This month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas posed a number of times with a photograph of Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who killed 37 Israelis, including 12 children, in the latest example of official Palestinian Authority-sanctioned incitement.
The photographs of President Abbas were posted on the official Facebook page of Mr Abbas’s Fatah party, showing the President smiling with a young child and a larger group while holding a photograph taken in December at a youth rally in Bethlehem to celebrate Fatah’s 52nd anniversary. Mughrabi featured on a large placard carried at the rally, and is prominent in the photograph held by Mr Abbas.
At the rally, a number of Palestinian ‘martyrs’ who murdered Israelis were honoured, including Mughrabi, who led led the most deadly terror attack in Israel’s history in 1978 when she and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway, killing 38 civilians, 13 of them children, and wounding over 70. An American photojournalist was killed in the attack.
In a Facebook post a few weeks earlier, Fatah described Mughrabi as a “Bride of Palestine”.
There are at least three Palestinian schools named after the terrorist, including the Dalal Mughrabi High School for Girls in Gaza and the Dalal Mughrabi Elementary School for Girls near Hebron in the West Bank.
Official Palestinian Authority television footage in April 2014 showed a teenage student at a school named after Mughrabi stating that her ambition in life is to follow her lead: “My life’s ambition is to reach the level that the Martyr fighter Dalal Mughrabi reached”.
The glorification of terrorists in the Palestinian Authority is widespread, with as many as 25 Palestinian schools named after them, sending a clear message to Palestinian children that murderers who target Israeli civilians should be honoured.
