Black market prices dive as weapons flood into Gaza

Black market prices dive as weapons flood into Gaza margot dudkevitch and jpost staff, THE JERUSALEM POST Sep. 14, 2005

Smugglers have brought large amounts of weapons and bullets into Gaza from Egypt, and the influx has cut black market prices, Palestinian officials and a weapons dealer said Wednesday.

An arms dealer said the price of an AK-47 assault rifle has dropped from 1,400 Jordanian dinars ($1,977) to about 900 dinars ($1,300). Bullets for the weapon are now being sold for as little as three shekels (less than $1) when previously they cost up to 18 shekels ($4).

Egyptian-made pistols that were recently sold in Gaza for $1,400 can now be bought for as little as $177, while an Italian pistol can be bought for $400, down from a previous high of $3,500, said the dealer, who identified himself only as Khader, for fear of arrest.

Most of the arms were bought from Bedouins and farmers on the Egyptian side of the border, Khader said. A Palestinian border control officer confirmed arms have been smuggled into Gaza, bringing down prices.

On Wednesday morning, Hamas operatives blew up a wall in Rafah in order to facilitate the uncontrolled flow of Palestinians and Egyptians streaming across the Gaza-Egypt border.

The gunmen threatened a PA security officer at the site not to seal the hole, vowing that for every hole sealed they would create ten more.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei was expected to head to Egypt in the next two days to discuss how to jointly monitor the border in an organized manner, PA National Security Adviser Jibril Rajoub said on Wednesday.

Despite Israeli demands on Egypt and the Palestinian Authority to immediately take action and seal off the border, Palestinians and Egyptians continued to freely cross the border since Wednesday morning.

Concerned over the chaotic situation in Gaza, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz warned Tuesday that failure to act immediately to restore law and order could have serious repercussions.

Mofaz also requested the intervention of US Ambassador Dan Kurtzer, sources in the Defense Ministry said.

Chairman of the Knesset's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud), on Wednesday harshly criticized the Egyptian force.

"The ink that signed the terrible Philadelphi agreement has yet to dry up and it has already become evident that in return for damaging the demilitarization of Sinai we got an open border for arms smugglers," he said.

Just hours after the IDF pullout from the Gaza Strip on Monday morning, thousands of Palestinians forced their way through the border crossing and rushed into Egypt. The crossing has since turned into an open passage, with thousands streaming across.

In preparation for the handover of the Philadelphi corridor to Egyptian and PA security control, Israel shut down its headquarters at the crossing a week ago.

Click here to view readers' opinions and to add your own opinion on the closing of Gaza's gates

The understanding was that once the PA received control of the Gaza Strip, it would assume the responsibility of monitoring the border with Egypt and act to prevent terror and weapons smuggling.

Ever since the army left Gaza, the situation has approached anarchy, strengthening Israeli fears that terror organizations will take advantage of the situation to restock their weapons' supplies and improve their capabilities.

"We view the situation as extremely serious and expect the PA and Egyptians to take immediate action and restore law and order," a source said. "If the situation remains unchecked, Israel will be forced to take steps." He declined to divulge further details.

but what is the PA? segment 1 of recent Deprogram Program by Sha'i ben-Tekoa...

Date: September 7, 2005 / ñùú ìåìà ã " ä
Parasha: Shoftim / íéèôù
Title: Gangocracy
Copyright Sha’i ben-Tekoa 2005
www.deprogramprogram.com
Shalom laYehudim, Shalom laBnai Noach, Shalom laGoyim. It’s the evening of the 5th
day, daled be-khodesh Elul, Parashat Shoftim, taf-shin-samech-heh; the evening of the 4th day,
Wednesday, 7 September 2005, webcasting from Judea, overlooking some 35 miles in the
distance down below, Gaza of the Philistines.
Gaza of the Neo-Philistines. Gaza of the declared Ancient Neo-Philistines about
whom Hanan Ashrawi, and every - and I mean every - self-proclaimed “Palestinian”
knows less about them than Jews do, because just about everything known of the
Philistines comes from the Bible and Biblical archaeology.
Did you ever notice how in the major museums of the world, like the
Metropolitan in New York, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, in the
sections dealing with ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, there is no one
artifact in a display case or standing up with an explanatory plaque or card next to it
labeling it “Palestinian, 3rd century b.c.e.,” or “Palestinian, Crusader Period”?
An ancient people with no ancient artifacts of their own.
I mean, for an ancient people to have left behind not one shard of pottery or
cruse of oil or mortar and pestle created in their distinctive Palestinian style is pretty
amazing.
Not one museum contains such galleries containing artifacts by the ancient
“Palestinians” next to the ones from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Israel.
Anyway, before dawn this morning in Gaza of the Neo-Philistines, the people
there were acting like Sicilians, like Mafia gangs, in that a contract was put out on Musa
Arafat whose home was attacked by, like, 100 gang members using assault rifles and
rocket-propelled grenades to attack his house and have a shootout with his bodyguards
inside the house, and after a 30-minute gun battle they broke into the house and dragged
Musa Arafat in his pajamas outside - this total scumbag of a nephew of the world famous
Dirtbag - and shot him in the head and left his corpse in the street.
Yours truly is moderately desperate for more subscribers-listeners to DPP and
you can help by asking your friends to give it a try, and maybe one selling point is that
DeProgram Program is unique in media coverage of Israel for calling what others call
organizations like Fatah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad neither political nor religious
organizations but gangs, because they act like gangs, because the gang is one of the common building blocks in Arab culture. These Arabs know what a nuclear family is, an
extended family of cousins is, a clan and a tribe, but that’s about it. Rising to the level of
nationhood has always been beyond their abilities; to transcend their bloodlines.
And when it comes to knowing how to govern themselves in large groups that
transcend the tribe, they only come up with these gangs. This is a gangocracy. That’s who
Saddam was: a local gang leader in the town of Tikrit, who rose with his gang to take
power in Baghdad, and then in typical gang behavior, murdered all of his fellow gang
members who had helped him on the way up in order to forestall any one of them
getting the big idea of deposing him as leader of Iraq.
Likewise the PLO was a syndicate of gangs not unlike the Cosa Nostra a/k/a the
Mafia. At its peak, the PLO had something like 12 to 18 separate so-called national
liberation organizations, all of them with fancy titles like the PFLP of George Habash,
the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or the DFLP, the
Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PLF, the Palestine
Liberation Front, and on and on in variations of a theme.
At first glance, it appears that these are all political groups with definite
ideologies, but in truth they were more like gangs created by junior members of older
gangs who did not like playing second fiddle to the big boss, so they split off and set up
their own gang. That was the difference between the PFLP of George Habash, an
avowed Marxist organization, and the DFLP which was created by his lieutenant Nayef
Hawatmeh, who like Habash is a self-styled ex-Christian Arab Marxist who broke away
to form his own gang.
Toward the end of the novel and later movie by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford
Coppola called The Godfather, as the old don ages and dies, one of his lieutenants, Tessio,
speaks of wanting to have his own “family,” meaning, Mafia franchise, and in the end
betrays the Godfather and then is bumped off for his betrayal.
Well, that was the PLO. There were 12 to 18 separate so-called political
organizations. Political? I mean, how many ways can a person or a people slice the
political baloney of ideological differences. You can have a left, a center, a right,
extremists at both ends. But 12? 18? Israel, in its pre-state days, had basically two armed
undergrounds; Haganah led by the Socialists of the countryside, and Irgun representing
the liberal, capitalist bourgeoisie of the cities. The Stern group was a third group but so
small it was something else altogether.
Versus these Arabs with their Fatah and PFLP and DFLP and PFLP-GC, and
Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the outfit this morning that
did the hit against Musa Arafat which calls itself Popular Resistance Committees. They
claimed credit for the gangland hit against this disgusting protection artist extortionist
criminal, who just like his uncle with his billions of dollars embezzled from funds meant
to help the poor-poor Ancient Ones, was lowlife dirt.
You know who the Popular Committees are? They were likewise second-string
punks in Fatah and Hamas, who because they were denied ultimate power quit and came
together - and to hell with the theoretical contradiction between Fatah the “secular
nationalist freedom fighters” and the Hamas Islamic ideology these other losers allegedly
adhered to. And according to one account today, the hit was really a Hamas hit because
the Popular Committees, whatever they were when they began, are now a Hamas front,
which is entirely reasonable as an explanation, because this is standard operating
procedure among the Arabs who are in so many ways a people of veils and false fronts.
Ever notice how just as the women go around veiled, so do the “freedom
fighters” who wrap their faces in keffiyas? It is a culture in which men wear long robes
that disguise their bodies and body language; where oil sheiks created the fashion of the
wrap-around sunglasses that Arafat liked to wear especially in his youth. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was a veil, a front created by Arafat during this
latest intifada after the Hamas suicide boys had become the heroes of “the Arab street,”
meaning those mobs of thousands of teenage Arab males seen on TV always swarming
in the streets shooting their guns, ululating. Arafat saw their popularity, gained by
blowing up buses and restaurants, outstrip that of the Tanzim, the youth organization of
Fatah, and so he established Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to compete - and never mind this
devil was always called by Dennis Ross and the think-tank boys a “secular moderate.”
Notice how he came up with a religious name - Al-Aqsa Martyrs - and joined in the
creation of a new shahid/martyr for Islam group.
Arafat’s eternal costume was also a veil, a disguise, modeled on Fidel Castro’s “I
am a Third World Revolutionary General costume.” It was 1959 when Castro the
communist came to power in Cuba and Arafat founded Fatah.
Arafat and Abu Mazen organized the Munich massacre at the Olympic Games in
1972 and as soon as it happened leaked the word to journalists that the “Black
September” organization had done it, a “radical splinter extremist group not at all
representative of the moderate, secular, centrist Fatah.”
So the gang today that bumped off Arafat’s nephew was probably Hamas in
disguise. Tony Blair and George Bush and Jack Straw and Condi Rice, I am afraid, take
much too seriously their shallow perception of what goes on here. And when they
believe there is a “Palestinian” people yearning for the peace and prosperity of living in
their own state, they have got it all wrong.
The men with the guns in Gaza are gangsters for whom patriotic ambitions are
way down their agenda of priorities. They are gunmen because they receive money to be
gunmen, to be bodyguards. These are not the counterparts of, say, the patriotic farmers
and merchants in the American colonies in 1776 who volunteered to fight for
independence, after which they would return to their preferred civilian pursuits having
nothing to do with violence, versus these gangsters for whom running around with an
M-16 and firing it off either into the air or into other people’s bodies is what they are all
about.
There is a contest for power in Gaza today, and there has always been a contest
for power there. I myself published articles in the 1980s on the gang fights between the
various PLO factions then, and later between these PLO factions and the Islamists.
This was before there was a Hamas. Then there were other gangs. In 1978, there
was an Islamist group called Mujama. The next year in Iran, Khomeini’s Islamists
overthrew the Shah, and in Gaza another gang sprang up called Salaffiyun, which refers
to the earliest and purist of Muslim jihadists. It’s a word now used for Islamists in Algeria
and the Philippines.
During the Lebanon War, Islamic Jihad as an organization in Lebanon came into
being, and before long a clone gang of the same name came together in Gaza, and this
was five years before Hamas which emerged as yet another gang formation that came
into being because the existing gangs had no room at the top. And Arabs like these, like
Tessio, want to have their own families.
So if you think of any of your friends who might want to subscribe to DPP, tell
them it’s the only media outlet coming from Israel that calls these murderers murderers,
and their organizations gangs.

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