Palestinian officials: Arafat era is over..

cnn.com ^ | Saturday, October 30, 2004 | cnn.com

[theFIRMbss]

>Now that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is beginning to defeat Israel, it is pulling out one of its most powerful terrorist weapons to finish the surrender process. That weapon is commonly known as "Islamic fundamentalism"

To my eyes this view
is hopelessly insular.
The PLO is

a very small group
almost entirely funded
by Western oddballs

from Europe and here.
Calling radical Islam
a PLO tool

is like calling, say,
the zoo a tool of the chimps . . .
The opposite's true.

Chimps are just one part
of the larger zoo. Likewise,
the PLO is

just one monkey part
of the vastly larger thing
radical Islam.

Check out this essay.
I don't endorse this left-wing
view of politics,

but this overview
of radical Islam seems
pretty sharp to me.

RADICAL ISLAM, August 19, 2002 by: S.R. Shearer