Daniel Pipes at FrontPage provides more evidence that Mahmoud Abbas is just another jihadist (as if this weren't enough, but given the wilful ignorance of so many today, I know it isn't).
There’s some puzzlement about Mahmoud Abbas, the new chairman of the Palestinian Authority. Does he accept Israel’s existence or want to destroy it?Matthew Kalman of Canada’s Globe and Mail discerns “an apparent campaign flip-flop” in this regard. A Jewish Exponent story is titled “He Wants It Both Ways: Palestinian front-runner: Anti-terror, but pro-‘return’.” An Australia Broadcast Corporation title acknowledges its mystification, writing that “Abbas’s election tactics confuse analysts.”
The media dwell on the same apparent contradiction: one moment Abbas demands that Palestinian terrorists stop their attacks on Israel and the next he (literally) embraces them, calling them “heroes fighting for freedom.” Also, he talks of both stopping the violence and of the “right of return” for over 4 million Palestinians to Israel, a well-known way of calling indirectly for the elimination of the Jewish state.
What gives?
Actually, there is no contradiction. By insisting on a “right of return,” Abbas signals that he, like Yasir Arafat and most Palestinians, intends to undo the events of 1948; that he rejects the very legitimacy of a Jewish state and will strive for its disappearance. But he differs from Arafat in being able to imagine more than one way of achieving this goal.
No matter what the circumstances, Arafat persisted from 1965 to 2004 to rely on terrorism. He never took seriously his many agreements with Israel, seeing these rather as a means to enhance his ability to murder Israelis. Arafat’s diplomacy culminated in September 2000 with the unleashing of his terror war against Israel; then, no matter how evident its failure, it went on until his death in November 2004.
In contrast, Abbas publicly recognized in September 2002 that terror had come to harm Palestinians more than Israel. Intended to prompt demoralization and flight from Israel, this tactic in fact brought together a hitherto fractured body politic, while nearly destroying the Palestinian Authority and prostrating its population. Abbas correctly concluded that “it was a mistake to use arms during the Intifada and to carry out attacks inside Israel.”
Abbas shows tactical flexibility. Unlike Arafat, who could never let go of the terrorist tool that had brought him wealth, power, and glory, Abbas sees the situation more cogently. If stopping the violence against Israel best serves his goal of eliminating the sovereign Jewish state, that is his program.
Read it all. Also, the original at FP has many useful links.
I don't know what the big mystery is. Pipes' conclusions notwithstanding, the muslim mind is capable of and engages continually in double-think.
I remain utterly dumbfounded at the apparent ignorance and naivete of our intelligent, distinguished leaders, such as Mr. Powell. I have the utmost respect for him and I know he is a competent, wise man. But he, as well as Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice, the U.S. Congress, etc. seem to think that Islam is a harmless, ordinary religion with a few fanatics.
If George Bush makes one more public pronouncement claiming that Islam is a "great religion, a religion of peace", I think I will vomit. Is he really that stupid? Are they all really that stupid? If not, why the charade?
There are many news reports indicating that Mahmoud Abbas has offered to engage Israel in "peace" talks. Is this true, or is he saying in Arabic that he is willing to engage in talks designed to formulate a "cease fire" (hudna)? If he is using the word salaam in his address to Arabic audiences, this would indeed be a significant development.
Abbas is a pragmatist, but not a moderate. He will likely do about as much as he can to rein in Hamas and other terrorist groups including those linked to his own Fatah party as he knows that killing Israeli civillians and tourists doesn't play well with his European supporters. I doubt he has much control over Hamas, but he can probably sell his own troops on the idea that the Palestinians will ultimately enjoy the "revenge of the cradle" as Quebeckers used to put it -- that demographics will ultimately prevail, and, in the meantime, they should just console themselves with the end of the occupation and the removal of settlements.
There is no mystery about Mahmoud Abbas. The only mystery is that people refuse to comprehend. Described on NPR as "a student of Jewish history," he wrote his "doctoral" thesis in the Soviet Union, which included Holocaust-denial Lite -- there were, he maintains, "fewer than one million Jews who died." You can guess why "the Jews" would exaggerate the number. He is corrupt, for everyone at that level around Arafat is corrupt.
And his interest is to promote a treaty. So what? It is not possible for any treaty, between Muslims and Infidels, to be regarded as anything other than a first step, a way to lull the Infidel opponent, and to buy time. At the moment violence has not worked. The American administration is not sufficiently friendly. In Europe, Muslims are gaining ground and the “Euro-Arab Dialogue” and the “Deux-Rivistes” (the “deux rives” or both banks, of the Mediterranean, which is the only thing standing in the way of the unity of Europe and Arab Muslim North Africa – for the belief-system of Islam, you see, is merely a detail, quite inconsequential).
One can call for a “Two-State Solution” (and that it is a “solution” is obvious – otherwise it wouldn’t be called a solution, now would it?). One can utter this phrase a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times. But it will not create a reality any realer than what the belief-system of Islam creates, and insists upon.
Let everyone get this straight: there is No Solution to the Jihad against Israel that is based on further Israeli retreat from the absolutely infinesimal territory it now controls, given geography (the heights of Jordan), the traditional invasion routes (from Egypt through Gaza, an invasion route with 2000 years of history behind it), the demographic imbalance, the ratio of length of border to size of territory (Israel even at present has the highest such ratio in the world). Look at a map. Look at a map with Israel pressed back in to the armistice lines of 1949 (the very lines that the Arab states refused to make permanent). And as you look at that map, look not with your own eyes, but with the eyes of a Believer.
How can it be, you (that pretend Believer) ask yourself, that this offense contra naturam, this outrage to Islam, can continue to exist, so small, so vulnerable, so frail, smack in the midst of the dar al-Islam? It simply cannot be.
Arafat knew this. And so does Mahmoud Abbas. But while Arafat repeatedly mentioned the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya (most famously in September 1974, before an audience of Muslims in Johannesburg) to show that of course he wasn’t serious about peace, he unfortunately lacked the patience to hold on, and get what he could have got, and then waited. It was more to his liking to take the money, steal most of it, use some to buy support – but never to burden himself with the actual responsibilities of rule, as opposed to the great fun of being a warlord who could check into the Hotel Raphael, or the Crillon, or some other swank place – all paid for by some accommodating Infidel state, and the French were the most accommodating of all – anytime the spirit moved him, until those last few years in the Muqata.
Mahmoud Abbas is like Zarqawi – not the Zarqawi of the headdress and glowering eyes, but the Western-suited-and-tied, bespectacled, mild-mannered accountant Zarqawi.
Again, so what? This or that Arab princeling or prime minister comes and goes. Islam remains. That Israel’s leaders, or most of them, are unwilling to confront the unpleasant reality of Islam, is humanly understandable – for them it is just too painful, for it implies an endless standoff (but an endless standoff may be entirely manageable, just as it was for the United States with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and it beats annihilation any day).
But what explains the failure of American policymakers to get out their Majid Khadduri, and sit to school, to figure out just what the Law of War and Peace in Islam is? Are they afraid of what they might find out – that is, the truth?
And remember that old quiz show, back in the 1950s, whose producer offered to film the show in any town in America, if that town would change its name to the name of the program. The program was called “Truth or Consequences.” One town made the deal, and that is how the toponym of the town Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, came to be.
Well, Truth OR Consequences, indeed. But also: Truth, and Consequences.
Forget about Mahmoud Abbas’ supposed “pragamatism” – this means only that he is cleverer and more realistic than Arafat, not that he differs in the slightest in his ultimate goal – and even if he did so differ, it would not make the slightest difference, because it is what Islam teaches its adherents that matters, in the end, not what this or that plausible leader (even one a hundred times better than Abbas) believes or says, or pretends to believe, and pretends to say. If one wants to consult any of the hundreds of Arab plans discussing the “back to the 1949 lines and then in for the kill” plan – utterly obvious to all who actually are not determined to ignore Islamic tenets, and even the reality of what Abbas and other Arabs have said, one example would be “Future Arab Strategy in the Light of the Fourth War,” by Al-Haytham Al-Ayubi published in Shuun Filastiniyya, Beirut, October 1974.
Let us, ladies and gentlemen, cut the crap. There is no solution, much less this idiotic “two-state solution,” to the relentless Jihad against Israel. It is permanent, it is endless. Israel’s size is irrelevant. Its existence is the affront. There can not be an Infidel sovereign state in the middle of dar al-Islam. Not every single Arab and Muslim heart palpitates at the thought of Israel’s destruction – but almost all of them do. If you are some ex-diplomat (say, Edward Djerijian of the “Baker Center” down in Houston), confidently assuring listeners that “of course, everyone knows pretty much what the final agreement will have to look like” – well, no, not everyone. Because all Muslims know that the notion of “pacta sunt servanda” (treaties are to be obeyed), is not a given in the law of war and peace in Islam. The only relevant model for treaties between Muslims and Infidels is that of Muhammad’s treaty with the Meccans in 628 A.D., the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya.
Abbas wants negotiations. He wants American money, as do all the Arabs and Muslims who are not already blessed by the accident of geology. He wants to be lionized, and his years of loyal service, as a loyally corrupt aide to an even more corrupt leader, his Holocaust-minimizing, his vicious rhetoric that is always on tap if not always turned on, all to be overlooked because he wears a business suit and therefore, for the shallow prosopologists of the age, he “looks moderate and pragmatic.”
“Pragmatic” – yes, just as Muhammad pragmatically signed an agreement with the Meccans for 10 years, because at that point they were stronger, and then broke that same agreement, after 18 months, on some excuse, because by that time he felt that he had grown sufficiently strong.
Not a “treaty” but Darura – necessity – is the only sure guarantor of peace for Israel. The Arab and Muslim leaders will be able to refuse to go to war if they can explain to their own people that the consequences of doing so would be terrible. And that is the only thing that will keep the peace – not a treaty. Right now, Egypt has not made open war on Israel (it has become, however, a world center of anti-Semitic propaganda) not because of its “treaty” with Israel, but for the same reason Syria does not attack – the consequences would be too severe. In Egypt’s case, of course, there is also the little matter of keeping the Americans shoveling in the foreign aid, a preposterous situation and one that, far from winning goodwill, only feeds anti-American resentment and pro-Islamic agitation because that aid is seen as supporting the luxurious Mena Island life of the rich and infamous, Egyptian-style, to wit -- Mubark and his Friends-and-Family Plan.
“Peace”? A “Two-State Solution”? Abbas the “moderate pragmatist”? Please. It’s too much. J’en ai marre – I’m fed up – as the old Mistinguett song, back in 1920, put it.
Pipes and Hugh are dead on target. Let's first look at Pipes' comment:
"Abbas shows tactical flexibility."
The operative word here, folks, is TACTICAL. When we speak in "tactical" terms we are speaking of the means to an end - not "the end" itself. When we speak of "the end", we are speaking in STRATEGIC terms. There's obviously a world of difference here (why some analysts don't get this is beyond me).
We have all seen and heard much of Abbas's "tactical flexibility" - this is nothing new. But what about Abbas's strategic flexibility? Will he give on the issue of Israel's existance? How is insisting on the "Right of Return" - the demographic destruction of Israel - a change in strategic terms?
It isn't.
Hugh is correct in that Israel must face the grim prospect of an unending war against the rabid wolves of Hamas and Islamic Jihad outside their door, but as he points out, it sure beats annihilation any day.
I hate to say this, but history backs me up on it - Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with their hudnas, taqiyya and kitman, cannot be trusted. EVER. Israel's existance can never rely on the supposed good will of its adversaries - it must rely on the strength and determination of their armed forces, just as it always has.
If you go here, you can look at the evolution of Israel's boundries:
http://www.mideastweb.org/maps.htm
What is even more preposterous than returning to the 1949 boundries is the call for Israel to return to the 1947 UN Partition Plan boundries.
Mind you, if Palestinians were given some land the
would be so busy fighting each other in their violent Islamic way, Israel could probaby do a roaring trade in Terrorist Tourism Watching from their wall... Sincerely hope situation will get better but don't hold your breath!
You're probably right, Morgane. I'm sure Israel relishes the opportunity to be adjacent to a country exploding into violent anarchy (as if that would be any worse than things are now).
* sarcasm off *
Colin Powell must know better. Here is the truth about the ideology that spreads by jihad. (If you've read it before, read it again--Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and George W. Bush should and refrain from mealy-mouthed pronouncements about the innate goodness of the "hijacked 'religion.'")
A Letter to Mankind
Dear fellow human,
Today humanity is being challenged. Unthinkable atrocities take place on daily basis. There is an evil force at work that aims to destroy us. The agents of this evil respect nothing; not even the lives of children. Every day there are bombings, every day innocent people are targeted and murdered. It seems as if we are helpless. But we are not!
The ancient Chinese sage Sun Zi said, "Know your enemy and you won't be defeated". Do we know our enemy? If we don't, then we are doomed.
Terrorism is not an ideology, it is a tool; but the terrorists kill for an ideology. They call that ideology Islam.
The entire world, both Muslims and non-Muslims claim that the terrorists have hijacked "the religion of peace" and Islam does not condone violence.
Who is right? Do the terrorists understand Islam better, or do those who decry them? The answer to this question is the key to our victory, and failure to find that key will result in our loss and death will be upon us. The key is in the Quran and the history of Islam.
Those of us, who know Islam, know that the understanding of the terrorists of Islam is correct. They are doing nothing that their prophet did not do and did not encourage his followers to do. Murder, rape, assassination, beheading, massacre and sacrilege of the dead "to delight the hearts of the believers" were all practiced by Muhammad, were taught by him and were observed by Muslims throughout their history.
If truth has ever mattered, it matters most now! This is the time that we have to call a spade a spade. This is the time that we have to find the root of the problem and eradicate it. The root of Islamic terrorism is Islam. The proof of that is the Quran.
We are a group of ex-Muslims who have seen the face of the evil and have risen to warn the world. No matter how painful the truth may be, only truth can set us free. Why this much denial? Why so much obstinacy? How many more innocent lives should be lost before YOU open your eyes? A nuclear disaster is upon us. This will happen. It is not a question of "if" but "when". Oblivious of that, the world is digging its head deeper in the sand.
We urge the Muslims to leave Islam. Stop with excuses, justifications and rationalizations. Stop dividing mankind into "us" vs. "them" and Muslims vs. Kafirs. We are One people, One mankind! Muhammad was not a messenger of God. It is time that we end this insanity and face the truth. The terrorists take their moral support and the validation for their actions from you. Your very adherence to their cult of death is a nod of approval for their crimes against humanity.
We also urge the non-Muslims to stop being politically correct lest they hurt the sensitivities of the Muslims. To Hell with their sensitivities! Let us save their lives, and the lives of millions of innocent people.
Millions, if not billions of lives will be lost if we do nothing. Time is running out! "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." Do something! Send this message to everyone in your address book and ask them to do the same. Defeat Islam and stop terrorism. This is your world, save it.
The ex-Muslim Movement
www.faithfreedom.org
To be quite honest I hope he does start more trouble with Israel. This will prove to all the anti-semitic lefties, that constantly critisize Israel in the most hateful manner, once and for all that the palestinians are a tribe of displaced nomads, led by hostile, violent psycopaths and they do not want peace with Israel, but it's eradication.
Then with that fact out in the open, Israel can finally (and with the full support of most westerners), give palestine no quarter and start blitzing Gaza and the West bank relentlessly, until all the terrorist groups surrender.
I'm fucking sick of hearing the left screaming about how hard done to the palestinians are, when in actual fact they are the root of all the problems.
I remain utterly dumbfounded at the apparent ignorance and naivete of our intelligent, distinguished leaders, such as Mr. Powell. I have the utmost respect for him and I know he is a competent, wise man. But he, as well as Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice, the U.S. Congress, etc. seem to think that Islam is a harmless, ordinary religion with a few fanatics.
If George Bush makes one more public pronouncement claiming that Islam is a "great religion, a religion of peace", I think I will vomit. Is he really that stupid? Are they all really that stupid? If not, why the charade?
Posted by: Susanp at January 11, 2005 10:51 AM
SusanP,
I often ask myself this question, and I think I know the answer.
Maybe the Government are more aware of jihad than we give them credit for, but have to appear to be politically correct on matters such as religion. Think of the medias reaction if Bush suddenly started saying "islam is an evil religion , as are the people that follow it, don't trust them,, and kill any that threaten you....".
Sure it would be refreshingly honest and accurate, but for those that believed him (the sensible ones) there would be a nationwide uproar, perhaps even civil war.
All the Bush critics, the idiots in denial and the left, they'd use it as ammunition against him, muslims would seem to be proven correct that the war on terror is actually a war on islam, and the liberal media would have a hell of a time trying to paint Bush as the new Hitler.
Thats why to avoid mass hysteria, the government has to keep such opinions to themselves. I don't like it either; in fact I'd prefer it if Bush and Blair would profess to not know enough about islam to comment than to call it the "religion of peace", but you see where I'm coming from???
I like to think though that they really are switched on to islams threat and are covertly doing everything in their power to stop the new caliphate becoming a nightmarish reality.