Suha Arafat: The 2000 Intifada Was Premeditated, Planned by Arafat

Suha Arafat: The 2000 Intifada Was Premeditated, Planned by Arafat

When Gingrich met Yasser Arafat

(news.yahoo.com)GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich stirred up plenty of controversy last week when he called Palestinians an "invented people" in an interview from the campaign trail.
"I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places,' Gingrich told the Jewish Channel last week.
All of which makes the above 1993 photo of Gingrich, then House Minority Whip, embracing the late Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, published by the Huffington Post's Sam Stein, perhaps noteworthy. Stein, who received the photo from a longtime political operative involved in Middle East issues, writes:

On Monday, a political operative who has been working on Palestine-Israel policy for the past 20 years sent The Huffington Post a picture of Gingrich, then the House minority whip, grasping the hand of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat immediately following the September 1993 Oslo peace accords.
The embrace, the source said, came after Arafat met with 20 to 25 House leaders over coffee. Jotting notes down in a yellow pad, Gingrich used the meeting to pitch Arafat on how best to actually construct a Palestinian state. "He said, 'Look, here is what I think you need -- an economic plan — and here is how it will work,' " the operative recalled. "It was a very positive contribution at the time and as they stood up, there were pictures." ....

As you can see this is politics as usual. Bibi Netanyahu met with Arafat as well... and while I would prefer that they never of done this, the fact remains that meeting with your murderers in politics is the job of every leader. It is also the job of every leader to reject the Arafats of their day, but offering economic advice is ok because the assumption when you meet with your murderers is that you are there to help each other. Yahoo was affiliated with ABC news and one of the GOP debates this week. It is the network of Peter Jennings and Christine Amanpour... should we be shocked that the partnering corporation of abcNEWS is attempting to spin a photograph?

US State Dept: Arafat was behind 1973 Khartoum murders of US diplomats

Ha'aretz has a good article about the 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum that gives a lot of background:

On the eve of UN recognition of Palestine, 18 years after the Oslo Accords carried Arafat to the White House and from there to the Nobel Peace Prize, and seven years after his death, the U.S. government now confirms that Arafat was responsible for the 1973 murder of its ambassador and his deputy in Khartoum, Sudan. The two were taken hostage and killed "with the full knowledge and by the personal authorization" of Arafat, according to a study released last month by the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian, entitled "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXV, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1973."
The incident began on March 1, 1973, when eight members of Black September stormed the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum during a reception, and captured the Saudi ambassador and four of his guests: American ambassador Cleo Noel, U.S. deputy chief of mission George Curtis Moore, and the Belgian and Jordanian charge d'affaires in Sudan. Black September was a transparent front for Fatah, and Arafat was the commander of both, as well as head of the PLO. When the kidnappers understood that Jordan, Israel and the United States would not be releasing prisoners in exchange for the captives, Fatah headquarters in Beirut ordered them to shoot the two Americans and the Belgian, Guy Eid.
Two months later - and one month after the so-called Spring of Youth raid on Beirut by an elite Israel Defense Forces unit, paratroopers and the Mossad, which killed three senior Palestinian leaders - Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited U.S. President Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

Here is how the State Department describes the incident in the document:

In the early evening of March 1, eight Black September Organization terrorists seized the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum during a diplomatic reception. The terrorists took U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission George C. Moore, the Belgian Charge´, the Saudi Ambassador, and the Jordanian Charge´ hostage. In return for the hostages’ freedom, the terrorists demanded the release of various individuals, mostly Palestinian guerrillas, imprisioned in Jordan, Israel, and the United States. The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the head of Fatah. When the terrorists became convinced that their demands would not be met and after they reportedly had received orders from Fatah headquarters in Beirut, they killed the two U.S. officials and the Belgian Charge´. Thirty-four hours later, upon receipt of orders from Arafat in Beirut, the terrorists released the other hostages unharmed and surrendered to Sudanese authorities.

Already a month after the incident, Secretary of State Rogers showed that the US knew the orders for the murders came from Beirut:

Memorandum From Secretary of State Rogers to President Nixon
Washington, April 11, 1973.
SUBJECT
Actions to Encourage Lebanon to Move Against Black September and Other Terrorist Groups
As you know, the Black September Organization’s operation in Khartoum was planned and directed from headquarters which that group has in Lebanon.

Abba Eban and Henry Kissinger spoke in May:

Kissinger: During the Khartoum incident, someone suggested we ask you for help. You would have blown up Beirut.
Eban: You know that it was from Beirut that the phone call went to finish them off.
Kissinger: We know that.

In November, there was an initial backchannel communication between the CIA's Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Walters and PLO leaders in Morocco, including Khalid al Hassan, at the time Arafat's number two man. Even then, there are appearances that the US was willing to downplay the murders of the diplomats in order to strengthen relations with the PLO, although Khalid put out an opaque denial:

He then with visible embarrassment asked me whether the U.S. had anything to do with the murder of their leaders in Beirut. I replied quite firmly that we had nothing to do with these murders. I gave him my word of honor as a soldier this was so. I replied that we did not resort to murder because it was morally wrong, dishonorable and did not produce results. Bullets killed only men, not ideas. I said I would ask him no questions about Khartoum but we did not resort to murder. He replied with some embarrassment that in all large groups where there has been much suffering, there are some who undertake violence on their own. I understood him to be telling me that the Khartoum murders were not sanctioned by the Fatah leadership.

As Ha'aretz writes, the NSA knew about Arafat's orders to murder the men ahead of time:

At the end of the 1990s, a former navy officer named James Welsh launched a campaign to denounce the intelligence, security and diplomacy establishments' failure to warn about the Khartoum attack. In letters to Congress and interviews with the media, Welsh said that between 1970 and 1974, he had worked in the NSA and secretly monitored the Palestinians' actions.
A day or two before the attack, the NSA recorded conversations about the terror plans, Welsh said, adding that he recognized the voice of Arafat telling his aides, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, to carry out the attack. The U.S. State Department was warned immediately, so it could pass on the message to the diplomats in Khartoum.
When he heard about the attack in the media, Welsh was astounded to discover that the person on duty had decided on her own that the warning was not urgent, and thus had delayed disseminating it. It arrived in Khartoum after the murders.
Welsh claimed that when he demanded that the State Department's failure be investigated, his superiors at the NSA told him such a campaign would cost him his security clearance and result in his transfer from Washington's quiet corridors to the rigors of a navy fueling ship. Welsh backed down.

If you think that the information here still allows for the possibility that the State Department believed that Black September was not under the complete control of Yasser Arafat, this State Dept. summary of a June 1973 intelligence memo should dispel all doubt:

The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy.
Initially, the main objective of the attack appeared to be to secure the release of Fatah/BSO leader Muhammed Awadh (Abu Da'ud) from Jordanian captivity. Information acquired subsequently reveals that the Fatah/BSO leaders did not expect Awadh to be freed, and indicates that one of the primary goals of the operation was to strike at the United States because of its efforts to achieve a Middle East peace settlement which many Arabs believe would be inimical to Palestinian interests....
The Khartoum operation again demonstrated the ability of the BSO to strike where least expected. The open participation of Fatah representatives in Khartoum in the attack provides further evidence of the Fatah/BSO relationship. The emergence of the United States as a primary fedayeen target indicates a serious threat of further incidents similar to that which occurred in Khartoum.

The picture that emerges is that the US seemed to be willing to overlook the PLO participation in the murders of its diplomats for what it perceived was the greater good of engaging the PLO in the nascent "peace process."
Only a year later, murderer Yasser Arafat was greeted by a standing ovation at the United Nations.

(h/t Yoel for original Ha'aretz article)

via elderofziyon.blogspot.com

Nephew admits he can't prove Arafat was poisoned

(EOZ) Yasser Arafat's nephew and former "foreign minister" Nasser al Kidwa has been a broken record for years - always saying he was on the verge of proving Arafat was poisoned by Israel, and promising to be able to prove it Any Day Now.
He promised that he would release the French medical report translated to Arabic, and somehow this was considered news.

Nasser al Kidwa

Al-Qudwa says the report will answer "many questions," as it is the Palestinian people's right to get a clear answer about how Arafat died. The document has not previously been seen in Arabic.
The report by French doctors describes a platelet disorder and speculates on its cause, al-Qudwa says. The doctors ruled out cancer and an acute infection, he told Ma'an.
A third possibility was poisoning, al-Qudwa says, but the records show that doctors were unable to conclusively determine what poison, if any, was in Arafat's system.
"We have said that it is poisoning," he hinted.

There are many conditions that result in low platelet counts - including AIDS.
Anyway, this "news" - and Kidwa's allegations - are a bit old. From the New York Times, November 23, 2004:

Yasser Arafat's death remained a mystery Monday when his nephew said he could not rule out that the Palestinian leader had been poisoned.
Two hours after receiving his uncle's medical records, 558 pages long, from the French authorities, Nasser al-Kidwa told reporters that according to the files no trace of any known poison had been found in Arafat's body.
But he insisted that a "question mark" remained over the exact cause of Arafat's death Nov. 11 in Paris and was likely to remain for some time.
"We don't have proof that it was a case of poisoning, and we don't have proof that it wasn't," Kidwa, the Palestinian envoy at the United Nations, said at a news conference in the French capital.
While he stressed that Palestinian officials trusted the French doctors who treated Arafat during his last 12 days and accepted that toxicology tests ruled out any known poisons, Kidwa refused to exclude the possibility that other, unknown substances played a role in Arafat's death.
"I am not asserting anything, but we are not in a position to exclude anything," he said.
This is in contrast to comments from the Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, who said the night before Arafat died at the Percy Military Training Hospital outside Paris that doctors had ruled out poisoning "completely."
Kidwa said the truth about Arafat's death was not just a matter for one person or one family, but for all Palestinians.
"The Palestinian people have the right to know," he said, pledging to share the medical report with the Palestinian leadership "as soon as possible."
When Arafat arrived in France for treatment at the end of October, his aides disclosed that he had a low count of platelets, which aid blood clotting, and a high count of white blood cells. They later revealed that the Palestinian leader suffered a brain hemorrhage that sent him into a coma.
Medical experts say the low platelet count makes hemorrhages more likely, but it is unclear what condition caused Arafat's platelet count to be low in the first place. A wide range of illnesses, from cancer to liver disease, could be consistent with such a condition.

And today, even with all the press rehashing things we knew for seven years, Palestine Todayreports:

Kidwa said during a ceremony last night to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the death of Arafat, "We renew our conviction of the responsibility of" Israel "for poisoning Arafat, but we recognize we have failed to get a definitive answer."

So expect to see identical news stories next year, and the year after....

no comment from me

Arafat's family to release report on how he died

I get the feeling that Carl does not believe the Palestinian Authority Report that Mohammed Dahlan Poisoned Yasser Arafat

(Israel Matzav) Nasser al-Kidwa, the nephew of Yasser Arafat and the 'Palestinian' ambassador to the United Nations, is going to release a report in Arabic that will tell 'Palestinians' how Arafat died.

Al-Qudwa says the report will answer "many questions," as it is the Palestinian people's right to get a clear answer about how Arafat died. The document has not previously been seen in Arabic.
The report by French doctors describes a platelet disorder and speculates on its cause, al-Qudwa says. The doctors ruled out cancer and an acute infection, he told Ma'an.
A third possibility was poisoning, al-Qudwa says, but the records show that doctors were unable to conclusively determine what poison, if any, was in Arafat's system.
"We have said that it is poisoning," he hinted.

Poisoning. What a load of bull dung.

People with HIV often have problems with their levels of platelets, cells in the blood that help with clotting.
When the body slows its production of platelets, and/or when platelets are destroyed at a higher-than-normal rate, a condition called thrombocytopenia occurs. People with this condition bleed and bruise easily.

Do I think Arafat had AIDS? I KNOW Arafat had AIDS. Arafat's doctor told us in an interview on Israeli television! And I can even tell you how he got it.

The End of Palestine

(MORE PAIN)

The Arab League had never believed in an independent Palestinian state. Even while they were creating the PLO, Jordan had already annexed the West Bank. And Gaza was in Egyptian hands. The PLO's purpose was not to liberate these areas, or even to govern them. Its own charter made that abundantly clear.

Article 24. This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area. Its activities will be on the national popular level in the liberational, organizational, political and financial fields.

Palestinian Authority Report: Mohammed Dahlan Poisoned Yasser Arafat

A Palestinian commission of inquiry has concluded that ousted Fatah Central Committee member Mohammed Dahlan was involved in the “poisoning” of former Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. The commission’s report was published on Sunday by a number of Arab news web sites, including Al-Jazeera. According to the 118-page report, which was prepared by top Fatah officials Azzam al-Ahmed, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, Othman Abu Gharbiyyeh and Nabil Sha’ath, the deposed Fatah official was involved in sending poisoned medicine to Arafat before the latter’s death. If true, this would be the first time that the Palestinian leadership accuses a Palestinian of being behind the “assassination” of Arafat. Khaled Abu Toameh recently wrote about the ongoing feud between Abbas and Dahlan.  Back in June, Dahlan told Abbas "to shove it." These remarks came after Dahlan was charged with murder and financial corruption, (and his websites were shut down by Abbas) which he was recently expelled from Fatah for. After losing his appeal, Dahlan's home was raided as he fled to Jordan. Don't forget that Abbas and Dahlan both hold Jordanian citizenship. Elliot Abram has also recently covered the feud between the PA and Dahlan and calls for an investigation into the corrupt Palestine Investment Fund. Jerusalem Post via Challah hu Akbar

Dahlan is detested by Hamas, but Hamas hated Arafat too. France refused to release Arafat's medical records to anyone but his family, saying, "The public authorities can in no case violate this law, which touches on fundamental freedoms"....and what medicine was Arafat taking?  Did he have AIDS?  We will never know.

The problem with 'agreed swaps'

The Palestinians argued that when Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt, it agreed to withdraw from 100 percent of the Sinai Peninsula. So they asked how could PLO chairman Yasser Arafat be given less than what Egyptian president Anwar Sadat received.

Nasser with Arafat (left)
at the emergency Arab League summit,
1970 via thefullwiki.org

Mt. Sinai

...As_a_result, Israeli academics involved in these backchannel talks accepted the principle that the Palestinians would obtain 100 percent of the territory, just like the Egyptians, despite the language of Resolution 242, and they proposed giving Israeli land to the Palestinians as compensation for any West Bank land retained by Israel. This idea appeared in the 1995 Beilin-Abu Mazen paper, which was neither signed nor embraced by the Israeli or the Palestinian leaderships. Indeed, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) subsequently denied in May 1999 that any agreement of this sort existed. By Dore Gold via Israel Matzav

TIME Magazine Facilitates the Transfer of Gaza to Egypt

Time Magazine spins Israel giving up territory as a Zionist trick.

It's

TIME

report here:

...if it [the opening of the Rafah Crossing] was a cause of celebration for Gazans...the reaction in official Israeli circles surely includes "quiet satisfaction." For in Jerusalem the feeling is: If the Egyptians want to take responsibility for 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, more power to them. Cairo after all had control of the coastal enclave from 1948 to 1967...

...observed Giora Eiland, a retired major general, in an interview almost a year go. "No one knows what to do with Gaza."...Not even Gaza's vegetables are welcome in Israel. "No, no, no," Eiland said. "We don't need any kind of economic relationship with Gaza whatsoever."..."It is not in Israel's interest to see Gaza and the West Bank as one entity," Eiland observed.

...That's a view...endorsed by Israel's settlers, as determined and implacable a group as you can find in the modern world. They want to hold onto the West Bank, an area rich in Biblical sites and significance to the observant Jews who are the most "hard core" of Jews living on West Bank hilltops, notes Naftali Bennett, director general of the Yesha Council, which represents settlers. Gaza has nothing of consequence to religious Jews, which is one reason to be rid of it [???].

How ‘experts’ got it wrong

Demographic trends
in the Land of Israel

Demographic threat hyped up,
Israeli withdrawal from
Judea and Samaria unnecessary

Another reason: Without the Strip, Israel can make a better case for annexing the West Bank. As Bennett explained the other day to a room of foreign journalists, the case against annexation has always been the assumption that Palestinians would soon outnumber Jews, making Israel a defacto apartheid state, with the minority governing the majority. Few Israelis want to be in that position. But, Bennett maintains, "the myth that demography is against us is wrong. Demography is not against us."

His math is instructive in more ways than one....

Within its borders, Israel has some six million Jewish residents and 1.1 million Arabs...Bennet thinks 1.8 million [Palestinians who reside on the West Bank] is about right. Combine them, and you have a nation of six million Jews and about three million Palestinians, a comfortable Jewish majority, Bennett says, given the declining birth rate among Israeli Arabs.

And Gaza? What about the 1.5 million Palestinians there?  "Gaza we don't count," Bennett says. "Because that's gradually becoming Egypt's problem."

Who once said 'Go drink the water of Gaza'?

Answer:
Arafat: the curse beloved by Arafat: "Go and drink from the sea of Gaza!"
YMedad via myrightword.blogspot.com

Actually... Gaza does have significance to religious Jews. The promise made by G-d, is "From the Nile to the Euphrates".

MK Zahalka: Committee must probe Arafat's death

Hundreds of people participated in a Balad rally in Umm al-Fham in memory of former Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, who died six years ago.  Knesset Member Jamal Zahalka called for the establishment of an international committee which would probe the circumstances of Arafat's death. (Roee Nahmias) via ynetnews.com

If the doctors had had the slightest doubt, they would have referred it to the police. I note that permission was given for him to be buried," a government spokesman, Jean-Francois Cope, told reporters after the weekly French cabinet meeting, according to news accounts. He repeated France's refusal to release Arafat's medical records to anyone but his family, saying, "The public authorities can in no case violate this law, which touches on fundamental freedoms.

via washingtonpost.com

At the time of his death Arafat was more popular in France, where almost half the population saw Arafat as a great national hero, than among his own people

In a June 2004 poll, only 23.6 percent of Palestinians named Arafat as the leader they most trusted.

Since Arafat’s death, most of the leadership of Fatah and the PA has made clear their interpretation of Arafat’s legacy was the need to fight on for total victory, no matter how long it took or how much suffering or lives it cost. One Palestinian leader recalled that when, in 1993, he had reproached Arafat for signing the Oslo accords, Arafat replied that by making the agreement, “I am hammering the first nail in the Zionist coffin. via rubinreports.blogspot.com


Like Edward Said and George Antonius--Yasir Arafat falsely claimed to be Palestinian Arabs when in fact they were born in Egypt:  On countless occasions, Yasir Arafat has regaled listeners about his Jerusalem birth and childhood. He fondly recalls his birthplace in a stone house abutting the Western Wall, then how he lived with his Uncle Sa'ud in Jerusalem. Like Said, Arafat presents himself as a victim of Zionism - someone who lost his wordly belongings and his place in the world due to Israel's coming into existence. But in fact, as two intrepid French biographers, Christophe Boltanski and Jihan El-Tahri revealed a few years, ago (in their 1997 book, Les sept vies de Yasser Arafat), "Mr. Palestine was born on the shores of the Nile."

The French researchers tell an amusing story of discovery.

They went to the University of Cairo and innocently asked for the registration of one Muhammad 'Abd ar-Ra'uf 'Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husayni at the School of Civil Engineering in 1956. This, Arafat's birth name means nothing to the Egyptian clerk, who "sits down behind a rickety wooden table, almost completely hidden by the pile of dusty files bound in black leather" and "blows off a layer of grime in a most professional way," then hands over the records. In a blue ink faded by time, the researchers find that their man, living at 24A Baron Empain Street, Heliopolis, "was born on August 4, 1929, in Cairo." With this information in hand, they dash over to the State Registry and find Arafat's actual birth certificate, which confirms the date and place.

Arafat then lived in Cairo until the age of 28 and identified as an Egyptian. His first political affiliation was an Egyptian student organization closed to Palestinians. He fought for an Egyptian group against Israel in 1948-49 and subsequently served in the Egyptian military. He first traveled to Moscow, in 1968, on an Egyptian passport. Arafat all his life has spoken Arabic like an Egyptian, something that has sometimes impeded his career; on first encountering him in 1967, a biographer recounts, "West Bankers did not like his Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien."

How is it that three men raised in Egypt decided at various points in the twentieth century - the 1920s, 1950s, 1970s - to become Palestinians? The answer probably lies in the fact that for a politically ambitious activist, Palestinian politics has far more to offer than Egypt's. An intellectual can raise his profile much higher; where would Said be today were he advocating Egyptian causes? And a politician finds the path to power far more open; had Arafat made Egypt his life's work, he might today be a retired deputy from that country's rubber-stamp parliament. Being Palestinian, in other words, is a good career move.

But Arafat did not create his own myth nor the myth of a Palestinian people all by himself--he had help. Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in September 2003 about Arafat. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, and is the author of Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington--as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day--believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.[emphasis added]

Read the whole thing.

Needless to say, the then-Soviet Union, as with so many pro-Palestinian apologists, have read the American public--and the West in general--very well.

And they continue to do so, as we see on a daily basis.

Originally posted on  daledamos.blogspot.com and Hat tip to Soccer Dad, from whom daledamos.blogspot.com found this article by Daniel Pipes, written in September 1999.
image via darrengarnick.wordpress.com

Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Your excess of pejorative language also gives away your anti-Israel agenda. Thus we learn that Israel practises “Machiavellian diplomacy” (not “Machiavellian” enough to stop the UN endorsing the Goldstone Report, though), “divide and rule” (divide and rule whom?) and “obfuscation and procrastination”. Tell me Lord Phillips, at Taba in 2001 Yassir Arafat was offered all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank. Moreover the West Bank area offered was contiguous, not “cantons”. He turned it down. Was that “obfuscation and procrastination” on the part of Israel?

via thejc.com

noahdavidsimon's posterous

CBS "60 Minutes" Joins the Arab Propaganda Bandwagon on Jerusalem

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA Media Analysis
20 October '10

h/t calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com

One of the main obstacles in previous peace-making efforts has been Arab unwillingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state and Muslim denial of Judaism's historical and religious ties to Jerusalem. U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross complained that during the July 2000 negotiations at Camp David, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's only contribution was his refusal to acknowledge Jewish ties to Jerusalem, claiming the Jewish Temple never existed there. When talks resumed in Taba later that year, the Israelis agreed to full Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount, but requested Palestinians acknowledge the sacredness of the place to Judaism. They refused. (See "The Battle Over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount") Moreover, Palestinian leaders not only deny the existence of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, they falsely allege that Jews are trying to takeover or destroy Muslim holy sites there. In that way, they follow the lead of Jerusalem Mufti and Nazi sympathizer Haj al Amin Husseini who so successfully incited anti-Jewish rioting in the1920's by making his battle cry "Defend Muslim Holy Sites."

The efforts to delegitimize Israel's claim to Jerusalem have generally been limited to Arab and Muslim leaders, but recently, international media outlets have jumped on board to support them. The latest one to join the fray is Lesley Stahl of CBS News's "60 Minutes" in an October 17^th segment entitled "Controversy in Jerusalem: The City Of David."

Ms. Stahl did not apparently bother to engage in serious journalism, the kind that involves research and fact-checking. She simply followed the playbook of Time Magazine, the Economist, and BBC's "Panorama" with a "paint-by-numbers" exercise calling on the same cast of characters, repeating the same distorted claims and reading from the same overall script. Echoing colleagues at the aforementioned media outlets, Ms. Stahl demonstrated how to promote Arab political propaganda with shoddy and partisan journalism:

1) Characterize as "controversial" Israel's publicizing of archeological findings of Israelite history in Jerusalem, discredit the field of biblical archeology and dismiss archeological excavations as something run by a "settler organization."

According to Ms. Stahl:

It's controversial that the City of David uses discoveries to try to confirm what's in the Bible, particularly from the time of David, the king who made Jerusalem his capital...

and
...But for all the talk of King David, one thing is glaringly missing here at the City of David. There`s actually no evidence of David, right?

Ms. Stahl dismisses the field of biblical archeology, especially the City of David enterprise, by throwing out a red herring — that there is no archeological proof of a King David himself. But, while it is impossible to uncover archeological evidence of any single individual, there is strong archeological evidence for the existence of a Davidic Kingdom. Stahl omits mention, for instance, that in 2005, archeologist Eilat Mazar uncovered remnants of a massive palace in the City of David dating to the 10th century BCE which is believed to be King David's palace.

It is unlikely that Ms. Stahl would ever challenge Palestinians about the existence of Mohammed, or whether she would question Christians about the existence of Jesus, based on lack of direct archeological proof of those individuals. Her approach, of course, supports attempts by Arab and Muslim leaders to erase any evidence of Jewish history in Jerusalem, whether through the Waqf's unsupervised construction and dumping of artifacts, or whether through the riots that are incited whenever Israel excavates, builds or discovers evidence of its Jewish roots in Jerusalem's holy basin. 

Ms. Stahl studiously avoided mention of this issue. She also did not bother to note that City of David archeologists, who are respected internationally for their scholarly contributions to the field, carry out their work under the auspices of the well-regarded Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Nor did she elaborate on the strict protocols which govern their work.

Excavations must be supervised by scholars associated with recognized institutes of archaeology, where there is an infrastructure for research, laboratory treatment, and processing. These scholars publish all of their finds (both Israelite and others) according to accepted scientific standards, and they conserve each uncovered layer of the excavated area as required by the Conservation Department of the IAA. But Ms. Stahl chose to smear the excavations as governed by a "settler organization." According to the CBS reporter:

While a government agency oversees the excavations, the dig and the site are largely funded and run by something called El`Ad...which claims they`re not a settlers` organization, though, people we spoke to say they are.

2) Call it political "indoctrination" to teach Jews about their historical roots in Jerusalem.

According to Ms. Stahl:

Half a million tourists visit the site every year, with guides who try to bring King David to life. There's an implicit message: that because David conquered the city for the Jews back then, Jerusalem belongs to the Jews today....

and

...So archeology is being used as a political tool. I mean, I hate to use the word, but indoctrination...

Would Ms. Stahl similarly suggest that archeologists should avoid telling Arabs about their own history in the area? Should Americans not send their children to Washington to visit the Lincoln Memorial? By conveying the attitude that it is somehow sinister to strengthen Jewish knowledge about and connection to Jerusalem, Ms. Stahl reflects the Arab perspective where Muslim rights and connection to the Holy Basin are a given, while Jewish rights and connection to the area are considered dubious and an obstacle to peace.

Needless to say, Ms. Stahl does not mention anything about indoctrination by Arab leaders who deny that Jews have any history in the area.

3) Portray Silwan as an area that does or should belong to Arabs. Describe Jews as interlopers with no right to live or carry out excavations there and ignore "inconvenient" history – both of Jewish habitation there as well as Jordan's illegal and racist occupation that ended it.

According to Ms. Stahl:

Another problem is an inconvenient truth that biblical Jerusalem is not located in the western half of the city. It`s right under the densely-populated Arab neighborhood of Silwan. And according to the Clinton parameters, Silwan should be part of a Palestinian state...

and

...organizations that move Jewish settlers into Arab areas have infiltrated Silwan...

and
...El`Ad has raised tens of millions of dollars, half from the United States, and buys these homes on land the Palestinians claim for a future state......

What Ms. Stahl fails to report is that there was a community of Yemenite Jewish families in Silwan as early as 1882 in the neighborhood known as Kfar HaShiloach, and additional Jewish families from various countries joined them in the following years. In the early 1900's Baron de Rothschild bought several acres of land there for the Jewish community. Silwan's Jewish residents lived in the area until they were forced out by Arab attacks in the late 1920s. The City of David, situated in the Silwan valley, is still 60 percent Jewish-owned, including the area bought by Baron de Rothschild. And it is perfectly legal to continue to buy homes there.

The notion that this area must now be rendered Judenrein — free of Jewish habitation, with Jews prohibited from purchasing homes there — echoes the racist policies of Jordan's 19-year illegal occupation of the area, something that Ms. Stahl assiduously avoids mentioning.

4) Gloss over, minimize or ignore "inconvenient truths" that show Arabs as interlopers in the area.

Ms. Stahl discusses the plans to create a tourist park in King's Garden near the City of David, noting that this "requires demolishing twenty-two Arab homes in Silwan," something she suggests would be an "explosive" action.

Ms. Stahl attributes to the mayor the argument that the "Arab houses were built illegally," and that he plans to relocate them, but viewers are never informed that the land had been set aside as conservation parkland with residential building prohibited long before the Arab homes in question were illegally erected. Instead she concludes, "but the locals want to stay in their homes," as if describing them as "locals" is reason enough for them to be allowed to defy the law governing this archeologically-rich area.

The missing "inconvenient truth" can be found in an article by Ha'aretz journalist Nadav Shragai:

Progress has brought troubles along with it to the King's Valley. For hundreds of years floodwaters drained into the garden of the kings of Judea, east of the Shiloah Pool in Jerusalem. In winter it was a swamp, but in summer it became a blooming garden.

With a bit of imagination and with the help of varied historical sources it is possible to imagine King David strolling in the royal garden with its abundant greenery and water among the olive, fig, pomegranate and almond trees, singing Psalms.

According to one tradition, this is where the Book of Ecclesiastes was composed.

About 20 years ago, the Jerusalem municipality shored up the water runoff there, and in the open green area (al Bustan, in Arabic), which the Turks and the British took care to preserve for hundreds of years as a public area intended for preservation and development of parks and tourism, an illegal Palestinian outpost arose.

Within 18 years 88 buildings went up there, under the noses of mayors Teddy Kollek and now outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Under former mayor Uri Lupolianski, the construction was halted, after the municipality confiscated tractors and heavy machinery from the lawbreakers.

Last summer the director general of the Antiquities Authority, Shuka Dorfman, noted in a kind of "post mortem" that the construction in the King's Garden caused significant and irreversible damage to antiquities.

Representatives of the municipality and Dorfman admitted that they had no good explanation for what has happened in this lovely garden, which is described in the Books of Nechemiah and Ecclesiastes, in midrashim (rabbinic Biblical homiletics) and in many historical sources. Dorfman stressed that together with Tel David, the garden constitutes the only complete archaeological garden of first-rate importance.

5) Challenge Israeli statements with Palestinian accusations.

Ms. Stahl gave up all pretense of journalistic objectivity when she took on the role of court prosecutor with Israeli interviewees. She challenged them by echoing Palestinian allegations:

LESLEY STAHL: So El Ad is doing archaeology and settlements?

DORON SPIELMAN: We are doing archaeology, and we are buying homes and buying land.

LESLEY STAHL: But is it El Ad`s goal to ease the Arabs away from right where we are right now?

DORON SPIELMAN: Put it this way, if there`s a home that an Arab wants to sell and I have the money to buy it and I can move, enable a Jewish family to live there, and I can dig archaeologically underneath it, then I think that`s a wonderful thing to do.

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): The Arabs say it`s a provocative thing to do.

......and

LESLEY STAHL: I heard you wanted to evict people. Where are-- where are those houses?

NIR BARKAT: That`s-- that`s just not true. To accept--

LESLEY STAHL (overlapping): Well, wait, but if you make a park, then those houses can`t be there anymore.

NIR BARKAT: They mustn`t have been there in the first place.

LESLEY STAHL: Yeah, but so-- so you will evict. You will evict.

NIR BARKAT: Not evict. When you improve their quality of life, the right word to say is that you`re dealing with improvement of quality of life.

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): His park, he says, will upgrade the area, and he`ll allow the people who`ll be evicted to build new houses nearby. But locals tell us the only way to do that would be to build on top of other homes in Silwan...

...The European Union, the United Nations has criticized this plan to get rid of these twenty-two homes. Public opinion, especially while the peace talks are under way, is-- is looking at this and saying you`re trying to get rid- - move Arabs out of Jerusalem.

NIR BARKAT (overlapping): That`s not true.

LESLEY STAHL: But that`s the way it looks......

6) Do not challenge or fact-check any Palestinian statements. Instead accept, repeat and endorse them.

In sharp contrast to her prosecutorial attitude toward Israeli interviewees, Stahl accepts Palestinian statements without challenge.

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): Palestinian Jawad Siyam was born in [Silwan] and says he can trace his roots here back nine hundred thirty years. He`s pessimistic about the Palestinians ever having their own state....

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): Jawad says that El`Ad uses the dig`s archeological prestige to hide its aim of moving the locals out. And he believes that the tunneling is a way for El`Ad to extend its reach deeper into Silwan...

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): There`s a feeling of encroachment. The Arabs feel it...

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): But as with the dig, the local Arabs see this as another attempt to gobble up their side of Jerusalem...

7) Avoid mention of anything that might portray Palestinians and Arab leaders in a poor light, or as an obstacle to peace. 

There was no mention of Jordan's ethnic cleansing of Jews from the region or their Judenrein policy during their illegal occupation, no mention of attempts by Palestinian and Muslim leaders to erase – both mentally (with denials) and physically (by destroying archeological remnants) Jewish history here.  There is no mention of the deadly attacks by eastern Jerusalem Arabs against Jews both in eastern and western Jerusalem — a contributing factor to why Israel does not want Jerusalem divided.

While she mentions "escalating confrontations" near Silwan, Ms. Stahl focuses on one incident which she says "became violent" when a car driven by an Israeli who turned out to be "of all people, the head of Elad," struck two masked Palestinian youths who had been throwing stones.  Of course, the incident was violent from the start, as masked Palestinian youths and adults surrounded the car, hurling stones at it. Three people, two of them minors and one adult, were subsequently arrested for thowing stones and smashing the window of a car. There were also many questions about the incident itself, particularly, why so many photographers had converged at the site well before the Israeli driver had entered the scene.  Had they been alerted in advance? Had they been told that there would be dramatic distubances or confrontations they might want to photograph? (See: "Silwan Distortions in the Israeli Press") Needless to say, Ms. Stahl did not explore any of this, as it did not support the story she was telling.

8) Suggest instead that it is Israeli actions – whether archeological excavations, purchasing of homes, or enforcing municipal laws – that obstruct the possibility of peace.

According to Ms. Stahl:

Settlements have been a stumbling block in peace negotiations of the past. And ...could become the stumbling block again.

A decade ago, Chairman President Mahmoud Abbas went on record challenging Jerusalem's Jewish heritage and the existence of a Jewish Temple, adding that even if there were one, "we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace." (Kul Al-Arab, August 25, 2000; Translation: MEMRI) Today, he refuses to accept Israel as a Jewish state.

But to Ms. Stahl and CBS, the Palestinians' refusal to recognize Israel and the attempt to erase Jerusalem's Jewish heritage are not the story she wants to tell. To her, the only obstacle to peace is Israel's commitment to its Jewish roots in Jerusalem.

via camera.org

noahdavidsimon's posterous

Arafat in a Bathroom

my encounter with a picture of Arafat by a toilet originally posted here