In a youth soccer tournament just outside of Jerusalem held for the Muslim fast month of Ramadan, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has made clear what kind of person it views as a role model for children under its rule: cold-blooded terrorist murderers.
Palestinian Media Watch revealed on Thursday that a new soccer tournament in Abu Dis, a suburb town to the east of Jerusalem, will feature teams named after infamous terrorists who murdered countless Israeli civilians in a blatant act of incitement.
A press announcement for the tournament organized by the Abu Dis Youth Club appeared in the PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Tuesday, and listed teams named after the “martyrs” Abu Jihad, Khaled Nazzal, Abu Ali Mustafa and Mu’taz Hijazi.
Just who are these sterling examples of citizenry that the PA decided to present as models for imitation to its youth?
Abu Jihad was a founder of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, and a deputy to Abbas’s predecessor Yasser Arafat. He headed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist group’s military wing and plotted numerous Fatah terror attacks that murdered 125 Israelis – including the most lethal terror attack in Israel, in which a bus was hijacked and 37 civilians, 12 of them children, were murdered.
Khaled Nazzal was secretary of the central committee of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) terror group, and a commander of its military branch. He was behind the Ma’alot massacre in 1974, in which 22 schoolchildren and five adults were murdered.
And then there’s Abu Ali Mustafa, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Communist Palestinian Arab terror group. The group rejected the 1993 Oslo Accords, and has murdered countless Israelis since its founding in 1967, most intensively in the Second Intifada or Oslo Terror War between 2000 and 2005.
The most recent addition to the PA’s terror pantheon as projected on its children’s soccer tournament is Mu’taz Hijazi, a member of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group who was arrested for terrorist attacks in 2000 at the start of the Second Intifada and released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal as one of 1,027 freed terrorists.
Despite having served 11 years in jail in a sentence that was twice extended after Hijazi assaulted prison guards, he was employed at the Terasa restaurant in the Begin Heritage Center.
It was outside the center that he tried to assassinate Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick last October 29, shooting him four times at point-blank range and fleeing on a motorbike only to die in a shootout with police the same night. Glick miraculously survived the shooting after undergoing several intense surgeries.
