In her speech to AIPAC this morning, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "When a Hamas-controlled municipality glorifies violence and renames a square after a terrorist who murdered innocent Israelis, it insults the families on both sides who have lost loves ones in this conflict."
What's so striking about this statement to anyone who has been following the story is that Hamas appears to have had nothing to do with it. Instead, the US-armed and financed Palestinian Authority appears to have been responsible for the event to rename a square for Dalal Mughrabi, the Palestinian woman who took part in the hijacking of an Israeli bus that ended in the deaths of dozens of people after a botched Israeli "rescue" attempt.
Ethan Bronner, he of The New York Times, reported on March 11:
EL BIREH, West Bank — Dozens of Palestinian students from the youth division of Fatah, the mainstream party led by President Mahmoud Abbas, gathered here on Thursday to dedicate a public square to the memory of a woman who in 1978 helped carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. Though one senior Fatah leader and a Palestinian Authority security official joined the gathering in this town abutting Ramallah, the administrative center of the authority, the relatively low key nature of the event, timed to the 32nd anniversary of the attack, was a kind of compromise. An official ceremony was put off by the Palestinian Authority as a result of Israeli protests and to avoid an unnecessary embarrassment during a visit to the region by the American vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who came partly to promote new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
In another report, the right wing The Jerusalem Post -- not exactly fans of Hamas -- makes it clear the ceremony was entirely the doing of Fatah and the US-backed Palestinian Authority. It adds:
Tawfik Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee and a former PA security commander, hailed Mughrabi, who died in the 1978 attack, as a freedom fighter who sacrificed her life for her people and her homeland. “We are all projects of martyrdom like Mughrabi,” he said. “We are all Mughrabi.” Mughrabi was not a terrorist, Tirawi said.
It should be noted that Tirawi has been one of the key Fatah figures involved in US-backed schemes to overthrow Hamas. Hillary was right about one thing: Hamas' Reform and Change list did in fact win Al Bireh Municipality in the 2005 municipal elections. But it appears Hamas had absolutely nothing to do with the Dalal Mughrabi event. Hillary should know better than anyone else that the very US-sponsored Palestinian Authority forces behind the event have been busily arresting Hamas activists, deposing democratically elected mayors, and shutting down civil society organizations suspected of sympathy to Hamas.
I would guess that the PA carried out the square renaming in a ham-fisted attempt to shore up their credentials as "freedom fighters" instead of collaborators. I've found no information Hamas had anything to do with this, and plenty that the Ramallah US client regime did. I think it takes a great deal of deception and cold calculation to engage in this sort of half-truth and fabrication. Hillary has evidently had a lot of practice.