(Yevgeny Biyatov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Mahmoud Abbas

When official Palestinian Authority media honors terrorists as martyrs, how can we believe a PA official who says he’s “shocked” by terror attacks?

By Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch

Yesterday, Palestinian Media Watch exposed that the Palestinian Authority has been the driving force behind the recent wave of eight stabbing attacks since the start of March in Israel. The Palestinian terror climaxed in the horrific attack on Tuesday in which four Israelis were murdered.

As reported yesterday, the PA and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah have been calling continuously for “popular resistance,” the PA term for knife and car-ramming terror.

To show their support for terror, not only didn’t the PA condemn any of the previous attacks – it publicized unqualified support for the terrorists, and condemned Israel for killing them to stop the attacks.

Moreover, official PA TV and the official daily newspaper honored the terrorist murderer yesterday as a “Shahid” – Islamic Martyr.

Yet, when Palestinian Minister of Civil Affairs Hussein al-Sheikh met with Israeli Minister of Public Security Bar-Lev an hour after Tuesday’s terror attack, he told him he “was shocked” by the attack:

Significantly, his condemnation was only said to the Israeli minister and was not publicized in any Palestinian Arabic media, nor was the murder of four civilians condemned by any official PA source.

PMW has translated al-Sheikh’s condemnation intended for Israeli ears into Arabic for Palestinians to hear and placed it in Hussein al-Sheikh’s Twitter feed.

PMW is calling on him to publicly condemn the terror in Arabic as well, to show that his condemnation is sincere.