To get an audience with a head of state, typically, one must have accomplished or been party to something of significance, and I guess that’s true with “Palestine,” too. It’s just that it seems that what qualifies as a significant achievement there diverges considerably from what most other cultures would find appropriate.

News agencies reported recently that the head of the Palestinian Authority met the other day with a woman who lured an innocent Israeli teenager to his death – a woman who was released from an Israeli prison as part of the horribly lopsided exchange for Hamas kidnap victim Gilad Shalit.

Israel is reportedly “furious” that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with the Palestinian woman who lured the youngster to the West Bank in 2001 with promises of sex, only to have him murdered.

Abbas met Amna Muna in Turkey where she was banished along with 10 other former prisoners, according to reports.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev reportedly said the Palestinian leadership “seems to be putting murderers up on a pedestal,” – an unfortunate proclivity that has been noted before.

Unfortunate, that is, if one’s goal is the peaceful co-existence of two groups of people. If, on the other hand, one’s goal is instigating perpetual bloody violence against one’s neighbors until, ultimately wiping them out completely, then this is precisely the correct approach.

Streets and plazas are named for terrorists in the Palestinian-occupied territories. Posters depicting suicide killers and other mass murders as heroes are typical there, as are songs glorifying even the most heinous violent criminals.

For instance the mass murderer who led a bus hijacking in which 37 innocent people were massacred, “has schools, summer camps, and many other events and places” named in her honor, to “immortalize and glorify her and her terror attack,” according to one website. Another website notes that a thoroughfare there is named after a leading Hamas bomb maker and other streets and places are named for terrorists. It would be like finding a Charles Manson High School or a Jeffrey Dahmer Square someplace in the United States. 

But, a Palestinian political analyst explains, “anyone who was killed by the Israelis, even in a car accident, is considered a martyr,” in that twisted society.

What most people in the world would consider murder, is lauded as martyrdom in the Palestinian/Islamo-Fascist universe.

So, faced now with the head of the Palestinian “state” granting an audience with a child killer, some Israelis think this “raises serious questions as to [the Palestinian’s] commitment and their desire to end the (Mideast) conflict,” according to reports.

An Abbas adviser defended the meeting, saying it’s natural for the Palestinian president to “meet his people wherever they are.”

And, of course it is. It’s just that I think one can tell a lot about the nature of a people and a culture by whom it elevates to pedestal status.

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here