Terrorist mass murderer joins teachers, journalists, and politicians as Palestinian role model on International Women’s Day.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
The Palestinian Authority exploited and degraded International Women’s Day this year once again by choosing to glorify a Palestinian woman who committed the mass murder of Israelis as their role models, the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch reported.
Each year, while praising female terrorists targeting Israel, the PA ignores the lack of equality for women in Palestinian society.
Last week, on International Women’s Day 2021, official Palestinian television, controlled by the PA, showed several news highlights focusing on four women as “role models of honorable and fighting women,” including terrorist murderers Dalal Mughrabi and Fatima Barnawi.
Mughrabi led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history, known as the Coastal Road Massacre. In 1978, she and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel’s coastal highway, murdering 37 civilians, 12 of them children, and wounding over 70. The Palestinian Authority has named schools after Mughrabi.
She was killed in the attack, but ever since the Palestinians have regularly praised her as a martyr, hero, and role model for Palestinian girls, with monuments to her in many towns and villages.
Barnawi placed a bomb in a movie theater in Jerusalem in 1967. The bomb failed to explode. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1977 after serving 10 years. In 2015, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas honored Barnawi with the Military Star of Honor.
In 2017, Norway demanded that PA return funding for a women’s center named after the terrorist. “The glorification of terrorist attacks is completely unacceptable, and I deplore this decision in the strongest possible terms. Norway will not allow itself to be associated with institutions that take the names of terrorists in this way. We will not accept the use of Norwegian aid funding for such purposes,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Brende said at the time.
The decision to name the center after Mughrabi was so repugnant that even the United Nations took action, saying the UN “disassociated itself from the Center once it learned the offensive name chosen for it and will take measures to ensure that such incidents do not take place in the future. The glorification of terrorism, or the perpetrators of heinous terrorist acts, is unacceptable under any circumstances.”
In fact, the director of the Women’s Affairs Technical Committee (WATC) of the PA, Nadia Abu Nahleh, slammed the PA, saying women’s rights are not being prioritized.
“Women’s affairs are still at the bottom of the political administration’s list of priorities, despite the strengthening of the campaigns demanding to improve things for women, and especially on everything connected to approving the law to defend women from violence, but there is no response,” Abu Nahleh wrote in the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper last week.
PA Minister of Women’s Affairs Amal Hamad mentioned on a morning TV news show that 24% of Palestinian working women “receive less than minimum wage” from Palestinian employers.