Word: aqsa
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Arafat’s double-talk is counterproductive, but it pales in significance when compared to his actions. Arafat’s Fatah and its associated Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade have claimed responsibility for a number of suicide bombings. Other organizations, more loosely affiliated with Arafat, have perpetrated many more. Arafat has allied himself with Iran in order to smuggle heavy weapons to Palestinian forces, clearly illustrated by the Karine A weapons-boat debacle, and has refused to jail and hold radical militants. A document released by the Israeli government, found last week in the PA compound in Ramallah, actually...
...just among fundamentalists. Last December the mainstream Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the nationalist group that forms the backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organization, entered the suicide-bombing business. Since then, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Fatah offshoot, has taken part in at least 10 such attacks, some of them in collaboration with Hamas or Islamic Jihad. The Brigades activists are generally not religious fanatics. "Within Palestinian society, in the past year, a very broad mechanism of social approval has been created that makes it possible for even less religious people to commit suicide," says Ehud Sprinzak...
Officially, at least, members of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades part from the fundamentalists in their goals: they support the idea of a free Palestine living in peace beside Israel and say they want only to force Israel to allow that state to rise up. But for now, nationalists and fundamentalists are united in their strategy, which is to kill and maim as many Israelis as possible and to horrify and demoralize those who go unscathed...
...Mohammed, 19, blew himself up in Jerusalem on March 2, after positioning himself next to a group of women with baby carriages waiting for their husbands to leave a bar mitzvah ceremony. He killed nine other people and injured more than 50 in the name of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Two weeks ago, a neighbor came by to pay a condolence call. She mentioned that she wished she were Mohammed's mother so her son could be a martyr. Ibtisam began crying uncontrollably, and another one of her sons showed the woman out the door. Says Ibtisam: "Palestinian mothers...
Arafat’s complicity in terror is unquestionable. If he really wants peace, then why his rejection of Ehud Barak’s insanely generous proposal for Palestinian statehood? Why the intifada? Why his approval of that infamous arms-laden boat from Iran; his funding of al Aqsa leaders; his penchant for praising terrorists as martyrs? The answer: he thinks Palestinian terrorism wins political concessions...