What a conciliatory statesman is Mahmoud Abbas. The President of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian National Authority, still, even after unilaterally extending his own tenure in the top job several years after promising an election that has never materialised.
Taking up his place among the great diplomats, Mahmoud spoke passionately about the Palestinian claim on some of the most sacred sites in Jerusalem, resolving that “the Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours… and they [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.”
Surprisingly (or perhaps, unsurprisingly), comments like this are strangely absent from media reports on the mainstream western media, who are shamelessly desperate to portray Palestinians as perpetual victims, and alarmingly prone to meekly play into the hands of Islamic extremists on the Palestinian / Israeli issue.
What serious diplomat, what political leader, what statesman, would use language like “filthy feet” of members of another ethno-religious group? How does one negotiate, let alone co-exist, with an opponent whose starting position is that your feet are filthy and you have no right to exist at all?