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Saturday, November 7, 2015 | by Bassam Tawil

Originally published by Gatestone Institute. Republished with permission.

Mahmoud Abbas: “We bless you, we bless the Murabitin, we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah… The Al-Aqsa is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours and they have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem”. (Screen grab from PalWatch youtube video).

Sadly, the Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders are continuing to bury their heads in the sand and lying to everyone — from their people to the international community.

The current wave of Palestinian terrorism has entered its fourth week, but our leaders, above all the PA President Mahmoud Abbas, are continuing to talk about a “peaceful, popular uprising” against Israel. This wave of Palestinian stabbings, shootings and vehicular ramming has been anything but either “popular” or “peaceful.”

President Abbas and his top PLO and Fatah leaders have yet to explain to us what is peaceful and popular about stabbing an 80-year-old lady named Ruti Malka in Rishon Lezion, and a 70-year-old Jewish woman in Jerusalem.

Instead of denouncing the terror attacks perpetrated by his people, Abbas continues to attack Israel for shooting the knife-wielding assailants to stop them. He has not missed one opportunity in the past four weeks to make false and libelous accusations against Israel. These include claims that Israelis are carrying out “summary executions” of “innocent” Palestinian men and women. In reality, these “innocent” Palestinian men and women were “merely” in the process of trying to stab people to death.

At two separate meetings of the PLO and Fatah leaderships in Ramallah this week, Abbas repeated his bogus charge that Israel is “committing war crimes” and working to “alter” the status quo on the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount. He has also made these charges during meetings with Western leaders and government officials in Ramallah and abroad.

Instead of appealing to his people to refrain from carrying out terrorist attacks, Abbas and the PLO and Fatah leaders “voiced appreciation for the heroic steadfastness” of the Palestinians who, he said, are “defending their holy sites and the national project.” The Palestinian leaders consider the terrorists who murdered and wounded scores of Israelis as “defenders” of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

It was Abbas who said just a few days before the eruption of current wave of terrorism, that Palestinians “won’t allow Jews to contaminate, with their filthy feet, our holy sites.” He also stated that “every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood” and that the terrorists would go to Paradise.

The terrorists who took to the streets to commit murder were doubtless inspired by their president’s words. It is this kind of rhetoric, officially-sanctioned, that encourages young men and women to carry a knife and stab the first Jew they see. Abbas went so far as to tell the terrorists that it is their duty to “defend” the Islamic holy sites. He assured them that if they are killed by Israeli security forces, they will end up in Paradise.

Abbas’s firing up his people to murder is happening at a time as his Palestinian Authority-controlled media continues its massive campaign of firing up the same people to murder, while hailing terrorists as “martyrs” and “heroes.” At the same time, this media is promoting fraudulent conspiracy theories, such as the lie that Israeli soldiers and policemen have been “planting” knives next to the bodies of the terrorists.

This week, Abbas’s envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, repeated the old-new blood lie that Israel is harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians.

Such libels, lies and vilifications are intended to radicalize Palestinians still further and drive them towards pursuing their terrorist attacks against Israelis. Such defamation is also aimed at spreading hated against Jews around the world, thus endangering lives in the U.S., France, Britain and elsewhere.

Abbas and his PA and Fatah leaders and officials are working hard not only to demonize and delegitimize Israelis, but also, through lies and blood-libels, Jews everywhere.

The only astonishing thing is that Abbas and the Palestinian leaders continue to refer to their wave of terrorism and bloodbath as a “peaceful, popular uprising.” Not only is this a mountainous lie; it is an attempt on the part of the Palestinian Authority leadership to deceive the world into believing that Israel’s mighty security forces killed these poor innocent terrorists who were merely part of a peaceful protest against those awful Israeli “occupiers.”

Abbas knows very well that the terrorists were not participating in any “peaceful” demonstration in the West Bank or Jerusalem. He knows very well that the terrorists are “lone wolves” whom he himself has whipped up to murder Jews for no other reason than that they are Jews. Yet this knowledge has not stopped Abbas and the rest of the Palestinian leadership from continuing to lie to the world and their own people about the nature of these terrorist attacks.

In this regard, Abbas and the Palestinian leadership are following with the famous Arab Proverb, “He hit me and cried, and then came to complain.” The Palestinians involved in the current wave of terrorism against Israelis are the same ones complaining to the world about Israel. It is no surprise that many in the international community are rushing to endorse the false narrative of the Palestinian leadership.

In the twisted world of Abbas, there is no wave of stabbings and vehicular attacks against Jews. In the twisted world of Abbas, there are no terrorists. Stabbing elderly Jewish women and a 13-year-old Jewish boy, according to Abbas, is part of a “peaceful, popular” protest. In the eyes of Palestinian leaders, most of the terrorists who have been encouraged by Palestinian leaders to murder Jews are “innocent victims” who have had knives placed next to them by Israeli policemen and soldiers in order to frame them.

This is the world in which Abbas and the Palestinian leadership live. It is a world of lies, fabrications and deception aimed at demonizing Israel and murdering Jews. The ultimate goal is not only to murder as many Jews as possible, but also to force Israel to its knees in the hope that it will vanish as soon as possible.

Welcome to the world of the Palestinians, where we lie and believe our own lies. And then want the rest of the world to believe them, too.

Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle East.