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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Pulley who wrote (2287)	4/13/2002 5:36:42 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

Tom would agree on the issue of semantics, as the Jews were living continuously in Hebron for example until 1929 when most of them were butchered by the local arab population at a time Israel did not exist and the Jews were calling Palestine their future homeland. More so many Jewish settlements were erased and people were deported from the West Bank and Gaza not to mention other arab nations during the period of 1947 to 1949 and forward. My point was that Transjordan was allocated for the regional arabs as their home state as was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon Saudi Arabia the Gulf Emirates, Tunis Algiers, Pakistan, Afghanistan and scores of other countries over 80 years ago. As one American Lebanese journalist wrote it is not about right it is all about land grabbing worldnetdaily.com worldnetdaily.com worldnetdaily.com As to the statement that arafat refused to make personally but was released by some arab agency it is not worth the paper it is written on.

To: Tom Pulley who wrote (2287)	4/13/2002 7:40:50 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 32591

Before there were 'Palestinians,' there was Arafat: The making of a 'statesman' The killings of Jews by Palestinians--and, earlier, by Arabs who didn't yet consider themselves Palestinians--predated the establishment of the state of Israel. The killers did not differentiate among their targets. They just had to be Jews, random Jews, any Jews: socialist farmers on some remote kibbutz in the Galilee, working people in Haifa, or ultrapious (and, for that matter, often anti-Zionist) men and women from a town like Hebron where Jews had lived innocuously and continuously since several centuries before Mohammed set foot on this earth. Nor, for that matter, is the specific phenomenon of suicidal murder altogether an innovation of contemporary Arab and Muslim fanatics. This has been a hot subject in historic Islam for centuries, and it remains so in the mosques and schools of higher Muslim learning today, pro and con. The widespread adulation of Al Qaeda and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, of Osama bin Laden and Yasir Arafat, of Mohammed Atta and the young man on his way to paradise because he perpetrated mass murder in Tel Aviv, is evidence of the deep roots that this practice has in the culture of the Arab and Muslim world. And let us name the phenomenon honestly. When pampered Saudi princes praise the "martyrs of Palestine," and when Arafat himself says (more than a bit insincerely) that he wishes to die a shahid, they are (as Shimon Peres has pointed out) countenancing the idea of human sacrifice as an active agent of modern politics. Yasir Arafat, of course, has never been finicky about terrorism, and his long history on that score mocks America's calls for him to renounce the only craft he has ever truly known. Arafat's debut on the world stage coincides with the beginning of the Palestinian revolution, which, it is urgent to recall, commenced at least three years before the Six Day War. This means that Arafat started the Palestine Liberation Organization before one Israeli ever stepped foot into the West Bank or Gaza Strip--or, for that matter, prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem or walked in the city's ancient Jewish Quarter. There were no "occupied territories" back then, and there weren't really any disputed territories either--except in the heads of the Palestinians. What Arafat wanted then (and what I believe he still wants now) was to liberate not Hebron or Nablus or Gaza (which in 1967 were in Arab hands) but Haifa and Tel Aviv, the plains of Sharon, and the Negev desert. Or, as military historian Victor Davis Hanson put it in The Wall Street Journal, "the current Arab-Israeli war--at least the fourth fought since 1948--is fought over the West Bank: but that is only because ... the Arab world lost the first three wars to destroy Israel proper." From the beginning, Arafat's tactics of terror were audacious: blowing up airplanes in midair; taking children hostage in schoolhouses; skyjackings; hijacking of buses; shootouts and bombings in crowded airports, theaters, terminals, markets, beaches, restaurants, wedding halls. His most daring moment was during the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which eleven Israeli athletes lost their lives. (It was also the first moment when Peter Jennings showed himself to be oh, so understanding of Palestinian terror.) But this terrorism occurred only sporadically. It wasn't until the Oslo agreements and the handshake on the White House lawn that Arafat's terrorism became a routine feature of life in Israel. Israel obliged itself in 1993 to provide the Palestinian Authority weapons (augmented, of course, by the armaments the Palestinians smuggled and illegally manufactured themselves). And those weapons became the instruments of Jewish death. The closer the Israelis came to meeting Palestinian demands, the more intense the terror became. Suicide bombing, in fact, didn't become the Palestinians' chosen mode of day in, day out terror until the year 2000, when Israel offered Arafat more than the old butcher probably ever expected. jewishworldreview.com