What’s the toughest habit to kick? Turns out, in the Middle East it’s humiliation.

Yes, according to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the explosion of hate, violence, and murder against their Jewish neighbors was ignited by Israel. The source of the humiliation? Israel’s installation of metal detectors on Jerusalem Old City’s Temple Mount near the al Aqsa Mosque. This, after Israeli Arabs machine gunned two Israeli (Druze) police officers from the sacred ground to Judaism and Islam. Their weapons were smuggled onto the Temple Mount before the shootings.

Wafa, the PA’s news agency, set the stage for the mayhem to follow:

“The aim of the occupation of placing electronic gates is the humiliation of worshipers and citizens during their entry and exit to Al-Aqsa, and to send a message to the Arabs and Muslims that they hold absolute sovereignty over Al-Aqsa … but Jerusalemites responded by rejection, until the situation returns to what it was before the electronic gates and checkpoints.”

Palestinian Media Watch tracks what the PA says in Arabic to the Palestinian people, not what they say to the international community in English. After characterizing the deployment of metal detectors, meant to protect worshippers from violence, as a horrific act against worshippers, the Palestinian political organization Fatah encouragedPalestinians to “rage” and encouraged a glorified death:

“If I fall I will not be the first to die, and not the last to die #Rage!”

Not to be outdone, a member of the Fatah Central Committee said the committee “called on its supporters and members … to turn this Friday into a day of escalation.”

It didn’t take very long for someone to come forward. On the night of Friday, July 21, the Solomon family had sat down to celebrate the birth of a new baby boy on Shabbat eve. A 19 year-old Palestinian man had other ideas. According to the Army, he poured water over his head to “purify” himself, then entered the Solomon home and stabbed the grandfather of the family and his two adult children, including the young father of the baby boy, to death. Only the bullet from a neighbor saved the rest of the family and children from the same fate.

On Sunday, the three were buried together, even as the Palestinian terrorist’s mother declared that she was proud of her son’s deeds.

Those wanton murders did nothing to assuage the global humiliation. Protesters as far away as London burned Israeli flags; in Istanbul protesters tried to block the entrance to the Jewish community’s main synagogue that previously had suffered two deadly terrorist attacks; and in Amman two Arabs were killed and an Israeli seriously injured after a shooting on the grounds of the Jewish state’s embassy.

Never one to miss an opportunity to bolster his Islamic street creds, Turkish President Erdogan further stoked the flames of hate by declaringthat Israel could not “expect the Islamic world to remain unresponsive after the humiliation Muslims suffered with the restrictions at the Noble Sanctuary.” For good measure, the Turkish leader — whose increasingly autocratic rule has been denounced by European countries, who has trampled on the human rights of his own people, and who has destroyed his nation’s free press —  shamelessly accused Israel of violating “fundamental human values”  according to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

Interestingly, Erdogan’s Holy Land hubris didn’t stop him from presenting himself as a peacemaker elsewhere. He just flew to visit the Gulf states, where he is positioning himself as a mediator in the dispute between the Saudi-led coalition and the pro-Iranian emirate of Qatar.

Now, President Trump has dispatched his Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, to the region to try to calm the situation but the worst thing people who want to help an addict can do is to supply the addict with more of the thing causing his addition.

There may be diplomats and pundits urging the U.S., EU, Middle East Quartet, to pressure Israel to remove the very same safety measures that every Jew must go through when approaching the Western Wall and that every pilgrim to Mosques across the Middle East and the Vatican are subject to. Indeed, millions of travelers everyday go through the same screening — we hope — before boarding a flight.

So let’s be clear. People who hate Israel, feel “humiliated” by the Jewish State’s very existence.

I am no expert on overcoming addiction. But I do know people who have overcome the worst humiliations that humankind has doled out. Ask a Holocaust survivor, or a Rwandan girl who survived rape and worst, or survivors of the Cambodian genocide who rebuilt their lives.

Any true friend of peace must help stop the self-induced drug of humiliation.  Peaceseekers must not feed the beast of humiliation but instead commit to isolate the Islamists who mainline this drug to the masses and help wean addicts from a culture of hate and death.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean and director of Global Social Action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/international/343666-israels-enemies-have-the-people-hooked-on-so-called

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