Terror in the North, Nabil Shaath, Accountability for Terror Attack in Jerusalem, Arafat Still in Power

Funding Terrrorism in Northern Israel?

The Attack

In the August 11 edition of the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, the leading military analyst Zev Schiff noted that the “Hezbollah uses anti-aircraft aimed to explode over Israeli communities and not hit Israeli planes,” and went on to say that “Hezbollah also set the shells fired from the cannon to detonate relatively low and thus increase the chances of casualties and damage.”

If you live in Israel’s northern Galilee like we used to, or if you have a son who serves in an IDF unit like we do now, then you know very well that attacks on Israel’s northern civilian communities have been going on for the past year and a half, and you know that a war is ensuing on Israel’s northern frontier – despite Israel’s hasty redeployment from Southern Lebanon three years ago.

So much for the illusion that Israel’s May 2000 redeployment to the 1949 armistice lines with Lebanon would facilitate international and even Lebanese recognition for Israel’s northern border and salve the appetite of Palestinian Arabs or Islamic fundamentalists to attack Israel.

The IDF spokesman’s computer recounts that 109 attacks occurred against Israel’s civilian communities in the North since January, 2002.

Such attacks portend a military campaign which Israel is ill prepared to cope with on Israel’s northern frontier. So much for the news reports over the past year and a half which gave the Israeli public the impression anti-aircraft fire was only being fired by Hezbollah against Israeli aircraft while the news media neglected to report that Israeli planes rarely fly over southern Lebanon.

Such myths were shattered when a Hezbollah missile decapitated a sixteen-year-old Israeli boy in the northern Israeli town of Shlomi yesterday.

The Context

Few people realize is that the lines which demarcate Israel and Lebanon are not “borders”; they are only “armistice lines” that Israel and Lebanon agreed to after the not-yet-resolved 1948 war, after the combined military forces Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia tried to eradicate the nascent State of Israel. The only border ever been defined between Israeli and a neighboring country is with Egypt.

The unresolved 1948 war simmers with Israel’s other neighboring countries who now host 4 million Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants who wallow in the squalor of UN Arab refugee camps, under the UN specious mandate of the “right of return” to 1948 Arab villages that no longer exist in present-day Israel.

The Cauldron

Nowhere does the UN Arab refugee camp issue fester with greater lethal capacity than in Lebanon, the only refugee “host” country that forbids their 320,000 Palestinian Arab refugees and descendants from working in more than 100 defined professions, while disenfranchising them from representation in the Lebanese parliament. UN refugee camps in Lebanon have become virtual military training camps for the Hezbollah and various factions of the PLO who use these UN facilities to train thousands of Arab refugees for their eventual crusade to retake northern Israel.

The Ein Hilwe UN refugee camp, some 70 kilometers from Israel, conducts daily military parades, with rival armed Palestinian Arab factions fighting for control of the camp. An aside: armed militias have been dispatched from Ein Hilwe over the last six months to conduct guerrilla warfare attacks against U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. The U.S. covers 30 percent of the budget for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, the agency which runs the UN Arab refugee camp in Ein Hilwe and the 58 other Arab refugee camps. The rest of UNRWA’s funding comes from 38 other western nations.

So there you have it. UNRWA stirs the cauldron of the “right of return,” while the forces of radical Islam energize the Palestinian Arab refugee population to prepare for the next battle to “liberate Palestine” – spearheaded by Hezbollah, armed and trained by Syria and Iran.

August 17, 2003

Shaath was correct: the “Road Map” is based on the Saudi initiative which endorses the “Right of Return”

Nabil Shaath, the Palestine National Authority (PNA) Foreign Minister led the news on the Israel Broadcasting Authority TV’s World News Hour

On Saturday Night, August 16th, when Shaath declared in a Beirut speech that the US-sponsored road map would mandate the right of Palestinian Arab refugees to return to villages from 1948 which have been replaced by cities, collective farms and woodlands in the present day the state of Israel. Surprisingly, Shaath was correct. All you have to do is to read the “road map” to know that The Saudi initiative, which supports the “right of return”, provides the basis for the Road Map.

If anyone doubts Shaath’s word, just read the official document which defines the road map, ” A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” which can be found at: http://www.un.org/media/main/roadmap122002.html.

The road map definition clearly states that the US sponsored road map is based on “the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah endorsed by the Beirut Arab League”

All this is in keeping with the Palestinian State Constitution, authored by the same Nabil Shaath and ratified on March 26th by the US- funded PLC, the Palestine Legislative Council. That constitution legislates the “right of return” for all Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents to return to the villages from 1948, even if they no longer exist

Thousands of maps recently issued and distributed by the Palestinian National Authority in Arabic and in English provide a clear guide for Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants to forcibly take back the 531 Arab villages lost in 1948 which have been replaced by Israeli cities, collective farms and woodlands.

Following Shaath’s appearance on IBA TV, IBA Radio was quick to report that Shaath had reversed his position on the “right of return” during the next speech that he delivered in Damascus in which Shaath reportedly said that the “right of return” was “open for negotiation”.

However, IMRA news agency (www.imra.org.il) publicized the press release of the official news organ of the PA,

The Palestine Media Center- (PMC), which issued an immediate press statement following Shaath’s clear declaration that the “right of return” was indeed the basis for the “road map”

In the words of the widely circulated PA press release, found at: http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=994, “The right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel or the territories the Jewish state occupied in 1967 was guaranteed under the US-sponsored “road map” for peace, “No condition has been set for a return (only) to an independent Palestinian state.

The right of return is no longer an illusion. It is an integral part of the Arab peace initiative, which is one of the reference points in the road map,” Shaath said, speaking at a hotel in the Lebanese capital Beirut, “I want to be clear: this right includes returning to an independent state and to Palestinian cities in the Jewish state. Whether a person returns to Haifa (Israel) or to Nablus (West Bank), their return is guaranteed,” he confirmed…The minister was referring to the Saudi initiative adopted by Arab League summit meeting in Beirut summit in March 2002″

Not that Israel does not object. However, Israel stands alone in its objection.

Shimon Shiffer, Senior Diplomatic Correspondent for Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper, reported on May 23, 2003, two days before the Israeli government ratified the road map that “The Americans rejected one of Israel’s central demands, which states that the Palestinian Arabs would agree to concede the right of return in return for Israel’s recognition of a Palestinian Arab state. They also rejected Israel’s demand to remove the Saudi proposal (a full withdrawal to the lines of June 4, 1967, recognition of the right of return, in return for the recognition of Israel by the Arab countries and normal relations) as one of the main sources of the road map’s authority”

Israel has requested that the US, Canada, the EU and the Scandinavian countries who are involved in Middle East negotiations issue a clear statement of opposition to the Arab demand for the “right of return”.

However, none of them will do so.

Checking with ranking diplomats from the US, Canadian, the EU and Scandanavia, I have discovered that all diplomatic missions in Israel, including the US, demand that Israel allow some refugees to return. They universally quote a recent Palestinian poll that “only 10%” of the Palestinian Arab refugees would want to return to their villages that they left in 1948.

Well, since UNRWA counts 3.9 million people who qualify as “Palestinian Arab refugees”, that would mean that Israel would have to absorb some 400,000 Arabs who would claim “their” homes and villages which are now in the heart of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa along with hundreds of Kibbutzim and Moshavim

Israel stands alone in its position that Arab refugees and their descendants have no legal or moral right to take back their villages from 1948.

However, the road map is based on precisely that presumption.

The people of Israel do not know that.

August 20, 2003

Road Map to Terror

Last night, at the precise moment that a bomb tore apart the bus en route from the Old City of Jerusalem, PA Prime Minister Abu Mazen was meeting with the heads of the Islamic Jihad — the same Islamic Jihad that claimed direct responsibility for that very bus bombing.

Abu Mazen’s spokespeople were open and candid about what took place in the meeting.

Abu Mazen was not asking the Islamic Jihad to disarm.

Abu Mazen, according to his spokesman, was “asking the Islamic Jihad to join the unified command of the Palestinian Authority.”

And yet the rationale for dealing with Abu Mazen was that his security forces would crush Islamic terror organizations.

Almost ten years ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat and Abu Mazen on the White House lawn, most people in Israel and abroad expected that Arafat and Abu Mazen would form a new Arab entity to restrain the violent Moslem movements known as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

That was the rationale behind what later became known as the Oslo Peace Process, wherein Israel was expected to cede land for a new Palestinian Arab entity, while Arafat’s PLO was expected to fight Islamic terror groups that continued to threaten the lives of Jews in Israel.

Yet, from day one, the opposite occurred: instead of cracking down on Hamas, the PA created an alliance with them.

Indeed, when I covered the Nobel Peace Prize news conference in Oslo in December, 1994, Israeli leaders Rabin and Peres conducted a press conference to state emphatically that their reason for making a peace deal with Arafat and Abu Mazen was that they had received a solid commitment from them to “crush the Hamas.”

I waited for Arafat and Abu Mazen for their press conference. I asked them if they would indeed fill the expectations of Rabin and Peres to “crush the Hamas.” Arafat and Abu Mazen were surprised by the question. Arafat laughed. Abu Mazen smirked.

Arafat’s answer was clear and precise: “The Hamas are my brothers. I will handle them in my own way.”

Arafat said that in front of more than 200 reporters who were transmitting news reports to thousands of media outlets around the world, not one of whom reported what Arafat said or how Arafat laughed at the very thought that he should be expected to “crush” terrorists.

And only three weeks after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, when the PLO celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in January 1995, Arafat delivered a series of lectures to his own people in Gaza and Jericho, praising suicide bombers and refusing to condemn the spate of Hamas terror attacks. These attacks had taken place at the time Arafat’s speeches of praise for Hamas were televised by the new Palestinian TV network, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, which is owned, controlled and operated by the Palestinian Authority and administered by Abu Mazen.

Video cassettes of Arafat’s harangues became popular in the Palestinian Arab open market.

The Palestinian Authority’s strategy was best summed up by then U.S. Ambassador to Israel and presidential confidante Martin Indyk, who told the Los Angeles Times on March 2, 1996, that the PA had decided to co-opt, rather than to fight, Hamas. The PA’s co-option of the Islamic terror groups had manifest itself in deeds.

On May 9, 1995, out news agency dispatched a Palestinian journalist to cover the Gaza press conference held by the PA Gaza police chief Ghazzi Jabali, in which the representatives the of the Palestine Authority officially announced that they would license weapons for the Hamas – this, only one month after Hamas had carried out an attack on an Israeli civilian bus near Gaza, killing six young Israelis and one American student (Aliza Flatow, R.I.P.).

At Jabali’s packed press conference, carried live on PBC radio, Jabali announced that Hamas leaders such as Dr. Muhammed Zahar – who was present at the meeting – would be “encouraged” to own weapons under the protection of the Palestine Authority. On the same day, our Palestinian TV crew filmed an armed Zahar addressing an angry mob in Gaza. Zahar’s speech called for the bloody overthrow of the State of Israel, as he stood in front of a skull and crossbones imposed on a map of Israel.

However, PA police chief Jabali would later assure the Associated Press on May 14, 1995, that he was expecting Hamas and Islamic Jihad to keep their licensed weapons “at home.”

In late October 1995, shortly before Rabin’s assassination, I asked Rabin at a public forum about the PA decision to provide weapons to Hamas. Rabin acknowledged that this practice existed and quipped, dead-pan, “Maybe they’re for peace, too.”

In other words, for the past eight years both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have operated with weapons licensed by the PA.

Any call for the PA to remove illegal weapons would not include the weapons issued to the Islamic terror groups by the Palestinian Authority

All levels of Abu Mazen’s security forces acknowledge that they have recruited radical Islamics to join forces with them.

The formal PA alliance with Hamas was exposed and hardly noticed when the semi-official Egyptian newspaper Al Aharam broke the story of the formal PLO-Hamas accord between the two organizations on December 15, 1995, in Cairo. As a direct result of that deal, the all important PA communications ministry was offered to Hamas leader Imad Falluci.

That accord allowed Hamas to conduct attacks in areas of “Palestine” that “had not yet been liberated.” PLO General Secretary Marwan Barghouti, justifying a Hamas attack at a bus stop on the outskirts of Netanya, explained that the PLO could not condemn such an act since that territory was “not yet liberated” by the PLO.

And on each occasion when the PA was asked to “crack down” on these Islamic groups that took credit for fatal terror bombs against Israel, the PA instead ordered mass roundups which only resulted in mass confessions followed by mass release of prisoners.

In 37 documented instances between 1994 and 2000, the Palestine Authority offered asylum to Hamas and Islamic Jihad members who murdered Israelis and took refuge in the new safe havens of Palestinian Arab cities that were protected by the PA security services.

Under pressure from Israel and Western countries, Arafat eventually did arrest 22 Hamas members who had been involved in bus bombings throughout Israel between 1994 and 1996 – all of whom were released when the current war broke out in September 2000.

A case in point: Muhammad Deif roams Gaza freely, fully armed and at liberty. Deif is the admitted Hamas mastermind of the October 1994, kidnapping and killing of Nachshon Wachsman, the 19-year-old American Israeli. When I asked the commander of the Palestine Liberation Army about Deif, he told me that he was under direct orders from Yasser Arafat not to touch Deif.

This,despite the fact that U.S. President Bill Clinton declared at Nachshon Wachsman’s grave in March 1996, that Israel should not continue any negotiating process with the Palestine Authority until and unless the PA hands over Deif to stand trial.

Many close followers of the Middle East situation wrongly assume that the two entities – the PLO and Hamas – are in conflict, when in fact they closely coordinate every move under the administrative framework of the Palestinian National Authority, the Palestinian state-in-the-making.

Meanwhile, our news agency has obtained a copy of the PNA-approved Constitution of the new Palestinian state, jointly agreed upon by the PLO and Hamas. That document, whose cover page thanks UNESCO and the Italian government for funding its law committee, declares that Islam will be the state religion of Palestine, that its borders will encompass all of Palestine – not just the West Bank and Gaza – and that no other religion will have any status in the future Palestinian state.

And where did we obtain from the PA State Constitution? Not from Israeli intelligence.

We covered a briefing for Congressmen provided by the Papal Nuncio, the Pope’s Ambassador, Msgr. Pietro Sambi, who presented the PA state Constitution as the “framework for a totalitarian Islamic terror state.”

In other words, the Hamas/Islamic jihad ideology will become the philosophy of the Palestinian State in the making.

An unwritten rule exists in the media – even in the Israeli press – to downplay the undeniable evidence of a PLO-Islamic alliance and their confluence of objectives. This is a denial of the cruel reality on the ground. They are in fact one entity with a single aim: the annihilation of the Jewish state in the Middle East.

I cannot forget Arafat’s laugh or Abu Mazen’s smirk in Oslo.

August 21, 2003

Rejoicing Over Jewish Blood

Mainstream media outlets are reporting that Abu Mazen condemns the August 19th bus Arab terror massacre, conveying the impression that the PA condemns the massacre.

However, most significantly, the Arabic language official Palestinian Authority Radio, Palestinian Authority TV and Palestinian Authority newspapers did not carry any real condemnation from Abu Mazen or any other official from the Palestinian Authority yesterday.

Dr. Michael Widlanski, who recently completed his Ph.D. on the subject of the Palestinian Authority media, and who was formerly a reporter for the Israel bureau of The New York Times and the bureau chief of The Atlanta Constitution, listened to and recorded the radio newscasts of the PA radio station on the day following the bus massacre.

The PA radio anchor led newscasts throughout the day by saying that “The Israelis are describing yesterday’s operation as a terrorist attack.” He then went on with other news of the day.

Dr. Aaron Lerner, the director of IMRA news agency, www.imra.org.il, asked Dr. Widlanski to comment on the reaction of the PA to the bus bombing yesterday in Jerusalem. The following are his observations: “If the Palestinian Authority, or as they term themselves, the Palestinian leadership, had any intention to convey a message of real condemnation of these attacks, they would call them attacks.”

The bombing of the bus yesterday is universally termed in the Palestinian press “amaliyya al Quds” – “the Jerusalem operation,” rather than as an “attack” or a “terroristic attack.” By the way, the “peace process” is also termed the “peace operation” by the Palestinian media.

The “condemnation” broadcast by Voice of Palestine radio never condemned the perpetrators. Interestingly, the reports all act as if the identity of the attacker is not known.

It should also be noted that the reports did not begin with the news of the attack and its “condemnation”. They opened with comments about the “horrible” things that the Israelis were doing (i.e. the “racist fence”). And yesterday morning the top story was the Israelis “invading” the Temple Mount.

Voice of Palestine also ran very cheerful music after the bus attack – as they did after the recent Rosh Ha’ayin/Ariel attacks. It was unusually light music – as they would play on a holiday.

Meanwhile, Al Quds, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, also ran an interesting editorial cartoon – two colored star bursts going off before cameras labeled Baghdad and Jerusalem.”

The time has come for the press to learn from the mistakes of the Oslo process.

For almost a decade, the media has tended to mislead the public by ignoring the Arabic language broadcasts and telecasts of the official Palestinian Authority media, whose radio news content is directly controlled by Arafat and Abu Mazen.

Even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency fell into the trap, when the JTA”s Gil Sedan reported in his dispatch of August 20th that Abu Mazen “vehemently condemned the bombing, [and] reportedly ordered PA security services to arrest those responsible.” Sedan, who knows Arabic, could very easily have checked with the Arabic language PA TV, PA radio and PA newspapers, where he would have heard an entirely different message from the Palestinian Authority.

What a totalitarian entity communicates for foreign consumption means very little. What matters is what that entity communicates to its own people in its own language and in its own media.

And what the PA is communicating bodes a dangerous future for innocent Israelis.

August 23, þ2003

Does Powell Contravene Bush’s Policy to Keep Arafat in Power?

Ever since President George W. Bush decided more than a year ago to deepen his involvement in the middle east quagmire, it had been the policy of the Bush administration to implement some kind of “modus vivendi” without Yassir Arafat.

It had been the adamant Bush policy to do everything possible to ignore Arafat, to weaken Arafat, and to coordinate a policy with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of making Arafat into an “irrelevant” figure in the middle east negotiation process.

And yet every step of the way in which Abu Mazen has been brought into the picture, Arafat and Abu Mazen have both made it quite clear that so long as Arafat is around, he will most certainly be running the PLO ship.

Indeed, when Abu Mazen appeared before the US House International Relations Committee on July 24, 2003, the first question of Middle East Subcommittee Chairperson Ileana Ros-Leighten was very simple:

“What is your relationship to Arafat”?, to which Abu Mazen answered in clear, simple terms: “Arafat sent me. I am the representative of Yassir Arafat”.

It was as if Abu Mazen had expressed a Lincolnesque version of the statement that “you can fool some of the people some of the time”.

The masquerade of the US foreign policy supposedly ignoring Arafat came to an end after the August 19th Arab terror massacre in Jerusalem, in which twenty Jewish men, women and children were murdered.

All of a sudden, US Secretary of State Colin Powell Suddenly Recognized Arafat’s Permanent Control of Palestinian Security Forces, when Powell made a statement at the UN on August 21st that “I call on Chairman Arafat to work with Prime Minister Abbas and to make available to Prime Minister Abbas those security elements that are under his control”. As Israeli media analyst Dr. Aaron Lerner noted, Powell made it a point to use the term s “make available” – not “transfer” and that Powell, speaking to the press with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan standing next to him, publicly dropped the key precondition of America’s launching of the road map (that Arafat is essentially out of the picture) and a key element of the Roadmap (that there not be different Palestinian security forces)”. See: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/23452.htm

In other words, Arafat isn’t out – Mr. Powell recognizes he is very much holding considerable power.

The existence of security forces beholden to Arafat isn’t put to an end – Mr. Powell recognizes that Arafat continues to have “security elements… under his control” and only wants that Arafat be so kind and generous as to make his forces “available to Prime Minister Abbas”, much as the United States wants many nations to make available forces to the American lead coalition in Iraq”.

And to further pour salt on the wound, Powell went so far as to compare those who opposed a PLO state with those who conducted acts of heinous murder, concluding his remarks by saying that “The alternative is what? Just more death and destruction? Let the terrorists win? Let those who have no interest in a Palestinian state win? Let those who have no interest but killing innocent people win? No. That is not an acceptable outcome.”

However, there is no PLO leadership that is in any way interested in breaking decisively with terrorism.

There are no signs that Abbas and Dahlan are capable of fighting terror. And now that Powell has revived Arafat as the real and present PLO leader who carries all power, this will dash any Palestinian, Israeli, and American hopes that this is the “new leadership, not compromised by terror” that President George W. Bush spoke of in June of last year.

We will know that a Palestinian Arab leadership has arisen that truly wishes to live by Israel’s side when that leadership forcibly confronts those who do not. The idea that Arabs who are willing to die to kill Israeli children can be sweetly talked out of their beliefs is not credible.

The Palestinian Arab people must choose if they want a state or unity under a banner of terror.

Tragically, US Sec’y of State Powell has chosen to reinforce Arafat, the symbol of the Palestinian Arab people who supports that “unity under a banner of terror”.

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Arafat has never left his leadership role will never voluntarily do so.

Only last month, the Palestinian Authority Elections Commission announced that there would be only one candidate for president of the nascent Palestinian State: Yassir Arafat.

Meanwhile, the PA State Constitution, adopted by the Palestinian Legislative Council, places all powers in the Palestinian State President, not in their Prime Minister.

The US Sec’y of State does not know that?

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

The question remains: Why does the US State Department help Arafat stay in power?

More important: Since the US Constitution mandates that the Congress must advise and consent the US Administration in matters of foreign policy, has Congress mandated that the US Secretary of State Colin Powell to keep Arafat in power?

Time will tell.