Free Republic

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., once falsely accused President Ronald Reagan's CIA of all but causing urban cocaine dealing in the '80s. She claimed that Reagan, by working with Nicaraguan drug dealers to defeat the communists running that country, colluded with them to created the urban drug epidemic. Never mind that The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all debunked Waters' claim. At a town hall meeting about these allegations, Waters shouted, "If I never do anything else in this career as a member of Congress, I'm gonna make somebody pay for what they've done to...

Haaretz's Barak Ravid reports that US Secretary of State John FN Kerry has given Israeli and 'Palestinian' negotiators something upon which they can agree. About one thing, thereÂ’s no disagreement between Jerusalem and Ramallah: Kerry has a lot of good intentions and a real sense of mission; he truly wants to make peace in the Middle East. But despite his good intentions, Kerry so far looks like a naive and ham-handed diplomat who has been acting like a bull in the china shop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or as former Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan once put it, heÂ’s a good...

Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmud Abbas may fire Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a Fatah member said, as the party criticized the premier's government as being "improvised and confused." Abbas "is leaning towards dismissing Fayyad from the head of the government and forming a new one," a member of Fatah's Revolutionary Council told AFP late on Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I am angrier than all of you at the government... but I don't want to say more than that now. Just wait for three days," he quoted Abbas as saying at a meeting of the council in Ramallah. He...

As the civil war in Syria enters its third year, there is much discussion of the regimeÂ’s chemical weapons and whether SyriaÂ’s Bashar al-Assad will unleash them against Syrian rebels, or whether a power vacuum after AssadÂ’s fall might make those horrific tools available to the highest bidder. The conversation centers on SyriaÂ’s chemical weaponry, not on something vastly more serious: its nuclear weaponry. It well might have. This is the inside story of why it does not. Relations between the United States and Israel had grown rocky after IsraelÂ’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006, for Secretary of State Condoleezza...

Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad urged Arab League nations on Sunday to make good on $100 million a month in pledged "safety net" funds, warning that his government was facing a "dangerous" financial crisis. "I have nothing left to do but to urge our Arab brothers to activate this net, because until this point there has been no movement to deliver the $100 million," Fayyad told reporters at a briefing in his Ramallah office, according to AFP. "If this safety net is not activated quickly, I'll call for an emergency Arab summit to discuss financial situation because it's a...

Protests against the government of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad continued over the weekend. Dozens of protesters gathered in Ramallah demanding that Fayyad resign, blaming him for the high prices of food and fuel in the Palestinian Authority. In one incident, protesters waited outside a radio station where Fayyad was giving an interview and when he emerged, they tried to rush him..... PA chief Mahmoud Abbas said that he believed the protests would intensify, but did not expect them to degenerate into anarchy.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced on Thursday that he would resign if that was the will of the people, the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency reported. .....

On Thursday morning, hundreds of PA Arabs blocked roads and burned tires in the Ramallah area, protesting the high price of products in the PA. The Thursday protest was the latest in a series of demonstations in PA controlled area over high prices. On Wednesday, hundreds of residents of Shechem gathered in one of the town's main squares. demanding the removal of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and PA chief Mahmous Abbas. ...Fayyad and Abbas did not represent them, and that they demanded a new government. Joining them were Hamas members of the PA parliament. Protests have been taking...

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has charged that “the cause of the Palestinians” has never been more marginalized than it is today. Fayyad, who spoke to the British daily The Independent, cited the international focus on the Arab spring, the eurozone crisis and the U.S. electoral cycle as reasons for the fact that PA leaders were facing a “path of growing untenability.” He was strongly critical of the West’s failure to tackle Israel more “seriously” over what he termed its “violations of international law.” Fayyad declared that this “marginalization” was now the “biggest obstacle” to progress towards a Palestinian...

Salam Fayyad ReutersPalestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has inaugurated a new PA construction project, despite the fact that it is located in an area under full Israeli control, the PA-based WAFA news agency reported on Monday. According to a statement issued by Fayyad’s office, he inaugurated on Monday stage one of a water dam to be built in “Palestine” at a cost of over $1 million. The statement quoted by WAFA said that during a visit to the village of Ouja and the Jordan Valley, Fayyad inaugurated the Ouja Dam, which he said is one of the projects to...

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad issued a call today to foreign terrorists to stop using the plight of the Palestinians as an excuse for their crimes. In condemning the Toulouse massacre two days after the killings, Fayyad said, “Extremists must stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life.” This was in reaction to the news that Mohammed Merah, the arrested suspect in the Toulouse shootings, claimed that the atrocity was done in part to exact revenge on the Jews for their supposedly poor treatment of the Palestinians. Fayyad is...

The Palestinian Authority may soon fail financially and cease to exist, its prime minister warned on Thursday. Salam Fayyad warned that if Israel does not resume the transfer of tax revenues it collects for the PA, the entity will collapse economically and thus cease to exist. Already now, Fayyad claimed, the PA cannot pay salaries to its employees. Channel 10 News reported that Fayyad made the comments following a meeting with Norway’s Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. According to the report, Fayyad said that the collapse of PA institutions “is advancing rapidly toward the point at which they will stop...

Finally, we have evidence that Islamists and even al-Qaeda supporters will play a central role in Libya’s new regime. Up to now there has been reasonable speculation that the U.S. government and NATO might be installing an anti-Western, Islamist government in Libya. Now there’s proof that this is so. The actual government remains in the hands of non-Islamists, technocrats, ex-regime officials, and moderates. But the armed rebels who actually made the revolution have voted and their idol is…an al-Qaeda guy. Political power, said Mao Zedong, grows out of the barrel of a gun and in Libya’s case this seems a...

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Wednesday that the PA's inability to pay its bills and its regular pleas for charitable cash infusions from the international community was not an acceptable argument against PA statehood. “The crisis does not undermine or cast doubt about our preparedness for the establishment of the state,” Fayyad insisted during his weekly radio address on Voice of Palestine radio. "All states face financial troubles and need the correct procedures and oversight to overcome such problems." “Civil servants will receive today half of their monthly salaries, and the other half will be paid when cash...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad suffered a heart attack while visiting the United States and was hospitalized for treatment, according to a spokesman from the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Fayyad felt chest pains Sunday while visiting Austin, Texas, for his son's graduation from the University of Texas, Dr. Ghassan Khatib said from Ramallah early Tuesday. The prime minister was hospitalized and doctors found a blocked artery that they corrected, Khatib said. Fayyad is in "good condition" at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas, spokesperson Adrienne Lallo told CNN on Monday.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad suffered a heart attack on Monday while in the United States for his son's college graduation. The Palestinian premier's spokesman, Jamal Zakout, said Fayyad was recovering and would likely be released from the Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas, within two days

Ayalon to 'Post': "What I say is that if the Palestinians are not willing to talk about two states for two peoples, let alone a Jewish state for Israel, then there's nothing to talk about." NEW YORK -- Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad angrily left a UN Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee meeting and canceled a scheduled subsequent press conference with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon in New York on Tuesday, after Ayalon refused to approve a summary of the meeting which said "two states" but did not include the words "two states for two peoples." "What I say is that if...

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-press-secretary-israel-s-announcement-gaza Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release June 20, 2010 Statement by the Press Secretary on Israel’s announcement on Gaza The President has described the situation in Gaza as unsustainable and has made clear that it demands fundamental change. On June 9, he announced that the United States was moving forward with $400 million in initiatives and commitments for the West Bank and Gaza. The President described these projects as a down payment on the U.S. commitment to the people...

PM is the most moderate PA official, but doesn't represent Palestinian thinking. Imagine this. You’re a prime minister praised in the Western media as a moderate man of peace. You represent a people who the US president says is in an intolerable situation. You’re dependent on contributions from Western democratic countries that want you to make a deal. Your rivals have seized almost half the land you want to rule and work tirelessly to overthrow your regime and very possibly to kill you personally. But here comes a big opportunity. You are invited by your negotiating partner to its most...

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad published a plan in August 2009 to unilaterally declare statehood after a two-year state-building process. The Fayyad plan involves numerous governance components that already exist within the various frameworks composing the Oslo Accords, which already enable the Palestinians to develop their state-building capabilities within the peace process, and not necessarily as a unilateral initiative outside the process. The only valid legal framework between the Israelis and the Palestinians remains the 1995 Interim Agreement, which represents the source of authority for the existence of the Palestinian governance and its component institutions. The Interim Agreement established that:...