I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
The “Moderate” Fatah
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You almost never hear of Mahmoud Abbas without hearing the adjective “moderate”, and that adjective has also been used to describe his party/organization, Fatah. These are the people with whom the world is expecting peace talks to succeed. These are the people with whom world leaders are pressuring Israel to negotiate peace. So, let’s see more about them. (Thanks to journalist Tom Gross for providing some excellent information on this.)
First, here is a lovely video provided by Palestinian Media Watch, taken at their conference in Bethlehem this month, which was attended by hundreds of Fatah officials from different Arab countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In this video, they are applauding Khaled Abu Asba, a terrorist who took part in a terrorist attack several decades ago in which a commuter bus was hijacked and 37 civilians were killed, including 12 children. Watch as PA Prime Minister Abu Ala welcomes Abu Asba and hails him as a hero:
Also at the conference, were many leaflets passed out among its delegates, one of them headlined, “Until the Zionist Entity is Wiped Out”.
Also, among its resolutions, the Fatah assembly approved a political platform emphasizing the Palestinians’ right “to resist occupation in all forms including armed struggle”, i.e., suicide bombings. A report by Reuters added that President Abbas personally insisted on this.
Another resolution explicitly said Fatah would oppose recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.
Yet another resolution adopted was one in which the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state is non-negotiable and that no Palestinian leader is permitted cross that line. Tom Gross elaborates:
The conference also adopted a position paper which states that the Palestinian national enterprise will not reach fruition until all of Jerusalem, including the outlying villages, comes under Palestinian sovereignty.
“Fatah will continue to sacrifice victims until Jerusalem will be in Palestinian hands, clean of [Jews],” the paper states.
The paper does not make a distinction between the eastern and western halves of Israel’s capital, nor does it distinguish between the territories within the Israeli side of the Green Line and the areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
PULLQUOTE:
“It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.”
The conference also endorsed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as Fatah’s official armed wing, contrary to their repeated promises under various agreements that the Fatah leadership has signed with Israel and the U.S. to dismantle the group. In an interview, Kifah Radaydeh, an Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades activist, said the PA would resume violence against Israel when Fatah is “capable,” and “according to what seems right… It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.”
Tom Gross writes:
Among the dozens of deadly terror attacks carried out in recent years by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians, including many children, are:
The Yeshivat Beit Yisrael massacre (which killed 10 Israelis), the King George Street bombing in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem supermarket bombing in Kiryat Yovel, the Allenby Street coffee shop bombing in Tel Aviv (see my Wall Street Journal article for more on this), the Ben Yehuda Market bombing in Jerusalem, the Petah Tikva shopping mall massacre, the French Hill Junction massacre, the Tel Aviv central bus station massacre (in which several African and Filipino migrants were among the 23 killed), the Kfar Sava train station bombing, the Mike’s Place suicide bombing in Tel Aviv (carried out jointly with British terrorists of Pakistani origin), the Rehavia Jerusalem bus massacre, the Liberty Bell Garden bombing, the Ashdod Port massacre, the Tel Aviv sea promenade bombing, the Beersheba Central Bus Station bombing, the Kdumim bombing, the Tel Aviv Old Central Bus Station bombing, the Eilat bakery bombing, and last year’s Dimona suicide bombing.
Are Fatah really “moderates” as many international news organizations and U.S. State Department officials claim?
Then, there is all the corruption in Fatah. Fatah, having learned well from Yasser Arafat, the Two-Faced (both of them hideous) Crook, is rife with corruption. Tom Gross writes:
The second day of the Fatah conference was marked by a stormy debate on the financial status of the organization. Delegates said they were alarmed to find that there were no financial reports prepared by party leaders. Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had to leave meetings he was holding on the sidelines of the main assembly to quell quarrels between the delegates and the party’s central committee.
Some members accuse Abbas of protecting members of the central committee who have been accused of corruption, fraud and mismanagement. The Palestinians have received more foreign aid per capita than any other people in the world. Billions of dollars of European and American taxpayers’ money have been siphoned off to Swiss banks by Fatah leaders over the years.
Even Nabil Amr, the Palestinian ambassador to Egypt, had this to say last month: “Fatah is full of thieves, spies and corrupt people, enough to destroy any country.”
And, finally, there are the accusations and conspiracy theories which fly right and left among them, all the way up to the highest levels of the Fatah leadership. Tom Gross tells of one such wild account:
Fatah’s veteran General Secretary, Farouk Qaddoumi, has accused PA President Mahmoud Abbas and former PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan of being accomplices in the “assassination” of Yasser Arafat.
In response, Fatah condemned Qaddoumi as “deranged” and “hysterical” and vowed to expel him from the organization. Qaddoumi is not attending the conference and has not been nominated for a place on the Central Committee or the Fatah Revolutionary Council.
The committee said that Qaddoumi was a man suffering from a “sick mind” and was renowned for his “fabrications” and “hallucinations.”
Qaddoumi, who is refusing to attend the Fatah conference, made his remarks at a news conference in the Jordanian capital of Amman shortly before the Fatah conference began. He said Abbas had worked in collusion with U.S. intelligence to assassinate Arafat.
Lashing out at Abbas, Qaddoumi accused him of stealing some of Arafat’s titles and of establishing an autocratic regime in the Palestinian territories.
“The man (Abbas) has fallen in love with titles used by President Arafat,” Qaddoumi said. “First he asked to be named overall commander of the Palestinian revolution and then the exiled president of Palestine.”
So, there you have it: just a small taste of the lunatics with whom Israel is supposed to make peace. And then people wonder why this peace is supposedly so elusive! Can you only imagine what kind of a country “Palestine” would be if it actually came into existence? Can you just imagine what the leadership would be like? Their policies? It’s not hard to imagine what a cesspool of hatred, infighting, terrorism, and corruption such a country would be.