 Hamas authorities did an about face on Saturday and dropped a plan to keep schools in the Gaza Strip open on a Palestinian holiday founded by the rival Fatah faction. An official with Gaza's Education Ministry said schools would shut down on Sunday, designated as an "independence day" for Palestinians, "in order to avoid misinterpretation of the decision to keep it a regular school day". A ruling issued on Friday to keep the schools open drew criticism from non-Hamas factions in Gaza as well as ordinary people who have been living under the Islamist movement's administration since it seized control from the Western-backed Fatah in the territory in 2007. Fatah still holds sway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and enjoys US recognition, while Hamas is largely isolated in Gaza over its refusal to accept permanent co-existence with the Jewish state. Egypt has been trying to broker factional reconciliation. Sunday is the anniversary of the symbolic Nov. 15, 1988 declaration of independence by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat, and Fatah, subsequently negotiated interim peace accords with Israel that secured Palestinians some self-rule. Source: Ynet 
 THIS week the world marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall. Thirty-five years ago an event with global ramifications likewise occurred. On November 13, 1974, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously addressed the UN General Assembly. Carrying a gun and an olive branch, Arafat appealed not to let the olive branch fall from his hand. Arafat's speech signified that the Palestinians had moved in international eyes from being a group of stateless refugees to a legitimate national movement.
Whether Arafat intended it or not, his statement also signposted two dichotomous directions for the Palestinians. One was the road to peace and reconciliation with Israel via mutual compromise and a two-state solution. This path would be encapsulated in the 1993 Oslo accord that led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and almost resulted, via the American-auspiced 2000-01 negotiations, in the creation of a Palestinian State. The other was the unbending war of terror and violence reflected in suicide bombings and rocket attacks to achieve the destruction of Israel. Notably they did not endorse a compromise two-state solution that recognised the legitimate claims of Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, they simplistically constructed the Israeli-Arab conflict as an extension of the struggle between Western colonialism and the Third World, and recommended the elimination of the Israeli side of the conflict. Anti-Zionist fundamentalists captured the pro-Palestinian agenda. In 1974 and again in 1975, the extremist-influenced Australian Union of Students, passed motions calling for the elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement by a democratic secular state of Palestine. The latter term was a disingenuous euphemism for an ethno-religious Islamic Arab state, given that most Palestinian Muslims are highly religious. The motions were rejected by Australian students, but this did not deter the fundamentalists. The fundamentalist agenda cooled following the PLO's implicit recognition of Israel in 1988. However the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 produced a renewal of the inflammatory rhetoric from the far Left. The higher the tide of violence perpetrated by the Palestinians, the greater the fury and blame directed at the Israeli victims.
The March 2002 attacks provoked the Israeli invasion of the leading West Bank cities in an attempt to destroy the terror networks, and stop the carnage. Yet the first Australian petition for an academic boycott of Israel initiated by a small clique of Australian academics after this invasion in May 2002 was directed at the victims of terror. Another group condemned Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard's visit to Israel last June. The petition signatories seemed oblivious to the fact that more than one million Arabs are citizens of Israel; that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip overwhelmingly demand an Arab state rather than a Jewish-Arab entity, and that most Arab states ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations over 50 years ago. No exposure of the infantile slogans of the fundamentalists obviates the need for Israel to promote rather than undermine the olive branch solution. More and more Israelis and diaspora Jews understand that Israel will not only have to freeze West Bank settlements, but eventually dismantle at the very least all settlements east of the security barrier.
Equally the Palestinians will have to make concessions that facilitate peaceful relations. This means finally accepting that the 1948 refugees will only return to the Palestinian state and not to Israel. The fundamentalists of course will never accept this win-win plan. Such is the nature of black-and-white revolutionary socialism. But their all-or-nothing demands for a similarly coercive utopia will bring only tragedy to the Palestinians. Philip Mendes is the co-editor of Jews and Australian Politics (Sussex Academic Press, 2004). Nick Dyrenfurth is the co-editor of Confusion: the Making of the Australian Two-Party Political System (forthcoming with Melbourne University Publishing). Source: The Australian
 By KHALED ABU TOAMEH Mahmoud Abbas's decision to hold new presidential and parliamentary elections at the beginning of next year is seen by some of his aides as one of the strangest moves he has made since he was elected to succeed Yasser Arafat five years ago. These aides are now trying to persuade Abbas to find an honorable way to come down from the high tree he climbed when he issued a "presidential decree" a few weeks ago calling for a vote on January 24. One aide in Ramallah said that Abbas was "actually digging his own grave" by insisting on holding the elections before reaching an agreement with Hamas. The Islamic movement has already made it clear that it won't participate in the elections. Moreover, Hamas has declared that it won't allow the vote to take place in the Gaza Strip and would punish any Palestinian there who is involved in the electoral process. Hamas's decision means that the elections, when and if they are held, would be confined to the West Bank, where Abbas is partially in control, and perhaps some areas in Jerusalem that are under Israeli sovereignty. Abbas's opponents can then argue that since the election was not held in the Gaza Strip, he does not represent the entire Palestinian people. As Hamas legislator Salah Bardaweel explained: "Abbas will then become the mayor or governor of the West Bank." As such, maintaining the status quo would be the best option for Abbas. Under the current circumstances, Abbas can always argue that he represents a majority of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who voted for him in the 2005 presidential election. If Gaza is excluded from the planned elections, Abbas or whoever replaces him as head of Fatah will never be seen as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This means that the new Palestinian leader would not have a mandate to negotiate or sign a peace agreement with Israel because he was not elected by a majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ABBAS'S DECISION to call the new elections came after the Egyptians failed to reach an agreement between Hamas and Fatah on ending their power struggle. The two rival parties were supposed to sign an Egyptian-brokered "reconciliation" accord in Cairo last month. But the signing ceremony was called off indefinitely after Hamas announced that it would not reach any deal with a "traitor" like Abbas. Read more here,,,, Source: JPost
 Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has said he will not seek re-election at presidential elections he has called for January and that he is not ready to debate the issue. "I have told our brethren in the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] ... that I have no desire to run in the forthcoming election," Abbas said on Thursday in a speech broadcast live from his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "This decision is not a kind of compromise or a manoeuvre." The 74-year-old leader who replaced Yasser Arafat five years ago as the Palestinian president said: "We're at cross roads. We have made lots of sacrifices in order to be able to have a right to a state. "Since the Oslo agreements in 1993, all these agreements are based on land and on peace and an end to Israel occupation of 1967. "We've pledged with Israel to reach a two-state solution but month after month we've seen nothing but complacency and procrastination."
Al Jazeera's Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah, said Abbas's decision would have "serious implications on Palestinian politics [and] also the prospect of peace and stability in the region".
She said reactions were pouring in from followers of Abbas's Fatah movement.
"They're beginning to speak ... and we understand they're planning to march to the president's office and express their support," our correspondent said. Read more here,,, Source: Al Jazeera (English)
 Tom Gross The Mail on Sunday (which is the Sunday sister paper of Britain’s Daily Mail) reports that: The British government is sending police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of brutal torture by Palestinian security forces funded by UK taxpayers. Their mission is to set up and train a new “internal affairs” department with sweeping powers to investigate abuse and bring torturers to justice.
On Saturday a senior official from the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank and its security agencies, admitted that torture, beatings and extra-judicial killings have been rife for the past two years, with hundreds of torture allegations and at least four murders in custody, the most recent in August. British detectives will also train the Palestinian police and Preventive Security forces in how to question suspects without torturing them. Britain spends £20 million a year funding the forces responsible for the abuse.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Nasser al-Shaer, a former academic from Manchester University who was deputy prime minister in the short-lived Hamas Palestinian Authority government elected in 2006, said many of those released from detention in recent months were telling the same story – of torture, including beatings, being suspended from the ceiling, and electric shocks. Now none of this is new. In spite of what the paper says, it has been continuing not just for the past two years, but since Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and took over most of the West Bank in 1993. What is new is that a major newspaper (The Mail On Sunday is one of Britain’s highest circulation respected newspapers) is reporting on it. Of course, the abuse of human rights and use of torture is even worse in other “moderate” Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, and far worse in non-moderate countries like Syria (which yesterday the European Union eagerly signed an Association Agreement with).
Many Palestinians I know yearn for the days when Israel ruled the West Bank before Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah took over most of the Palestinian-populated territories. Meanwhile, as Palestinian detainees are being tortured to death in Palestinian Authority jails, Palestinian prisoners (including convicted terrorists) in custody in Israel are studying for Israeli university degrees (at Israeli taxpayers’ expense) and also given cable TV, IPods and dental treatment – but international human rights groups instead criticize the treatment of prisoners in Israel, whose deputy foreign minister and former ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon narrowly escaped being arrested in Britain for “war crimes” yesterday. And the world community that routinely and harshly condemns Israel even when Israel hasn’t done anything wrong, has failed to condemn the Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon which narrowly missed an Israeli town last night.
It is a strange world. Source: National Review
 By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed Everyone knows that Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas differs much from his predecessor, the late Yasser Arafat, in his method of managing crises. This prompted President Abbas many times to go into isolation and sometimes threaten to resign because he could bear internal and external pressures. Had Abu-Ammar [Yasser Arafat] been alive and had he come under such a publicity attack over the Goldstone report, he would have rushed to deny and denounce and may have used someone as a scapegoat. And before doing that, he may have sought to appease the figures who lost in the past PLO elections, disregarding the true results in order to ensure that the losers, such as Nabil Amr, would not turn against him, support Hamas, and attack him. One of the shortcomings of Abu-Mazin [President Abbas] is that he is less flexible and bargains less. Surely, he is not a political player who maneuvers right and left to avoid attacks.
Rather, he sits in the middle making himself an easy target. The Goldstone report was used against him by both his comrades and opponents alike, and they all sought to settle their accounts. The funny thing is that Hamas, which used the dirtiest expressions against the Palestinian president because he agreed to postpone the discussion of the Goldstone report, is itself the party that rejected and attacked the report, considering it a Jewish conspiracy by Jewish Goldstone. From Hamas's viewpoint, Abu-Mazin suddenly became a traitor and agent, his nationality should be withdrawn, and he must be tried because he agreed to postpone the discussion of the report. Hamas has been playing the game of distortion against the PA leadership since 2005, and it made this game the primary goal in its political project. Hamas steps up the campaigns against Abu-Mazin and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad because it knows very well that the government's performance in the West Bank is the best in the history of the Palestinian leadership in terms of its fairness and commitments toward its Palestinian citizens. Historically, it has been a very familiar practice for Palestinian parties to exchange accusations to a point where each party accuses the other of being an agent. This practice is part of verbal exchanges and political frivolity. In the past, leftist Palestinian groups, and Hamas afterward, accused Abu-Ammar of selling the cause. Earlier, "revolutionary" Fatah bragged about killing Palestinian officials on the pretext of treachery.
In fact, all of these moves were domestic or regional political disputes that had nothing to do with Israel whatsoever. Read more here,,,, Source: Asharq Alawsat
 When Barack Obama announced in June 2009 about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, "I'm confident that if we stick with it, having started early, that we can make some serious progress this year," he displayed a touching, if naïve optimism. Indeed, his determination fits a well-established pattern of determination by politicians to "solve" the Arab-Israeli conflict; there were fourteen U.S. government initiatives just during the two George W. Bush administrations. Might this time be different? Will trying harder or being more clever end the conflict? No, there is no chance whatever of this effort working. Without looking at the specifics of the Obama approach — which are in themselves problematic — I shall argue three points: that past Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have failed; that their failure resulted from an Israeli illusion about avoiding war; and that Washington should urge Jerusalem to forego negotiations and return instead to its earlier and more successful policy of fighting for victory. I. Reviewing the "Peace Process" It is embarrassing to recall the elation and expectations that accompanied the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993 when Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. For some years afterward, " The Handshake" (as it was then capitalized) served as the symbol of brilliant diplomacy, whereby each side achieved what it most wanted: dignity and autonomy for the Palestinians, recognition and security for the Israelis. President Bill Clinton hosted the ceremony and lauded the deal as a "great occasion of history." Secretary of State Warren Christopher concluded that "the impossible is within our reach." Yasir Arafat called the signing an "historic event, inaugurating a new epoch." Israel's foreign minister Shimon Peres said one could see in it "the outline of peace in the Middle East." The press displayed similar expectations. Anthony Lewis, a New York Times columnist, deemed the agreement "stunning" and "ingeniously built." Time magazine made Arafat and Rabin two of its "men of the year" for 1993. To cap it off, Arafat, Rabin, and Peres jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1994. As the accords led to a deterioration of conditions for Palestinians and Israelis, rather than the expected improvement, these heady anticipations quickly dissipated. When Palestinians still lived under Israeli control, pre-Oslo accords, they had benefited from the rule of law and a growing economy, independent of international welfare. They enjoyed functioning schools and hospitals; they traveled without checkpoints and had free access to Israeli territory.
They even founded several universities. Terrorism declined as acceptance of Israel increased.
Oslo then brought Palestinians not peace and prosperity, but tyranny, failed institutions, poverty, corruption, a death cult, suicide factories, and Islamist radicalization.
Yasir Arafat had promised to build his new dominion into a Middle Eastern Singapore, but the reality he ruled became a nightmare of dependence, inhumanity, and loathing, more akin to Liberia or the Congo. Read more here,,,, Source: Daniel Pipes
 By Prof. Raphael Israeli One of the axioms of the “peace process” is that the settlements are “an obstacle to peace,” as if removing them would instantly bring peace on earth.
It’s well known, however, that before 1967 there were no settlements, and no peace - unless, of course, you consider the communities within Israel “settlements,” since the Arabs considered them occupied territory. The greatest contribution of the settlements, then, is that they took the place of Israeli towns as occupied territory, except perhaps for Hamas and considerable parts of the Arab world.
Therefore, the formula that removing settlements equals peace is laughable and baseless.
The Arabs’ total-denial approach to Israel never depended on settlement on a particular parcel of land. They are bothered by Jewish settlement in Israel in general. It’s enough to browse through the books of the “moderate” Palestinian Authority to see that Haifa, Jaffa and even Tel Aviv are considered Palestinian cities, while Hamas believes the Wakf land of all Palestine should be expropriated from the Jewish state, which doesn’t have the right to land on either side of the Green Line. In 2000, Yasser Arafat was offered an Israeli withdrawal from 95% of the territories in exchange for agreeing to end the conflict. He refused, because he didn’t consider this a full withdrawal from Palestinian land. Although Israel made yet another step in leaving the Gaza Strip, not only freezing construction there but evicting the settlers, all it got in return was more war and destruction, a far cry from the peace that removing this “obstacle” was supposed to create. In other words, not only did the Arabs not consider Israel’s older settlements different from the new ones that “endanger peace,” but the eviction of the latter drove them to begin attacking the former. We know now that one thing that motivated Anwar Sadat to come to Jerusalem was his fear that unless settlements in the Rafah area and Sinai were uprooted, they would grow into large cities that no peace agreement could remove. Read more here,,,, Source: Israpundit
By Sultan Knish In the conventional political narrative the root causes of Islamic terrorism usually run the class warfare gamut from the generic oppression to outrage at Western foreign policy or more esoteric issues of globalism. And naturally like most people who look into a mirror to find the cause of someone else's anger, their reflection only repeats back to their own agenda. Surprisingly enough the root cause of Islamic terrorism has very little to do with any of these things, though they are moderately handy talking points when it comes to recruiting future terrorists or touching base with idiot leftist reporters. To understand the root cause, requires understanding the function which terrorism serves in the Arab-Muslim world. While Western liberals insist on viewing terrorism as a form of political or social activism, within the Muslim world terrorism is a two-sided tool, a way to create friction with an enemy without going to war while promoting the political standing of its leaders and backers. This two-sided concept of terrorism goes back to the nomadic days of bandit raiders that would carry out hit and run attacks that would bring in loot while raising the status of the tribal sheikh and the head of the raiding parties. Given enough time probing the enemy's weakness and raising the stature of the sheikh, such attacks might escalate into all out wars. And while such tactics may seem primitive, Mohammed was able to leverage them to turn his newly created Islamic cult into a major player in the region. In modern times, the driving ideological force behind Arab-Muslim terrorism has been to recreate a single great state to replace the splintered colonial entities left behind by the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. It was an ancient tribal goal, and one that Mohammed's followers had come closest to achieving in the Arab version of the Thousand Year Reich. Modern versions of this might vary from the Islamic Caliphate to the secular Arab Nationalist version that would be a Socialist dictatorship run by someone like Nasser or Saddam. So while the ideology might vary, the underlying idea was always the same. One great state under one great ruler, who would demonstrate his fitness to rule by subjugating the enemy and thereby bring all of the region under his rule. Under the ancient raiding codes, showing the most boldness and inflicting the most damage by striking at the enemy demonstrates that fitness to rule. This form of Arab-Muslim internal rivalry routinely spills over into external wars and terrorism, as both sides seek to prove their superiority by killing as many infidels as possible. So Osama bin Laden's tribal religious conflict with the Saudi rulers was fought with the Soviets and then with America and Europe, more than with the House of Saud itself. Using the pretext of the US troops that the House of Saud had brought in to protect themselves from Saddam, Bin Laden was able to gain religious imprimatur for a war on America to build status for his claim to rule over the holiest place in Islam. The Saudis in turn had been funding a covert war on America for the same reason, as well as to divert wannabe Bin Ladens from trying to seize power. Read more here ...Source: Sultan KnishH/T Gramfan
 Source: Andrew BoltH/T: Gramfan The Age
Latest recipients of the Yellow Rag Award
 Anyone has April 20th issue? We'd love to see what The Age printed about Hitler.
 But a vote to renew the governing bodies of the secular movement was delayed again and re-scheduled to take place today. More than 2000 delegates at the congress in the West Bank city of Bethlehem unanimously raised hands in favour of Mr Abbas, who took over as party chief after the 2004 death of Yasser Arafat. The convention, which started on Tuesday and had been due to last three days, was extended after bitter arguments between the old guard and young delegates seeking a stronger role and broad reform. Saturday's discussions centred on ways to clean up the corruption-plagued party and offer an alternative to their bitter rivals in the Islamist Hamas movement. Debate focused on how to restore Abbas's authority in Gaza after Hamas seized control of the enclave in June 2007, routing Fatah forces and limiting Mr Abbas's power to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority, exercised undivided power among Palestinians before it lost heavily to Hamas in a 2006 parliamentary election. In a new sign of the continued rivalry between the factions, Fatah accused Hamas on Friday of briefly detaining a number of its senior leaders in Gaza. Infighting and corruption allegations have further weakened Fatah, which was founded by Arafat in the late 1950s.
Source: The Australian
 Amir Taheri | April 21 As Palestinians wonder about what they could do next, they would do well to remember that their starting point is a double failure shaped over the past decade. The first of the two failures is that of Al Fatah, which has dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s and exercised control over the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the Oslo accords. At some point in its history, Al Fatah may well have devoted its energies to a grand, though so far futile, struggle to create a Palestinian state. Since 1991, however, Al Fatah has been principally interested in one goal: its own survival and the prosperity of the elite that sustains it. With the late Yasser Arafat showing the way, Al Fatah has kicked its former national aspirations into tall grass. Each time its narrow interests clashed with the broader interest of the national struggle, Al Fatah clung firmly to the former and jettisoned the latter. Al Fatah, and beyond it the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which it controls, have danced to every tune of the day in the same way western teen-agers go for pop "tubes" of the season. The Oslo accords were designed to drown the fish, that is to say bury the national aspirations of the Palestinians under tons of paper. The PLO adopted them with excessive zeal. Then we had the so-called Road Map, presented by President George W Bush, a kind of political bikini, revealing everything except the essential. Again, the PLO, and Al Fatah, bought into it without a flutter. Finally, we had the "two states" formula, also presented by Bush. The PLO adopted this as a slogan but did all it could to prevent any step towards achieving it. Arafat's departure from the scene did not change the essentials. Amir Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night", is published by Encounter Books, New York and London. More.... Source: Hudson New York
 Backed by millions in U.S. funds, Palestinian unity missing key element
By Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM – The recognition of Israel is not on the table at talks aimed at creating a unity government between Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization, according to participants taking part in the discussions.
The international community is urging the formation of a unified Palestinian government to clear the way for some $5 billion in international aid to flow into Gaza, including parts of a recent $900 million pledge from the U.S.
Two sources inside the unity talks currently underway between Fatah and Hamas in Egypt both confirmed to WND that Hamas is not being asked to recognize Israel as a condition for joining the Palestinian Authority. Instead, Abbas' Fatah party – under international pressure – is asking for Hamas to recognize, but not agree to, past agreements with Israel, including one deal that tacitly recognizes the Jewish state's right to exist.
In the past, the U.S. has said that before it deals with Hamas, the Islamist group must first recognize Israel's right to exist. Clearly, Fatah does not place as much importance on that U.S. condition.
Mushir al-Massri, a Hamas spokesman and parliament member, told WND from the talks in Egypt: "The world is asking us to recognize Israel, but Fatah does not recognize Israel. It's not demanded from Fatah, and you (Americans) give plenty of money to Fatah, so why are you asking Hamas to recognize (Israel)?"
Indeed, contrary to popular perception, Fatah has never officially recognized Israel as a party.
In 1994, the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, signed what was known as the "recognition principals," in which the PLO formally agreed to recognize Israel. Fatah is the largest faction of the PLO, and as such, is thought to be party to the recognition agreement.
Fatah as a party, however, never officially declared it recognized the Jewish state. The last time the Fatah party held its official congress - in which it amended its charter - was in 1989. At that time, Fatah declared jihad on Israel and called for the Jewish state's destruction.
PLO Leader Yasser Arafat later made a statement to the French media in which he claimed the portion of Fatah's charter calling for the destruction of Israel was null and void, but the terms were never officially nullified. According to Fatah bylaws, the group's charter can only be changed by vote during an official Fatah congress session.
Al-Massri, meanwhile, said Hamas may be ready to recognize, but not accept, previous agreements between Israel and the PLO.
"Hamas can live with recognizing past agreements with Israel," he said, "but we need to discuss small nuances."
U.S. funds to reach Hamas?
The unity talks could bring Hamas into the PA, which is slated to be infused with large amounts of foreign donor funds. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this month announced that a $900 million U.S. aid package for the Palestinians was meant to foster regional peace and would not fall into the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization.
But the aid is slated to be received both by a U.N. agency that openly employs Hamas and by the PA, which Hamas may now join.
Clinton told a news conference at an international donors meeting in Egypt on March 2, "We have worked with the Palestinian Authority to install safeguards that will ensure our funding is only used where and for whom it is intended and does not end up in the wrong hands."
The U.S. considers Hamas a terrorist group. Hamas' charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel. The group is responsible for scores of deadly suicide bombings, shooting attacks, border raids and rocket launchings aimed at Jewish civilian population centers.
The $900 million U.S. in funding includes $300 million earmarked to provide "humanitarian aid" for Gaza following Israel's 22-day war there aimed at denting Hamas' terrorist infrastructure.
A U.S. official reported the money will go to the PA and to nongovernmental organizations, most notably the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, or UNWRA, which administers aid to millions of Palestinian "refugees" in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Israeli security officials warned that since Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, any reconstruction efforts in the territory are likely to bolster Hamas, whether the Islamist group directly receives the funds or not. They also said the PA has previously used donor funds to pay salaries for Hamas officials and the terrorist group's police force in Gaza, which includes scores of terrorists among its ranks.
Further, Hamas and the soon-to-be cash-infused PA are in talks to join a unity government. The talks are said to be favored by the Obama administration.
In recent meetings with representatives of donor countries, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu warned that infusing the Hamas-controlled Gaza with funds or construction efforts before Hamas stopped firing rockets at Israel would send a message to the terrorist group that it can continue its onslaught with little consequence.
Netanyahu also reportedly said reconstructing Gaza with international aid could make it more difficult for Israel to launch a future anti-terror operation in the territory, since the Israeli army may hit locations rebuilt with foreign donations.
Reacting to the news of the pledged U.S. funds, Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, recently told WND, "We are very happy with this decision."
"In the first place, this money will go toward reconstructing efforts," said Barhoum, speaking by cell phone from Gaza.
Hamas, UNWRA closely linked
The $900 million is also slated for UNWRA. From 1990 until today, teachers affiliated with the Islamic Bloc, which is formally associated with Hamas, have won elections as representatives of the teachers' section of the UNRWA union. By 2003, they held all seats and fully constituted the executive committee of this section of the union. The publication of UNWRA school books in Gaza is coordinated with Hamas.
Saeed Siam, Hamas former interior minister and one of the leaders of the group's so-called military wing, taught in UNRWA schools from 1980 to 2003 and served as a representative to the UNWRA union. He was killed during an Israeli air strike last month.
Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the man who founded Hamas and has been immortalized by it, worked as a UNRWA teacher from 1967 to 1994.
On July 6, 2001, Hamas convened a conference in the UNRWA school in the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, with students, teachers and school administrators in attendance. Yassin presented his ideology, and then an official named Saheil Alhinadi, who represented the teaching sector of UNRWA, praised students who had recently carried out suicide attacks against Israel, declaring "the road to Palestine passes through the blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh and their bodies."
A 2002 report from the Intelligence and Terrorism Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies, a think tank associated with Israeli intelligence, documented how a number of wanted terrorists were found hiding inside schools run by UNRWA.
"A large number of youth clubs operated by UNRWA in the refugee camps were discovered to be meeting places for terrorists," said the report.
Muhammad Ali Hassan, a Hamas terrorist arrested in February 2002, confessed he had carried out a sniper shooting from the school run by UNRWA in the al-Ayn refugee camp near Nablus, or biblical Shechem. He also reportedly told his interrogators that bombs intended for terrorist attacks were being manufactured inside the school's facilities.
Nidal Abd al-Fattah Abdallah Nazzal, a Hamas activist from Kalkilya, was arrested in August 2002. He had been employed as an ambulance driver by UNRWA. He confessed during his interrogation that he had transported weapons and explosives in an UNRWA ambulance to terrorists.
Additional information about arrests of UNRWA employees by Israel came in 2003 from the U.S. General Accounting Office, which was charged with conducting an investigation of UNRWA operations. The office found that in three instances Israeli military courts convicted UNRWA employees of involvement with explosives.
More recently, in the time leading up to and since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in the summer of 2007, there has been concern in Jerusalem about UNRWA camps being used for the manufacture, storage and launching of rockets and mortars into Israel. Also, camp residents have been suspected of active involvement in launching missiles and infiltrating shooters and suicide bombers into Israel. Source: WorldNetDaily
 David Burchell | January 12, 2009
UNTIL our own times, few civilisations showed much emotional interest in distant peoples.
Medieval Europeans were titillated by reports of dog-headed men and other far-off monstrosities, but chiefly because they provoked interesting thought experiments (what's human and what's not?). Medieval Muslims were so incurious about the Europeans, they called them all Franks, or Frenchmen, and distinguished them by body smell.
The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire made much out of the human toll of a catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon, because he believed it proved his arguments for the non-existence of God. There's no evidence he shed any tears.
It's we, the emotional sophisticates of the modern West, who invented the idea of global empathy. On our large-screen televisions we're joined up momentarily with the suffering faces of far-distant innocents, the better to make sense of the sorrows of the world. That's why, when the stories came in last week about the emaciated children discovered beside their dead mothers in a shelled house in Gaza, we immediately visualised the scene in our mind's eye. And our hearts felt a stab, as if these were our own children. Neither geographical distance nor paucity of factual detail is any longer a barrier to our capacity to feel.
Global empathy is one of those illegitimate children of the imperial experience whose origins we like to forget.
In the days of the British Empire, Australians greeted reports of distant massacres of British soldiery with a new urgency, as if we too were witness to the Indian Mutiny or overrun by African tribesmen at Mafeking. Even today, the same impulse appears to unite the sympathy of pious Muslims everywhere -- towards suffering peoples of their own kind. After the catastrophe of World War I, however, a new generation of critical intellectuals turned the tables on imperial sympathising, rerouting all that emotional energy towards the victims of European colonialism.
This was the generation that took Gandhi, that eminently Western non-Westerner, as its moral hero. But there were few enough Gandhis in the moral history of the 20th century. And so that generation's offspring switched their sympathies to new, more troubling heroes, from Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to Yasser Arafat. In the process, empathy became, in effect, the handmaiden of ideology. We learned to bestow empathy on those we approved of in our political fantasies, and to withhold empathy, with determined efficiency, from those we did not. We became gymnasts of the heart.
And so the '60s generation wept bitter tears for that young girl, half-alight with napalm, who ran naked down that Vietnamese road. But the curious economy of empathy required them to avert their eyes from the massacre of civilians by the Viet Cong or the barbaric behaviour of North Vietnamese prison guards. Just as, today, we weep bitter tears for those hapless prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay even as we withhold them from the wretched political inmates of Cuba's Guantanamo Provincial Prison, a few hundred metres away.
The same complicated moral logic was on evidence in The Netherlands last week when two high-profile Dutch political figures assumed leadership of a demonstration against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Harry van Bommel, a former schoolteacher, serves as Socialist Opposition spokesman on international affairs. Gretta Duisenberg, once a flamboyant socialite, is the socially conscious wife of the former Dutch central bank chief. Each has spoken at great length about the Palestinians' plight. (According to Duisenberg, Israeli rule in Gaza is worse than wartime Nazi rule in Holland.)
And each looked thoroughly comfortable in their skins as they led the crowd in chants of that old party tune, "Intifada, intifada, Palestinian state!" Even as, in the background, their fellow demonstrators could clearly be heard singing the more uninhibited political ditty: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" And so here they were together: the warm heart of the global conscience and the icy blood of Hamas, united within the same pulsing breast.
For the discriminating empathist, Israel presents special problems as an enemy. After all, it's hard for someone who trades in the currency of sympathy to deny any moral capital whatsoever to a state founded as a refuge for one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet.
The easiest solution to this dilemma is not to ignore the past, but rather to reconfigure it for your own purposes. Hence those familiar formulas, which hardly merit sober political analysis: Zionism equals fascism; Israel equals Nazi Germany; Gaza is a concentration camp; the Palestinians are the new Jews. Indeed, these aren't political slogans in the normal sense. They're a ritual language of degradation, employed to place your defiled opponents beyond the empathetic pale.
When empathy isn't serving as ideology's handmaiden, it puts in overtime as its usher. And while the present wave of sympathy towards the inhabitants of Gaza is no doubt sincerely felt, in some quarters it's also serving to usher in an altogether more pragmatic political calculation. For some time now many Western supporters of the Palestinian cause have been discreetly shifting their political allegiance away from Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority -- whom they mistrust as Western collaborators -- and towards that superlative foe of Western interests, Hamas.
So Britain's The Guardian last week editorialised in favour of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, to be engineered by withholding EU funds from the West Bank until Fatah submits. The alternative, the paper thundered, was a Fatah "satrap" (that old imperial imagery again!) under Israeli dominion.
And editorialists everywhere have been talking about Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, as if they were now the acknowledged spokespeople for Palestinian interests.
Yet, without lubrication from our discriminating tears, this change in political sympathies might be a little hard to swallow. After all, this is the same Hamas whose websites extol the divine achievements of its suicide bombers and whose children's TV exhorts a new generation of martyrs shaped in the same incandescent image. On Hamas's Friday-night TV sermons, the imam likes to recall the perfidy of the Jews towards Mohammed 1300 years ago: a broken pact that, as readers of Ibn Ishaq's biography will know, obliged the prophet to behead an entire Jewish tribe with his sword. Hamas, demonstrably, does not trouble itself much with the politics of empathy beyond the confines of its own kind.
And so, having elevated empathy to a universal faculty, it seems we've come full circle.
Now we're willing to authorise any kind of exotic political creed, with any kind of consequences, so long as it promises to rid us of the spectre of those distant children in distress. Source: The Australian
 From correspondents in Ramallah
November 10, 2008 10:09pm
FORMER Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died four years ago this week, was poisoned by Israel, a relative says.
"Every day there are statements and clues about the elimination of Arafat and every day we draw closer to the poisoning theory," Nasser al-Qidwa, a nephew of the late Palestinian leader, said.
"In a year or two, the nature of the poison administered to Yasser Arafat and the procedure used will be known,'' said Mr Qidwa, who heads the Yasser Arafat foundation.
"In any case, Israel is responsible for his death. There were preparations to get rid of the political leadership of the Palestinian people."
The precise cause of Yasser Arafat's death on November 11, 2004 remains unknown, but several Palestinian leaders are convinced he was poisoned by Israel, which emphatically denies the claim.
Thousands of people are expected to take part in ceremonies to mark the fourth anniversary of his death in the West Bank city of Ramallah tomorrow. Source: Adelaide Now
By Joseph Farah WASHINGTON – When Taysir Saada served as a trained assassin for Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization in the late 1960s, he admits he hated Christians. If he found a home belonging to followers of Jesus, he would sometimes throw a grenade inside and shoot it up with bursts of machine-gun fire. He has no idea how many people were killed and wounded in such attacks. Today a non-uniformed Saada, now known as Tass, patrols the dangerous Hamas-dominated streets of the Gaza Strip – no longer hunting down Christians or bearing arms; the Palestinian-American has traded in his automatic weapons and grenades for the Bible, humanitarian service and apologies to Arab Christians he once persecuted. His transition from Islamic terrorist to Christian missionary is recounted in a new book, " Once An Arafat Man: The True Story of How a PLO Sniper Found a New Life." Saada has returned to his roots, having been born in Gaza shortly after the 1948 war. Read more ...Source: WND
 When Yasser Arafat received the Nobel Prize, should Jews worldwide have rioted, issued fatwas demanding his murder and posted rewards for his execution? After all, Arafat was a self-acknowledged terrorist, complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent Israelis, Jordanians, Lebanese and assorted others, including his own not-so-innocent followers who often fell out of Arafat’s inconsistent favour. When the Wahhabi version of the Word of God is absolute, when the radical Muslim world (now dominant and in ascendance) countenances no alternative views, no variations of subjective interpretation and mandates death for such apostasy, then the knighting last summer of Sir Salman Rushdie does indeed smack of provocativeness. But how many prizes and decorations have been given to Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Who in the West should honestly not be provoked by this lauding of these foul-mouthed gangsters, of an Iranian president who denies the Holocaust and demands the extermination of Israel, the only fully fledged democracy in the Middle East? Should not every Holocaust survivor and family, every Israeli, every freedom-loving individual everywhere be taking to the streets? Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
 By Frank J. Gaffney Jr. Jimmy Carter's pathetic need for political rehabilitation following a presidency widely regarded as one of the worst in American history is once again making news. He reportedly will meet this week with Khaled Mashaal, Syrian-based leader of the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian arm, Hamas - an internationally recognized terrorist organization. Mr. Carter maintains this is no big deal since he has met with Hamas officials before. Indeed, in keeping with his Carter Center's self-appointed status as global election monitor, the former president did officiate in January 2006 when the Brotherhood's terrorists defeated those of Fatah led by Yasser Arafat's longtime crony, Mahmoud Abbas. In point of fact, it seems there is scarcely a serious bad actor on the planet with whom Jimmy Carter has not met. He is a serial tyrant-enabler, the very personification of Rodney King's risible appeal, "Can't we all get along?" Mr. Carter has come to epitomize the notion that "dialogue" is always in order, no matter how odious or dangerous the interlocutor - or the extent to which they or their agendas will benefit from such interactions. Read more ...Source: The Washington Times
 Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter lays a wreath at the grave of
Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah Former President Jimmy Carter is set to meet with Mahmoud Zahar, a top Hamas leader with control over militants in the Gaza Strip. FOX News confirms the Islamic militant group will meet with Carter in Egypt about their demand that Israel open Gaza's crossings and stop military raids in the territory. The meeting is expected to take place Thursday. The U.S. and Israeli governments brand Hamas a terror group and have refused to negotiate with the organization. Carter says the search for Mideast peace should include reaching out to groups such as Hamas. The former president was the broker of Israel's peace treaty with Egypt peace treaty three decades ago. The former president told FOX News Wednesday, "I'm going to try to get Syria to be constructive in the entire peace process, that would include Iraq and Lebanon, as well." Read more ...Source: AP / FOX News
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Copyright Muslims Against Sharia 2008. All rights reserved.
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Hamas authorities did an about face on Saturday and dropped a plan to keep schools in the Gaza Strip open on a Palestinian holiday founded by the rival Fatah faction. 
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