Posted on 09/10/2003 9:21:10 AM PDT by knighthawk
Abu Mazen, last month's avatar of Palestinian statesmanship, is now gone, the victim of his own mediocrity. But not to worry, there won't be a void. The Palestinians, who produce so little, have a great reserve of ersatz leaders. Meet Abu Ala, the next Palestinian prime minister.
Abu Ala, at 65, has a biography full of blank pages. He has spent his adult life scraping and fetching for The Big Abu, Yasser Arafat. Abu Ala, aka Ahmed Qureia, is better educated, better bred and better dressed than Abu Ammar, aka Arafat, but he lacks the essential ingredient of Palestinian political stature: gunmen.
If Abu Ala has ever had an independent thought, it is unrecorded. He was a moderate back in the early '90s, when Arafat ran his Oslo scam. When Arafat changed the game at Camp David, Abu Ala was right there, cheering on the intifadeh.
Not that he is a warlike man. Abu Ala is a bean counter, not a fighter. For many years he managed Arafat's business empire (aka the Palestine Liberation Organization treasury), a job that requires a good head for figures and slavish obedience.
As a reward for these qualities, Arafat made Abu Ala speaker of the Palestinian parliament. In this role, one of his first decisions was to ban smoking in legislative sessions. The edict was ignored by everyone and, within two sessions, rescinded.
This raises an obvious question: Can a guy scared of a bunch of chain smokers stand up to Arafat? Or take on Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Arafat's own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades? Or make any kind of move at all without permission from The Big Abu in Ramallah?
It's not that Abu Ala is more timid than Abu Mazen, aka Mahmoud Abbas. He's just no braver. They're the same guy, a couple of lifetime .235 hitters at the end of Arafat's bench. President Bush spent half a year, and more than a little presidential capital, vainly hoping Abu Mazen was more than Arafat's pinch runner. He probably won't make that mistake again.
Still, good manners require Bush to at least pretend to take Abu Ala seriously. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will play along. Sharon would rather sign up for an aerobics class than get on the wrong side of the U.S. right now. That's because he's confident Bush won't back away from his bottom line demand that the Palestinians stop the terror before demanding any Israeli concessions. Since the Palestinians are addicted to violence, that leaves Sharon free to pursue his counter-intifadeh, which consists of hunting down terrorists one by one and blowing them to smithereens.
In the last few weeks, more than a dozen Hamas leaders have been killed. Israel missed an opportunity Saturday to kill more when one of its planes fired a half-ton bomb at a Hamas leadership meeting. The terrorists walked (or, in the case of wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, rolled) away from the blast, but Sharon is a man who knows how to learn from mistakes. Next time, he'll drop a ton.
Yesterday, Hamas dropped bombs of its own at an army base near Tel Aviv and an upscale Jerusalem cafe. It also is threatening to assassinate Sharon.
The Israeli prime minister, for his part, is in India, publicly solidifying Jerusalem's de facto alliance with New Delhi.
Israel's strategic problem has always been its lack of size; facing the jihad alone is difficult. Sharon believes that teaming up with a billion Hindus will change that equation. If he's right, Abu Ala and the rest of the Little Abus are going to get even smaller.
LOL! This guy is just another puppet.
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