Sunday, October 3, 2010

Now They Tell Us

Khaled Abu Toameh:

Former Palestinian President, Yasser Arafat, who won the Nobel Peace prize, fooled all of the people all of the time.
Mahmoud Zahar, a prominent Hamas leader, has just revealed that Yasser Arafat, when he failed to get what he wanted at the negotiating table, instructed Hamas to launch terror attacks in the heart of Israel. Hamas obviously took Arafat's orders seriously, waging an unprecedented campaign of suicide booming and terror attacks that killed and injured thousands of Jews and Arabs.
When Arafat reportedly unleashed Hamas's terrorists against Israel, both he and the Palestinian Authority were still on the payroll of the international community, first and foremost the Americans and Europeans.
Arafat pretended back then that he was doing his utmost to stop the terror attacks that were launched not only by Hamas, but also by members of his own ruling Fatah faction. It now appears - from what Zahar has to say - that Arafat was bluntly lying to Israel and the Western donors.[...]
This is the first time that a Hamas leader openly admits that his movement carried out terror attacks against Israel on instructions from the Palestinian Authority leader. Arafat is believed to have issued the orders to Hamas after the botched Camp David summit, which was hosted by President Bill Clinton.
Sadly, some Israelis, Americans and Europeans refused back then to open their eyes to the reality - that Arafat was fooling them. They even turned a blind eye when it was revealed back then that Arafat was funding the armed wing of Fatah, the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose members carried out dozens of terror attacks in the past 10 years.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

And Arafat hs been fawned over by media and governments alike. It simply goes to show you how much a murderer of Jews will be helped to look good in our world.

Just nauseating.

Asaf

NormanF said...

And Israeli leaders, like Yitzhak Rabin paid the price for helping that mass murder butcher who knows how many Jews.

Nauseating, indeed.

Its a lesson in how people who willfully blind themselves to evil, get devoured by it in the end.

But no one in Israel seems to have taken that lesson to heart.

Anonymous said...

I think when you are a politician at the top you have to be able to think and FEEL with a split mind i.e. smile credibly at whomever and remain convinced in the back of your mind that he/she is still the same thug you've known all along.

Recently I heard an interview where Hugh Lunghi claimed that Churchill found common ground with Stalin in their shared interest in history. That must have helped Churchill to keep up the smile while (as Lunghi also said) never give up his conviction that "they" were evil. (Churchill found in his WW1 series good words for everybody including Kemal Ata Turk. There was just one exception the Bolsheviks, he despised them with such energy that his writings about the Mahdis seem tame by comparison)

I guess what it would ideally be is succumbing to a kind of Stockholm syndrome while retaining one's critical abilities.
I doubt there are a lot of people who can pull that of, the wish that for once a villain might have reformed and we were the agent of that miracle takes over. And since Arafat was obviously very very very good at that charade, lots of people wanted to claim that prize.

Which supports my point, let them talk as much as they want while concentrating on what they do.

Silke

PS: it makes Clinton's judgment from a few days ago that Arafat "lost his nerve" at Camp David seem rather besides the point, doesn't it? But maybe all the way at the top calling for massacres is normal after one lost one's nerve ... http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/21/bill_clinton_russian_immigrants_and_settlers_obstacles_to_mideast_peace

Lee Ratner said...

NormanF, part of having a nation-state means that Jews will often have to deal with less than savory people diplomatically. There was no alternative to Arafat because he was the closest the Palestinians had to a leader that could theoretically speak for the bulk of them. If the conflict with the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims is ever going to be resolved its going to be through negotiations with some not very nice people.

Anonymous said...

Lee
"not very nice Arafat" did something that even Stalin didn't do to his allies and there were a lot of things Stalin wanted and didn't get.

Negotiations with people who are unreliable i.e. whose word counts for nothing may be necessary some time but one doesn't put trust in deals one may make with them and especially not the kind of trust that leads to injuries and loss of life.

Silke

Empress Trudy said...

You mistake the key point. It was always widely if quietly understood Arafat did this and worse. That was WHY he was adored by the media and the UN. If they could give him another Peace Prize posthumously, they would.

Anonymous said...

Are we supposed to be surprised by this? The only surprising thing is that a Hamas leader actually admits it is true.

Nycerbarb

Lee Ratner said...

Silke, yes. Everybody knows that Arafat is thug and a criminal. So is most of Palestinian leadership. Unfortunately, its who the world has to deal with. I'm sure the Palestinians aren't exactly pleased to have being forced to deal with people like Rabin, Sharon, Peres, Barack, and Netanyahu either.

Anonymous said...

Lee

if the Palestinians had any sense they'd organize rallies to cheer "people like Rabin, Sharon, Peres, Barack, and Netanyahu" and ask them to assist them in getting a decent life. Wouldn't that be a nice way for them to oust their devious intent on murder thugs?

In my book there is a scale of evilness and to put Israel's leaders with breaking their word at a whim thugs on an even footing is not permissible, no matter how much Palestinians may lobby for that kind of world view.

They are better! just like Nixon was better than Mao and Georg W. Bush was better than Saddam and so on and so on

Evilness is not exclusively in the eye of the beholder, fashion is.

Silke

Barry Meislin said...

...especially since dose wascally Izwaellis so twuly, deahly, uttahly deziah to establish a Palestinians State.

(Alongside Israel.)

...Indeed, one can only sympathize with the Palestinians.

...Such, such are the joys (and sorrows?)...of inane moral equivalence.....

Sérgio said...

Now one has to deal with criminals no matter what? And Arafat was the same as Rabin, Barak, etc.? So, it is all the same, Israel proposing an unprecedented deal and pals upset that they didn´t get enough?

Really, moral relativism has no bounds indeed.

Soccer Dad said...

Yaacov, often we miss the obvious. This is from September 18, 2000 preserved by IMRA. I don't recall when the significance of this item struck me. Obviously most reporters didn't attach much significance to this story.

Anonymous said...

completely OT and it may be irrelevant but once upon a time we got to a chance to pal around with Glenn Greenwald's pals on whether Chekoslovakia and Poland were treated the same way by us Germans. Now I read that Greenwald has done a study for the Cato-Institute on the consequences of Portugal's legalizing all drugs, hard and soft. He finds (of course) only beneficial consequences. The way I read this piece it seems others do not agree. However, I'll remember that Greenwald works for Cato whose podcasts I found after a few tries predictable to the point of inducing paralyzing boredom.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly

Silke

Anonymous said...

Sergio
one probably has to deal with criminals, if one has the tough luck to have them as neighbours, but one doesn't have to trust them or their word - that IMHO is a world of difference.

A German Israeli blogger yesterday told this wonderful story:

It is said that Amos OZ when lecturing in a scandinavian country, probably Sweden, was asked during the Q&A by a Swede "why do Israelis insist so much on their own state? They might just as well build a state togehter with the Palestinians. Their language and culture are similar, geographically the area belongs together and this partition in separate national states is an anachronism"

Amos Oz: „Yes and why do Swedes insist on a state of their own? Why don't they build a state together with the Norwegians? Language and culture are similar and geographically it kind of belongs together and a division into separate national states is an anachronism"

the Swede almost scowling: "Yes but don't you know what kind of people these Norwegians are?“


http://rungholt.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/mein-ticker/#comment-32550

But I guess it will take decades and decades more of Lee's teaching us on world politics until the wisdom of that little story will get through. And once that is achieved we'll have to go for explaining the difference in behaviour and reliability between drunk on dreams of resurrected caliphates wannabe sheikhs and Norwegians or Swedes.

Silke

Sérgio said...

Silke,

This wonderful story is so typical of
those "Israeli-critics", and their reaction so strong that it clearly shows that much deeper emotional issues are at stake, and there´s no other name to it: antisemitism pure and simple (and acessories such as wilful ignorance or mendacity).

Anonymous said...

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about this kind of blog: anyone on the left who takes something a Hamas representative says at face value is labeled a naive, gullible fool. Then, as soon as one says something that is in keeping with the suspicions and ideological leanings of the author, he becomes a reliable font of knowledge. Now, Zahar might indeed be telling the truth. But I don't know that, and Mr. Lozowick doesn't know that. At the very least, such an accusation, in the midst of intra-Palestinian feuding where Fatah, Hamas, and others use Arafat--his actions, the circumstances of his death, etc.--as a cudgel against their political opponents, warrants a bit of skepticism.

But why bother when it's so much easier to just believe that one's worst suspicions about the Palestinians were right after all?

Sérgio said...

"This is one of the things that drives me crazy about this kind of blog:

So, why you read this blog? Do you like to be driven crazy?

Just curious.

Anonymous said...

Anon and Sergio

the way I read it Soccer Dad at October 4, 2010 11:29 PM supplies support for Yaacov's "gullibility".

but then who is Soccer Dad that Anon should put any trust in him or the piece he links to.

Silke

Yaacov said...

Actually, Anon, the facts have been crystal clear and widely recognized in Israel ever since they happened, and were supported at the time by publicly available evidence such as the widespread freeing of Hamas terrorists from PA jails. It was the rest of the world which pretended this wasn't so. The only new part of the story is that al-Zahar has now said publicly what everyone knew all along.