A senior Palestinian Authority official has again publicly praised the terrorists who lynched two Israeli Jews in the PA capital city of Ramallah on October 12, 2000.
Laila Ghannam, the PA’s Governor for Ramallah and El-Bireh, telephoned lyncher Habbes Bayyoud, who now lives in Egypt, and pledged that he and other terrorists will “remain at the top of our priorities.” Governor Ghannam said she “saluted” Bayyoud and all the “brave” terrorists. And then she boasted about the phone call on her Facebook page.
(Translation courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)
The PA official made that call together with Bayyoud’s mother, whom she was visiting. Both Bayyoud and his family receive salaries from the PA as rewards for the lynching. So do the other participants in the Ramallah lynching.
The sight of Bayyoud’s fellow-lyncher, Aziz Salha, celebrating the murders by waving his bloody hands before a frenzied crowd will never be forgotten.
Some protesters at pro-Hamas rallies around the world in the past two years painted their hands red and waved them in gestures similar to the infamous photograph of Aziz Salha.
Publicly glorifying lynchers was once common in the American South. Photographs of lynchings were made into postcards. They showed lynchers posing proudly next to their victims in front of cheering crowds, with many parents hoisting their children on their shoulders to get a better look.
Some leading Southern newspapers glorified the lynchers and justified the lynchings. Decades later, in April 2018, the editors of one of those newspapers, the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser, published an editorial headlined “Our Shame.”
The editorial began, “We were wrong.” It expressed profound remorse that the newspaper “propagated a worldview rooted in racism,” promoted the lynchers’ “sickening myth of racial superiority,” and “dehumanized” the victims in language that made it seem as if they provoked the lynchers.
Some contemporary media accounts have dehumanized Israeli Jewish victims of Arab terrorism by labeling them “settlers,” implying that they, too, provoked their killers.
“We were wrong.”
If those words are ever heard from a Palestinian Authority official, acknowledging that it’s wrong to praise lynchers and pay them salaries—then perhaps Israelis will once again believe there is hope for peace.
(Dr. Medoff is the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.)
