The views of the Israeli Parents Circle—Families Forum (PCFF) are “deeply repugnant,” the Australian-Israeli Arnold Roth has written, whose daughter died in the infamous 2001 Hamas terrorist attack on a downtown Jerusalem pizzeria. Such context is critical in evaluating anti-Israel PCFF spokespersons like Robi Damelin, who recently appeared at a February 14 Foundation for Middle East Peace event at Washington, DC’s Middle East Institute (MEI).
Howard Sumka from PCFF’s American affiliate introduced Damelin as a “moral authority” on Israel’s conflicts with its Arab neighbors and a “world traveler who takes her message all over the place.” She lost her son David to a Fatah sniper at an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) West Bank checkpoint during a March 2002 shooting. During a month that saw a Palestinian terrorist violence wave, the sniper killed seven IDF soldiers, including their commander David and a beloved volunteer paramedic who offered aid, along with three civilians.
While Damelin and PCFF have won prestigious awards and praise from Democratic congressmen, the British-Israeli terrorism victim Kay Wilson adamantly rejects Damelin’s conceit as a “moral High Priestess.” Wilson’s own “moral authority” derives from narrowly surviving a brutal 2010 knife assault by two Palestinian terrorists that killed her fellow female hiker in a Jerusalem woods. Damelin’s “overused cliché” of “cycle of violence” leaves Wilson cold, an example of what Israel’s NGO Monitor assesses as PCFF’s consistent “immoral equivalence between terror victims and terrorists.”
NGO Monitor has slammed PCFF’s “highly biased view of the conflict” examined in detail by Roth and his wife Frimet. PCFF “leverages our collective bereavement” for a “very specific and particular political line” that “even they concede is unrepresentative of Israel’s bereaved families,” yet Damelin has professed opposition to “using bereaved parents for an agenda.” In PCFF’s flawed understanding, Israelis are aggressors, Palestinians victims, in a conflict that began in 1967 with an Israeli “occupation” of disputed territory, not in 1917 with unrelenting decades-long Arab/Muslim rejection of Zionism. PCFF is “a small, marginal and noisy” organization “offensive to many of Israel’s thousands of terror-affected families,” whose “ultimate Stockholm syndromers” display “naiveté befitting young children.”
The Roths reject Damelin’s blathering about Israeli and Palestinian children as “pawns of politicians.” The Roths forthrightly recognize that their 15-year-old Malki “was murdered for being Jewish by unrepentant Palestinian terrorists.” She was a “victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism,” ideological factors that PCFF never mentions.
Damelin instead attributes the killing of people like her son, who had participated in Israel’s peace movement and opposed Israeli “occupation” of disputed territories, to deficient human understanding. She wrote a letter to the sniper’s family quaintly claiming that “if he had known” David the sniper “could never have done such a thing.” Her universal message, proclaimed in 2015 interview and reflected in a 2016 USAID video, is that “when you see the humanity in the other that is the beginning of the end of conflict.”
Damelin’s belief in interpersonal relationships appears in a 2016 interview where she claimed that IDF killing of the sniper’s family members, not any nefarious beliefs in destroying Israel, motivated his killing spree. “He went on a path of revenge, it’s clear. He wasn’t politically motivated,” she stated; by contrast, Israeli society remains supposedly ignorant of its own next-door security policies. She stated in 2013 at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, that “most Israelis have not the faintest idea what is going on in the occupied territories. Maybe they don’t want to know.”
Given Damelin’s description during a 2015 Denver presentation of a “total cut-off” of Israeli-Palestinian contact, it follows that she has previously demanded that Israel “remove the security barrier as a prerequisite to peace.” While this barrier system separating Palestinians from Israeli society has saved numerous lives, a Denver audience member recalled to Damelin his Berlin Wall memories and by false analogy called it “shocking when you see the wall” in Israel. Her fellow PCFF presenter, the Palestinian Bassam Aramin, whose daughter IDF crossfire tragically killed during a 2007 Palestinian riot, called the security barrier a “wall of shame” built on supposedly Palestinian land. While his rhetoric exaggerates the nature of a security barrier that is a wall only in small sections, his hyperbole has also previously compared Israel’s Sephardic religious Shas party with Hamas terrorists.
For Damelin, the security barrier’s abolition is merely one of several Israeli steps necessary to redress Palestinian grievances, as “this is not an equal situation at all. The Israeli is the stronger side.” She describes Palestinian raging against Israel because of Israeli repression, not jihadist indoctrination, for if she were to live in a Palestinian refugee camp, “I wouldn’t need a curriculum to teach me to hate.” Therefore in a 2011 video of the leftist Jewish-American group J Street, she stated that “to support Israel today means to support Israel to get out of the occupied territories.” She consistently expresses the alarmism that “Israel will be destroyed, because this occupation is killing the moral fiber of Israel.”
Damelin also demands that Israel release imprisoned Palestinians or “there’ll never be peace,” just as in Northern Ireland’s peace process, a leniency that corresponds to her disturbing terminology for terrorists. PCFF members like her and her fellow MEI panelist Mazen Faraj, whose father IDF soldiers mistakenly shot in 2002 when he was outside after a West Bank curfew, consistently refer to Palestinian terrorists as “freedom fighters.” Her letter to the sniper’s family correctly noted that “your son is considered a hero by many of the Palestinian people,” even though she stressed nonviolent strategies as the only hope for peace.
Damelin’s strained outreach efforts have provoked little positive response from Palestinians, while Faraj observed at MEI that most Palestinians feel that they have little to discuss with Israelis. She has noted that after the imprisonment of her son’s sniper, her contact with him resulted in a “letter filled with hate and justification for killing,” something that reflects the Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” program. A veiled Muslim girl also said to Damelin during a Jerusalem school presentation that “your son deserved to die.”
Damelin finds satisfaction in even the most minimal Palestinian willingness to dialogue like Palestinian participation in PCFF visits to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. This is a “very big gesture” and not a basic investigation of one of history’s greatest crimes necessary for all decent people. “What did they have to do with that?” she argued in defense of Palestinians, “on the contrary, they actually lost their homes because of many of the immigrants that came.”
Unsurprisingly given Damelin’s South African background, the Roths have noted that PCFF members often make “offensive and wrong South African comparison” to Israel. She has written that in Israel the “discourse that prevails in this country is extremely monologic, racist and aggressive.” She was an anti-apartheid campaigner whose uncle had defended anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandala in his 1956 treason trial before she left her native South Africa in 1967 to make Aliyah to Israel. She has noted how her South African upbringing and the “miracle of South Africa” in peacefully abandoning apartheid have had “tremendous influence” upon her.
Damelin has repeatedly emphasized that “I love Israel,” yet only fellow leftist ideologues could accept her claims of striving for impartiality between Arabs and Jews. At MEI, for example, she condemned the American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, as “behind a lot of the dangerous decisions” like the American embassy move to Jerusalem. She called for congressional Democrats to investigate him.
Damelin’s reconciliation rhetoric merely gives superficial veneer for a political warfare campaign that delegitimizes Israel as an aggressor and uses Palestinian victimization claims to undermine Israeli security. Yet she is merely part of a wider like-minded anti-Israel network in PCFF and beyond, as a forthcoming article will investigate. This analysis only begs the question, why are the United States government and other donors funding groups such as PCFF?
Buraq says
….. for if she were to live in a Palestinian refugee camp, “I wouldn’t need a curriculum to teach me to hate.” (Damelin, says)
It’s the curriculum of hate that explains why there are Arabs live in so-called refugee camps! Clown!
Billy Chickens says
The curriculum of hate is taught from the Quran which is Lucifer’s book of pure hatred for humanity. Even those professing Islam are hated by Lucifer for their greatest goal is to die for Islam so they ca go to Islamic heaven which is really Lucifer’s domain – Hell.
FYI says
Given that allah is the author of the koran,a book that curses Christians and Jews k9:30, and that his greatest enemy{Sahih Muslim vol 5 hadith #5611} is defined as being a man called MALIK AL-MALAK{“the king of kings”,a title attributed solely to Jesus Christ Revs 19 v 16}it is obvious where the koran comes from.There certainly is a luciferian cunning at work:pretending to be equal to ,and speaking for God{diabolus simius Dei}The islamic doctrine of hate,al walaa wal baraa is a dead giveaway.
These naive PCFF people should see if they can explain away Sahih Muslim #6985,an islamic teaching that calls for a genocidal war against the Jews.
gravenimage says
+1
mortimer says
How can Robi Damelin be a “MORAL AUTHORITY” if she has ZERO KNOWLEDGE of Islamic moral teaching ?? Answer: an unread, unstudied person cannot be a ‘moral authority’ at all.
Morality requires HARD WORK and RIGOR OF STUDY. The assumption of people like Robi Damelin is that she can TALK MUSLIMS INTO adopting the Golden Rule … even though DUALISTIC Islam OPPOSES the universal Golden Rule with its ‘ESSENTIAL TEACHING’ called ‘Al Walaa wal Baraa’.
‘Al Walaa wal Baraa’ is in effect a form of APARTHEID with which Robi Damelin as a South African is familiar.
‘Al Walaa wal Baraa’ requires that Muslims not have sympathy for kafirs nor support them in any way.
‘Al Walaa wal Baraa’ is the MOTIVATING FORCE for all jihad. Most jihad is ‘peaceful’ jihad involving disinformation about Islam, distortions in the narrative and bald-faced lies about Islam.
Ordinary Muslims participate in verbal jihad when they hide, dissemble and cloak the meaning of their jihadic world-conquest agenda as Muslims.