Palestinian Partners For Peace?

This video, from the now thankfully restored Memri.org video channel on You Tube, has been doing the rounds of pro-Israel sites today, and no wonder.  For it shows an impromptu rant at the Al Aqsa Mosque by Omar Abu Sara that reveals a bloodthirsty bigotry against against Jews rooted in Islamic tradition, with the speaker reiterating the view that Jews are "the most evil of Allah's creations, and warning that "we shall slaughter you without mercy":

Meanwhile, having read Ronen Bergman's article here regarding Mahmoud Abbas's dissertation. American academic Mike Lumish, who blogs at Israel Thrives, observes there (and in his cross post at Jews Down Under):

'Mahmoud Abbas completed his PhD dissertation for Lumumba University in Moscow in 1982.

For years I have been reading that this piece of writing – which to the right is the original cover – entitled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism” was one in which he denied the Holocaust....

 The problem here is not Holocaust denial, but something perhaps quite worse.  Abbas is accusing the Zionist movement, and thus the many hundreds of thousands of Jews who participated in it in the mid-1940s and who lost their families to the Nazis, of colluding with the Nazis to persecute their own people – even unto genocide – in the service of Zionism....

 This man is a liar who will say absolutely anything.  There is nothing within the movement for Jewish liberation which comes even remotely close to what Abbas accuses us of.He is claiming that the early Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to commit genocide upon the Jewish people in order to extort land in the Middle East and compel European Jews to move to that land.  While that is heinous enough it thereby implies that today’s Jewish supporters of the Jewish people – within the tradition of Zionism, as if there were only one – represent the contemporary form of Nazi ideology.  In the imagination of Mahmoud Abbas, not to mention G-d only knows how many of his progressive-left western allies, Zionism is the ideological and functional equivalent of Nazism today....

 To my mind [Abbas's dissertation] as revealed by Bergman] drives the final spike into Abbas' standing as a negotiating partner.

The man was elected to a four year term that ended five years ago. 

He also wrote the checks for the Munich Massacre during the 1972 Olympics, so why bother with him?

In truth, he should be in prison....''

Do read Mike Lumish's entire piece, and Bergman's too, as Lumish urges.  (Warning: A dovish friend of mine, who's rather a fan of Mr Abbas, has been left somewhat shaken as a result of doing so...)

Meanwhile, behind a paywall, in a report by Ean Higgins entitled (should you wish to google it) "Tony Burke cancels Palestine speech", today's (9 December) issue of The Australian notes that  Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal MP Tony Burke has, at the eleventh hour, cancelled his planned speech to the Inaugural General Meeting in Lakemba, a suburb of Sydney with a strong Muslim presence that falls within his constituency, of the newly formed lobby group Labor for Palestine (described on its Facebook page as "a grassroots network of ALP members and trade unionists that works to campaign for the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people"):

"The decision came after The Australian highlighted the fact that the contact person for the event was Fahad Ali, a medical student at Sydney University who has been known as a leader of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel and lauded by prominent pro-BDS academic Jake Lynch....

Mr Ali recently appeared on his Facebook page under a flag of a terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is not proscribed in Australia but is on the list of terrorist organisations against which Australia imposes financial sanctions under a UN Security Council resolution."