Proclaiming Justice with Laurie Cardoza Moore

Guest (Male): Terrorists, they went with knives, they went into this home, they found three children sleeping there, they slit their throats. Palestinian television invited the mother of Hakem Awad, the one who did the murders himself and actually was proud. My son, the one who did the Itamar attack. And she talked about him, he's the apple of my eye, and he is a hero and a legend.

Allah, count them till the last one, kill them till the very last one, Christians and Jews. This is official Hamas television. The war, World War III, that this Hamas member of parliament and religious leader was anticipating would start with Rome, the capital of Christianity. Our mission of saving humanity, to subjugate the world under Islam. Palestinian terrorists, they kill civilians and then they are turned into legends and heroes, and this is a fantastic motivation for future terrorists.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I'm Laurie Cardoza Moore, and this is Proclaiming Justice podcast.

Itamar Marcus: Palestinian Media Watch was founded 14 years ago, and we study what the Palestinians are saying amongst themselves in Arabic. We always knew what they were saying in English to the media, what they were saying in English to negotiators. We wanted to know what they were saying in Arabic with a special focus on what they were saying to the children.

We're convinced that what they say to their children is both their authentic beliefs and opinions, and what they say to the children will determine if we have peace in the next generation. For 15 years, we have been studying the Palestinian world by looking at things as broad as crossword puzzles, music videos, their schoolbooks, and of course, even things like sports in order to get a sense of what's happening at the people level in the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian Media Watch finds that around the world, among members of parliaments around the world, right here in the United States among members of Congress, there is so much misinformation and disinformation that people are listening to and hearing that there is a tremendous amount of sympathy for the Palestinian Authority. Like I say, it's based on false information.

There is no reason why Christians here in the United States should not be victims of that as well, and that's what we're finding throughout the world. This lack of information is bringing sympathy toward the Palestinian cause. What our role is is to let the world see exactly what the Palestinian Authority is.

They tell the world they're promoting peace, and when you listen to them, you see that the Palestinian Authority has named soccer tournaments after people like Abdel Basset Odeh, who blew himself up at the Passover Seder, killing 30 Israelis a number of years ago.

This past year, they named a summer camp after Dalal Mughrabi. Dalal Mughrabi is a person who hijacked a bus where 37 civilians were killed. Why was the Palestinian Authority naming this summer camp after her? This summer camp was sponsored by Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister, who's supposed to be the moderate.

We find that there are different messages, completely different messages. To the outside world, they play the victim card, and people are naturally sympathetic with victims, but people must look at what's really going on there. This is not a situation of a Palestinian Authority promoting peace.

The people are victims, but they're victims of their own hateful leadership that has brought violence and destruction and hatred upon them. Those are the people who they should be angry at, their own Palestinian leaders, not at Israel, who's probably done more for them than any country in history.

There is ongoing demonization by the Palestinian leadership of Israel and of Jews. I'll just give you some examples. In the last few years, we have heard the following libels. One, Israel is spreading AIDS and drugs amongst Palestinians, and that was said by the head of the Palestinian Drug Authority.

Two, Israel is spreading prostitution and drugs, and that was said by an advisor to the Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Israel is planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and is in very late stages of planning. The Mufti of the Palestinian Authority said that Israel is injecting acids into the ground under the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to destroy it.

Of course, that's a horrific libel when you're talking about a very religious population accusing Israel, but these libels are ongoing. Israel is stealing body parts of Palestinians, and this was in the official newspaper. They even went so far as to say Israel buries Palestinians only 70 centimeters under the ground so that when the families leave, Israel rushes and takes out the body, takes out the body parts, and then transplants them into sick Israelis.

Of course, that's ridiculous, yet this is the kind of hatred that they're promoting amongst their people. Give you another example. Since Yasser Arafat died, the Palestinian Authority has been saying that Israel poisoned him. Now, this is the person who created the Palestinian people really out of nothing.

He is their hero, and they've been saying that Israel poisoned him, and we get this at every level, at the political level, at the media level. Then children repeat this on TV. In fact, one child was interviewed, and this has been broadcast three years in a row on the anniversary of his death.

A child said on television, "I think the Jews poisoned him." Then he said, "Well, actually, I don't know how he died, but I know it was the Jews." Here this child, this Palestinian child, has heard so much hatred about Jews, so many libels and lies, that he's concluding that if something bad happened, if Yasser Arafat died, he doesn't even know how he died, but he is convinced it must have been the Jews.

The United Nations is problematic in two ways with regard to Israel and the Palestinians. One, UNRWA. In its very essence, it is an organization that's in charge of welfare for refugees. It's a special organization for the Palestinians. It's different from the other UN organization which deals with all other refugees.

The other United Nations organization, its role has always been to solve the refugee problem by having them settle and resettled in wherever they happen to be and letting them get on with their lives. UNRWA has exactly the opposite role. UNRWA's role is to perpetuate the problem, to not let the people get out of the refugee camps, and to force the people to suffer for political purposes.

This isn't written into their official policy, but this is in practice what they've been doing. So you have people in Lebanese refugee camps, for example, who according to Lebanese law have not been allowed since 1948 to actually have a profession or a business outside of the camps.

They can't buy a home, even if they wanted to better their lives, and the UN goes along with this. UNRWA is not an organization to help the refugees. It's to perpetuate their suffering and then to perpetuate its own massive infrastructure, its multi-hundreds of million-dollar infrastructure creating jobs, creating waste, and essentially perpetuating the people as victims who suffer so that they will then be angry at Israel and have hatred toward Israel. That's the first problem, is UNRWA should not exist. It should be completely restructured as a resettlement organization.

The second thing is what UN money goes to beyond the refugees. Here we have, for example, over the years, we've had UN money actually sponsoring summer camps named after Palestinian terrorists who've killed large numbers of Israelis. Now, this was done without the knowledge of the UN in New York, but it's being done by the UN workers because the overwhelming majority of UN workers in the Palestinian areas are Palestinians, and they really don't care what policy is in New York, and they do what they want with the money.

They've sponsored summer camps named after terrorists. A few months ago, there was a soccer tournament named after Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide terrorist, and in the advertisement on the website, you had the name of the organization Alamari and inside their name, under their name, you had the letters UNRWA as if they were a co-sponsor.

UNRWA denied that they were co-sponsoring, denied that they were funding this in any way, but their logo was there and it remained there. The UN in New York might not be aware, and they're probably not aware, and they're not intentionally involved, but there is no supervision as to what's really happening with the money so that the money can even go for glorifying terrorists.

This is not just a problem of the UN. This is a problem of the United States. It's a problem of the European Union. All the Western countries that are funding the Palestinian Authority are funding their Ministry of Prisoners who honors and glorifies terrorists regularly.

They're paying salaries through the general budget of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Terrorists who've killed dozens of people are on salary of the Palestinian Authority, and that money is coming from the United States and the European countries. There are a lot of organizations that are involved in this horrific transfer of money to the Palestinian Authority because it is that transfer of money without condition that enables the Palestinian Authority to continue promoting hatred, promoting violence, and essentially guaranteeing that we're not going to have peace in the next generation.

The Palestinian summer camps are involved in a lot of what they call political education. Really it's indoctrination. We saw summer camps on Palestinian TV for a couple of years in the late 1990s, and we publicized them. What we saw were children running and jumping through fire hoops.

We saw children being taught how to slit someone's throat. Literally, you saw young children running up to a boy with a plastic knife and literally slitting their throats. This was on Palestinian television in official Palestinian summer camps.

They, of course, learn to see all of Israel, Jaffa, Haifa, Akko, all of Israeli cities as occupied as part of Palestine to be liberated. This was the ideological indoctrination of very young children: hatred and violence and murder, the glorification of hatred, violence, and murder.

We publicized this, I think in 1999. It got a lot of exposure and a lot of condemnation, and the interesting thing is that since then, the Palestinian Authority has not broadcast from their summer camps. This is very striking. It's a major, major event.

It's completely reported in their newspapers, but apparently they've learned that the world won't accept that kind of hate promotion and indoctrination, so they're hiding it. That's what happens regularly. We'll publicize something and then the Palestinian Authority will try to hide it, candy-coat it, and then we'll have to find it someplace else. It's like when someone is ill with a disease and they're given antibiotics and then they build up some kind of immunity to that antibiotic. That's what's going on here, but I don't believe there's a different message. If there were a different message, then they would be showing that on Palestinian TV.

The first problem with the curriculum is that it explicitly denies Israel's right to exist. The Palestinian curriculum teaches children, I'll give you an example. In a 12th-grade Palestinian schoolbook, they teach the 1948 war ended with the greatest catastrophe in history when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and created the state of Israel.

The Palestinians tell President Obama and they tell the Europeans, we're upset with what happened in 1967 when Israel got Judea and Samaria, West Bank. They tell their own children that the Zionist gangs stole Palestine in 1948 to create the state of Israel. In other words, the children are growing up, Israel has no right to exist, it's a theft.

This message then comes through poetry, singing about longing for Jaffa and longing for Haifa, and it's the environment of the entire Palestinian educational system. The maps, the maps print everything as if there is no Israel, as if it's a world without Israel.

The education jumps back and forth between presenting a world in which Israel doesn't exist and presenting a world in which Israel stole Palestine in 1948. Either way, the children are growing up feeling victimized from the moment they were born and therefore hateful of the one who supposedly turned them into victims.

The hatred is right there from the first moment throughout the Palestinian education. In addition, there's the glorification of violence. They refer to terrorists right after the creation of the state of Israel. Of course, they don't call them terrorists, they call them heroic fighters who fought against Israel.

The heroic fighters in the 1950s were all PLO terrorists. This hatred's not just toward Israel, by the way, in the education. For example, in the schoolbooks that were produced most recently for grade 12 a few years ago, they talked about what was going on in Iraq.

American soldiers were there still, British soldiers were there still, and then they talked about the invasion, and then they talked about the heroic Iraqi resistance against this occupation by the United States and Britain. This is a Palestinian Authority that gets hundreds of millions of American dollars every year, and they were teaching their children that terrorists who were killing or people who were killing American soldiers were heroic resistance against occupation.

They say that the dog doesn't bite the hand that feeds them, but in the Palestinian situation, they keep biting and America keeps giving. The Palestinian Authority presents a face to the world as if they are the protectors of Muslims and Christians in the land. However, that is a false image.

They very much are protecting and promoting everything Islamic, but they are destroying everything Christian. Just one of the great examples of this is just looking at the Christian population of Bethlehem. The Christian population thrived when Bethlehem was under Israeli rule, and in fact, was about 65, 70% of the population was Christian.

Since the Palestinian Authority has taken over since 1993, less than 20 years, the Christian population of Bethlehem today is around 10%. Here one of the holiest cities to Christians and there is really only a handful of Christians who have stayed there. Why?

It has nothing to do with Israel. Under Israel, they thrived. This is because the Palestinian Authority has allowed them to be persecuted extensively. We don't get this in the Palestinian press, they hide this. But there have been reports over the years of Christian girls being raped by Palestinian policemen and the policeman being arrested just for a few days and then released. Many stories like this, also of businesses being persecuted and corruption.

The numbers speak for themselves, they've gone down to 10% population. This is a typical example of the deception that goes on with the Palestinian Authority. They speak to the world in such wonderful expressions about supporting Christians.

I've met Christian leaders from Bethlehem. They refused to even acknowledge a meeting we had a few years ago. The people in Israel who were trying to help turn this around, first of all, they didn't want anyone to know that this meeting was happening. One of them had already been shot twice, and he was afraid for his life.

This is a very serious problem. Essentially the Christian presence in the Palestinian areas is going down and eventually probably disappear. It should be noted that I think the only place in the Middle East where the Christian population has been thriving in many, many years is Israel. Because of course Christians that live in Israel have full rights and are protected, and not because we have to but we want to, we want them to have full rights and to feel comfortable in Israel, and they do.

Guest (Male): Now you're going to see that this is not just an issue for Jews, but that Christians are very explicitly being targeted as well for some of the most horrific destiny by the spokespeople of the Hamas. The Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

That first message is so clear: Allah, count them till the last one, kill them till the very last one, Christians and Jews. This is official Hamas television. The second was a different approach. The war, World War III, that this Hamas member of parliament and religious leader was anticipating would start with Rome. That is the capital of Christianity.

His last words were so important. He said, "Our mission of saving humanity, this World War III to subjugate the world under Islam is not something negative. We're doing this for the Christians and the Jews and the Buddhist and everyone else because otherwise they're going to burn, and therefore we're going to start World War III, subjugate them under Islam in our mission of saving humanity."

Itamar Marcus: Israel gave over land to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and destroyed the communities, thousands of people who've been living there for many, many years who built their homes. Israel didn't want to do this, but we did this in the hope that this would promote peace.

Israel did something that even to our own people was immoral because we hoped it would bring peace. In exchange, the Gaza Strip was immediately turned into a fortress. Hamas won the elections, eventually the Hamas took over. Today they have smuggled in thousands and thousands and thousands of missiles.

We have no idea how many really. We have no idea of the range of these missiles. We don't even know what kind of missiles they might be. They might be much more powerful to be used at some later date than what they're lobbing over today. This is what we got when we gave land for peace.

I think Israel has learned and hopefully our leadership has learned a great lesson from this. Until there is a Palestinian Authority leadership that teaches its people peace so that we know they really want peace with Israel. They teach them acceptance, they teach them that Israel has been a wonderful neighbor for many, many years.

If they would teach them to see Israel as a state with right to exist who should live in peace by them, then we can begin to negotiate about some kind of land exchanges or giving more land to the Palestinian Authority and the creation of a state. Until that time, we have to see the Gaza experience as a prototype.

Were we to leave Judea and Samaria today, we would have Jerusalem surrounded on three sides by Palestinians. We would be, and just a few, we're talking about kilometers. We're talking about a couple of miles, we're talking about nothing. All of the center of Jerusalem could be in missile range within a couple of years.

We're talking about the airport few miles away from those old borders. Those old ceasefire lines, we should never return to them. They are too dangerous. What we've learned from what's happening in the Arab world today, the so-called Arab Spring, is that no peace treaty is necessarily going to last. Therefore, we want to see peace education first and then we can do some kind of border adjustments from where we are today that will guarantee that even should this land turn into a battlefield again, we would be secure. Those I feel are the conditions that mean that those old ceasefire lines that President Obama and others talk about, the 1967 lines, those can never be returned to because those will absolutely invite war and terror and grave destruction upon Israel.

There are a few hundred thousand Israelis living in communities throughout Judea and Samaria. After the 1967 Six-Day War, when Judea and Samaria were occupied by Jordan prior to the war, Jordan used that land to try to destroy Israel. Israel got that land in that war. The United Nations in 242 gave Israel the right and even the obligation to develop that land.

It said that Israel should not have to withdraw until there would be recognized and new borders. It didn't say the word new borders, but they said secure borders. They didn't say those old ceasefire lines, they said secure borders. Well, that hasn't happened yet, which means Israel has had the right and the obligation to develop that land for the benefit of Israelis and for the benefit of the local Arab population.

That's what Israel has done. The life of the local Arab population has increased tremendously, the way they're living. They had no universities when Israel got the land. Jordan didn't open up one university. Israel opened up 11 universities for them. Their life expectancy under Jordan was 43, under Israel it went up to 79.

The economy in the early 1970s of the West Bank Arabs was the fourth fastest growing in the world as Israel brought in infrastructure. When Israel got Judea and Samaria, the local Arab population, 10% of them had running water in their houses, electricity, and gas. Under Israel, it went up to 90%.

Israel has benefited the local. Israel felt these are our neighbors, we're going to help them. But there was no reason, moral or ethical, that Jews could not live in Judea and Samaria. This has been part of Jewish history. Jews had lived there until the Jordanian occupation in 1949. People forget this. Under the British mandate, Jews were allowed and there were many Jews who were living there, thousands of Jews who were living there who were expelled by Jordan.

Jordan's 19-year occupation didn't give anyone the right to prohibit Jews from living there, and the UN clearly made that statement, Israel would not have to withdraw to those old borders. One of those cities was named Itamar, which is my name, and the Fogel family lived there.

Just about a year ago, terrorists from the Awad family, from a town called Awarta right nearby, went in there. They went with knives, they went into this home, they found three children sleeping there, stabbed them, slit their throats. They then killed the parents who put up a certain fight when they saw them.

These people today were finally arrested, they're in Israeli jails, and it turned out not just the two, it was the whole family was involved. About six or seven of the Awad family members ended up in jail. Just a few weeks ago, Palestinian television invited the mother of Hakem Awad, the one who did the murders himself.

She spoke on TV, she talked about him and actually was proud. "My son, the one who did the Itamar attack, and he's sitting five life sentences in prison." She was proud to say this on television and she talked about him, "He's the apple of my eye." Then her sister spoke and talked about Hakem Awad, the killer, "He is a hero and a legend."

The Palestinian television moderator then said, "Well, we also send our best wishes or regards to the prisoners." What we're seeing is that these people come, they kill civilians, these Palestinian terrorists, and then they are turned into legends and heroes in the Palestinian Authority. This is the great tragedy of the Palestinian Authority today.

They tell the world they're fighting for peace, and they tell their people that Jews should be killed, you have a right to kill Jews, and if you do, you are a Palestinian hero. We'll name a sporting event after you, we'll name a summer camp after you, we'll name a street after you. This is a fantastic motivation for future terrorists.

Palestinian Media Watch for 15 years has been following what's happening in the Palestinian world. What I want to do tonight is show you a couple of videos relating to two specific issues, things that you would never hear them say in English, but these are messages that come regularly in Arabic.

The Mufti, quoting an Islamic source: "The Hour of Resurrection won't come until Muslims fight the Jews and essentially kill all the Jews." Following that was a glorification of the family that was involved in one of the most horrific murders in recent years.

The person who was mentioned there as a hero and legend was a person who went with his knife together with his cousin into the family of the Fogel family's home, killed the parents with his knife, slit the throats of the three children, one of them two months old. He is a hero and legend on official Palestinian television. That's how the Palestinian Authority promotes the killing of Jews before the fact and how they glorify those people who've killed Jews after the fact.

One of the things that upsets me terribly is when I hear people discussing the Iranian plans to build nuclear weapons as if it's Israel's problem. People who think an Iranian bomb is Israel's problem have no understanding of what Iran represents. Iran represents a Shiite ideology that sees itself eventually having Islam subjugate the entire world under Islam.

This has been said explicitly so many times by Shiite leaders. It's in the writings of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah Khomeini who established the modern current Iran. He wrote that if a Muslim government has enough strength so that they can be assured of victory, then offensive jihad becomes permissible to go out and conquer the world.

If they get one nuclear weapon, which will then enable them to build a whole slew, they will, they absolutely will. Then those nuclear weapons are going to be smuggled into cities of Europe and they will be smuggled into cities across the United States. Then I fear the entire world will be facing nuclear blackmail.

They might even detonate one just as a warning and say, "Okay, now this is what we want of you." That is not a possibility, that is inevitable if you listen to what they say and understand what they are building there. This is not Israel's problem. This is humanity's problem. This is the free world's problem. It's every Christian's problem, and we all must eliminate this threat before it becomes a reality.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Thank you again for joining me on this edition of Proclaiming Justice. Please share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information about how you can get involved, please visit our website at pjtn.org. As a PJTN Watchman, you can help us keep up the fight to preserve our freedom for our children and their children for such a time as this.