Posted on 02/06/2002 6:02:27 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Despite their terrorist track record, Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization are not only protected from punishment, but are warmly welcomed at the UN.
On January 3rd, Israeli commandos boarded and seized a Palestinian cargo ship, the Karine A, in the Red Sea. The 4,000-ton vessel was loaded with 50 tons of arms from Iran destined for the Gaza Strip, controlled by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The huge cache of arms and munitions was displayed for foreign journalists at Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat and presented as evidence of what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called Mr. Arafat’s "empire of lies."
The "terror ship" cargo reportedly included 3,000 pounds of plastic explosives, Russian Katyusha rockets, hand grenades, mines, mortars, rifles, and anti-tank missiles. Sharon charged that this helps prove that Arafat is "a bitter enemy of Israel" who is preparing for war while talking of peace.
One need not be a partisan of Israel or Mr. Sharon to see that the weapons seizure was very damning evidence against Iran and Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA), both of which pretend to have renounced terrorism. As expected, all of the principal culprits implicated in the smuggling operation deny any involvement. Both the PA and Iran strongly denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, the matter. The PA also denied that Arafat had any involvement or knowledge; and both Iranian and PA officials denied that their two terror regimes had any military relationship with each other.
Not wanting to derail what is euphemistically referred to as the Mideast "peace process," the Bush administration joined the chorus of make-believe artists suggesting that the terror ship operation was the handiwork of a "rogue" element in the PA. "The information we are receiving and developing on our own makes it clear that there are linkages to the Palestinian Authority," said Secretary of State Colin Powell on January 10th. However, he noted, "I have not seen any information yet that links it directly to Chairman Arafat." Powell said that the U.S. would be speaking to Palestinian authorities "to make it clear to them that this is a very serious matter.... They have to give it their immediate attention, they have to conduct whatever inquiries or investigations are necessary to get to the bottom of this matter."
Likewise, President Bush let loose with a barrage of "stern" rhetoric. "I intend to ask [U.S. Middle East envoy Anthony] Zinni to go back to the region at the appropriate time to keep pushing for a dialogue, to keep pushing for the process to go forward," Bush said. "And Mr. Arafat must renounce terror, must reject those who would disrupt the peace process through terror, and must work hard to get to the peace table. It seems like it’s up to him to make these decisions."
But Arafat has renounced and denounced terrorism — many times. And he is, undoubtedly, willing to do it many more times, if that is the price he must pay to maintain his "peacemaker" status and keep the billions of dollars in aid flowing into the PA coffers.
Teflon Terrorists
Yasser Arafat, like fellow comrade Fidel Castro, is an aging dinosaur of the 1960s generation of Communist terrorist kingpins. Both know that no matter how many times they get caught red-handed, they will always be allowed to skate free. No matter how heinous the terrorist act or how iron-clad the evidence against them, their apologists in Washington, D.C., other capitals, and the media will invent ways to excuse or explain away their criminal deeds. They seem to have been given perpetual immunity from the consequences of their actions.
Castro can shoot down civilian American planes in international waters, murdering the occupants; smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States; snuggle with terrorists from the IRA, Hezbollah, FALN, FARC, and the PLO; torture political prisoners; and place spies on our military bases and within the top levels of the Pentagon itself. Yet, none of this dampens the enthusiastic ardor of his sympathizers. Similarly, Yasser Arafat can associate with terrorist regimes, openly violate his solemn "peace process" commitments, covertly support Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, attend terrorist summits, and operate the PA as his own private mafia with the sure knowledge that the worst he will suffer from "world opinion" is an occasional "stern" lecture and a few harsh editorials.
The seizure of the massive Iranian arms shipment aboard the Karine A should not be dismissed with the usual facile arguments. Here are the facts in the case:
The Palestinian Authority owns the Karine A, purchasing it with $400,000 of its own funds.
The captain of the Karine A, Omar Akawi, and three other members of the 13-member crew are members of the PA’s naval police.
The smuggling plans called for off-loading weapons in Gaza Strip waters controlled by the PA naval police.
The weapons’ cost, estimated at $16.5 million to $20 million, could not have been dispersed from PA accounts without Arafat’s knowledge.
Fuad Shubaki, one of Arafat’s top aides for procurement for the PA’s security services, apparently transacted the arms purchase from Iran and arranged the transport. "Same Bloody Terrorist"
In an op-ed entitled "The Arafat I Know," for the Wall Street Journal of January 10th, General Ion Mihai Pacepa gave his informed insight into the Arafat-Karine A affair. "I am not surprised to see that Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania’s foreign intelligence service," wrote Pacepa, who once headed Communist Romania’s DIE, one of the satellite intelligence services that fronted for the Soviet KGB. "I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB," says Gen. Pacepa. According to the former DIE spy chief, "In 1972, the Kremlin established a ‘socialist division of labor’ for supporting international terrorism. Romania’s main clients in this new market were Libya and the PLO [Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization]."
Pacepa’s op-ed offers a particularly chilling insight into Arafat’s ongoing protestations that he and the PA have nothing to do with the continuing terrorist attacks against Israel. For instance, he points out Arafat’s strategic deception in the 1978 assassination of the PLO’s London representative. Arafat blamed the hit on Abu Nidal, who had broken away from the PLO to form his own terror group. Pacepa was later startled when Arafat’s top aide, Hassan Salameh, bragged that the assassination had actually been carried out by the PLO and made to look like an Abu Nidal hit. "Why kill your own people?" one of Pacepa’s colleagues asked Salameh. Pacepa says that Salameh explained, "We want to mount some spectacular operations against the PLO, making it look as if they had been organized by Palestinian extremist groups that accuse the chairman of becoming too conciliatory and moderate." It is a tactic Arafat continues to use.
"For over 30 years the U.S. government has considered Arafat a key to achieving peace in the Middle East," says Pacepa, but it is "high time the U.S. end the Arafat fetish." Arafat is a consummate liar, a murderer, a thug, and a terrorist. Some "highlights" from his abbreviated PLO résumé include the following accomplishments:
May 1972: Members of the Japanese Red Army, acting in support of the PLO, open fire with machine guns and grenades at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, killing 26 and wounding 70.
October 1972: The PLO’s Black September group massacres Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
May 1974: Maalot school massacre, killing 28, nearly all children.
1976: PLO, Libyan, and Iraqi terrorists overrun Maronite Christian villages in Lebanon, brutally murdering hundreds of civilians, including women and children.
March 1978: Terrorist bus rampage on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway leaves 35 dead and 80 wounded. Then there was the murder of American citizen Leon Klinghoffer in the PLO’s Achille Lauro hijacking, the murderous attacks on the Rome and Vienna Airports, the La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, the bombing of the Istanbul Synagogue — to name just a few.
Legacy of Red Terror
Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization (Arabic for "Conquest"), the dominant arm of the PLO, was formed in 1956 under the sponsorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Soviet puppet dictator in Egypt. Officially, the PLO and its military arm, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), were formed at the Arab-Cairo Summit in 1964.
The Soviets paid no serious attention to the PLO until after the humiliating defeat of its Arab client states by Israel in the 1967 war. Soon thereafter, the PLO began sending hundreds of recruits to terrorist training camps in the Soviet Union — in Moscow, Tashkent, Batum, Odessa, Baku, Simferopol — as well as East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Cuba. Arafat’s Fatah/PLO thugs, in turn, have trained and aided Communist insurgents such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, the ANC in South Africa, Khomeini’s revolutionaries in Iran, and Idi Amin’s butchers in Uganda.
In 1974, the Soviet Union invited Arafat to open a PLO office in Moscow. He responded with alacrity. Arafat quickly became so dependent on the Soviets, East Germans, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Albanians that he rarely made any serious move without first getting counsel from his Communist superiors. For years, his chief contact in the Soviet Union was Vladimir Buljakov, head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department. It is also no secret that during the PLO’s Lebanon sojourn Arafat met regularly, sometimes daily, with Soviet Ambassador Alexander Soldatov, a high-level KGB agent who had been expelled from Britain for espionage. General Ion Pacepa revealed after his defection to the West that Arafat had intimate ties to the Romanian DIE. In fact, in his 1987 book Red Horizons, Pacepa explained that Arafat’s best friend and head of PLO intelligence, Hani Hassan, was actually a DIE agent and that the PLO’s Beirut telephone monitoring center (built by the KGB) was wired directly to the Soviet Embassy.
Gen. Pacepa’s memoir also revealed other unsavory aspects of the PLO leader’s character. He wrote that his own dossier on Arafat provided "an incredible account of fanaticism … of tangled oriental political maneuvers, of lies, of embezzled PLO funds deposited in Swiss banks, and of homosexual relationships, beginning with his teacher when he was a teenager and ending with his current bodyguards. After reading that report, I felt a compulsion to take a shower whenever [I] had just shaken his hand."
Pacepa also recalled the strategic advice that Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s Communist dictator, gave Arafat during the PLO leader’s visit to Bucharest in 1978: "In the shadow of your government-in-exile, you can keep as many operational groups as you want, as long as they are not publicly connected with your name. They could mount endless operations all around the world, while your name and your ‘government’ would remain pristine and unspoiled, ready for negotiations and further recognition."
In 1979, Arafat led a PLO delegation to Moscow for a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The minutes of that PLO meeting with these top officials of the world Communist Conspiracy are very enlightening, showing how the Soviets attached great importance to the PLO for Middle East strategy, and how the PLO depended on the Soviet Union.
In a 1980 speech in Beirut, Abu Iyad, Arafat’s deputy, declared: "We, the members of the Communist Party and of the National Movement, are fighting together in the same foxhole...." In a 1982 speech to a Soviet delegation visiting Beirut, Arafat himself stated: "We look to you, comrade, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and the socialist bloc, full of hope, as friend to friend … in considering the question of liberation and progress in the world."
Arafat’s PLO played a very crucial role for the Soviet Union in toppling the pro-American Shah of Iran and installing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary regime in his place. The PLO and Tehran have been tightly connected ever since, in spite of occasional appearances to the contrary. Backed by the PLO and the Soviets, Khomeini launched a whole new global wave of Marxist-Leninist revolution disguised as Islamic fundamentalism. And, for more than 20 years, Tehran has been destabilizing the Middle East. It is now pursuing a joint strategy with Russia to gain a stranglehold on the Mideast oil sources upon which the U.S. and Europe are so dependent.
Revolutionary Iran and the PLO were so slavishly pro-Soviet that they cheered the Soviet invasion of Islamic Afghanistan! PLO spokesman Yassir Abd Rabhi declared, "The Russian involvement in Afghanistan is an important asset to all revolutionary forces which oppose the expansion of the American presence in the Middle East." PLO leader Bassam Abu Sherif said, "The Russians have helped progressive forces in Afghanistan to foil efforts by pro-U.S. elements to take control of the nation’s institutions."
At the same time that Arafat’s PLO was helping Ayatollah Khomeini’s Soviet-backed revolution in Iran and cheering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was also assisting the Soviet-backed terror regime in Syria in the destruction and occupation of Lebanon. During that awful, murderous epoch, Arafat received many arms shipments similar to the cache discovered aboard the Karine A. When the Israeli forces captured the PLO Lebanese strongholds in 1982, they were astounded to discover that the PLO armaments vastly exceeded their intelligence estimates. When the Israelis transported this enormous cache to their homeland, they found it filled 4,300 trucks. The materiel included 5,630 tons of ammunition; 1,320 armored vehicles, including Soviet T-34, T-55, and T-62 tanks; 1,352 anti-tank weapons; 82 artillery pieces; 215 mortars; 62 Katyusha rocket launchers; 196 anti-aircraft guns; and 33,303 small arms. These arms had been supplied by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, Red China, North Korea, and Vietnam.
The Arafat apologists insist that that was the old Yasser, before he converted to a peacemaker and signed the Oslo Declaration of Principles and the Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. These defenders point to the PLO arrests of, and running gun battles with, Hamas and Hezbollah radicals as proof of his peacemaker bona fides. But this has proven to be as phony as the very same deceptions used by Communists like Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, Romulo Betancourt in Venezuela, and dozens of other Reds who at various times found it expedient to temporarily change their stripes.
Most of Arafat’s "arrests" have been purely for show, much like scenes from Casablanca, in which the police inspector played by actor Claude Rains tells his men to "round up the usual suspects."
Arafat and the PLO have continued to work closely with the most radical "islamic fundamentalists," as evidenced by their regular attendance at annual Iranian terrorist conferences. Take, for instance, the Tehran terror summit of April 2001. Officially entitled "The International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada," it featured delegates from 34 countries, including: Syrian vice president Muhammad Zahir Mosahareqa; Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the head of the "reformist" faction in the Iranian parliament and a political ally of Iranian President Muhammad Khatami; Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah of the Lebanese Hezbollah; Khalid Mash’al of Hamas; and Ramadan Shalah of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At that Tehran summit, notes Reuven Paz of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, "Palestinian participants included Palestinian Authority (PA) minister in charge of Jerusalem affairs Faisal Husseini and Palestinian National Council head Salim Za’noun (Abu Adib), one of the founding generation of Fatah and for many years the main link between Yasir Arafat and Islamic fundamentalist circles."
The escalation of terrorist attacks on Israeli "soft targets," i.e., civilians, including children, in the past year can be laid at the door of Arafat. That is precisely what Israel’s Army Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz did last July, when he charged that the PA under Arafat’s rule is a "terrorist entity." Mofaz stated that 42 percent of Israelis killed over the past 10-month period were the victims of attacks carried out by the PA security apparatus or members of Arafat’s Fatah faction. "What can you call an authority which carried out about half of the attacks against us and is responsible for half of those civilians and soldiers killed?" he said in a radio interview.
On January 17th, a Palestinian gunman killed six and wounded dozens more at a bat mitzvah — a Jewish girl’s coming of age celebration — in the town of Hadera. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group linked to Arafat’s Fatah, claimed credit for the attack. The following day Israeli tanks and troops rolled into the West Bank town of Ramallah, trapping Arafat in his PA headquarters. Israeli forces then occupied the West Bank city of Tulkarm, allegedly the launchpad for many recent terrorist attacks, and arrested many Hamas and Fatah members in house-to-house searches. Confined to his offices, Arafat remained defiant, proclaiming that "the Palestinian state will be established with al-Quds al-Sharif [East Jerusalem] as its capital" regardless of whether he is "martyred or alive." According to a Reuters dispatch of January 21st, Arafat told a group of supporters, "May God give me the honor of martyrdom in my steadfastness for Jerusalem." Arafat the Martyr? Arafat the Communist terrorist invoking God’s blessing on his murderous schemes? As always, he does not lack in the audacity department.
In 1982, when the PLO was surrounded in Lebanon and facing capture and/or annihilation, President Ronald Reagan, following the advice of George Shultz, sent U.S. Marines to evacuate the terrorists. Arafat and 14,000 of his PLO cutthroats were given safe passage to Tunisia. A heavy price in blood and treasure has been paid over the past 20 years for that intervention.
On that I will agree
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