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PFLP hand out sweets to celebrate the Har Nof synagogue massacre
Language is a powerful part of our identity, as intellectuals from Bill Bryson to Slavoj Zizek to Steven Pinker acknowledge. Europeans are particularly sensitive to the use of racist language. We know how prejudicial and violent language can lead to horrific policy, so we carefully avoid parroting racist tropes.
Were someone to walk into a room and claim that the Jews caused all wars and revolutions and it is a moral duty to kill them, we would wince awkwardly, and treat such a person as a racist. Yet whilst language is important to the identity of any individual person or mass movement, there is more to identity than just language. Actions also matter.
This is worth bearing in mind when considering two Palestinian terror groups – Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – which take different approaches to racism.
The Hamas charter claims that there is a secret world Jewish plot for global domination, and the Jews are behind any and every war and revolution the world has ever known. The PFLP, meanwhile, studiously avoids the crude anti-Semitic language of Hamas. The PFLP says it opposes “Zionists” rather than Jews, framing their fight as Marxist-Leninist “resistance” against “oppression”. On its website, PFLP claims its goal is to “establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights.”
When four Jewish rabbis – and a passing Druze policeman – were butchered to death whilst praying in their own sacred space, the response by Hamas and the PFLP were disturbingly similar. Hamas called the massacre a “quality development“, whilst the PFLP called it “heroic.” As Hamas distributed sweets in Gaza to celebrate the mass killings, the PFLP did the same.
http://hurryupharry.org/2014/11/21/the-pflp-the-synagogue-massacre-and-the-language-of-terrorism/
Just goes to prove that Palestinians will be Palestinians.