The Other Enemy, The Palestinians
By Alan Caruba (04/21/03)
Despite yet another 'road map' to peace being offered by the United States to the Palestinians and Israel, it is time to end the charade that the Palestinians are anything other than the enemies of this nation and the Israelis. They have proven impervious and indifferent to any peace agreement. They can either be conquered, Iraq-style, and have a peace imposed by a new regime or they will remain a threat to peace in their region.
Following the fall of Baghdad, the Palestinian newspapers were filled with reports and commentaries, all of which declared their support for Saddam Hussein and their opposition to the US. The Palestinian Authority [PA] Deputy Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Adly Sadeq, continued to express his support for Saddam, describing him as a man who "was a thorn in the eyes of the imperialists. We will never change our mind [about him], no matter what [the attempts at] humiliation and deception."
The Palestinians know a lot about deception. They have maintained a campaign of deception about the existence of Israel before and since it became a sovereign nation in 1948. They have never abandoned their intent to destroy Israel despite five failed wars perpetrated by Israel's neighboring Arab nations and their 'intifada' campaign of resistance. The White House ceremonies in which Yassir Arafat shook hands with the late Itzak Rabin and declared its intention to pursue peace remain a deception and a deceit.
In the Palestinian newspaper, Al-Ayyam, columnist Abdallah Awwad predicted that "The weak who possess no means of resisting [their] destruction, plunder, and death will again awaken to confront the American culture of murder and destruction. There is room for surprises." It takes a great deal of 'chutzpah' to claim that the US has a culture of murder in the face of the PA's long campaign of suicide bombings in Israel, all directed against non-combatant civilians.
In January, at a rally in Gaza, a senior member of the militant Islamic movement Hamas said that Muslims and Arabs would attack American targets everywhere if the US went to war against Iraq. Over 3,000 Palestinians marched through the streets. Mahmoud al-Zahar said, if we attacked Iraq, "all American targets will be open targets for every Muslim, Arab or Palestinian." It should not be forgotten that Yassir Arafat supported Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait and after his forces were driven out in 1991.
And who has been the greatest supporter of the Palestinians? The United Nations. The Palestinians are the oldest existing group of refugees in the world. UN 'refugee camps' such as Jenin have been the headquarters for terrorist attacks throughout Israel. After Ali Alna'amani blew himself up in Iraq, killing four American soldiers at a checkpoint, the PA named the center of Jenin after him! The Palestinians have perfected suicide as an act of war.
The UN has passed endless resolutions seeking to bifurcate Israel into a separate nation for the Palestinians. The UN was also the source of a resolution equating Zionism with racism. Its conferences on human rights have degenerated into nothing more than endless condemnations of Israel, rendering them further examples of the farce this institution has been since its creation.
In February, the United States indicted Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian and professor at the University of South Florida. The 50-count indictment revealed how the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, for nearly twenty years, funded and coordinated terrorist activities in the Middle East from here. It is well to remember that Americans, too, died in some of the terrorist attacks in Israel.
In March, the PA announced that a 'new' Palestinian leader had been chosen as Prime Minister. Dr. Mahmoud Abbas has been correctly described as a Yassir Arafat clone. Abbas gained fame with his doctoral thesis, later published throughout the Arab world, denying the Holocaust occurred, citing the Nazi murder of six million Jews as a vast exaggeration. This so-called Arab scholar gained his education in Egypt, Syria and from the Moscow Oriental College, a combination of Syrian fascism and the communism of the former Soviet Union. The notion of conducting any kind of serious diplomatic affairs with Dr. Abbas is absurd.
Two headlines on April 14 tell the whole story. In one, the Israeli Premier, Ariel Sharon, made a pledge to relinquish some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. In the other, Yassir Arafat rejected a 'reformist' cabinet proposed by the PA Prime Minister-designate, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Palestinian leadership has never demonstrated any authentic intention to achieve peace with the Israelis and has funded and maintained some of the terrorist organizations that continue to wage war against it. The notion that Palestinians are a separate 'nation' or entity is without any substance. They are Arabs who live in the nation of Israel and continue to seek to destroy it.
When Saddam was attacking Israel in 1991 with Scud missiles, they celebrated. When the World Trade Center was destroyed and the Pentagon attacked in 2001, the Palestinians danced in the streets of their cities. Let the restructuring of the Middle East that has begun in Afghanistan and now in Iraq be extended to this obstacle to peace in Israel.
It is time for the Palestinians to be totally discredited by the United States. It is time to end negotiations with murderers. It is time for Americans to understand, at last, that the Palestinians are enemies of peace, of Israel, and of America.
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