The March 11, 2011 heinous stabbing to death of a Jewish family – while asleep on the eve of the Sabbath – including a three month old baby, a three year old toddler, an eleven year old child and their parents was carried out by graduates of Abu Mazen’s (Mahmoud Abbas’) hate-education.  This slaughter was not an anomalous phenomenon.  

The slaughter was a derivative of the infrastructure of hate-education and incitement via school text books, Abu Mazen-controlled media and Abu Mazen-controlled mosques.  It was installed in 1994 by Abu Mazen, then Arafat’s deputy, and perpetuated, since 2005, by Abu Mazen, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority.  It is an extension of Palestinian incitement and terrorism, introduced by Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s, and 1,400 years of Arab/Muslim hate-mongering and terrorism toward each other, but mostly against “the infidel.”  

While speaking softly, Abu Mazen carries a horrendous stick of hate-education, which is largely funded by US foreign aid (over $2BN since 2007).  Since 1994, he has brainwashed Palestinian youth, producing manufacturing lines of hundreds of thousands of potential terrorists/suicide bombers.

One’s education is the most authentic reflection of one’s values, ideology, vision, goals and character.

According to Prof. Efraim Karsh, Head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies program at King’s College in London (Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 255-6), “For all their drastically different personalities and political styles, Arafat and [Mahmoud] Abbas are warp and woof of the same fabric: dogmatic PLO veterans who have never eschewed their commitment to Israel’s destruction and who have viewed the ‘peace process’ as the continuation by other means of their lifelong war…He [Mahmoud Abbas] described the proclamation of  Israel as an unprecedented historic injustice and vowed his unwavering refusal to ever accept this injustice…[There is] no fundamental difference between the ultimate goals of Hamas and the PLO vis-…-vis Israel: neither accepts the Jewish state’s right to exist and both are committed to its eventual destruction….”

On August 13, 2009, Abu Mazen – who enrolled in KGB courses and coordinated PLO ties with the Communist Bloc – ratified the resolutions of Fatah’s 6^th General Conference, which state (article 19):”The struggle shall not end until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”

Holocaust denial is promoted by Abu Mazen’s school text books, such as Modern World History for tenth graders (p.83). Prof. Karsh notes that Abu Mazen’s doctoral dissertation, submitted at the Moscow University, and published in 1984 in Amman, “endeavored to prove…the existence of a close ideological and political association between Zionism and Nazism…[that] fewer than a million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust, and that the Zionist movement played a role in their slaughter.”  Hence, Mein Kampf and the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion are best sellers in the Palestinian Authority.

Abu Mazen’s school textbooks reaffirm the founding document of the PLO, the Palestinian Covenant. It was compiled in June, 1964, aiming at the pre-1967 Israel. Two thirds of the Covenant is dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish State, as a prerequisite for the attainment of Palestinian goals. 

Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad pay condolence visits – and authorize the transfer of monthly allowances – to families of suicide bombers.  In February, 2011, they named a soccer tournament in honor of Wafa Idris, a suicide bomber.  On January 16, 2010, they named a major square in El Bireh (in addition to two schools and a summer camp) in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, who commanded the March 11, 1978 massacre of 38 bus passengers on Israel’s coastal road. 

The school text books of Abu Mazen – who supervised the 1972 Munich Massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and the March 1973 murder of two US ambassadors in Sudan – idolize suicide-bombing, fuel anti-Semitism and repudiate Israel’s right to exist.  For example, fifth grade Our Beautiful Language (pp. 26, 31, 32, 36, 70), tenth grade Grammar (pp. 30, 146) and Islamic Education (pp. 42-4, 48, 50) and tenth grade Modern World History (p.64).

On October 12, 2010, Abu Mazen’s official TV channel heralded the terrorists who murdered six Israeli civilians in 1975 (Kfar Yuval) and 1980 (Misgav Am).  On January 29, 2010, Abu Mazen’s official TV channel broadcast the weekly sermon, referring to Jews as “the enemies of Allah and humanity, modern day Nazis, who must be annihilated.”

Hate-education is the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has always been over the existence – and not over the size – of the Jewish State.  Hate education on one hand, and peace negotiation on the other hand, constitute an oxymoron.

Japan and Germany were transformed from hateful – to peaceful – countries by uprooting regimes of hate-education; not merely by condemning hate-education. To ignore the centrality of hate-education, is to reward and fuel terrorism at the expense of peace and Western democratic values.

If you wish to write to the people of Itamar to express your condolences: itamar@shechem.org