Adventures in Pallywood

Moderation must be in the eye of the beholder. Caroline Glick on Pallywood in action:

As the Jerusalem Post's Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh reported Monday, over the weekend he and the newspaper fell victim to a Fatah hoax. Saturday, Abu Toameh was "summoned" to Fatah's General Intelligence headquarters in Ramallah where he was given a "scoop" - a graphic videotape of the murder of a 16-year-old girl in July perpetrated as a so-called "honor killing." The Fatah officer in Ramallah supplied Abu Toameh with the phone numbers of two "eye-witnesses" to the episode who would corroborate the story.

It later worked out that the "eye-witnesses" were Fatah militiamen in Gaza. The story was a fabrication. The video was taken in Iraq in April. The purpose of the elaborately crafted tale was clear. Fatah wished to use the Post to project itself as a credible, moderate actor battling the forces of evil and darkness in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Abu Toameh had written up the story and it appeared on The Jerusalem Post's Web site on Saturday night. It was removed when the Post was alerted to the hoax and did not appear in the Sunday paper.

Abu Toameh's forthright admission of his error and his report in Monday's paper of the anatomy of the Fatah ruse is a testament to his own journalistic integrity. But he is not the issue here. The issue here is Fatah and what the hoax tells us about the organization on which the Olmert government and the Bush administration are basing all their plans for a future peace between the Palestinians and the State of Israel.

As Abu Toameh noted, the false videotape was Fatah's second propaganda story last week. Wednesday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's terrorist organization's propaganda services announced that its forces in Bethlehem had intercepted two rockets "ready for launch" against Israel in the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala. They further announced that they had turned the rockets over to the IDF. This story, which came as Abbas was meeting with US President George W. Bush and other world leaders at the UN in New York, of course projected the image of Fatah as a terror-fighting, Israel-protecting, peace-seeking, credible, moderate actor.

SPEAKING to The Washington Post on Thursday, Abbas used the story to explain why Israel should feel comfortable giving Fatah all of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem. Responding to a question regarding his view of Israel's concern that areas transferred to Palestinian control will be used as operational bases for carrying out attacks against its cities Abbas said, "Last night, [our security forces] seized two rockets. We handed [them] over to the Israelis. We are very worried about these deeds and I think we can put an end to all this. Our security apparatus is ready to stop all kinds of violence."

The Washington Post published the interview without noting that the story was a total fabrication. The "rockets" that Fatah transferred to the IDF were just a pile of metal pipes which had apparently been used as toys by local children. The IDF had already noted that the rockets weren't real when The Washington Post conducted its interview with Abbas. Unlike Abu Toameh and The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Post and its veteran reporter Lally Weymouth saw no reason to mention that Abbas's anti-terror credentials were based on nothing but lies manufactured by his own propaganda arms.

AND THAT'S the thing. Since Fatah's creation in 1959 its primary weapon has been disinformation and its primary asset has been the Western media's willingness to be duped and stay duped. What is notable about the honor killing video story is not that it was false, but that The Jerusalem Post acknowledged that it had been lied to.

I remember reading about both stories but didn’t blog about those incidents. I felt the kassam story had a weird feel to it – I mean, only two never used or gently used rockets (depending on the source), and the honour killing, well this is the mid-east, honour killings are relatively a common form of murder. The Fatah faux outraged was just a mite stage-managed for me but I had no idea I was reading Pallywood in action. It's literally everywhere now.