Posted on 02/21/2002 10:06:39 AM PST by FresnoDA
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The speaker is Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Member of the Palestinian Authority-appointed "Fatwa Council" and former acting Rector of the Islamic University in Gaza.
"O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists - are the Jews, who have butchered our children, orphaned them, widowed our women and desecrated our holy places and sacred sites. They are the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help you to overcome them, and will relieve the minds of the believers..."
"Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them - and those who stand by them - they are all in one trench, against the Arabs and the Muslims because they established Israel here, in the beating heart of the Arab world, in Palestine. They created it to be the outpost of their civilization and the vanguard of their army, and to be the sword of the West and the crusaders, hanging over the necks of the monotheists, the Muslims in these lands. They wanted the Jews to be their spearhead..."
"Even if an agreement of Gaza is signed - we shall not forget Haifa, and Acre, and the Galilee, and Jaffa, and the Triangle and the Negev, and the rest of our cities and villages. It is only a matter of time. The weak will not remain forever weak, and the strong will not remain forever strong... If we are weak today... and we are not able to regain our rights, then at least we have to pass on the banner - waving high - to our children and grandchildren..."
"...We will not give up a single grain of soil of Palestine, from Haifa, and Jaffa, and Acre, and Mulabbas [Petah Tikva] and Salamah, and Majdal [Ashkelon], and all the land, and Gaza, and the West Bank..."
"...Let us put our trust in Allah, close ranks, and unite our words, and the slogan of us all should be, 'Jihad! Jihad! For the sake of Palestine, and for the sake of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa!'"
"O brothers in belief, the beautiful bride has a costly price and dowry... Our bride is paradise, O brothers in belief... The cost and the dowry of this bride, the dowry of this paradise, is that we fight in the path of Allah, and kill and be killed."
"Allah has purchased from the believers their persons and their property in return for the promise that they shall have paradise, for they fight in the cause of Allah, and they slay the enemy and are slain."
Israel Urgently Needs New Counter-Terror Strategy-DEBKAfile Analysis
20 February: Ariel Sharon may not realize how fast Yasser Arafat is advancing on his goal of defeating yet another Israeli prime minister, exactly five years after a Palestinian bus-bombing campaign and strike against Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center forced Shimon Peres to throw in the towel after only a year as prime minister.
Ehud Barak was the next prime minister to resign in mid-term under the pressure of Arafat’s Intifada.
All three refrained from calling a spade a spade, ie naming Arafat a master-terrorist. They were all at pains to adjust to molds fashioned in Washington and in left-wing salons and media at home and abroad. No Israeli leader, left or right, ever ventured to touch the 1993 Oslo Peace framework Accords that Arafat, its Palestinian signatory, began violating on Day One.
Sharon was elected a year ago for his hard line views on defense and military prowess. He was Israel’s great white hope for eradicating the Palestinian terror scourge. However, his performance has been marked by indecision, procrastination, fuzzy messages and lack of perceived leadership in the face of the pressures coming from the unwieldy national unity government he insists on preserving. Sharon has refused to face up tomounting Palestinian belligerence and its expanding support base made up of Iran, Iraq, Hizballah and other militants and Islamic extremists of the Arab world and, latterly, al Qaeda.
The Israeli Defense Forces are widely seen as one of the strongest and most effective armies in the world. Yet its commanders and men are increasingly hamstrung by the lack of firm leadership and the government’s refusal to explicitly name the enemy and let them go to war. The outcome is misconceived strategy and faulty tactics. A soldier out in the field may also find himself out on a limb – hence the missteps and disasters of the last 48 hours.
Tuesday night, February 19, an-eight man combat engineering unit took over a roadblock position on the approach road to the Ramallah district, stranded in an isolated, unpopulated area. An hour later, a group of Palestinian Fatah-Tanzim gunmen crept up and shot six men dead at close range, wounding another. The eighth man survived to fetch help.
The IDF’s retaliatory operation later Tuesday night covered much West Bank and Gaza Strip territory, but did not do much to disarm or deter Palestinian terror. Wednesday, Palestinians approaching to within 300 meters of Israeli army roadblocks were fired upon indiscriminately, a sign of the confusion among Israeli troops.
Wednesday morning, February 20, Israel’s inner security cabinet went into session promising a package of improved counter-terrorist tactics. Before them were the dread statistics of Arafat’s accelerated cycle of terror. Two weeks ago, the Israeli death toll had risen to one a day; in the last six days it has tripled. However, given Sharon’s past performance and the divergent viewpoints of its three members – the prime minister and two Labor ministers, Binyamin Ben Eliezer, defense and Shimon Peres, foreign affairs - no one attached much hope of the forum coming up with any real cure or deterrent.
Confined in Ramallah for nearly three months, the Palestinian leader has yet whipped the various Palestinian groups into a unified command structure for run his terror campaign on quasi-military, sophisticated lines. All its militants have embraced Hamas kamikaze tactics. He is willingly assisted by Iran-backed Lebanese Hizballah terror-guerrilla warfare experts, applying their twenty years of exposure in South Lebanon to Israeli military vulnerabilities. Al Qaeda fugitives, from their safe berth in the Palestinian refugee centers of Lebanon and Syria, are contributing terror methods and materials.
In the last three weeks, the terror command has swept its sights from one group of Israeli targets to the next – from the crowd centers of Israeli towns, to military command centers, then police, and finally soldiers and settlers. Israel’s casualty toll has been ratcheted up at each new stage.
The Sharon government’s weakness has not only encouraged Arafat; it has re-opened the domestic political arena to Israel’s left-wing dissenters and peace campaigners. Discredited by the Palestinian intifada and popular anger at the concessions they made to the Palestinians under the 1993 Oslo Peace Framework accords, they kept their heads down for more than a year. Now, they hope to capitalize on the bleak popular mood, which is sending some affluent Israelis to pack their bags and leave, and are back at their old maneuvers of demonstrations, petitions, anti-IDF litigation, solidarity gestures for Palestinians and hobnobbing with their leaders, including terror masterminds.
These groups enjoy active and material support from likeminded backers in Germany, France, the UK, Scandinavia and other places.
Two petitions making waves come from former security circles: a group of reserve officers objecting to service in Palestinian-ruled areas and another, made up of
former high army and security service officers demanding Israel’s unilateral withdrawal to pre-1967 war lines. Israel’s High Court, which traditionally flexes its muscles at times of weak government, Tuesday interfered in the IDF operation to clear the Gaza Strip route, on which three Israelis died in ambush the night before, of buildings and homes serving as Palestinian firing positions. A temporary injunction halted the military bulldozers in their tracks at the request of a group of Gazan residents and Israeli Arab Knesset member Mohamed Barakeh.
Most of the judges on the High Court bench have shown sympathy for the peace campaigners in their past rulings.
The peaceniks are a minority – some say a fringe. Yet their campaign, faithfully recorded by domestic and international media, has stirred up a vortex of national disputation, fueling Palestinian hopes of Israel’s impending social integration and lending fresh vigor to their campaign of violence. The cure is in Sharon’s hands. To apply it, he must first break away from his predecessors’ immobilizing constraints and bring his lingering duel with Yasser Arafat to closure, before his hold on power is eroded.
The situation must be escalated in order to restore peace in that region Atafat must be removed and the PA as well. Otherwise expect to see Breaking News that states. "(Insert Number) killed in terror strike on Israel" for a long time to come.
"Yeah, right, and to make it even more fair, let us give nukes to Iran, Iraq and North Korea."
Bit of a giveaway that. So you automatically assume that only the god given us of a and friends should have nukes? Why even mention nukes? I bet you wouldn't mind firing them off at the axis of evil, eh?
the fact that your analysis is so simplistic, and that you can't recognise irony is what makes people with your mindset particularly unsuitable as ambassadors for your nation. A shame though that one of your own should slough his way into the White House.
great news about the restrictions on Palestinians though, eh? Barbed wire, ditches and machine gun posts. I propose that we call these areas camps - places where Palestinians can be concentrated. Any problems, all you happy readers?
No problem here. They certainly deserve the concentration camps
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