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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Janice Shell who wrote (7780)	2/19/1998 9:12:00 PM
From: DD™	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

He must be getting coaching lessons from The Slickster. Remember when Slick said that he "did not break any laws of this country" when asked the first time if he smoked pot? DD

To: Janice Shell who wrote (7780)	2/19/1998 9:47:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Palestinian backlash could prove greater threat than Iraq attack By LAURA KING Associated Press Writer JERUSALEM (AP) - The scenario goes like this: The United States launches an air strike against Iraq, and a vengeful Saddam Hussein lashes out at Israel, perhaps even with chemical or biological weapons. But the greatest danger to Israel arising from any U.S. action against Iraq might instead be a violent backlash from Palestinians - particularly the militant Islamic group Hamas. Even before the standoff began over Iraq's noncompliance with U.N. weapons inspectors, Israel and the Palestinians were at loggerheads over the stalled peace process. The Iraq crisis, though, has added a hard new edge to their enmity. The Palestinians accuse Israel of using the dispute to delay handing over any more West Bank land; Israel says the Palestinians' flag-waving support for Iraq prove they aren't serious about making peace. In the past week, Israel and the United States have forced Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority to crack down on pro-Iraq rallies and muzzle Palestinian media commentary on the subject - moves that some are predicting will backfire. "There is so much hatred in the street, such a sense of humiliation and defeat," said Abdel Sattar Qassem, a Palestinian political science professor at An-Najah University in Nablus. "And the greater the effort to bottle that anger up, the more likely it is that it will explode." The military wing of Hamas, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, weighed in Tuesday with a threat to strike targets in Israel, where it has staged more than a dozen suicide attacks in the past four years. "We will not stand by with our arms folded...if Iraq is subjected to American military aggression," said a Hamas-signed leaflet distributed in the West Bank. Hamas has not staged a suicide attack in Israel for nearly six months, but Sattar Qassem and others said a U.S. strike on Iraq would give the group just the excuse it needed. "Israel and the United States are two faces of one coin, our resistance will continue," Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin said Thursday. Hamas' own statements seemed to support that, with the group's political wing suggesting that suicide attacks would be justified regardless of whether there was any Israeli involvement in the Iraq crisis. "The Palestinian people are part of the Arab world ... it is natural that there be a reaction by the people to what is happening in Iraq," said Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas' founder and spiritual leader. Israel has said it will respond harshly to any Iraqi strike against the Jewish state, using any military means it deems appropriate. But Israeli officials are much more loath to discuss how they would go about putting down a major outbreak of Palestinian unrest or an upsurge in terror attacks stemming from the Iraq crisis. That's perhaps because the prime Israeli tactic in such cases is one deeply hated by the Palestinians: sealing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israel, preventing thousands of Palestinian workers from traveling to their jobs. Israel can also impose so-called internal closures that confine Palestinians to their cities and towns. There hasn't been a prolonged closure of the Palestinian lands since two suicide attacks in Jerusalem killed 26 people last summer, including the five bombers. But Palestinians believe one is all but inevitable if the United States hits Iraq - whether or not Iraq responds by targeting Israel. "Israel will take advantage of an assault on Iraq to impose a complete siege on our towns and villages and choke our people," chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Palestinian lawmakers meeting in emergency session Tuesday. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel not only sealed off the West Bank and Gaza, but imposed tight curfews that confined people to their homes. It can't do that this time because most Palestinian population centers are under Palestinian control, but a long closure would be economically devastating. Shlomo Dror, an Israeli army liaison with the Palestinians, said there were no plans to automatically seal off the territories in the event of a U.S. strike on Iraq, but acknowledged that Israeli officials were concerned about the prospect of Iraq-related unrest. Prior to Arafat's crackdown on pro-Iraq protests, demonstrators on several occasions clashed with Israeli troops - and Palestinian police came precariously close to joining in the fray. In both Gaza and the West Bank, there were instances of Israeli and Palestinian troops pointing weapons at one another, though they held their fire. "The Palestinian Authority has to deal with the violence," said Dror. "But it's liable to deteriorate, and will hurt them also."