PLO Saddam Support and Clinton’s Middle East Credibility

Barely 72 hours after the high point of US President Bill Clinton’s recent Middle East mission, when he participated in the Palestine National Council in Gaza, where he witnessed the PNC annulling the PLO Covenant that calls for Israel’s destruction.

The official TV and radio of the PLO are expressing enthusiastic support for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and endorsing Saddam Hussein’s proposed war of extermination against the state and people of Israel. All of this is not new. This is what Israel experienced during the Gulf War in 1991, when massses of Palestinians demonstrated for Saddam in the west bank and in Gaza. What has changed is that 95% of the Arabs in the west bank and Gaza now live under the de facto sovereignty of the Palestine Authority, which maintains a Palestine Liberation Army of more than 50,000 in the west bank and Gaza, capable of organizing systematic guerrilla actions against Israel, in support and in coordination with Iraq, at any given moment. Meanwhile, The PLO also maintains at least three paramilitary bases in and around Bagdad, the capital of Iraq.

Many people in Israel have come to see Clinton’s role in presiding over the symbolic voice vote of the Palestine National Council to cancel the traditional Palestinian covenant as no more than a futile Clinton attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

After all, a PLO that for its 34 years of existance has seen its “raison d’etre” in terms of Israel’s destruction can be expected to do almost anything possible to reinforce rather than to deny its own covenant and constitution. That is what self-determination is all about.

That is why, at the outset of the 1998-99 Palestinian school year, the first academic study of the new school books used by the Palestine Authority showed that the PLO Covenant calling for Israel’s liquidation remains the central theme of the Palestine Authority school curriculum, while the PLO Covenant is invoked by the Palestine Authority as the prime reason for leaving three million Palestinian Arabs in the squalor of refugee camps for more than fifty years, under the PLO Covenant‘s premise and promise of the “inalienable right of return” for Palestinian refugees to be repatriated to the homes within Israel proper that they left in 1948, as promised by the PLO Covenant and ratfied every year by UN resolution #194.

Yet another principle of the PLO Covenant remains in force, and that is that Jews should not be able to purchase new lands in Palestine. In that spirit, the Palestine Legislative Council enacted a statute in November, 1998 that made it a capital offense for Jews to purchase land anywhere that the PLO considers to be “Palestine”. The PLC was not only referring to the west bank and to Gaza.

And just to make sure that everyone understands that Arafat is a man of his word to his own people, the popular FATAH movement, under the steady leadership of Yassir Arafat since 1964, issued a new constitution this week and distributed it on the net, in which the FATAH officially announces that it absorbs all of the principles of the PLO Covenant that advocate Israel’s destruction.

It was therefore not surprising that Arafat’s popular Palestinian movements, under the watchful eyes of the Palestine Liberation Army police, organized new massive demonstrations for Saddam Hussein, on the morning that followed the first American airstrikes on Iraq. The of the Fatah demonstrations for Saddam Hussein: “Fire chemical weapons at Tel Aviv… “

Clinton, for his part, will have a tough time regaining credibility in Israel.

When Clinton compared the tears of the Arab children of killers whom he met with to the tears of the Jewish orphan children of Arab terror attacks whom he also said that he met with, that would have been insensitive enough. Except that Clinton did not even bother to meet the Israeli orphan children of PLO terror attacks.

So there you have it. Clinton tells Israel that he has facilitated an end to the PLO Covenant and the PLO goes on to support Saddam Hussein, as soon as Air Force One flies out of the friendly skies of the Middle East.

Well, Bill Clinton can fool some of the people in the Middle East, some of the time…