By Moshe Phillips, JNS
When the 89-year-old Palestinian Authority chief looks around him, he must be astonished at how the international community has acquiesced in his brutal dictatorship.
It was 20 years ago this week that Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a single four year term as chairman of the Palestinian Authority. I suspect he’s having a very happy anniversary.
According to the U.S. State Department, there is “credible” evidence of “unlawful or arbitrary killings by Palestinian Authority officials; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishments by Palestinian Authority officials; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners and detainees … .”
Yet when was the last time you heard human-rights groups protesting about P.A. torture?
The State Department says that the P.A.’s laws “discriminate against women, including in relation to marriage, divorce, custody of children, and inheritance.” The P.A. “has no comprehensive domestic violence law.” And those who perpetrate “honor killings” of female relatives are given a slap on the wrist.
When was the last time feminist groups spoke out against this oppression?
Abbas’s four-year term expired in 2009. He remains because he refuses to hold elections. The P.A.’s Legislative Council has not functioned since 2007. The P.A. dissolved its Constitutional Court in 2018.
So where are all the protests from pro-democracy groups around the world?
The State Department reports that the P.A. is guilty of “arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media, including violence, threats of violence, unjustified detentions and prosecutions of journalists, and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom … .”
Why the silence from all those who claim to be concerned about free speech?
According to the State Department, the P.A. is guilty of “lack of investigation of and accountability for … crimes involving violence and threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or intersex persons ... .”
So why aren’t gay-rights groups outraged?
The State Department also tells us that the P.A. engages in “the worst forms of child labor.”
Why aren’t those rights groups shouting to the high heavens about this? Remember all those boycotts of Nike because its sneakers were being made by child laborers in Asian sweatshops? Why is there no similar outcry about child labor used by the P.A.?
Then there’s the free pass Abbas has been given for Holocaust denial. The outgoing U.S. envoy for combating antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, is described as an expert on the subject. She even once battled an infamous British Holocaust denier in court. But a lone Englishman is far less dangerous than an entire regime—the P.A.—that teaches children the Holocaust is a Zionist hoax. Yet Lipstadt paid no attention to such denial, presumably for fear of upsetting the (non-existent) Mideast peace process.
Nor have any protests been heard from the international community about the P.A. coddling and protecting terrorists. It has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world, armed and trained by the United States. Yet instead of using those forces to arrest and extradite terrorists—as the Oslo Accords require—the P.A. pays salaries to terrorists and their families, and shelters fugitive terrorists so Israel can’t reach them.
Every once in a while, the P.A. and Hamas have a brief clash—not over policy toward Israel but as a result of their own internal power struggles. The P.A. will briefly detain a few Hamas members, and Western media outlets will claim that it is “cracking down” on terrorists. In fact, the “crackdown” is just “a big show,” as Lt. Col. Dr. Shaul Bartal of the Begin-Sadat Center has pointed out.
The most glaring proof that it’s just “a big show” is that the P.A.’s recent “crackdown” was not even mentioned by its own news agency, WAFA. If the P.A. had turned against the terrorists, then it would have broadcast the news as loudly as possible so that average Palestinian Arabs would turn against Hamas, too. But WAFA didn’t say a word, even as The New York Times and others were claiming that the authority had gone to war against Hamas.
What must make this an especially happy 20th anniversary for P.A. chief Abbas is how, for two decades, he has made a mockery of the Oslo Accords—and the West couldn’t care less. All the governments and journalists and advocates who hailed Oslo as the dawn of peace choose to ignore his daily, constant, wanton violations of his Oslo obligations.
And the settlements! For two decades now, Abbas has smiled with satisfaction as the international community has incessantly berated Israel for establishing Jewish communities in the Israeli-controlled parts of Judea and Samaria, even though there is not one word in the Oslo agreements prohibiting such construction. Meanwhile, of course, Abbas’s own construction in P.A.-controlled areas has not elicited a word of protest from all those who are busy denouncing Israeli construction of homes.
So, this octagenarian must be having a very happy anniversary. Twenty years of “human rights” groups and “progressive” intellectuals turning a blind eye as he tramples every principle they supposedly claim to care about. Twenty years of the international news media and government officials looking away as his Palestinian Authority commits every outrage in the book.
What more could a dictator ask for?
