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Photo: AFP
The Abbas-led PA is using terror as a tool to achieve its political objective
Photo: AFP
Shoula Romano Horing

Abbas must be held responsible for current terror

Op-ed: The wave of terror will not stop as long as the Palestinian leadership is free to incite, travel and orchestrate terror without personal consequences.

The time has arrived for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to be held responsible by Israel for his involvement in the Munich Olympic massacre and his long history of sponsoring and inciting anti-Israel terror, just as brutal terrorist Samir Kuntar, who was killed in an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria this week, has been held responsible 36 years after personally smashing a four-year-old Israeli girl's skull with the butt of his rifle.

 

 

In December 2015, for the first time, the public discovered the long hidden cruel, gruesome details of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Eight terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, broke into the apartments at the Olympic Village where 11 Israeli athletes were staying before dawn on September 5, 1972.

 

The Israelis were held hostage for 20 hours, during which they were beaten and in at least one case, castrated. Mr. Romano, a champion weight lifter, was shot when he tried to overpower the terrorists early in the attack. He was then left to die and his genitals were cut off through his underwear while the other 10 athletes were sitting around tied up, watching. Other athletes were beaten and sustained serious injuries, including broken bones.

 

Mr. Romano and another athlete were killed in the Olympics Village by the Palestinian terrorists, while the other nine were killed during a failed rescue attempt after they were moved with their PLO captors to a nearby airport.

 

Abbas must know that if he continues his instigation, he will be held inside the Muqata just as his predecessor was (Photo: AP)
Abbas must know that if he continues his instigation, he will be held inside the Muqata just as his predecessor was (Photo: AP)

 

Since then, most of the PLO terrorists who were involved in the Munich attack have been assassinated by Israeli Mossad agents. But Mahmoud Abbas has not been held accountable.

 

For those with short memories, Abbas, like Arafat, was a founding member of Fatah the PLO's main faction since 1969. While Arafat was the face of the PLO, Abbas was always No. 2 to Arafat and the main financier of numerous terrorist attacks.

 

In the autobiography of former PLO official Muhammad Daoud Oddeh, published in France in 1999, it was reported that Abbas, also called by his guerrilla name Abu Mazen, was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. Oddeh, known as Abu Daoud, wrote that he recalled the plan was concocted in Rome at a meeting he held with senior PLO official Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, and Abu Mazen, who, Abu Iyad said, was to secure the funding.

 

For many years, the West and left-wing Israeli governments and the media chose to play a preposterous game of presenting Abbas as the new, credible and moderate Palestinian leader with whom Israel and the West could trust to bring at last peace through negotiations.

 

In order to reach this delusional possibility of peace, they chose to ignore, deny or simply forget the true past of Abbas and give him a different, more wholesome past. They chose to advance the myth that Abbas was a partner for peace who was willing to coexist with the Jews, despite the fact that he was second to Arafat when the PA rejected Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital in the year 2000 and through the subsequent five years of Arafat’s war of terror through suicide bombings against Israel, which killed over 1000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005.

 

After Arafat's death in 2004, Abbas became the chairman of the Fatah branch and the PLO, and as a president of the PA he again rejected another offer of peace made this time by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, which would have allowed the Palestinians to coexist with Israel as an independent state.

 

For years as president, he has continued the legacy of Arafat by inciting and indoctrinating to violence and hatred new generations of young Palestinians through the PA-controlled media outlets and schools, but he did depart from Arafat when he called for an end to anti-Israel violence and a return to peaceful resistance. However, he never was the peace partner the West or Israel yearned for, but was considered by Israeli officials as useful, nonthreatening and a violence abhorring strategic asset.

 

But now his usefulness has expired. He has become more a part of the problem than the solution. While Abbas has been repeatedly portraying the current terror campaign as a kind of popular, spontaneous struggle led by Palestinian youth, frustrated by lack of hope, in reality, for the last three months, Abbas - in coordination with Hamas - has chosen to copy his former boss Arafat by orchestrating, sponsoring, directing and inciting the recent wave of stabbings.

 

The Abbas-led Palestinian Authority is using terror as a tool to achieve its political objective to compel Israel to unilaterally withdraw from the West bank and East Jerusalem under international pressure without any negotiations or any agreement to end the conflict with the Jewish State.

 

Throughout the past year, Abbas has instigated the violence by telling his people lies that Israel was planning to defile and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and inflamed them further through social media and mosques preachers by telling them that Israel is committing "war crimes" and "summary executions" of innocent young Palestinians.

During the last month, the Abbas-led PA and Hamas officials have been meeting in total and united support to spread the knives terror campaign and the warfare against Israel in the international arena.

 

On November 20, the Fatah Central Committee and Hamas Political Bureau took part in the General Arab Conference to Support the Intifada in Beirut. In the closing declaration of the conference, participants stated that the Intifada seeks to make it less costly for the IDF to withdraw than to keep fighting both the Intifada itself and international opinion. The committee’s resolutions described Israel as an enemy against which all-out war must be waged until its complete destruction.

 

On December 6, the Fatah Central Committee headed by Mahmoud Abbas convened in the presidential headquarter in Ramallah and approved a confrontation strategy towards Israel. Based on Palestinian media reports, it seems that the committee gave its backing to a strategy that combines the terror knives intifada, with diplomatic and legal warfare in the international arena and ending the security cooperation with Israel.

 

The wave of terror will not stop as long as Abbas and the Palestinian leadership are free to incite, travel and orchestrate terror without personal consequences. Abbas must know that if he continues his instigation, he will be held inside the Muqata just as his predecessor was, and the sources of income to Abbas, his armies, and the Palestinian people will dry up completely by Israel’s withholding of taxes and aid, preventing Palestinians from working inside or visiting Israel, and preventing non- residents from entering Palestinian controlled areas.

 

Finally, the Palestinians should know that the first and second intifadas not occur under a Likud government. If they continue, they will see the IDF up close, inside all their cities and homes in Judea and Samaria. Israel is here to stay until a new Palestinian leadership arises that truly wants peace with the Jewish state.

 

Shoula Romano Horing is an Israeli-born and raised attorney. Her blog can be found here: www.shoularomanohoring.com

 


פרסום ראשון: 12.23.15, 22:49
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