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BUSH CAN'T MAKE TERRORISTS SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY'S SAKE
By Michael D. Evans
President George W. Bush has invited Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to come to Washington on May 26. Presumably, the visit is meant to offer Abbas some reciprocity following Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s warm reception at Bush’s Texas ranch last month – that and some US support for Palestinian efforts to follow the so-called Road Map to peace.
But just what does Abbas represent? Is he the leader of a would-be state that wants to live in peace with Israel or, like his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, is he “harboring, supporting, and aiding” terrorists?
Bush propagates a doctrine on terrorism that states: If you aid or support them, then you are one of them, and an enemy of the United States. Leaving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aside for a moment, has Abbas’s PLO supported the US war on terrorism or has it sent terrorists into Iraq to kill Americans? How can Bush give red-carpet treatment to someone who, by his own definition, is the leader of a terrorist regime?
“If the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council election results in Hamas politically dominating the Gaza Strip, Israel should reconsider its planned withdrawal from the area” Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said recently. “Otherwise,” Shalom warned, “Gaza would become ‘Hamastan’, a virtual terrorist mini-state.”
A day following Shalom’s statements, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas condemn Israel for its resistance to the involvement of an armed terror group in government, and attacked the Jewish State’s democratic values: “What kind of democracy is this? What democracy do the Israelis believe in,” asked Abbas cynically.
Abbas apparently thinks that the brand of democracy espoused by Palestinian Arabs – terror groups and all – is a basis for enduring peace in the Middle East.
Two years ago, on April 30, 2003, the US State Department released the text of the "Road Map" to a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first and most important stage of the Road Map was to be an end to terrorism.
Since the Road Map was announced, Palestinian terrorists have murdered 301 Israelis and wounded 1,156, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The PA under Abbas has done nothing to meet its obligation under the Road Map to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. The main terrorist members of the PA – Hamas and Islamic Jihad – are thriving.
Bush says it’s all about giving democracy a chance. That’s what the democratically elected Nazi Party said to FDR – and Hamas just did very well in the Palestinian Authority local elections.
If the US has placed Fatah and Hamas on its list of terrorist organizations, why is it pressuring Israel to give the Palestinian terrorists control of the Gaza Strip? It appears that the Gaza pullout is the opening of Pandora box.
A statement released after the Arab-South America Summit in Brasilia, Brazil, reiterated that Israel’s departure from the Gaza Strip is not sufficient if the Jewish State desires peace with the Arab world.
PLO Chief Mahmoud Abbas, one of only seven major Arab leaders to attend the gathering, restated his stipulation that the Jews quit every inch of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip as part of a final status agreement. “We are very keen to reaching just peace with Israel on basis of full Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab and Palestinian [sic] lands it occupied in 1967,” Abbas said.
How can Bush look the Israeli families of Gaza in the face and tell them to give terrorist murderers their homes, schools, synagogues, and livelihoods? This is truly the theater of the absurd, appearing in a festival of hypocrisy.
How can Bush tell the world not to support terrorist regimes when he does so himself? How can he expect to win the war on terrorism while sending signals that the US can support a terrorist regime if it’s a “moderate” one that promises to reform. If this is so, then why did we attack Afghanistan and Iraq? It would have been a lot easier just to give them aid and negotiate – as we’re pressuring Israel to do.
Arafat is dead, but his poisonous Palestine National Charter lives on, despite claims by former president Bill Clinton that it was amended in 1998 at his initiative. PLO "foreign minister" Farouk Kaddoumi has publicly acknowledged that the charter was never changed. He told the Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab: "The Palestinian National Charter has not been amended until now. It was said that some articles are no longer effective, but they were not changed. I'm one of those who didn't agree to any changes." (The Jerusalem Post, April 22, 2004)
The charter, the “Palestinian constitution,” still calls for the destruction of Israel through unrelenting violence. It posits "armed struggle" as the only means for eliminating the “Zionist entity” and achieving Palestinian self-determination. Not surprisingly, it denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination.
The US has suffered some painful terrorist attacks, but nothing on the scale of what Israelis have had to live through over the past four years. One difference between Palestinian terrorist murderers and, say, Oklahoma City terrorist murderers is the oil-rich, Jew-hating dictators who are determined to keep the Palestinian crisis alive, so the abused masses in their countries have someone else to blame.
Another difference is that the terrorist regimes are learning to stick together. While the ayatollahs of Iran are occupying the West with their nuclear shell game, their Hizbullah proxies in Lebanon are supplying Palestinian terrorists in Gaza with the rocket technology for their ongoing terror attacks on Israelis – both inside the Gaza Strip and in Israel itself.
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