A PERFECT STORM:
A TERRORIST MOVEMENT CONVENIENTLY DISGUISED AS NATIONALISM + A LEGACY CONVENIENTLY DISGUISED AS A PRESIDENCY 1
- by Mia T, 7.26.06
- The myth that the Muslim world's problems are directly linked to the Palestinian question has gone up in flames, argues Mark Steyn
A FEW years back, when folks talked airily about "the Middle East peace process" and "a two-state solution", I used to say that the trouble was the Palestinians saw a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to a one-state solution. I underestimated Islamist depravity. As we now see in Gaza and southern Lebanon, any two-state solution would be an interim stage en route to a no-state solution.
In one of the most admirably straightforward of Islamist declarations, Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the slaughter of US and French forces 20 years ago, put it this way: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
.... For the first quarter-century of Israel's existence, the Arab states fought more or less conventional wars against the Zionists and kept losing. So then they figured it was easier to anoint a terrorist movement and in 1974 declared Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", which is quite a claim for an organisation then barely a decade old.
Amazingly, the Arab League persuaded the UN, the EU, Bill Clinton1 and everyone else to go along with it and to treat the old monster as a head of state who lacked only a state to head.
It's true that many nationalist movements have found it convenient to adopt the guise of terrorists.
But, as the Palestinian movement descended from airline hijackings to the intifada to self-detonating in pizza parlours, it never occurred to its glamorous patrons to wonder if maybe this was, in fact, a terrorist movement conveniently adopting the guise of nationalism.
Mark Steyn: If only they had refused to indulge Arafat
The Australian | July 26, 2006 | Mark Steyn
Many blame Clinton's failed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- which sought Israeli territorial concessions for promises of peace by Arafat and ignored indications of growing Palestinian militancy and violations of security-reform agreements -- for partially causing the current intifada.... Arafat visited the White House during the Clinton administration 24 times, more than any other world leader during those eight years.
Yasser Arafat endorses Kerry
Thinks Democratic senator 'better for Palestinian cause'
October 18, 2004
By Aaron Klein
- At the time, clinton observed: "I made more progress in the Middle East than I did between Socks and Buddy." Retrospectively, it is clear that clinton's characterization was not correct.
Mia T
Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers
A family with close ties to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat contributed thousands of dollars to Senate candidate Hillary Clinton at a secret fund raiser in May...
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The family of Hani Masri donated $6,000 directly to Mrs. Clinton's campaign on May 11 and 12 of this year. On May 12, Clinton attended a fund raiser at Masri's Washington, D.C., mansion - which, as the Jewish Forward reported later that month, was closed to the press and was not even listed on her daily schedule.
In May alone, Masri himself donated $134,000 to the Democratic Party - money that could be funneled into Clinton's Senate campaign. FEC records show a handful of other Masri contributions to various Democratic causes going all the way back to 1995, but nothing like the burst of generosity in May 2000.
The Masri family controls the Palestinian Development Investment Co., a business entity with ties to Yasser Arafat. Masri himself has been described as "an advisor" to Arafat.
According to the Forward, another company run by Masri, Capital Investment Management Corp., was awaiting approval from the Clinton administration for a $60 million loan guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers through the Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC).
Masri told the Forward that he was asked by Mrs. Clinton's campaign to stage the secret fund raiser.
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In the final weeks of the campaign, Mrs. Clinton has come under fire for attending a June fund raiser sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance, which reportedly advocates violence against Israel.2
Remember:
Just a reminder......3/3/2004 9:09:00 PM...
Arafat visited the Clinton(D) WhiteHousE...
More then any other Egyptian... More then any other foreign leader... More then any other terrorist... More then any other mass murderer....
Remember that Clinton(D) sent Carville to interfere in Israel's elections to help impose Oslo upon the Jews:
It's the Terrorists, Stupid
Bill Clinton's first international "success" was brokering the Oslo Peace Agreements between Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yassar Arafat. These agreements made it possible for the PLO to transform itself in the eyes of the world from a terrorist gang to a recognized "national authority." The Israelis came away with a promise of peace in our time and its Labor Party leaders brought home a shared Nobel Peace Prize. (The reality of the bad deal that Rabin and Peres brokered for their country is summarized in this web article on freeman.org written in 1996 three years after the accords were signed.)
For the entire eight years of the Clinton administration our foreign policy took a huge tilt in favor of Arafat. He was the foreign leader who visited the Clinton White House more times than any other. It's hard to forget how Clinton snubbed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited the U.S., while welcoming Arafat with open arms.
It was only after Ehud Barak under the tutelage of James Carville, President Clinton's aggressive political consultant, defeated Netanyahu that our administration again welcomed an Israeli Prime Minister properly. Yet, Clinton wasn't finished with meddling in the Middle East. Seeking his own Nobel Peace Prize, he strong-armed Barak into concession after concession at the Camp David Peace talks. Unfortunately for Clinton his "friend" Arafat was not satisfied with achieving 95% of his goals and turned down every offer. Thus Clinton lost his Nobel Prize opportunity, while the Middle East has sunk into an ever-increasing spiral of violence - violence choreographed by Arafat and his terrorist thugs.
Hillary's hands are not clean:
Can You See?
In 1998, Mrs. Clinton gave a speech in New York (broadcast to the Arab Middle East) calling for creation of a Palestinian state. Hillary's position was not new, as former Justice Department attorney Barbara Olson, on my national radio show Monday, elaborates in her new bestseller Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary, according to Olson, "has a lifetime record of support for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)," even during its years of intense terrorist activity against Israel.
While Hillary chaired the New World Foundation from 1982 until 1988, it gave a $15,000 grant to Grassroots International, which, according to Olson, "had direct ties to the PLO." This grant money, she writes, was funneled to two branches of the PLO.
David Horowitz notes
How the Left Undermined America's Security Before 9/11
Among the terrorist entities that supported the al-Qaeda terrorists were Yasser Arafat's Palestine Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO had created the first terrorist training camps, invented suicide bombings and been the chief propaganda machine behind the idea that terrorist armies were really missionaries for "social justice." Yet, among foreign leaders Arafat was Clinton's most frequent White House guest. Far from treating Arafat as an enemy of civilized order and an international pariah, the Clinton Administration was busily cultivating him as a "partner for peace." For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions--poverty, racism and oppression--for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.
The idea that terrorism has "root causes" in social conditions whose primary author is the United States is, in fact, an organizing theme of the contemporary political left. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world'"--declared the writer Susan Sontag, speaking for this faction--"but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?" (Was Susan Sontag unaware that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center attack? That Iraq had attempted to swallow Kuwait and was a regional aggressor and sponsor of terror? That Iraq had expelled UN arms inspectors--in violation of the terms of its peace--who were there to prevent it from developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons? Was she unaware that Iraq was a sponsor of international terror and posed an ongoing threat to others, including the country in which she lived?)
During the Clinton years the idea that America was somehow responsible for global distress had become an all too familiar refrain among leftwing elites.
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Clinton's continuing ambivalence about America's role in the world was highlighted in the wake of September 11, when he suggested that America actually bore some responsibility for the attacks on itself. In November 2001, even as the new Bush administration was launching America's military response, the former president made a speech at Georgetown University in which he admonished citizens who were descended "from various European lineages" that they were "not blameless," and that America's past involvement in slavery should humble them as they confronted their attackers. Characteristically the President took no responsibility for his own failure to protect Americans from the attacks.
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After the first World Trade Center attack, President Clinton vowed there would be vengeance. But like so many of his presidential pronouncements, the strong words were not accompanied by deeds. Nor were they followed by measures necessary to defend the country against the next series of attacks.
After their Mogadishu victory and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, unsuccessful attempts were made by al-Qaeda groups to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other populated targets, including a massive terrorist incident timed to coincide with the millennium celebrations of January 2000. Another scheme to hijack commercial airliners and use them as "bombs" according to plans close to those eventually used on September 11, was thwarted in the Philippines in 1995. The architect of this effort was the Iraqi intelligence agent Ramzi Yousef.
The following year, a terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers, a U.S. military barracks in Saudia Arabia, killed 19 American soldiers. The White House response was limp, and the case (in the words of FBI director Louis B. Freeh) "remains unresolved." Two years later al-Qaeda agents blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 245 people and injuring 5,000. (One CIA official told a reporter, "Two at once is not twice as hard. It is a hundred times as hard.") On October 12, 2000 the warship USS Cole was bombed while re-fueling in Yemen, yet another Islamic country aligned with the terrorist enemy. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and 39 injured.
These were all acts of war, yet of the President and his cabinet refused to recognize them as such.
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Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the Administration was made up of people who for twenty-five years had discounted or minimized the totalitarian threat, opposed America's armed presence abroad, and consistently resisted the deployment of America's military forces to halt Communist expansion. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was himself a veteran of the Sixties "anti-war" movement, which abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, and created the "Vietnam War syndrome" that made it so difficult afterwards for American presidents to deploy the nation's military forces.
Berger had also been a member of "Peace Now," the leftist movement seeking to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions to Yasser Arafat's PLO terrorists. Clinton's first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake was a protÈgÈ of Berger, who had introduced him to Clinton. All three had met as activists in the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign whose primary issue was opposition to the Vietnam War based on the view that the "arrogance of American power" was responsible for the conflict rather than Communist aggression.
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FBI agents have stated that they were prevented from opening either criminal or national-security cases because of a fear that it would be seen as 'profiling' Islamic charities. While Clinton was 'politically correct,' Hamas flourished.
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Inattention to defense also did not prevent the Clinton Administration from pursuing massive social experiments in the military in the name of gender and diversity reform, which included requiring "consciousness raising" classes for military personnel, rigging physical standards women were unable to meet, and in general undermining the meritocratic benchmarks that are a crucial component of military morale.
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During the 1990s, Bill Clinton's most frequent foreign guest was Yasser Arafat, whose allegiance to Iraq and betrayal of America during the Gulf War could not have been more brazen. Following the defeat of Iraq, a "peace process" was launched in the Arab-Israeli conflict that predictably failed through Arafat's failure to renounce the terrorist option. But why renounce terror if there is no price exacted for practicing it?
