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Posted on 05/30/2005 8:10:59 PM PDT by Alouette
Palestinian security forces in Ramallah on Monday arrested a suspect in the murder of Samir Rantisi, a local journalist and spokesman for former PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo.
Rantisi, 42, had for years urged Palestinians to endorse non-violent methods in their confrontation with Israel and was strongly opposed to suicide bombings.
He was murdered early Monday morning while he was sleeping in his bedroom in the Sateh Marhaba neighborhood. A lone gunman who broke into his apartment in the Shkukani Building shot him twice in the head in front of his wife.
The wife managed to identify the suspect, who fled the scene but was later arrested by PA security forces.
PA security officials said the murder was criminally motivated and was not linked to Rantisi's job as a journalist and former spokesman for the information minister.
The suspect was identified as Hani Yassin Dik, 28, a senior official with the PA's ministry for prisoners' affairs. Sources in the city said Rantisi and Dik had been involved in a personal quarrel for some time, but refused to elaborate.
Rantisi began his career as a journalist by working as a consultant for a number of foreign media organizations. In the early 1990s, he was employed by the US consulate in east Jerusalem. When the PA was established in 1994, he served as an advisor to Yasser Abed Rabbo and helped run the Ramallah-based Palestine Media Center.
Following the announcement of the Geneva Initiative by Abed Rabbo and former minister Yossi Beilin, Rantisi was appointed coordinator of the Palestinian team in the joint Israeli-Palestinian Peace Coalition.
Rantisi recently established his own think tank known as the Jerusalem Institute for Peace Studies. He also served as an analyst on Palestinian affairs and was invited to speak at different forums around the world.
His last publication was about the crisis in the ruling Fatah party led by PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
The study came in anticipation of Fatah's sixth general conference scheduled to convene in the Jordanian capital, Amman, in August 2005, the first to be held by the party after the death of Yasser Arafat.
The study identified Fatah's main internal crisis as a crisis of identity between those in the party's leadership who still perceive Fatah as a revolutionary movement and those who would like to see Fatah start a gradual transformation into a democratic political party.
"A major opinion split threatens the movement's unity," Rantisi wrote. "The opinion split is between holders of the revolutionary concept, represented by the old guard who constitute a majority of the members of the central committee, most are located outside the Palestinian areas, and are headed by Farouk Kaddoumi, the Secretary General of Fatah, and holders of the political party concept, represented by the new and younger guard, most are grassroots leaders, operating inside the Palestinian areas, and are better represented by Fatah's jailed West Bank leader Marwan Barghouti."
Although he was closely associated with the PA, Rantisi did not hesitate to criticize the way the PA was handling the conflict with Israel.
"The truth is that the Palestinian struggle, even though it is a just and moral struggle, it lacks serious factors of power," he wrote last March in an article published by the Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN).
"The Palestinian people during the past years – regardless of the mistakes which were committed – have nearly exhausted much of their powers in a fruitless struggle against the Israeli occupation, the expansion of the illegal settlements, and reaped the gift of the Israeli wall which is shredding their prospective state into pieces - thanks to the suicide bombing strategies that undermined the forces of peace in Israel and equipped the Israeli right wing with magnificent pretexts and ideas to destroy the option of an independent Palestinian State in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The beginning of the real struggle therefore must restart within the Palestinian house."
Rantisi was among the first Palestinians to call for adopting non-violent resistance against Israel.
In 1990, at the peak of the first intifada, he staged a one-man sit-in outside the headquarters of the Civil Administration in Beit El to demand an end to occupation.
"I placed the banners in front of the Israeli military leadership headquarters and chained my body to a light post," he later recalled. "Within a few moments, Israeli soldiers congregated around me, with one soldier contacting his superiors to report what I had done while the others looked on with confused and astonished eyes. Soon, it was clear that the soldiers thought I was a foreigner collaborating with the Palestinian people. They could not imagine for one moment that the person in front of them was one of the Palestinian youth who had been throwing stones at them."
A few weeks later, Rantisi arrived in downtown Jerusalem carrying a back-pack filled with olive branches and a sign that read, "I stretch out my hand to you in peace, and I give you an olive branch if you agree to end your occupation of my land and your oppression of my people."
"Getting the Palestinian elite leadership to adopt the non-violent resistance strategy, and convincing the leadership of the Palestinian national movement of the validity of a peaceful protest method, is the only means remaining of reviving the Palestinian non-violent peaceful resistance option," he explained.
"This option is capable of transforming the Palestinian struggle against occupation to a peaceful protest movement and will enable it to enjoy the largest possible international support and assistance. The time has come for the Palestinian leadership to make use of the experience of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues, in transforming the resistance strategy of the South African national movement to non-violent resistance options."
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<< This is how the PA deals with "peace activists." >>
The mad mullahs' moon-rock-walloping death cult of pieces strikes again.
[Providing ever-more evidence there is no way the word, "savage," sneaked accidentally into the English Language]
Sad.
John Q. Muslim speaks again.
I am not sure when we will ever start listening.
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Arafatism is Marxism, not Islamism. And their party elite, like commies everywhere, live a bourgeois lifestyle. It's only the proletariat dupes who would dream of strapping on a bomb.
May 30, 2005
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