Free Republic

On a Sunday afternoon several months ago, I was engaged in one of my favorite religious rituals, watching pro football on television. During a break in the game, I reflexively clicked the “mute” button on the remote control. But my eyes stayed fixed on a startling commercial. The screen showed a balding man with tawny skin and a salt-and-pepper goatee, and seconds later it spelled out his name: Mujahid Abdul-Rashid. The advertisement went on to show him fishing, playing in a yard with two toddlers, and sitting down to a family meal. One week later, again during an N.F.L. game,...

WASHINGTON (AP)--President Bush warned Israel anew on Friday not to take actions that would make it harder to create a Palestinian state. ``It's in Israel's interest there be a Palestinian state,'' Bush told reporters at the White House. ``It's in the poor suffering Palestinian people's interest there be a Palestinian state.'' Also Friday, Israel Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said after a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell that he and Powell agree that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians should begin immediately without preconditions. Shalom added that he hoped Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed...

Two ramifications of the West Bank separation fence - its disruption of daily Palestinian life and its seeming determination of the borders of a future Palestinian state - are "troublesome" for the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday. "It's one thing to put up a security fence, a barrier that is clearly on your property - the dividing line, so to speak - in order to protect yourself, and that would be understood," Powell said in a CNN interview. "But as the fence goes deeply into Palestinian areas and starts to put more and more Palestinians...

Senior U.S. official: Israel promised to consult U.S. before deciding to expel Arafat from the Palestinian territories (Reuters)

WASHINGTON US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday dismissed Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's characterization of the road map as being "dead," and insisted the step-by-step peace plan is the only mechanism for ending violence and creating a Palestinian state. "We didn't deal with Yasser Arafat when we were putting the road map together. And so his comments don't mean a whole lot to me, and I'm not responding to them in any way," Powell told reporters at the State Department, where he outlined a draft resolution the US is submitting to UN Security Council members calling for a...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Thursday Israel and the Palestinians would fall off "a cliff" if they abandon a U.S. peace plan, and he urged Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to help stop attacks on Israel after a bomb killed 20 people in Jerusalem this week. U.S. officials fear Tuesday's attack by a suicide bomber from the Hamas militant group will unleash a fresh cycle of attack and retaliation, something that may already be happening as Israel killed a senior Hamas official and Palestinian militant groups called off their seven-week-old cease-fire. Powell, the main advocate...