Media Bias - Fatah WILL Continue Attacks

One of the reasons this weblog was started was to be a source to counter some of the anti-Israeli bias in the media, which is so common it has become almost unconscious. An example is the headline to this article, "Arafat's Fatah movement to prevent attacks on Israelis". Reading the article with an understanding of Palestinian semantics shows that the headline is much different from the reality.

Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement has announced it opposes attacks on civilians in Israel.

The group has stated it will try to prevent such violence.

However, in a three-page leaflet Fatah said it would continue resisting Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The leaflet did not specifically say that attacks in these areas would continue, but the word resistance is usually taken to mean that. [Emphasis mine]

In addition, as James Taranto pointed out yesterday,

the Palestinian Arabs don't regard anyone who's ever served in the Israeli Defense Forces (in a country with universal conscription) or who lives in the disputed territories as a "civilian."

These facts render Fatah's pledge to prevent attacks against Israelis nearly meaningless, since Israelis who happen to be in or live in the West Bank or Gaza and current and former (and probably future, if the truth be told) members of the IDF are considered legitimate targets by Fatah. Combined with Arafat's propensity for outright lies, as in the cases of terrorist Raed Karmi, whom Arafat had assured the Europeans was in custody at the time the of his death, and the denials surrounding the Karine A, this statement is worth nothing. As if to underscore this point comes the story of a 15-year old recruited by Fatah to be a suicide bomber.

The same day that Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement published an announcement condemning terror attacks against civilians, a small Fatah cell was reported to have recruited a 15-year-old boy in Nablus to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel.

The boy's relatives were informed of the plot by Israel's Shin Bet secret security agency, The Associated Press reports.