Although Palestinian Arab leaders and their cohorts throughout the Arab world claim that desperate conditions have led to an uncontrollable groundswell of violence, thousands of examples prove that Arab leaders have instigated, encouraged, ordered and often brainwashed followers to commit some of the most horrendous crimes against humanity. Extremist Muslim-Arab leaders have consciously chosen to stymie genuine peace and coexistence with Israel. They continue to foment hatred and terror against the United States, the free world and Israel to preserve their authoritarian regimes by controlling information and deflecting criticism onto Israeli and American scapegoats.

Short of mega-terrorism which could kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent civilians, the terrorism that Israel has been subjected to – waves of suicide bombings and the like – threatens the very fabric of democratic societies and Western civilization. Israel has been called “the canary in the mine” as a warning to other democracies about the future.[41]

Terror against democratic societies has a deeper motive than just inflicting unbearable pain and cost to targeted societies. It threatens to undermine the very foundation of those democracies, putting them on par with their non-democratic adversaries by undercutting the rule of law and making daily life in New York or Washington, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem as arbitrary as life in Teheran or under the PA.

Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” told Atlantic Monthly [42]  in a May 2003 interview:

“People always think that living in a tyranny is a coercive experience. But living under  a  tyranny  you  don’t  suffer  just  from  physical  oppression.  You  suffer because the regime is so arbitrary. Living in the U.S., when you wake up in the morning you know accidents could happen to you but you sort of know what might happen when you go out into the street and go to work. In Iran, when you leave home you literally don’t know what could happen to you.”

In  a  September 2002  poll,  after  30  months  of  suicide  bombings  and  other attacks, 92 percent of Israelis said they “fear that they or a member of their family would fall victim to a terrorist attack.”[43] In a certain sense, Israelis began to feel the ‘arbitrariness’ Azar Nafisi spoke about. Palestinians seek to pull Israel down into the abyss by killing and maiming as many as possible and by robbing its citizens of their way of life. Despite the resilience Israelis have shown in dealing with terror, no democratic society should be expected to accept such conditions.

The agreement failed to eradicate the terrorist infrastructure, and as a result, did not lead to peace. A hudna is a temporary tactical truce meant to be broken as soon as Palestinians believe they are strong enough to continue the fight, resembling  the  European-style  hudna  of  1938,  touted  to  bring  “peace  in  our time.”

In its historical context, a hudna first appears in the Quran as a truce made by Mohammed with his rivals, the Quraysh tribes, which the Prophet broke as soon as he had the upper hand, crushing the Quraysh and conquering Mecca. A hudna is a tactical truce, a temporary measure designed to allow a shift in the balance of power to one’s advantage, made to be broken as soon as the opportunity arises. It is not a prelude to a peace process, but a preparation for war.

A hudna with terrorists as part of a road map for peace is as prudent, as workable, and as perilous as the belief that appeasement can bring “peace in our time” (Modern History Sourcebook: Neville Chamberlain: "Peace in Our Time" 1938).

What is happening in Israel now is the proof.

• Terrorism emanates from conscious incitement. The hatred against Israel and the West, fanned by Arab leaders, has reached epidemic proportions.

• Incitement in the Arab world is massive and omnipresent. It is directed at adults  and  children  via  virtually  every  kind  of  institution  and  every  possible media outlet.

• Incitement against Israel keeps autocratic Arab regimes in power by deflecting criticism onto scapegoats: Israel and the United States.

• The atmosphere of hatred blocks a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and threatens Israel and the United States. The result of incitement, and its anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli and anti-Western, and anti-American nature, threatens the world order and the security of Western society.

• A hudna is not a vehicle for peace, it is a recipe for warfare.

• Incitement must be stopped – terrorists must be disarmed and disbanded.

• Incitement of hate is an uncontrollable weapon of mass destruction.

Sources:

4 1Jeff Jacoby, "The Canary In Europe's Mine" The Boston Globe, April28, 2002. See:

www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo jcanary.html. (11640)

4 2 Azar Nafisi "The Fiction of Life," The Atlantic online, May 7, 2003, at:

www.theatlantic. com/unbound/interviews/int2oo3-05-07-htm. (11641)

43 Professor Asher Arian, Memorandum No. 61, Israeli  Public Opinion on National Security, 2002, Tel Aviv University's Jaffee  Center  for Strategic Studies.