Free Republic

How holding Palestinian elections threatens to expose Fatah. The Palestinian attempt to appease the Biden administration by holding Palestinian elections threatens to reveal the flabbiness and collapse of Fatah, which lies at the heart of the Palestinian Authority. Recently, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas threatened Fatah members who opted to run outside the Fatah list with death. This apparently occurred last week during a Fatah Revolutionary Council meeting in Ramallah. Abbas had barred members of the Fatah Central Committee, Revolutionary Council, and Consultative Council from running in the upcoming legislative elections. This ban also included current ministers, ambassadors, governors, security officials,...

Powell Plans 'Candid' Dialogue in Syria By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) says he plans to have a "good, strong, candid" dialogue with Syrian officials when he travels to Damascus. "We have issues with the Syrian government that I am going there to talk about," Powell said Thursday. He said they included support for terrorist organizations, development of weapons of mass destruction and a need to seal the border with Iraq (news - web sites) to stop former officials from taking refuge in Syria. "I will not hold back...

Obama aide wants talks with terrorists Foreign adviser's 'anti-Israel policies,' sympathy for Hamas, raise concerns Posted: January 29, 2008 By Aaron Klein © 2008 WorldNetDaily.com Robert Malley JERUSALEM – While officials here largely maintain a policy against interfering in U.S. election politics, some Israeli security officials quietly expressed "concern" about an adviser to Sen. Barack Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group. The officials noted Robert Malley, a principal Obama foreign policy adviser, has penned numerous opinion articles, many of them co-written with a former adviser to the late Palestinian Authority President...

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as...

The three ambassadors who died violent deaths were Cleo Noel Jr.,killed in March 1973 when Palestinian terrorists struck an embassy in Sudan; Adolph Dubs, killed in 1973 when Afghan police stormed a hotel room where he was being held by terrorists; and Arnold Raphel, who died in 1988 when a plane crashed. Receiving waivers as longtime diplomats with military service were William Rivkin and Philip Crowe. Rivkin, who died in 1967, served as ambassador to Senegal, Gambia and Luxembourg and spent five years of in the Army during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Crowe, who...

Egyptian intelligence warned American officials about a week before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden's network was in the advance stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, it will be reported on Tuesday (in the NY TIMES)... MORE... A senior U.S. intelligence official denied the warning was received...

ZOA: It's Troubling To See Jewish Leaders Defend Israel/U.S. Basher George Soros Against Glenn Beck's Criticism November 16, 2010 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Morton A. Klein Phone: 212-481-1500 http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=1968 Soros: 1944 (Nazi occupation) “was happiest time of my life … adventure … fun” The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has expressed its concern over the strong criticism that a number of American Jewish leaders and other prominent Jews in recent days have directed at Fox broadcaster, Glenn Beck, for his criticism of Israel/U.S.-basher, financier George Soros, regarding his behavior in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944. In that year, George Soros’ father...

The author of the attack on Rue Copernic identified. 27 years after the explosion that killed 4 persons in Paris, justice is on the trail of a Palestinian living in Canada. The head of the team that perpetrated the attack on a synagogue on Copernic Street on 3 October 1980 was living peacefully in Canada after long years spent in the United States.

This article analyzes the breakdown of the Palestinian nationalist movement as resulting from the policies of Yasir Arafat and Fatah, the Palestinians' leaders for 35 years; the weaknesses of his successor, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazin); the movement's overall strategy and ideology, and how Hamas will seek to consolidate and perpetuate its own rule. The victory of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, in the January 2006 parliamentary elections seemed like an earthquake transforming the Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinian politics, prospects for democratization, and even the region as a whole. Yet this development should not have been a surprise. More than just heralding...

To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business. Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, "poorly managed" and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

JERUSALEM, Sept. 7 - The medical records of Yasir Arafat, which have been kept secret since his unexplained death last year at a French military hospital, show that he died from a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unidentified infection. The first independent review of the records, obtained by The New York Times, suggests that poisoning was highly unlikely and dispels a rumor that he may have died of AIDS. Nonetheless, the records show that despite extensive testing, his doctors could not determine the underlying infection. Arafat seemed frail in his final months but not, by...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

A Non-Nuanced Middle East Peace Plan Posted 10/11/2004 By Rick Richman In the October 7, 2004 issue of The New York Review of Books, Rob Malley, who was part of the U.S. team at Camp David, reviewed Dennis Ross's book on the peace process (The Missing Peace) and came to a conclusion very different from Ross. For reasons that will not be evident at first, it is a conclusion worth studying. In his book, Ross blamed the collapse of the Oslo peace process on Yasir Arafat, as well as the failure of the U.S. to insist, as part of the...

Israeli intelligence officials tell Lesley Stahl they can now prove that Iraq and Iran are secretly financing and directing acts of terrorism against Israel. The proof, they say, was found in files confiscated during raids earlier this year on the headquarters of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and gleaned from prisoner interrogations. Stahl’s report will be broadcast on the premiere of 60 Minutes’ 35th season, Sunday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 p.m ET/PT. The documents, obtained from the Ramallah compound earlier this year, are from the Palestinian Authority’s most secret files, says Col. Miri Eisen of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. “We...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's national bus company said Sunday it would sue Palestinian President Yasser Arafat for damages it incurred in dozens of Palestinian attacks, including suicide bombings. Palestinian Communications Minister Imad Falouji said Egged had chosen the wrong defendant and blamed Israeli policy in the occupied territories for the attacks that caused the damages. Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, more than 100 passengers on buses owned by the Egged bus cooperative have been killed and some 600 wounded in suicide attacks, roadside bombings and shootings, the company said. Ron Ratner, Egged's vice president of...

Filed at 3:05 p.m. ET BEIRUT (Reuters) - The militant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said on Friday that it will target Israeli leaders in response to the Jewish state's tactic of killing senior Palestinian militants behind attacks on Israelis. Usama Hamdan, who heads Hamas in Lebanon, said Israel's killing in recent weeks of two senior Hamas figures -- one in an air strike that left 14 others dead -- meant Hamas's military actions should expand beyond suicide bombings in public places. ``From here on out, targeting a leader, minister, or the head of the government of the Zionist entity will...

Filed at 4:48 p.m. ET CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Israa Badr was pleased an American president finally recognized the need for a Palestinian state, saying George Bush ``is finally admitting there is something called Palestine.'' But like many other Arabs, the 25-year-old public relations officer mistrusts the motives behind Washington's plan for Mideast peace, saying America only has Israeli concerns in mind. ``It just won't work,'' she said, ``(the Americans) only listen to the Jews.'' Bush, who on Monday became the first American president to endorse Palestinian statehood, set strict terms for such a move. Only after the Palestinians elect...

asir Arafat claims that he was born in Jerusalem, but he was actually born in Cairo. He claims to belong to the prominent Jerusalem family of Husseini, but he is at best only distantly related to it. He claims that he turned down a chance to go to the University of Texas, but according to one biographer, the Palestinian-born writer Saïd K. Aburish, it is highly unlikely that he was ever accepted. He claims to have disabled ten Israeli armored personnel carriers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but Israel didn't even have ten APCs in the sector he was...

<p>For the second time in three weeks, a major media survey has found that Americans' news habits have not been fundamentally changed by the traumatic events of Sept. 11.</p> <p>On the heels of a Project for Excellence in Journalism study that revealed that network news was returning to a pre-Sept. 11 diet of softer content, a new Pew Research Center survey reports that the terror attacks and the war in Afghanistan have not significantly whetted the public's appetite for news.</p>

WASHINGTON, May 25 — An intense debate among President Bush and his top advisers over whether to press for the removal of Yasir Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian Authority has effectively frozen the nation's Middle East policy, according to some administration officials. It has also prompted George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to delay his mission to the region until the policy is worked out. For more than two weeks, Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have said that Mr. Tenet will go to the Middle East to work to restructure Palestinian security...