WARPED AND DISGUSTING

Leave it to Arab extremists to transform a sentimental moment into an ugly international incident.

A rare feel-good occasion was created when 13 teen-aged musicians from the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, traveled to a Tel Aviv suburb to perform for 30 Holocaust survivors at a social club on Wednesday, March 25, The New York Times reported. Though the event was unusual, it sounded like a pleasant enough outing for both the audience and the performers, who were members of a camp youth orchestra.

By the weekend, Arab political activists who represent the Palestine Liberation Organization shut down the club and banned the orchestra’s director, an Arab Israeli woman, from all activity in the camp. This reaction was the most surprising in a series of warped and disgusting episodes among Arabs who must have been determined to reassure the world that peace in the Middle East is a fantasy…so long as they’re around.

We also witnessed an Arab Knesset member who voiced fealty for Iran, arms smuggling persisting in Gaza and a Palestinian Authority official distorting the history of the so-called peace process. The most disgusting spectacle was the hero’s welcome extended to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir at an Arab League summit meeting in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, March 30.

Bashir faces war-crime charges leveled by the International Criminal Court for orchestrating the slaughter of up to 300,000 people in Darfur in addition to rape, pillaging and driving 2.7 million others from their homes. While the IOC urges Bashir’s arrest when he visits a foreign country, the Arab leaders in Qatar pulled Bashir to their collective bosom. It was sort of like the lawyer joke where a band of sharks surrounding survivors from a shipwreck forms a safe corridor for an attorney so he can swim to shore without harm. A matter of “professional courtesy.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose father once massacred 20,000 rebels, declared, “As for their weak pretexts about fabricated crimes committed by Sudan, we can discuss it with them after they bring those who committed the atrocities and massacres in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq to the court implicated for the same crimes.” Referring to Assad and other Arab leaders, former Kuwaiti minister of information Saad al-Ajmi told the Times, “Most of them have their hands smeared with the blood of their own people.”

Terrorists in Gaza are chomping at the bit to smear their hands with more Jewish blood. The departing Israeli cabinet learned on Sunday, March 29, that the terrorists are still smuggling weapons since the three-week war with Israel ended on Jan. 18. The Associated Press reports that the cache includes 22 tons of explosives, 45 tons of raw materials for producing bombs, dozens of rockets, hundreds of mortar shells, and dozens of antitank and antiaircraft missiles. Also, the military said that 185 rockets and mortars were launched from Gaza since Jan. 18.

These Gazans have an ally in Hanin Zoabi, the first woman elected to the Knesset representing an Arab party, according to Philadelphia’s Bulletin. Discussing Iran as a potential nuclear power, Zoabi said, “It would be more supporting me to have a counter-power to Israel…It’s the balance of power. Our only idea that it is more dangerous to the world, more dangerous to everyone, more dangerous to the Palestinians, to Israelis to have Israel as the only powerful state…This balance will restrict the Israeli using its power. The Israeli violence of the army is an outcome of Israel’s convenient feeling that no one will restrict her, that no Arab country will really declare a war.”

While observers could debate the justification for the recent Gaza conflict, an Iranian bombing raid of Israel could kill Zoabi and her family members by the very acting of living in the target zone. Am I being too logical here?

Before Netanyahu was sworn into office, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat slammed the incoming administration in a Washington Post op-ed for the prime minister’s refusal to endorse creation of a Palestinian state and limiting any changes to “a series of disconnected cantons with limited self-rule.” He adds, “The new Israeli government must unequivocally affirm its support for the two-state solution and the establishment of a viable, independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.”

A previous Israeli prime minister - three prime ministers ago - did in fact “unequivocally affirm its support” for a Palestinian state. Erakat conveniently neglects to mention that Ehud Barak agreed to establishing a Palestinian state during negotiations at Camp David in July 2000, but then Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat twice refused the offer. That futile exercise in diplomacy was followed by three wars and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of settlements from Gaza.

Back in Jenin, PLO leaders were so aghast that Arab teens would perform for Holocaust survivors that Wafaa Younis, the orchestra’s director, was prohibited from all activity in the camp and that the house she rented as a studio was sealed, Adnan al-Hindi told the Times.

Hindi, leader of the camp’s popular committee that represents the PLO, indicated that his people balked because the teens might come to believe that their people must sacrifice because Israel was established to compensate for the Holocaust. He charged that the program was targeted to “destroy the Palestinian national spirit in the camp.”

Younis claimed that camp officials seized control of the orchestra to acquire its money, according to the Associated Press. “What did these poor, elderly people do wrong? What did these children do wrong?”

Wafaa Younis is living proof that there are good people among the Arabs. Yet, the inmates continue to run the asylum.