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July 3, 2019 Special Dispatch No. 8153

Fatah Revolutionary Council Member And Columnist For Palestinian Authority Daily: Trump Is A New Hitler Bringing Destruction Upon The World

July 3, 2019
Palestinians | Special Dispatch No. 8153

In his June 30, 2019 column in the Palestinian Authority (PA) daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Fatah Revolutionary Council member Muwaffaq Matar responded to statements made by U.S. President Donald Trump at a press conference one day previously, at which he announced his decision to cut aid to the Palestinians because of the "hostility" of their leadership towards his administration and its refusal to renew negotiations with Israel. Accusing Trump of racism and arrogance, Matar described him as "a new Hitler who brings destruction upon the world and undermines the very foundations of the balance among states and among peoples." He emphasized that the Palestinians can neither be bribed with financial aid nor intimidated with threats to stop it, and noted that Trump must not be surprised at the attitude of the Palestinian leadership towards him after he has reneged on U.S. commitments to the Palestinians and repeatedly harmed them and their cause.

This column by Muwaffaq Matar is part of the hostile rhetoric in the PA press towards Trump, which includes comparisons of his foreign policy to that of Nazi Germany.[1]


Muwaffaq Matar (image: alwatanvoice.com)

The following are excerpts from Matar's column:[2]

 

"How does this man [Trump] think? [His] notion of exclusive control, his view of the other as inferior, and his racism and arrogance amount to a democratically-elected dictatorship, [and] turn him into a new Hitler who brings destruction upon the world and undermines the very foundations of the balance among states and among peoples.

"Donald Trump surely never anticipated that, of all the presidents and kings in the region, [Palestinian] President Mahmoud 'Abbas would be the one to stand up to him and, armed with the weapon of international law and legitimacy, defend his people's historic rights and its cultural and political principles. This Trump, who strides arrogantly upon the earth, thinks that the Palestinian state – its soil, people and leadership – is [just another] banana republic in the Middle East. U.S. President Donald Trump thinks he can bribe the Palestinian people's national leadership and turn the economic aid into a weapon with which to intimidate the PLO. Perhaps he listened to the whisperings of the human devils who surround him in the White House, [who convinced him] that exerting economic and media pressure on the President of the Palestinian people would surely cause him, the commander of the Palestinian national liberation [movement] Mahmoud 'Abbas Abu Mazen, to surrender and to come to [Trump], obedient and subservient, and accept the Deal of the Century.

"As the leader of a new imperialist plan in the Middle East, Trump [decided] that he must first of all lay siege to the bastion of Palestine and [then] storm through its main gates. But how can he do this when the bastion – its people and leadership – stands strong? [Trump] should have read about [Napoleon] Bonaparte and his defeat at the gates of Acre as his imperialist plan collapsed, before going so far in his desperate attempts, the last of which was the workshop [conducted] by his elegant son-in-law Jared Kushner in Bahrain, which brought his administration into the strait of failure...

"The latest manifestation of the shock that seized Trump at the resounding official and popular slap in the face he received from President Abu Mazen [when the Bahrain workshop failed] was his statements at the press conference on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan, [where he said]: 'I stopped the aid to the Palestinians to force them to resume the negotiations.' Before that he said, 'I ended that money because a year ago I heard they were saying nasty things.'[3] Did Trump expect [us] Palestinians to praise him when we saw him leap headlong, together with the occupation, into a campaign aimed at ending our political existence, and try to erase Palestine from the map of the world [while] stabilizing the racist, occupying and settlement-building Israel and helping its politicians to Judaize our holy places?

"Can we conceivably ignore his new colonialist declaration [i.e., the Deal of the Century]... Can we conceivably forget his decisions against our people and our cause?... When he [first] came to us, we rolled out the red carpet for him, but now that he has betrayed us [with] his subsequent decisions [e.g., the decisions on Jerusalem and UNRWA], we will cover the ground between us and White House with refusals made of nails, to prevent the wagon of the conspiracy against our rights from moving forward.

"What does Trump expect of us after he stabbed us in the heart on the day he unveiled before the whole world, and especially before the Muslims, his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Israeli occupation state – a decision which means Judaizing the city and everything in it, first and foremost the sites holy to Christianity and Islam – and then moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem?...

"As for the workshop in Bahrain – by means of which he planned to crush and minimize the cause of [our] liberation, independence and sovereignty over our soil, to blur our Palestinian national features and to tear them out along with our Arab heart and our human and cultural roots by turning the mother of all causes [i.e., the Palestinian cause] into nothing more than a humanitarian problem – is the true expression of his failure. The plan to humiliate us with the weapon of money did not succeed in the past and will not succeed in the future. It is as if he does not know that we have withstood the weapons of massacre, killing, expulsion, destruction and racism that were used against us by the leaders of the Israeli occupation and its generals, and yet here we are, standing strong and cleaving to our land.

"We remind Trump of his repeated blows [against us]... so that he will expect nothing from us but rigidity: He canceled the financial and other aid to UNRWA in order to liquidate the refugee problem; put himself in place of the legitimate international bodies and determined that the number [of Palestinian refugees] is only 40,000...; revoked the U.S. financial commitments  to the PA as part of its [role] as guarantor of the PLO-Israel agreement of 1994 [apparently a reference to the Cairo Agreement, which established the PA], even though this is neither charity or aid but a commitment that previous U.S. administrations upheld. He canceled the financial aid to the hospitals in [East] Jerusalem, decided to close the PLO representation in Washington and its bank accounts, and demanded that the Palestinian ambassador leave the U.S.

"We do not say bad things about anybody. Our leadership can teach the leaders of the world the meaning of values and ethical behavior. But whoever insolently [denies] the rights of our people and practically attacks us should expect nothing of us except for the words and deeds of a people born free."

  


[2] Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), June 30, 2019.

[3] Trump's statements at the press conference were as follows:  "And what I’ve done is said, 'Look, as long — if you’re not negotiating and if you don’t want to make peace, we’re not going to pay you.' So let’s see what happens. I went to other negotiators from past years. For many, many years they’ve been trying to make this deal.  And I said, 'Did you ever take the money away?' Because they were always very hostile.  And they said, 'No, we wouldn’t do that. That’s inappropriate.' 'Why is it inappropriate?  I mean, they’re saying bad things. Why is it inappropriate?'" (Whitehouse.gov, June 29, 2019).

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