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4/12/2002 (1:02) |
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April 10, 2002, 9:20 a.m.
Fighting to the Last Palestinian
Saddam, Arafat and their posse.
By Ariel Cohen
Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein are willing to sacrifice thousands of lives to remain in power and prevent the United States from attacking Iraq. They are willing to fight the Israelis and the U.S. to the last Palestinian. From the outside, the suicide-murders being carried out by the teenagers and young adults may seem senseless, but the internal logic and emotion of Arab and Muslim politics dictate the escalation of the body count.
The timing of Palestinian-perpetrated killings, such as the recent Passover Massacre, is certainly not accidental when one plots the timeline of those blood lettings and the recent trip by Vice President Cheney to secure support for future U.S. moves to rid the region of Saddam. Suicide-murders are an efficient means of diverting the U.S. foreign-policy agenda and refocusing the attention of the world on Israel — and away from Saddam.
Over a thousand Palestinians, have died since Arafat spurned President Bill Clinton's and then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak's peace offer in the summer of 2000. Many of the dead are brainwashed to believe that in dying they will reach paradise, and enrich their families. They were lead to believe that by committing murder-suicide they will hasten the arrival of a Palestinian state and have Israeli leadership sufficiently cowed so as to be willing to hand it over to them.
Sending young Palestinians to kill Israelis, Jews, and Americans is the only profession Arafat ever mastered. It is his only calling. Neither his engineering studies, nor his attempts to pass as an elected official and an international celebrity apparently satisfied him enough to drive him away from terror, the West's naïve Nobel peace prize notwithstanding.
Arafat's track record and appetite for enticing youngsters to kill other youngsters seems to have been limitless. He was deeply involved in planning the killings of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the March 1, 1973, as well as the assassinations of U.S. ambassador Cleo A. Noel and Deputy Chief of Mission Curtis G. Moore in Khartum. The following year, Arafat's terrorists threw Israeli schoolchildren out of the windows of a school in the town of Maalot. Since then, his henchmen have killed dozens of Israeli children, and trained hundreds of Palestinian children to serve either as human shields for snipers or as killers.
Having assumed control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1993 under the cover of the Oslo Accords, Arafat proceeded to turn the Palestinian Authority's education system into one big jihad factory. While Israeli textbooks were revised to preach peace, Arafat ordered Palestinian youths into terrorist-training summer camps and preached a nonstop barrage of anti-Jewish hatred through everything from Sesame Street-type broadcasts through school textbooks and radio and TV programs financed by the European Union. He appointed Sheikh Akrama Sabri Chief Mufti of the Al Aqsa mosque whose weekly diatribes called for murder of Americans and Israelis.
While children as young as four are taught to march with suicide-bomber belts strapped to their bodies, while mothers celebrate suicide bombings carried out by their sons and daughters (and received monetary rewards for those murders courtesy of Saddam Hussein), those ready to fight to the last Palestinian — in Europe and in the Middle East — remain mum.
Arafat introduced deadly religious rhetoric, previously typical of the radical Islamic movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, into the formerly secular Fatah mainstream. He repeatedly called for a 'million martyrs marching to Jerusalem,' and begged on every Arab channel to become a shahid (martyr) himself.
His behavior is increasingly reminiscent of Hitler in 1945, who sent one wave of 12-13-year-old Hitlerjugend (Hitler youth) after another to their deaths against American armor and Russian artillery, then proclaimed that the German people did not deserve their Reich if they could not die for it.
But Arafat's motives for practicing human sacrifice on a large scale are even more crass. He has told his close associates that without a new war against Israel, the Arabs will not continue paying the Palestinian Authority. Arafat and his associates skimmed most of the foreign assistance the U.S. and Europe provided since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993. And today, while the Palestinians suffer from 70 percent unemployment, Arafat's coffers are flush with cash — over $20 billion according to some intelligence estimates. War is certainly good business for Abu Amar.
His partner Saddam Hussein is equally willing to fight to the last Palestinian. He turned himself into the patron saint of suicide bombers. As Iraq is squeezed by international sanctions, there must be a compelling reason why Saddam recently doubled the blood money he pays to the families of 'martyrs' from $12,000 to $25,000. Adjusted for per-capita income in the Palestinian Authority, this is the equivalent of $600,000 U.S., a tidy sum.
Saddam has created hell on Earth for his own citizens, by gassing the Kurds, attacking Iran and Kuwait, and later by refusing to allow the U.N. inspectors for weapons of mass destruction into Iraq, and flaunting the U.N. sanctions. He diverted the majority of cash from his 'oil-for-food' program to the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Now he is busily helping the Palestinians to the 'gates of heaven.'
Similarly to Arafat, Saddam's rationale is his own political survival. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalates, and as Arab and Muslim solidarity reaches a feverish pitch, echoing loudly in Europe and in the U.N., he believes it is less likely for other Arabs to cooperate with the U.S. in against his totalitarian regime — an attack that President Bush has repeatedly promised. The hotter the Arab-Israeli front, the louder become Arab pleading to spare Saddam.
Demonstrations in the Arab capitals and in Europe are aimed against Israel and the U.S. — but they also implicitly strike against the moderate Arab regimes which Saddam, Osama bin Laden, and radical Palestinians have excoriated for years.
Arafat is playing the role of Saddam's subcontractor for this bloody diversion, while Arab rulers, especially Prince Abdullah, and the Europeans, have become the enablers of Saddam and Arafat, with their policy of murder and human sacrifice.
And as the French and the European Union foreign-policy mandarins quietly contemplate their next move in the 'friendly criticism' of Washington, they too become the enablers of terrorism released by Arafat. Some in Europe's corridors of power do not mind seeing the U.S. bogged in the swamps of Arab hatred and foreign-policy obstruction. But by pursuing this course, they too are providing succor to Saddam and Arafat — and encouraging their war to the last Palestinian.
— Mr. Cohen is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
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