Regards, Ivan
Posted on 12/14/2002 3:48:58 PM PST by MadIvan
THE Israeli army may have reduced his daily world to four rooms surrounded by spectacular hills of rubble, but Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was not pulling any punches last week.
He accused Osama Bin Laden of being an opportunist who has cynically exploited the Palestinian cause to woo support in the Islamic world.
Arafat was angry and uncharacteristically direct. “Why is Bin Laden talking about Palestine now?” he said, his eyes bulging behind huge spectacles that dwarfed his pale face.
“Bin Laden never — not ever — stressed this issue. He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests.”
Arafat delivered his first attack on Bin Laden in an interview two days after a spokesman for the Al-Qaeda founder claimed that his priority was an independent Palestinian state.
“Liberation of our holy places, led by Palestine, is our central issue,” said Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the spokesman, in a tape-recorded statement that admitted responsibility for the simultaneous attacks on an Israeli jet and hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, on November 28. An attempt to shoot down the plane failed, but 15 people died in the car bombing of the Paradise hotel.
Arafat dismissed Al-Qaeda’s intervention. “I am the first leader (in the Arab world) to stand up to Bin Laden,” he said. “I’m telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause.” The difference between the men is stark: while Arafat would love an invitation to the White House, Bin Laden probably dreams of destroying it.
Arafat was particularly enraged by a website established in the name of the previously unknown Islamic Al-Qaeda Organisation in Palestine, which claims that it “joins its voice with the voices of the mujaheddin in Palestine . . . and will accept nothing but the full liberation of the Palestine land”.
Arafat’s anger continued into a denunciation of a claim by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, that Al-Qaeda cells were operating in Gaza and planned to attack Israeli targets.
Sharon was trying to hitch his wagon to the American “war on terror”, Arafat said, insisting the Palestinians were engaged in a purely nationalist struggle for an end to Israeli occupation.
“Big, big lies,” Arafat said of the Israeli prime minister’s charge. “Sharon wants to cover his military attacks against the Palestinian people with a new face. He knows that there are no relations between Al-Qaeda and Palestine.”
Arafat’s strongest denunciation yet of Bin Laden reflected his deep concern that the war on terror will encourage the Bush administration to accept Israeli claims that Palestinian operations are part of global terrorism.
Arafat has history on his side. Bin Laden came late to his espousal of the Palestinian cause: the Saudi Arabian dissident founded Al-Qaeda to oppose American troops on Saudi soil, what he calls the “land of the two sacred shrines”, Medina and Mecca. He denounced the Saudi regime and wants the royal family to be replaced by a sharia, or Islamic, government.
Although Al-Qaeda now mentions “Palestinian brothers” in every communication, this was not the case until the September 11 attacks last year on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In a long screed about its goals in 1998, Bin Laden mentioned Palestine only once, to call for the liberation of Jerusalem, Islam’s third holy site.
While Bin Laden denounces Christian “infidels”, Arafat makes a point of embracing Christian Palestinians. He said in the interview that he wanted to make his traditional Christmas trip to Bethlehem to attend midnight mass at the Church of the Nativity, but he did not know if the Israelis would allow it. Sharon banned him from travelling to Bethlehem last Christmas.
Arafat acknowledged that there was sympathy for Bin Laden among youths in the West Bank and Gaza, but said this came from despair at the lack of progress towards an independent state. “These kids don’t really know who Bin Laden is,” he said.
The Bush administration has little time for Arafat’s distinctions; the American president has refused to meet him and has called for a change in the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
Yet the vehemence of Arafat’s comments about Bin Laden did not appear to result from desperation, despite his isolation in his Muqata headquarters for more than eight months. He was at his most relaxed, leaning back in an oversized chair at the head of a long table as he sipped a cup of sweet, milky tea and offered around Arabic pastries brought by a well-wisher.
The table was in his cramped office in the small space remaining to him since Israeli troops, blaming him for a wave of suicide bombings in March, demolished his base in April and May with tank shells, missiles and bulldozers.
In September they laid siege again. A tank shell smashed into a wall directly above his bedroom, showering his bed with plaster. The compound that once contained sprawling presidential offices and barracks is now a moonscape of concrete slabs, piles of bricks, smashed cars and steel rods.
“I was afraid for my people,” said Arafat, who was dressed in his customary black-and-white keffiya, olive green military uniform and black Chelsea boots. “For me it makes no difference. We have been here before.”
To his right was a 2ft-high stack of papers, mostly reports and requests for help or adjudication from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. When I entered he was working his way through another stack.
He was rueful about the mundane details of his confinement. “Much more paperwork,” he said. “Nobody can travel to see me because of the Israeli siege of our cities, so they send a report. As you see.”
His pale skin is the most striking affect of the siege. “I need half an hour of sun every day,” he said, proffering hands so pale that they looked as if they belonged to a subterranean creature. “I need the sun. But I can’t go out here, we have Israeli snipers outside.”
There are fears for his health. He said he was fine, but a doctor had ordered him to install an oxygen machine in the Muqata.
Arafat likened the current position to the 88-day Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. Then, as now, he was facing Sharon, who was the architect of the Israeli drive into Lebanon that was aimed at destroying the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the hope that a more pliable Palestinian leadership would emerge in the occupied territories.
Sharon’s strategy appears to have changed little over the years. He sees Arafat as an enemy rather than a partner in peace. He has made it clear that he would long ago have killed or expelled Arafat had he not promised that no harm would come to the Palestinian leader.
So far the strategy has yielded little more success than it did in 1982. The Israeli siege has increased Arafat’s popularity, silencing Palestinian opponents who had accused his government of corruption and who had been trying to ease him into a more symbolic role.
But Sharon is still hugely popular among an Israeli public that is angry and anxious after two years of Palestinian suicide attacks. He is far ahead in the polls for next month’s Israeli elections.
Arafat insisted that he opposed the suicide bombings. “We are against terrorism,” he said. “We are against any attempt against Israeli civilians — any civilians.”
He said he offered no apologies for attacks on Israelis within the occupied West Bank and Gaza, however. “Who can prevent anyone from defending himself, even if there are strict orders?” he said.
The Palestinian leader made perhaps his sharpest criticism to date of Sharon’s policy. “I am an old general. We are both old generals,” Arafat said, leaning forward to emphasise his message.
“He has to remember that he must respect his rank as a high officer to make peace for his people, otherwise their future will be black.”
As for Arafat himself, he said he would not leave Palestinian land for exile. He did not need to look at the sub-machinegun on the floor behind him to emphasise the point.
Regards, Ivan
- Me against my brother.
- Me and my brother against our cousin.
- Me, my brother and my cousin against the tribe.
- Me, my brother, my cousin and our tribe against the other tribes.
- Me, my brother, my cousin, our tribe and its allies against the rest of the world…
Arafat pretends to want peace, whereas Osama favors the groups that don't even bother pretending...
In an interview with Britain's Sunday Times newspaper, Arafat said he believed bin Laden and his al Qaeda network were using the Palestinian campaign for independence to gain support in the Islamic world.
"Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now? ...He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests," Arafat told the paper.
"I'm telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause," Arafat said.
Arafat gave the interview after a purported al Qaeda statement was posted on the Islamist Web site www.azfalrasa.com, claiming responsibility for last month's bomb attacks on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, that killed 16 people.
"The operations send the message to the Jews that their corruption on earth, the occupation of our sanctities, the crimes against our Palestinian people...will not go unanswered and will be met many fold," said the statement, signed by the "Political Office of Qaeda al-Jihad."
That statement was followed by a notice posted on a pro-al Qaeda Web site, www.mojahedoon.net, announcing the launch of an "Islamic al Qaeda Organization in Palestine," which would "serve as a powerful basis for restoring the rights of our Arab and Islamic people in Palestine."
"We declare that the squadrons of our martyrs will strike with all their might the Zionist and American arrogance in the region and that the blood of our men in Palestine, Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Kashmir (news - web sites) will not go unavenged," it added.
U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters they monitored that Web site but could not say how credible the reports were.
Arafat said that al Qaeda had tried to justify attacks by claiming they were part of a campaign to seize control of Palestinian territories from Israel.
He also dismissed as "big, big lies" claims by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) that al Qaeda had established a presence in the Palestinian-ruled areas of the Gaza Strip (news - web sites) and in Lebanon.
"Sharon wants to cover his military attacks against the Palestinian people with a new face. He knows that there are no relations between al Qaeda and Palestine."
Bin Laden's al Qaeda network is Washington's prime suspect in last year's September 11 attacks on U.S. cities and has been blamed for a string of attacks on Western targets around the world.
As well as the Kenya bombing, the group has been blamed for an attack in April on a synagogue in Tunis that killed 15 westerners and five Tunisians.
But no attacks have so far been blamed on al Qaeda in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Palestinians have been waging an uprising against Israeli occupation for more than two years.
I don't recall anyone who had at all been paying attention making that arguement. It's been Bin Laden's position all along that the reason for his actions has been because the U.S.A. has troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, the land of Islam's two holiest shrines. I also remember that when Bin Laden first started singing his song about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, back when it became obvious that the American actions in Afghanistan wasn't going to be a replay of the Russian failure, most news outlets made a point of reporting that this was the first time he'd brought up the subject, and that he was obviously trying for sympathy now that he was getting his ass kicked.
Or maybe its because Arafat has gotten word that Bin Ladens goons are about to strike either over seas or in Israel and hes just distancing himself from the future consequences?
Bin Laden's bin scorpion food for a year, says me.
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