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Tears don’t protect against murder. Bullets do.

by Speranza ( 205 Comments › )
Filed under Fatah, Germany, Hamas, History, Israel, Palestinians at April 18th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

The way to stop terrorism is to exterminate the terrorists, a fact that should be manifest to all except the blinkered ideologues who prefer “dialog”.

by Daniel Greenfield

After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities.

They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder.

While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.

The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attacks were followed by raids on the mansions and apartments of top Fatah officials in the same city where Pohl had found temporary refuge. By the time his first book was published, hundreds of PLO terrorists and officials were dead.
European law enforcement had failed to hold even the actual perpetrators of the Munich Massacre responsible, never mind the representatives of the PLO who openly mingled with red radicals in its capitals. Israeli operatives did what the German judicial system had failed to do, putting down Safady and one of the Al-Gasheys, while the other one hid out with Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

The Israeli raid on the PLO terrorists in Beirut’s Muslim Quarter missed one important target. Arafat. And so, on another September day, some 19 years later, September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook hands with Arafat and proclaimed, “Enough of blood and tears! Enough!” But the blood and tears had only begun, as a PLO on its last legs was revived and built its terrorist infrastructure inside Israel’s borders.

[..........]

Today, some 40 years after that September in Munich and 19 years after the even worse tragedy of that September (1993) in Washington D.C., with over 1,500 dead since that fatal handshake, there have been rivers of blood and tears. And a shortage of bullets.

PLO officials these days are more likely to die of morbid obesity or, like Arafat, of AIDS, than of Israeli raids. They are nearly as likely to kill each other, like Arafat’s cousin, Moussa Arafat, the former head of the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist forces, who was dragged out of his home and shot by his own people. The murder of Mohammed Abu Shaaban, killed a week after the handshake, by his own people, was the first of a long string of Fatah on Fatah violence that is a far more likely cause of death for top terrorists than the jet planes and tanks of the hated Zionist regime.

The rivers of tears keep flowing, but tears don’t protect against murder. Neither do peace treaties. No amount of tears from the tens of thousands mutilated, tortured, crippled, wounded, orphaned and widowed by the PLO in all its front groups, splinter groups and incarnations, including its current incarnation as a phony government, has been enough to stop Western governments from supporting, arming and funding the terrorists.

Tears don’t protect against murder. They don’t stop killers from killing. They don’t prevent the authorities from looking the other way when the killings happen because there is something in it for them. They don’t bring the terrorists to justice. [.........]

Tears did not stop the operation of a single gas chamber. They did not save the life of a single Jewish refugee. [.......] They will not stop Israel from being carved up by terrorists whose demands are backed up by the diplomatic capital of every nation that bows its head in the direction of Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, and the old men who control the oil wells and the mosques.

In 1988, Willi Pohl published another book, Das Gesetz des Dschungels or The Law of the Jungle. That same year, PLO terrorists carried out the “Mother’s Bus Attack” taking the passengers of a bus, filled with women on board, hostage and demanding the release of all imprisoned terrorists. The terrorists killed two hostages and Israeli Special Forces moved in, killing the terrorists and saving the lives of all but one hostage.

In response, Israeli commandos stormed Tunis, killing Abu Jihad, a former Muslim Brotherhood member and the number two Fatah leader after Arafat . The United Nations Security Council met and passed Resolution 611, noting with concern the “loss of human life”, particularly that of Abu Jihad, and vigorously condemned the “act of aggression”, Not a single member of the Security Council voted against it. The United States abstained.

Not one single resolution was passed that year or the year afterward or the year after that condemning a terrorist attack against Israel or criticizing any of the countries that trained, armed and harbored the terrorists. Instead there were numerous resolutions condemning Israel for expelling and deporting terrorists. The closest thing to a resolution critical of terrorism was Resolution 579 in response to the Achille Lauro hijacking, carried out by men loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the current President of the Palestinian Authority, who also provided the funding for the Munich Massacre. Resolution 579 did not mention the Achille Lauro, Leon Klinghoffer or Palestinian Arab terrorists. Instead it condemned “hostage-taking” in general.

In 1972, the year of the Munich Massacre, there were three Security Council resolutions condemning Israel. Not a single one condemning the massacre of Olympic athletes at an international event. [........]

This was the law of the jungle disguised as international law. Against the law of the jungle, tears are futile. Jungle law cannot be debated away or subdued with the speechifying of an Abba Eban or a Benjamin Netanyahu. It cannot be moralized into decency or signed away with peace treaties. It can only be met with resistance.

Tears don’t protect against murder. Bullets do.

Read the rest – Tears don’t protect against murder

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Fatah, Germany, Hamas, History, Israel, Palestinians | 205 Comments »

Crisis of the universities: why are colleges hotbeds of anti-Semitism, and what can be done?

by 1389AD ( 63 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Fatah, Islamic Invasion, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians at March 13th, 2013 - 8:00 am

On YouTube:

Published on Feb 25, 2013 by Pajamasmedia

Allen West interviews investigative journalist and Israeli activist Lee Kaplan about anti-Semitism at American universities. Why is this happening? What can be done about it? And is the political left uniting with the Islamists on campus? Find out in this interesting conversation.

Also see:

Tags: LTC. Allen West
Posted in Anti-semitism, Fatah, Islamic Invasion, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians | 63 Comments »

Forty years ago this month – What were Arafat’s rewards for ordering the deaths of American diplomats in Khartoum?

by Speranza ( 128 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, Fatah, History, Middle East, Sudan and South Sudan, United Nations at March 4th, 2013 - 4:00 pm

As the author states – what Arafat received for being directly responsible for the March 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum was “Only fame, fortune, dozens of trips to the White House, and a Nobel Peace Prize.” Henry Kissinger was an amoral man and the U.S. State Department far from being an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Ministry is a subsidiary of the House of Saud. Interesting that charge George Curtis Moore of the American Embassy in Khartoum who was murdered by the Palestnians, was an anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian careerist! The similarities between Khartoum in March 1973 and Benghazi in October 2012 are striking.

by Andrew Wilson

History is sometimes made in the unmaking — with some of the critical facts in an appalling event being hurriedly and knowingly swept under a rug like so many pieces of broken glass. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of such an event in the making and masking of history.

In the early evening of March 1, 1973 (like today, a Friday), eight gunmen from the Black September Organization — the same terrorist group which had created havoc six months earlier at the 1972 Munich Olympics — stormed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum where a going-away party was being held for George Curtis Moore, second-ranking officer at the U.S. embassy in the Sudan.

Following an initial burst of gunfire, they took five hostages — a Belgian, a Saudi, a Jordanian, and two Americans — Moore and Cleo Allen Noel, Jr., the newly appointed American ambassador to the Sudan.

Twenty-six hours of intense negotiations followed between the gunmen and Sudanese authorities. The gunmen sent out a long list of provocative demands, which included the freeing from Jordanian captivity of Abu Daoud, a leader of the Black September Organization (BSO); the freeing of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s killer, from a California prison; the freeing of members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang held in Germany; and the freeing of “Palestinian women in prison in Israel.”

[......]

Later that day, after nightfall, the terrorists executed the three westerners — Noel, Moore, and Guy Eid, chargé d’affaires at the Belgian embassy. They were lined up against a wall in the basement of the embassy and gunned down in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Reportedly, the gunmen shot first for sport — aiming at their feet and legs — before aiming to kill.

Ironically, far from condemning the PLO, Moore held strongly pro-Arab, anti-Israeli views — believing that “the Arabs had legitimate grievances and were, in general, more wronged by Israel than wrong-doing against it.” Arab terrorists have often targeted the most pro-Arab Americans — as witness the recent slaying of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

Like the slayings of Stevens and three other Americans on the night of September 11/12, 2012, the assassination of Moore and Ambassador Noel was front-page news in the United States for a week or more.

What was missing then (as in the more recent catastrophe) was an honest account from the U.S. government of what happened.

It was not until the release of the summary portion of a long-classified U.S. State Department document in May 2006 that the real truth emerged. Written soon after the event, this document — entitled “The Seizure of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum” — reached the unambiguous conclusion:

The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

Initially, the main objective of the attack appeared to be to secure the release of Fatah / BSO leader Mohammed Awadh (Abu Daoud) from Jordanian captivity. Information acquired subsequently reveals that the Fatah/BSO leaders did not expect Awadh (Daoud) to be freed, and indicates that one of the primary goals of the operation was to strike at the United States because of its efforts to achieve a Middle East peace settlement which many Arabs believe would be inimical to Palestinian interests.

… The terrorists extended their deadlines three times, but when they became convinced that their demands would not be met and after they reportedly had received orders from Fatah headquarters in Beirut, they killed the two United States officials and the Belgian chargé. Thirty-four hours later, upon receipt of orders from Yasser Arafat in Beirut to surrender, the terrorists released their other hostages unharmed and surrendered to Sudanese authorities.

The Khartoum operation again demonstrated the ability of the BSO to strike where least expected. The open participation of Fatah representatives in Khartoum in the attack provides further evidence of the Fatah / BSO relationship. The emergence of the United States as a primary Fedayeen target indicates a serious threat of further incidents similar to that of Khartoum.

Despite the certain knowledge of his guilt displayed in the long-hidden U.S. State Department document, Arafat went from strength to strength following the murders that he had ordered in Khartoum — and he did so with the tacit support of President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser (and soon-to-be Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger. That set the pattern for three decades to come, or until Arafat’s death on Nov. 11, 2004:

With little dissent, the PLO leader was lionized by most of the world media as an Arab “Moses” struggling to lead his people to the promised land. He became a welcome guest in presidential palaces and residences around the world — most especially including the White House. Time magazine called Arafat the Clinton administration’s “Most Frequent Visitor — President Clinton has held more tete-a-tetes with the Palestinian leader than any other world leader during his eight years in office.” Arafat also became a near-billionaire (according to his former finance minister, more than $900 million of western aid money had gone missing) — cited by Forbes magazine as one of the world’s wealthiest leaders.

Neither Nixon (then up to his neck in alligators as a result of the Watergate scandal) nor the ever ambitious and opportunistic Kissinger ever came close to denouncing Arafat for his role in ordering the execution of U.S. diplomats. [........]

Later on in 1973, as Kissinger became secretary of state as well as national security adviser, he was obviously keen to keep open all channels of communication with the Arab world, including relations with Arafat — both because of the Yom Kipper War and, tied to that, the OPEC oil embargo, which soon caused gas prices in the U.S. to skyrocket and the U.S. to tumble into what was then the worst recession in post-World War II history. As the world’s biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia was one of Arafat’s strongest supporters.

Arafat made his first visit to the United States (an event that could not have happened without State Department approval) in November of 1974, and he made the most of it — in terms of thumbing his nose at the U.S.

Wearing a sidearm (or at least an empty holster; stories vary) and accompanied by several of the participants in the Khartoum operation, Arafat made his famous debut at the United Nations in New York on November 13 — using the occasion to denounce Zionism as racism.

[.........]

In May 1974, Palestinian terrorists entered Israel from Lebanon and took over a high school in the town of Maalot, six miles south of border — killing 22 children (mostly 15-year-old girls) with grenades and automatic weapons and injuring many more. Another similar attack a month earlier killed 18 people in the town of Kiryat Shmona.

THERE WAS AT LEAST ONE person who was intimately involved in tracking the events in Khartoum who was outraged by the decades-long cover-up that followed. His name is James J. Welsh and he contacted me after reading a recent article of mine in TAS entitled “Obama Fiddled … While Benghazi burned … and a U.S. election approached.”

[......] Welsh still seethes with indignation over what happened inside the Nixon administration over that lost weekend of 40 years ago.

In achieving a top security clearance as a result of his knowledge of Arabic and his skill as a communications technician, Welsh served in the U.S. Navy as a foreign language specialist assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept and analyze foreign radio transmissions in the Middle East.

From 1969 to 1972 he worked at an intercept site just outside of Nicosia, Cyprus, and from then until 1974 he worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade near Washington, D.C. — supporting his old colleagues back in Cyprus and elsewhere in the Middle East.

In a series of interviews lasting over eight hours, Welsh told me this story of what happened between Thursday, Feb. 28 — the day before the takeover of the Saudi Embassy — and Monday, March 4, when different agencies in the U.S. government were just beginning to take stock of Saturday night’s disaster in Khartoum.

This is the first part of his story:

Late in the morning on Thursday, the teletype machine at his office at NSA headquarters clattered with the receipt of a printed message from an old colleague at the listening post in Cyprus.

“This is Mike,” the message said.

“What’s up?” Welsh tapped back in reply.

“I’ve got an intercept of Arafat in Beirut talking to Abu Jihad (a top Black September operative) in Khartoum, and it looks big,” Mike answered, saying that he was able to recognize Arafat’s voice.

As their typed conversation continued, Welsh learned that eight members of BSO — the same number of terrorists who had been dispatched in 1972 to go to Munich — had assembled in Khartoum and were awaiting Arafat’s instructions on when to strike at the target (still unknown to the NSA).

When he had gathered all he could from ‘Mike,’ Welsh tore the paper from the machine and took it to his supervisor. The information was passed immediately through the chain of command at NSA. Before the end of the working day, Welsh and others at the agency sent out a Flash (top priority) message to the U.S. Embassy Khartoum via the State Department, as required by inter-agency protocol, warning the embassy of the imminent danger of an assault from Black September.

Knowing he had the next day off, Welsh went to bed that night feeling that intercepted communication might have come just in time to avert a disaster.

[........] Welsh received an urgent call the next morning telling him to “turn on the television set” — and then get back to the office asap. The television news was all about the capture of the U.S. diplomats in Khartoum by same terrorist organization that had captured and eventually killed 11 members of the Israeli team at the summer Olympics in Munich.

Inexplicably, it turned out that a watch officer at the State Department had downgraded the NSA message to the embassy in Khartoum from the highest urgency to a routine cable. [.......]

On Monday morning, Welsh said, “the buzz at the NSA” was that the agency’s director (Gen. Samuel C. Phillips) had headed over to the State Department “steaming mad” about the department’s failure to do its job in sounding the alarm in a timely fashion.

But upon the general’s return, Welsh and others in the agency were shocked to hear their director had come back from the State Department in a morose and chastened state. Said Welsh: “The word came down that whatever happened to squelch the warning, that issue was over: We’re not going to talk about it anymore.”

When Welsh suggested to a supervisor that it would be worth taking the issue to Congress, he was told that if he (as a naval enlisted man) dared to suggest any such thing again, he would be put out to sea on “a fleet oiler.” Translation: He would lose his top secret clearance and be sent back to the navy doing the most menial of tasks, such as throwing fuel lines from one ship to another.

[........] He thought to himself: “Am I supposed to believe that everything I heard the day before the attack was a total fantasy — and, coincidentally, it all just turned out to be true?” To this day, the tape has never surfaced.

Returning to civilian life a year later, he stayed silent for 27 years. But in seeing Arafat reach something of an apotheosis during Clinton’s administration, he found he no longer hold his tongue.

In interviews with sympathetic segments of the news media (such as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz) and in letters to Congress, Welsh denounced the failure on the part of successive U.S. administrations to acknowledge the truth about Arafat. He told one reporter: [.........]

Today he notes two overriding similarities between the tragic events in Benghazi and Khartoum.

One is the simple fact of a State Department and White House cover-up driven by political considerations and the desire to hide mistakes.

And, in his words, the second is “the whole continuing idea that the Palestinians and Arabs have to be given a pass on everything they do — no matter how bad it is — just because they are such poor victims.”

Read the rest – What did Arafat get for killing U.S. diplomats?

Tags: Andrew B. Wilson, Black September, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat
Posted in Cold War, Fatah, History, Middle East, Sudan and South Sudan, United Nations | 128 Comments »

The four horesemen of the American foreign policy apocalypse

by Speranza ( 101 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Cold War, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Hezballah, History, Iran, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Syria at January 14th, 2013 - 7:00 am

Barack Obama as president, John Kerry as Secretary of State, Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, and John Brennan as C.I.A. chief, Barry Rubin thinks that John Brennan wins the prize as being the worst of the four. You can take your pick but as the cliche goes, the fish stinks from the head down. I wish Susan Rice did not withdraw her candidacy for Secretary of State.

by Barry Rubin

I did a lot of soul-searching before writing my latest article, “After the Fall: What Do You Do When You Conclude America is (Temporarily or Permanently) Kaput?” Of course, I believed every word of it and have done so for a while. But would it depress readers too much? Would it just be too grim?Maybe U.S. policy will just muddle through the next four years and beyond without any disasters. Perhaps the world will be spared big crises. Possibly the fact that there isn’t some single big superpower enemy seeking world domination will keep things contained.Perhaps that is true. Yet within hours after its publication I concluded that I hadn’t been too pessimistic. The cause of that reaction is the breaking story that not only will Senator John Kerry be the new secretary of state; that not only will the equally reprehensible former Senator Chuck Hagel be secretary of defense, but that John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism advisor, will become CIA chief.

About two years ago I joked that if Kerry would become secretary of state it was time to think about heading for that fallout shelter in New Zealand. This trio in power—which along with Obama himself could be called the four horseman of the Apocalypse for U.S. foreign policy—might require an inter-stellar journey.[.......]

You can read elsewhere details about these three guys. Here I will merely summarize the two basic problems:

–Their ideas and views are horrible. This is especially so on Middle Eastern issues but how good are they on anything else? [.......] Far worse is that they are pro-Islamist as well as being dim-witted about U.S. interests in a way no foreign policy team has been in the century since America walked onto the world stage.Brennan is no less than the father of the pro-Islamist policy. What Obama is saying is this: My policy of backing Islamists has worked so well, including in Egypt, that we need to do even more! All those analogies to 1930s’ appeasement are an understatement. Nobody in the British leadership said, “I have a great idea. Let’s help fascist regimes take power and then they’ll be our friends and become more moderate! [.......]

–They are all stupid people. Some friends said I shouldn’t write this because it is a subjective judgment and sounds mean-spirited. But honest, it’s true. Nobody would ever say that their predecessors—Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and David Petraeus—were not intelligent and accomplished. But these guys are simply not in that category. Smart people can make bad judgments; regular people with common sense often make bad judgments less often. But stupid, arrogant people with terrible ideas are a disaster.

Brennan’s only life accomplishment has been to propose backing radical Islamists. As a reward he isn’t just being made head of intelligence for the Middle East but for the whole world! [.......] All he has is a proximity to Obama and a very bad policy concept. What’s especially ironic here is that by now the Islamist policy has clearly failed and a lot of people are having second thoughts.

With Brennan running the CIA, though, do you think there will be critical intelligence evaluations of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, or even Hamas? [.......] Can we have confidence about U.S. policy toward Iran?

To get some insight into his thinking, consider the incident in which a left-wing reporter, forgetting there were people listening, reminded Brennan that in an earlier private conversation he admitted favoring engagement not only with the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah but also the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. [........]

Kerry, of course, was the most energetic backer of sponsoring Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad before the revolt began. Now he will be the most energetic backer of putting the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Syria. Here is a man who once generalized about American soldiers in Vietnam as being baby-killers and torturers. Such things certainly happened but Kerry made the blame collective, except for himself of course.As for Hagel, suffice it to say that the embarrassing quotes and actions from him in the past–including his opposition to sanctions against Iran–fueled a response to his proposed nomination so strong that the administration had to back down for a while.

What would have happened if President Harry Truman turned over American defense, diplomacy, and intelligence in 1946 to those who said that Stalin wanted peace and that Communist rule in Central Europe was a good thing?

[.......]

I apologize for being so pessimistic but look at the cast of characters? When it comes to Obama Administration foreign policy’s damage on the world and on U.S. interests one can only say, like the great singer Al Jolson, folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To get a sense of his thinking, check out Brennan’s article, [.......] Here’s the conclusion:

“If the United States actually demonstrates that it will work to help advance rather than thwart Iranian interests, the course of Iranian politics as well as the future of U.S.-Iranian relations could be forever altered.”

The Obama Administration followed this advice during its first two years with the result being total failure. The theme of the 2008 article carries over to his view of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the United States shows it is friendly, helpful, and does not oppose their taking power then revolutionary Islamists will become moderate.

For example, he also proposes a U.S. policy, “to tolerate, and even to encourage, greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system….” This step, he suggests, will reduce “the influence of violent extremists in the organization.”

Of course, Hizballah does not need to stage terrorist attacks if it holds state power! Terrorism is only a tactic to seize control of countries. [.......] Yet putting them in power does not increase stability, improve the lives of people, or benefit U.S. interests. If al-Qaeda, for example, overthrew the Iraqi or Saudi government you would see a sharp decline in terrorist attacks! If the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt, Tunisia, or Syria it doesn’t need to send suicide bombers into the marketplaces.

The same by the way would apply to anywhere else in the world. If Communist rebels took power in Latin American or Asian countries you wouldn’t find them hanging out in the jungles raiding isolated villages.In Brennan’s terms, that means the problem would be solved. Instead, the correct response is parallel to Winston Churchill’s point in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri, speech: “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.”

This is what Brennan—and the Obama Administration—fails to understand regarding this point. The danger is not terrorism but a dangerous revolutionary movement that becomes even more dangerous if it controls entire states, their resources, and their military forces.

Read the rest - Noxious nominations: the four horsemen of the American foreign policy apocalypse

Tags: Barry Rubin, Chuck Hagel, John Brennan, John Kerry
Posted in Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Cold War, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Hezballah, History, Iran, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Syria | 101 Comments »

‘Absolutely no way’ Arafat was poisoned – however he is still dead

by Speranza ( 122 Comments › )
Filed under Fatah, France, Israel, Palestinians at November 15th, 2012 - 8:00 am

All that matters is that he is still dead.

Paris- A leading French doctor who teaches at the Paris hospital where Yasser Arafat died in 2004 has broken the official French medical silence surrounding the case to tell The Times of Israel, based on Arafat’s medical report, that there is “absolutely no way” the Palestinian leader was poisoned.

Dr. Roland Masse, a member of the prestigious Académie de Médecine who currently teaches radiopathology at Percy Military Training Hospital in the Paris suburb of Clamart, where Arafat was hospitalized two weeks before his death on November 11 eight years ago, spoke to The Times of Israel to scotch the allegations of polonium poisoning two weeks before a group of scientists are set to take samples for testing from Arafat’s body.

Masse said the symptoms of polonium poisoning would have been “impossible to miss,” noted that Percy had tested Arafat for radiation poisoning, and revealed that the hospital specializes in the related field of radiation detection. “A lethal level of polonium simply cannot go unnoticed,” he said, speaking as workers in Ramallah on Tuesday began the process of preparing Arafat’s grave for exhumation.

Dr. Thierry Revel, the head of the Hematology Department at Percy who signed the medical report on November 14, 2004, has refused to comment on the case. Indeed, medical confidentiality laws prevent doctors in France from divulging any information on their current or past patients. It was Arafat’s family that chose to make public the late Palestinian leader’s medical report; Al Jazeera, a Qatar-based news outlet, said in July that it had received the report from Arafat’s widow Suha.

In a telephone interview with The Times of Israel, Masse said flatly that “there is absolutely no way the symptoms described in Yasser Arafat’s medical report match those of poisoning by polonium.”

Masse elaborated: “When in contact with high levels of polonium, the body suffers from acute radiation which translates into a state of anemia and a severe decrease in white blood cells. And yet Arafat did not present any of those symptoms. What did decrease was his platelets, not his white blood cells,” said Masse, who may have been prepared to discuss the case because he does not treat patients at Percy, only teaching there. (He said the medical team at Percy would have had no need to consult with him, given their high level of expertise.)

Noting that radiation detection happens to be one of the areas in which Percy military hospital excels, Masse said that while Arafat’s medical report contains no specific reference to a test for polonium, it does specify that a number of tests were conducted to check if the patient had been subjected to radioactive substances.

Polonium-210, which Yasser Arafat’s widow Suha believes may have caused her husband’s death, is a rare chemical that became more familiar to the public a few years ago when it was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy, in London in 2006.

[............]

Masse was in charge of “national radioactivity supervision” in France in the 1990s — as head of the Office de Protection des Rayonnements Ionisants (OPRI — the Bureau for Protection against Ionizing Radiation), which worked under the authority of the French Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour to protect French citizens and the environment from the effects of ionizing radiation. In the job, he said, he received daily alerts about the presence of far lower levels of radioactive elements than would have been necessary to kill a man; these alerts came from waste collection sites, for example, and from people who had recently undergone medical treatments involving the application of radioactive substances.

Arafat was reported by his doctors in Ramallah to be suffering from flu in late October, 2004, and was treated by a team of Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Tunisian doctors for what were then described as symptoms of “anorexia, nausea and nasal congestion.” His condition deteriorated, and he was helicoptered to Jordan and then taken by French government jet to France and admitted to Percy.

On arrival, Arafat was diagnosed with “thrombocytopenia and persistent digestive problems,” according to his medical report. After a series of tests, the doctors specified that Arafat suffered from Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation (DIC), a blood disorder which leads to the formation of small blood clots throughout the body and can be the result of a number of diseases. Arafat’s health then rapidly deteriorated. He fell into a coma on November 3 and died eight days later.

In July, Al Jazeera claimed that tests carried out by the Institute of Radiation Physics at the University of Lausanne had found traces of polonium on Arafat’s belongings in quantities much higher than could occur naturally. A spokesman for the institute, however, said “conclusions could not be drawn as to whether the Palestinian leader was poisoned or not.”

[...........]

On Tuesday, Palestinian sources said, two weeks of work to open Arafat’s grave began, with the removal of “concrete and stones from Arafat’s mausoleum,” according to AFP. “There are several phases,” the news agency quoted a Palestinian source saying. “It starts with the removal of stone and concrete and cutting the iron (framework) until they reach the soil that covers the body, which will not be removed until the arrival of the French prosecutors, Swiss experts and Russian investigators.”

[.........]

The French Ministry of Defense, which is responsible for the Percy hospital, told The Times of Israel that, given the formal complaint submitted by the Arafat family over the case, the ministry “cannot comment on the case due to confidentiality of investigation laws.”

Read the rest – ‘Absolutely no way Arafat was poisoned’, says top doctor who teaches at Paris hospital where Palestinian leader died

Tags: Yasser Arafat
Posted in Fatah, France, Israel, Palestinians | 122 Comments »

Libya, Jordan and Obama’s guiding lights

by Speranza ( 125 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Political Correctness at October 22nd, 2012 - 8:00 am

Obama is as they used to say about the Bourbon Kings of France, someone who “learns nothing and forgets everything”.

by Caroline Glick

The operational, intelligence and political fiascos that led to and followed the September 11 jihadist assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, all derive from the same problem. That problem is the failure of US President Barack Obama’s conceptual framework for understanding the Middle East.

The Islamic revolutionary wave sweeping across the Arab world has rent asunder the foundations of the US alliance system in the Middle East. But due to Obama’s ideological commitment to an anti-American conceptual framework for understanding Middle Eastern politics, his administration cannot see what is happening.

That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.

What Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing, discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his administration has purged the US federal government’s lexicon of all terms that are necessary to describe reality.

“Jihad,” “Islamist,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and similar phrases have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government officials has been outlawed.

The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”

According to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for committing a thought crime. He “portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way.” Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses across the US military educational system.

[..........]

Another failure, also deriving from Obama’s embrace of the anti-American and anti-Israel foreign policy narrative, is also wreaking havoc on the region. And like the conceptual failure that led to the murderous attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, this conceptual failure will also come back to haunt America.

This second false conceptual framework argues that the root of instability in the region is the absence of formal treaties of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It claims that the way to pacify the radical regional forces is to pressure Israel to make concessions in land and legitimacy to its neighbors.

Obama is not unique for his embrace of this conceptual framework for US Middle East policy. He is just the latest in a long line of US presidents to adopt it.

At the same time the concept that peace processes and treaties ensure peace and stability collapsed completely during Obama’s tenure in office. So what makes Obama unique is that he is the first president to cling to this policy framework since it was wholly discredited.

Israel signed four peace treaties with its Arab neighbors. It signed treaties with Egypt, Jordan, the PLO and Lebanon. All of these treaties have failed or been rendered meaningless by subsequent events.

Today Israel’s 31-year-old peace treaty with Egypt is a hollow shell. No, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood regime has not officially abrogated it. But the rise of the genocidally anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood to power has rendered it meaningless.

[........]

All of this has changed in the past 10 to 15 years as the Beduin of the area underwent a drastic process of Islamic radicalization. Today the Beduin of Sinai stand behind much of the jihadist violence. The Beduin of Israel have increasingly embraced the causes of irredentism, radical Islam and jihad. And the Beduin of Jordan have become even more opposed to peaceful coexistence with Israel than the Palestinians.

This leaves the Hashemites. A small Arabian clan installed in power by the British, the Hashemites have historically viewed Israel as their strategic partners and protectors of their regime.

Since the fall of the Mubarak regime, Jordan’s King Abdullah II has been increasingly stressed by regional events and domestic trends alike. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has empowered the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. The rise of pro-Iranian Shi’ite forces in post-US-withdrawal Iraq has made pro-Western Jordan an attractive target for triumphant jihadists across the border. The rise of Islamist forces in the Syrian opposition, not to mention the constant subversive activities carried out by Syrian regime agents, has limited Jordan’s maneuver room still further.

[.........]

This revolt was exposed in all of its ugliness in recent weeks following Abdullah’s appointment of Walid Obeidat to serve as Jordan’s new ambassador to Israel.

Obeidat’s tribe disowned him and his family and branded him a traitor for accepting the appointment. His tribe invited the other tribes to join it in a mass rally demanding the abrogation of the treaty and the destruction of Israel.

In this state of affairs, the strategic value of Israel’s peace treaty has been destroyed. Even if Abdullah wished to look to Israel as a strategic protector, as his father, King Hussein, did in the 1970 Jordanian civil war between the Hashemites and the Palestinians, he can’t. In 1970, the Syrians shared Hussein’s antipathy to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and therefore did not intervene on their behalf. Today, there is no Arab force that would back him in an Israeli-supported fight against Islamic fundamentalists.

Perhaps in recognition of the fragility of the Hashemites’ hold on power, last week it was reported that the US has deployed military forces to the kingdom. According to media reports, the force consists of a few hundred advisers and other teams whose main jobs are to assist Jordan in handling the 200,000 refugees from Syria who have streamed across the border since the onset of the civil war in Syria, and to help to secure Syria’s chemical and biological arsenals. It is more than likely that the force is also in place to evacuate Americans in the event the regime collapses.

[.........]

But to adopt this policy, the Americans first need to discard their false conceptual frameworks regarding the Middle East. Unfortunately, as the US response to the Benghazi attack and its continued assaults on Israel make clear, there is no chance of that happening, as long as Obama remains in the White House.

Read the rest - Libya, Jordan and Obama’s narratives

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Political Correctness | 125 Comments »

1972 Olympics Massacre: Germany’s secret contacts to Palestinian terrorists

by Speranza ( 151 Comments › )
Filed under Fatah, Germany, History, Terrorism at September 5th, 2012 - 2:00 pm

On the 40th anniversary of the Munich Massacre (September 5, 1972), this long but interesting article from Der Spiegel is a must read. However given the history of Willy Brandt’s appeasement of terrorists, can anyone actually say that they are surprised? The Germans were not the only ones who made deals with the Devil – the French and Greek governments also thought that Palestinian terrorists could be bought off. We do know (as was admitted during the film “One Day in September”) that the Brandt government was complicit in the Palestinian hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner so they could have an excuse to free the three Black September murderers that they were holding. When I saw the photo of Brandt kneeling before the Warsaw Ghetto monument, I was not impressed.

by Felix Bohr, Gunther Latsch and Klaus Wiegrefe

Eleven Israelis and one German police officer died in the Munich massacre of 1972, when Palestinian terrorists took Israeli athletes hostage at the Olympics. Now, government documents suggest that Germany maintained secret contacts with the organizers of the attack for years afterward and appeased the Palestinians to prevent further bloodshed on German soil.

In the busy streets of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, hardly anyone noticed the three Buick sedans that came to a stop just before the corner of Rue Verdun. Several couples got out of the cars. They were dressed casually and looked like tourists. Some of the people were in fact wearing blonde wigs and women’s clothing, which wasn’t recognizable from a distance.

In fact, the couples were all men, members of an Israeli special forces unit operating in enemy territory.

At about 1:30 a.m., they entered an apartment building. They rushed up the stairs to the upper floors, pulled Uzi submachine guns and explosives out from under their baggy clothing and received a radio message from their commander ordering them to blow open the doors to several apartments. They immediately opened fire, shooting and killing Abu Youssef, Kamal Nasser and Kamal Adwan, three senior officials with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Youssef’s wife and a female neighbor were also killed.

[........]

‘New Basis of Trust’

Operation Spring of Youth was part of a revenge campaign the Israelis waged against the backers of the Munich massacre of Sept. 5-6, 1972. Black September, a terrorist group with ties to the PLO, had killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in an attack during the Munich Olympics. After the Lebanon operation, the government in Tel Aviv gave the returning Israeli elite troops a hero’s welcome.

Walter Nowak, 48, the then German ambassador to Lebanon, condemned the Israeli action, saying that the dead Palestinians were among the most “rational and responsible” members of the PLO. A day after the retaliatory strike, the outraged diplomat wrote a letter to government authorities in Bonn, the then-German capital, saying that it was “not to be ruled out” that the Israelis had killed Abu Youssef and the others to hinder the peace process in the Middle East. “Those who don’t want to negotiate are bothered by those they might be expected to face in negotiations,” he wrote.

[......]

The Munich attack had occurred only six months earlier. Despite the still-vivid images of masked terrorists on the balconies of the Olympic Village and a burned-out helicopter on the tarmac at the NATO airbase at Fürstenfeldbruck, there was already active but secret diplomatic communication between Germans and Palestinians. West German representatives were talking to men like Abu Youssef, Ali Salameh and Amin al-Hindi, all of them masterminds of the Munich murders. Even the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which is obligated to prosecute criminals, was involved in meetings, according to documents in the Political Archives of the German Foreign Ministry and the Federal Archive in the western city of Koblenz, which SPIEGEL has now analyzed.

The motives were plain. Bonn knew that the Palestinians craved international recognition. Any contact with West German representatives, even in secret, upgraded the PLO’s status as an institution. In return, the government of then Chancellor Willy Brandt and Vice-Chancellor Walter Scheel hoped to protect Germany from further attacks. But the price they had to pay in return appears to have been high.

Spirit of Appeasement

In the coming weeks, during events to mark the 40th anniversary of the attack, the question will once again be raised as to why the German courts never tried any of the perpetrators or backers of the Munich massacre. The documents that are now available suggest one answer in particular: West Germany didn’t want to call them to account.

In the first few weeks after the attack, German government offices in Bonn were imbued with a spirit of appeasement. From the Israeli perspective, it felt like a bitter irony of history that it involved Munich — a city that became a symbol of the Western powers’ appeasement of Hitler after the Munich Agreement permitting Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland was signed there in 1938.

Although the Munich attack involved multiple murders, the language in the files oddly downplays what happened there. Then-Chancellor Brandt is quoted as saying that the Olympic massacre was a “crazy incident,” while Paul Frank, a state secretary in the Foreign Ministry, refers to it simply as the “events in Munich.” Diplomats and senior Interior Ministry officials upgraded the status of Black September by calling it a “resistance group” — as if its acts of terror had been directed against Hitler and not Israeli civilians.

At the Foreign Ministry, in particular, some officials were apparently very sympathetic to the Palestinians. Walter Nowak, the German ambassador to Lebanon, once told Abu Youssef that the Germans were a people “with a substantial number of refugees,” because of the fact that ethnic Germans had been expelled from parts of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II. (Nowak himself was born in Silesia, which is now part of Poland, back when it belonged to Germany.) This, he added, made them more understanding of the Palestinian situation than other nations.

[.......]

‘The Munich Chapter Was Closed’

At the time, there were widespread fears of further attacks. The intelligence services regularly reported on plans to hijack German airliners. In most cases, they warned that hijackings could be used to secure the release of the three Olympic killers who had survived the firefight with the police in Fürstenfeldbruck.

And then, on Oct. 29, the warnings became reality. A group of PLO terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa flight en route to Frankfurt. The Bavarian state government immediately released the three prisoners, who were flown to Libya via Zagreb.

[........]

Frank pushed for a “fundamental clarification of the relationship with the Palestinians.” Because the conservative-led German government in the mid-1960s was considered pointedly pro-Israel, key Arab countries had broken off diplomatic relations with Bonn. Egypt and Algeria had only brought ambassadors back to Bonn shortly before the 1972 Olympics. Frank speculated that further attacks by Black September could threaten the German-Arab rapprochement. That, in turn, could jeopardize Germany’s oil supply and export contracts. This prompted Frank and his diplomats to seek direct contact with the PLO at the end of 1972, first in Cairo and then in Beirut.

While Chancellor Brandt issued a public promise to the Israelis that he would “not capitulate to terrorism,” Foreign Ministry sources suggest a different interpretation of events. Helmut Redies, a Middle East expert at the Foreign Ministry, merely asked the PLO to exclude West Germany and its citizens from its attacks. “It is critical to us that the Palestinians respect public safety in West Germany, and that no operations are conducted on the soil of the Federal Republic, or against German individuals and facilities abroad.”

Germany Did Not Push for Terrorist’s Extradition

PLO leader Yasser Arafat relented, and on January 1973, he made it clear that he had “officially decided” to comply with Germany’s wishes. In return, he asked to be allowed to send an envoy to Bonn. Arafat wanted to secure his influence among the several thousand Palestinians living in West Germany at the time, whose donations were one of his most important sources of funding. His wish was granted, and in 1975 Abdallah Frangi, an Arafat confidant who was the jovial son of a Bedouin, became the head of the so-called Palestine Information Office on Kaiserstrasse in Bonn.

The Black September terrorists had tried to reach Frangi several times by telephone on the day of the Olympic massacre. Frangi narrowly escaped death in a Mossad revenge attack in October 1972.

[........]

Frangi’s chutzpah was especially apparent ahead of the 1974 soccer World Cup, which was hosted by West Germany. According to the files, Frangi offered the Foreign Ministry a sort of anti-terror hotline. The PLO representative, who was married to a German woman from the western state of Hesse, explained that the Germans had nothing to fear in the way of attacks during the World Cup, because there were “no plans of this nature.” Nevertheless, he added, he would make himself “available” just in case, and could be reached at the home of his wife’s parents. In his memoirs, Frangi writes that the Munich murders were “no longer an issue” during talks in Bonn at the time.

Awkward Issue

This didn’t change when the French police arrested one of the main culprits in 1977. Abu Daoud, a teacher from Jerusalem, had coordinated the Black September operation in Munich and left the country on the morning of the attack. When the German Justice Ministry received an inquiry from Paris as to whether there was any interest in an extradition, it referred the request to the relevant authorities in Bavaria.

In Munich, Alfred Seidl, a senior official in the state’s Justice Ministry, recommended that Bonn support an extradition request by Israel instead of becoming directly involved. In this way, he argued, the German government “could possibly avoid having to issue its own extradition request or having Abu Daoud extradited to Germany.”

The matter became too awkward for the French after a few days, and they allowed Abu Daoud to fly to Algeria. They too were worried about attacks being carried out on their territory.

[.......]

In the fall of 1977, a member of Schmidt’s staff at the Chancellery even met with Ali Salameh, probably the key mastermind of the Munich attack. As a representative of the Palestinians, Salameh, nicknamed the “Red Prince,” demanded recognition of the PLO. In return, he offered that the PLO would not only distance itself from terrorism, but also become “actively involved in fighting terrorism.” To its credit, Bonn turned down the deal.

Tacit Permission

Whether or not Germany’s appeasement policy was a success is debatable. Despite Arafat’s guarantee of security, it was mostly luck and focused police work that prevented further PLO attacks in Germany or against Germans abroad. When in 1979 the police arrested 11 Palestinians with explosives in West Berlin and at a number of border crossings, Frangi’s friend, the armchair terrorist Hindi, asked the German Embassy in Beirut for a meeting. The files indicate that the mood was “relaxed and friendly.”

Hindi openly admitted that the men had had orders to send parcel bombs to Israel. He also said that he would continue to “conduct such operations against Israel” and that he would have to “use other countries as operating bases.” Hindi advised the Germans to take the Italians’ approach, saying that Rome “tacitly” allowed him and his compatriots to operate in Italy.

What happened after that remains one of the secrets of the former West Germany. It is clear that the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) cooperated with the PLO, as evidenced by a telex from the embassy in Beirut reporting on a meeting between Hindi and a BKA official on June 14, 1980. According to the message, Hindi complained that the press had gotten wind of the connections between the PLO and the BKA. He also claimed that the leak was on the German side. An indiscretion like this could jeopardize cooperation, Hindi threatened, telling the BKA official that either the two organizations “continue working together in secret, or not at all.”

Hindi died of cancer in 2010, and most of the others behind the Munich massacre are now dead, as well. One of the three terrorists whose release the PLO secured by hijacking a Lufthansa flight occasionally appears in documentary films. There is still a German warrant out for his arrest, but there is nothing to suggest that German authorities have ever tried to find him.

[........]

Read the rest - 1972 Olympics Massacre: Germany’s secret contacts to Palestinian terrorists

Tags: Felix Bohr, Gunther Latsch, Klaus Wiegrefe
Posted in Fatah, Germany, History, Terrorism | 151 Comments »

Tears don’t protect against murder, bullets do

by Speranza ( 43 Comments › )
Filed under Fatah, Hamas, History, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Palestinians, Terrorism at August 14th, 2012 - 8:00 am

The Knish reminds us that gnashing our teeth, pulling our hair, and appealing to an immoral worlds sense of morality will never stop murder. Only ventilating the terrorists with lead (starting with their leaders) gives you a chance to live a life free of fear. Arafat (and his successors) should have been killed decades ago and very few Palestinian prisoners (only enough to interrogate) should be taken.

by Daniel Greenfield

After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel, written as Willi Woss, was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder.

While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.

The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attacks were followed by raids on the mansions and apartments of top Fatah officials in the same city where Pohl had found temporary refuge. By the time his first book was published, hundreds of PLO terrorists and many of its top officials were dead.

Western law enforcement had failed to hold responsible even the actual perpetrators of the Munich Massacre, never mind the representatives of the PLO who openly mingled with red radicals in Europe’s capitals. Israeli operatives did what the German judicial system had failed to do, putting down Safady and one of the Al-Gasheys, while the other one hid out as a frightened guest of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

The Israeli raid on the PLO terrorists in Beirut’s Muslim Quarter missed one important target. Arafat. And so, on another September day, some 19 years later, September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook hands with Arafat and proclaimed, “Enough of blood and tears! Enough!” But the blood and tears had only begun, as a PLO on its last legs was revived by that handshake and built its terrorist infrastructure inside Israel’s borders.

By 1993, the year of the infamous Rose Garden handshake, 45 Israelis had been killed and 34 injured in Muslim terrorist attacks. A year after the handshake, the toll stood at 109 Israelis dead and 456 wounded. By 2002, the year that Israel’s patience finally broke and Sharon sent forces storming into Arafat’s compound, the numbers for that year were a horrifying 451 dead and 2,348 wounded.

Today, some 40 years after that September in Munich and 19 years after the even worse tragedy of that September in Washington D.C., with over 1,500 dead since that fatal handshake, there have been rivers of blood and tears. And a shortage of bullets.

PLO officials these days are more likely to die of morbid obesity or, like Arafat, of AIDS, than of Israeli raids. They are nearly as likely to kill each other, like Arafat’s cousin, Moussa Arafat, the former head of the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist forces, who was dragged out of his home and shot by his own people. The murder of Mohammed Abu Shaaban, killed a week after the handshake, by his own people, was the first of a long string of Fatah on Fatah violence that is a far more likely cause of death for top terrorists than the jet planes and tanks of the hated Zionist regime.

[........]

Terrorists are a renewable resource. Arrest them, plant them in jail, let them study for advanced degrees and post status updates to Facebook while collecting salaries from the Palestinian Authority, funded by the United States and Europe, then trade them for a soldier. Then when they’ve gone back to their old habits, arrest them and trade them again. But doing that with territory is much harder. Let Israel try offering Ramallah a second time in exchange for peace and see what kind of howls rise out of the State Department in Washington D.C. and the Foreign Office in London.

The terrorists can offer Israel peace in exchange for Jerusalem, even though they already offered it in exchange for Ramallah, but Israel isn’t allowed to meet farce with farce by seizing Ramallah and then offering it back in exchange for peace.

Instead, Israel keeps putting new lands on the table, which Washington and London proclaim to be insufficient because something is too low a price to pay for nothing. Peace is a priceless commodity. while half of Israel’s capital is a negotiable commodity. But after two decades of negotiations, Israel is running out of things to negotiate with.

[........]

The rivers of tears keep flowing and, while Israeli spokesmen can list in detail every single casualty, tears don’t protect against murder. Neither do peace treaties. No amount of tears stopped the murder of Six Million Jews, convinced the British Foreign Ministry to allow Jews fleeing the Nazis into Israel or the State Department to allow them into the United States. The St. Louis and the Struma are both reminders of the futility of tears.

No amount of tears has convinced the International Olympic Committee to respond decently to the Munich Massacre. And no amount of tears from the tens of thousands mutilated, tortured, crippled, wounded, orphaned and widowed by the PLO in all its front groups, splinter groups and incarnations, including its current incarnation as a phony government, has been enough to stop American and European governments from supporting, arming and funding the terrorists.

Tears don’t protect against murder. They don’t stop killers from killing. They don’t prevent the authorities from looking the other way when the killings happen because there is something in it for them. They don’t bring the terrorists to justice. They don’t even ensure that the truth will be told, rather than the lie that rationalizes the crimes.

Tears did not stop the operation of a single gas chamber. They did not save the life of a single Jewish refugee. They did not stop a single dollar from going to the PLO or Fatah or Black September or the Palestinian Authority or any of the other masks that the gang of Soviet-trained killers wore. They will not stop Iran from developing and detonating a nuclear weapon over Tel Aviv. They will not stop Israel from being carved up by terrorists whose demands are backed up by the diplomatic capital of every nation that bows its head in the direction of Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, and the old men who control the oil wells and the mosques.

In 1988, Willi Pohl published another book, Das Gesetz des Dschungels or The Law of the Jungle. That same year, PLO terrorists carried out the “Mother’s Bus Attack” taking the passengers of a bus, filled with women on board, hostage and demanding the release of all imprisoned terrorists. The terrorists killed two hostages and Israeli Special Forces moved in, killing the terrorists and saving the lives of all but one hostage.

In response, Israeli commandos stormed Tunis, killing Abu Jihad, a former Muslim Brotherhood member and the number two Fatah leader after Arafat . The United Nations Security Council met and passed Resolution 611, noting with concern the “loss of human life”, particularly that of Abu Jihad, and vigorously condemned the “act of aggression”, Not a single member of the Security Council voted against it. The United States abstained.

[........]

In 1972, the year of the Munich Massacre, there were three Security Council resolutions condemning Israel

In 1972, the year of the Munich Massacre, there were three Security Council resolutions condemning Israel. Not a single one condemning the massacre of Olympic athletes at an international event. Not a single one condemning the countries which armed, trained, harbored and controlled the terrorists. The countries that had refused that their flags be lowered in response to the massacre.

This was the law of the jungle disguised as international law. Against the law of the jungle, tears are futile. Jungle law cannot be debated away, it cannot be disproven, it cannot be defeated with Hasbara, it cannot be subdued with the speechifying of an Abba Eban or a Benjamin Netanyahu. It cannot be moralized into decency or signed away with peace treaties. It can only be met with resistance.

Tears don’t protect against murder. Bullets do.

Read the rest – Tears don’t protect against murder

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Fatah, Hamas, History, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Palestinians, Terrorism | 43 Comments »

The Islamist primacy; and Obama’s astounding failure

by Speranza ( 253 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Hezballah, Iran, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Lebanon, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Sharia (Islamic Law), Syria, Taliban, Turkey at July 13th, 2012 - 2:30 pm

As bad as they could be, I would still prefer Arab nationalists to Islamists any day. You can reason with a nationalist, not with an Islamist. We are aligning ourselves with people (the Muslim Brotherhood) who do not even share a temporary convenience of interest with us (unlike for example Stalin’s U.S.S.R. from 1941 – 45).

by Charles Krauthammer

Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes.

Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider:

Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament — enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).

As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power. Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.

What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.

It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history. Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century. Stage II was the Arab nationalist era — secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical — ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.

Its vehicle was military dictatorship and Gamal Nasser led the way. He raised the flag of pan-Arabism, going so far as changing Egypt’s name to the United Arab Republic and merging his country with Syria in 1958. That absurd experiment — it lasted exactly three years — was to have been the beginning of a grand Arab unification, which, of course, never came. Nasser also fiercely persecuted Islamists — as did his nationalist successors, down to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Baathists, Iraqi (Saddam Hussein) and Syrian (the Assads) — as the reactionary antithesis to Arab modernism.

But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.

Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011. Many Westerners naïvely believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.

[.......]
To be sure, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China. Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).

For now, the new Islamist ascendancy in Arab lands has taken on the more benign Turkish aspect. Inherently so in Morocco and Tunisia; by external constraint in Egypt, where the military sees itself as guardian of the secular state, precisely as did Turkey’s military in the 80 years from Ataturk to Erdogan.

Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran.

[........]

Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor. This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.

Read the rest – The Islamic ascendancy

We apparently have not learned our lesson from 1979 when we aided the mujahadin in Afghanistan against the Soviets, never once imagining that the same people who reveled in killing Soviets would revel in killing us just as much.

by Caroline Glick

Two weeks ago, in an unofficial inauguration ceremony at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi took off his mask of moderation. Before a crowd of scores of thousands, Mursi pledged to work for the release from US federal prison of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

According to The New York Times’ account of his speech, Mursi said, “I see signs [being held by members of the crowd] for Omar Abdel-Rahman and detainees’ pictures. It is my duty and I will make all efforts to have them free, including Omar Abdel-Rahman.”

Otherwise known as the blind sheikh, Abdel Rahman was the mastermind of the jihadist cell in New Jersey that perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His cell also murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990. They plotted the assassination of then-president Hosni Mubarak. They intended to bomb New York landmarks including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the UN headquarters.

Rahman was the leader of Gama’a al-Islamia – the Islamic Group, responsible, among other things for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. A renowned Sunni religious authority, Rahman wrote the fatwa, or Islamic ruling, permitting Sadat’s murder in retribution for his signing the peace treaty with Israel. The Islamic group is listed by the State Department as a specially designated terrorist organization.

After his conviction in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abdel-Rahman issued another fatwa calling for jihad against the US. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden cited Abdel-Rahman’s fatwa as the religious justification for them.

By calling for Abdel-Rahman’s release, Mursi has aligned himself and his government with the US’s worst enemies. By calling for Abdel-Rahman’s release during his unofficial inauguration ceremony, Mursi signaled that he cares more about winning the acclaim of the most violent, America-hating jihadists in the world than with cultivating good relations with America.

And in response to Mursi’s supreme act of unfriendliness, US President Barack Obama invited Mursi to visit him at the White House.

Mursi is not the only Abdel Rahman supporter to enjoy the warm hospitality of the White House.

His personal terror organization has also been the recipient of administration largesse. Despite the fact that federal law makes it a felony to assist members of specially designated terrorist organizations, last month the State Department invited group member Hani Nour Eldin, a newly elected member of the Islamist-dominated Egyptian parliament, to visit the US and meet with senior US officials at the White House and the State Department, as part of a delegation of Egyptian parliamentarians.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland refused to provide any explanation for the administration’s decision to break federal law in order to host Eldin in Washington. Nuland simply claimed, “We have an interest in engaging a broad cross-section of Egyptians who are seeking to peacefully shape Egypt’s future. The goal of this delegation… was to have consultations both with think tanks but also with government folks, with a broad spectrum representing all the colors of Egyptian politics.”

[........]
The proximate cause of the Obama administration’s most recent assault on Israel is the publication of the legal opinion of a panel of expert Israeli jurists regarding the legality of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. Netanyahu commissioned the panel, led by retired Supreme Court justice Edmond Levy, to investigate the international legal status of these towns and villages and to provide the government with guidance relating to future construction of Israeli communities beyond the armistice lines.

The committee’s findings, published this week, concluded that under international law, these communities are completely legal.

There is nothing remotely revolutionary about this finding. This has been Israel’s position since 1967, and arguably since 1922.

The international legal basis for the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 was the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. That document gave the Jewish people the legal right to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, as well as all the land Israel took control over during the 1948- 49 War of Independence.

Not only did the Mandate give the Jewish people the legal right to the areas, it enjoined the British Mandatory authorities to “facilitate… close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.”

So not only was Jewish settlement not prohibited. It was required.

Although this has been Israel’s position all along, Netanyahu apparently felt the need to have its legitimacy renewed in light of the all-out assault against Israel’s legal rights led by the Palestinians, and joined enthusiastically by the Obama administration.

[......]

Whereas the Obama administration opted to embrace Mursi even as he embraces Abdel-Rahman, the Obama administration vociferously condemned Israel for having the nerve to ask a panel of senior jurists to opine about its rights. In a press briefing, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell banged the rhetorical hammer.

As he put it, “The US position on settlements is clear. Obviously, we’ve seen the reports that an Israeli government-appointed panel has recommended legalizing dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts.”

In short then, for the Obama administration, it is all well and fine for the newly elected president of what was until two years ago the US’s most important Arab ally to embrace a terror mastermind indirectly responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. It is okay to invite members of jihadist terror groups to come to Washington and meet with senior US officials in a US taxpayer- funded trip. It is even okay for the head of a would-be-state that the US is trying to create to embrace every single Palestinian terrorist, including those who have murdered Americans. But for Israel’s elected government to ask an expert panel to determine whether Israel is acting in accordance with international law in permitting Jews to live on land the Palestinians insist must be Jewfree is an affront.

THE DISPARITY between the administration’s treatment of the Mursi government on the one hand and the Netanyahu government on the other places the nature of its Middle East policy in stark relief.

Obama came into office with a theory on which he based his Middle East policy. His theory was that jihadists hate America because the US supports Israel. By placing what Obama referred to as “daylight” between the US and Israel, he believed he would convince the jihadists to put aside their hatred of America.

[......]

Obama’s failure is exposed in all its dangerous consequence by a simple fact. Since he entered office, the Americans have dispensed with far fewer jihadists than they have empowered.

Since January 2009, the Muslim world has become vastly more radicalized. No Islamist government in power in 2009 has been overthrown. But several key states – first and foremost Egypt – that were led by pro-Western, US-allied governments when Obama entered office are now ruled by Islamists.

It is true that the election results in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and elsewhere are not Obama’s fault. But they still expose the wrongness of his policy. Obama’s policy of putting daylight between the US and Israel, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood against US allies like Mubarak, involves being bad to America’s friends and good to America’s enemies. This policy cannot help but strengthen your enemies against yourself and your friends.

[......]

The analysis embraces the notion that it is possible and reasonable to appease the likes of Mursi and his America-hating jihadist supporters and coalition partners. It quotes Michele Dunne from the Atlantic Council who claimed that on the one hand, if the Muslim Brotherhood and its radical comrades are allowed to take over Egypt, their entry into mainstream politics should reduce the terrorism threat. On the other hand, she warned, “If Islamist groups like the Brotherhood lose faith in democracy, that’s when there could be dire consequences.”

In other words, the analysis argues that the US should respond to the ascent of its enemies by pretending its enemies are its friends.

Aside from its jaw-dropping irresponsibility, this bit of intellectual sophistry requires a complete denial of reality. The Taliban were in power in Afghanistan in 2001. Their political power didn’t stop them from cooperating with al-Qaida. Hamas has been in charge of Gaza since 2007. That hasn’t stopped it from carrying out terrorism against Israel. The mullahs have been in charge of Iran from 33 years. That hasn’t stopped them from serving as the largest terrorism sponsors in the world. Hezbollah has been involved in mainstream politics in Lebanon since 2000 and it has remained one of the most active terrorist organizations in the world.

And so on and so forth.

Back in the 1980s, the Reagan administration happily cooperated with the precursors of al-Qaida in America’s covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It never occurred to the Americans then that the same people working with them to overthrow the Soviets would one day follow the lead of the blind sheikh and attack America.

Unlike the mujahadin in Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood has never fought a common foe with the Americans. The US is supporting it for nothing – while seeking to win its support by turning on America’s most stable allies.

Can there be any doubt that this policy will end badly?

Read the rest – Obama’s spectacular failure

Tags: Caroline Glick, Charles Krauthammer
Posted in Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Hezballah, Iran, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Lebanon, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Sharia (Islamic Law), Syria, Taliban, Turkey | 253 Comments »

Obama gives 192 Million to the PA without Congressional approval

by Rodan ( 2 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Fatah, Hamas, Headlines, Islamists, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Progressives at April 28th, 2012 - 6:38 pm

Barack Obama really does view himself as a god-king Pharaoh. Last night without any authorization from Congress, Obama waived frozen funds for the Palestinian Authority. He sent $192 Million to a terrorist entity.

Friday night news dump: President Obama has decided to provide $192 million to the Palestinian Authority despite Congress’s freeze on PA funding after its president, Mahmoud Abbas, attempted to declare statehood unilaterally last September, in violation of the PA’s treaty commitments.

Obama’s “waiver” of the restrictions on Congress’s Palestinian Accountability Act was first reported in the foreign press (AFP), which is where Americans generally need to go to get news about what the U.S. administration is up to. A report from the Times of Israel is here. [Hat tip, Creeping Sharia.] The New York Times, evidently too busy reporting on how much Israel sucks, did not find this story fit to print.

White House spinmeister Tommy Vietor stated that President Obama made the decision to pour American taxpayer dollars into Palestinian coffers in order to ensure “the continued viability of the moderate PA government.”

[....]

The PA continues to endorse terrorism against Israel as “resistance.” Moreover, the PA most certainly does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Back in November, for example, Adil Sadeq, a PA official writing in the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, declared that Israelis

This is disgusting and shows the totalitarian nature of Obama. He really would make himself a Pharaoh if he could.

Tags: foreign aid, Palestinian Authority
Posted in Barack Obama, Fatah, Hamas, Headlines, Islamists, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Progressives | 2 Comments »

Archive for the ‘Fatah’ Category

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Obama gives 192 Million to the PA without Congressional approval

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