In This Edition: On Powell’s Red Herring Mission – The Real Yasser Arafat – Israeli Apartheid
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An interesting perspective about our policy, but your assumed view of punishing us - Americans - by withholding oil is
flawed. Without oil export, what other viable economy is there in the Middle East or South America? American consumption
of oil drives their economies. Oil is money for both sides.
On my personal standpoint, I would love for the Saudis and others to stop exporting oil to us Americans. It will then
force us to accept alternative fuels sources such as natural gas, electric or hybrid cars. The technology is available,
but the incentives aren't there yet. Heck, we may even be able to reduce our CO2 pollution.
MG
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The Real Yasser Arafat
It is often said that the truth is one of the first casualties of war. This is certainly the case with regard to
Palestinian Authority chairman, Yasser Arafat.
Arafat once declared Jerusalem his birthplace: “This is my city … this is where I was born.” But he was not born in
Jerusalem. Nor, as some of his comrades have claimed, was he born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza; but in Cairo,
Egypt, in 1929.
Arafat presents himself to the world as a victim of Zionism who only took up arms because he lost his home and worldly
goods when the Israeli state was created. While it is true that his parents came from Palestine, it is important to note
that they were not “refugees” or “exiles.” They had simply moved to Egypt in the mid-1920s, more than two decades before
the state of Israel came into being in 1948.
Arafat then lived in Cairo until age 28 and identified as an Egyptian. He first became involved in radical politics in
1951 while a student at Egypt’s Fuad University, working as a student organizer for the Marxist-Leninist Moslem
Brotherhood.
One of the goals of the Brotherhood was to infiltrate the Islamic fundamentalist movement, in order to spread among
Arabs the Soviet propaganda claim that Israel was an outpost of US imperialism. This would destabilise the Middle East,
aid anti-American regimes into power, and build up Soviet influence in the region.
In 1956 Arafat, along with fellow Marxist-Leninists Salah Khalef and Khalil al-Wazir, attended the Soviet-run Prague
World Festival of Youth where they formed the nucleus of the terrorist Al Fatah. This radical cell would later become
the core of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Arafat first came to public prominence in the West after the 1967 Arab-Israel war, with the help of the Soviets and
their media stooges. He was one of the organisers of a 1972 conference held at the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon that
established what international terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky refers to in his book Target America as “an alliance of
progressive movements and terrorist organizations.” Besides the PLO, this would include terrorist cells from Europe and
the Third World.
This conference institutionalized international left-wing terrorism directed from the Kremlin, intended to undermine
Israel and the West and lead to socialist victory.
The makers of the US documentary “The Russian Connection” interviewed several PLO members and were told that in the
1970s, no terrorist attack on Israel would occur without first being cleared with the Soviets. The PLO itself boasted of
Arafat’s regular weekly meetings with Soviet Ambassador Alexander Soldatov. The Soviets, according to the documentary,
supported the PLO with arms, training, planning and propaganda.
These planned attacks were not military actions, but the killing of innocent civilians. They continue to this day in the
wave of cowardly suicide bombings splashed across newspapers all over the world. The strategy is that Israel can be
defeated and destroyed by the terrorist murder of as many Jewish men, women and children as possible.
In his ongoing use of terrorism, Yasser Arafat continues to employ political methods learned from his Soviet masters,
displaying a consummate mastery of the Marxist-Leninist tactic of “dialectical materialism.”
For Marxist-Leninists, as Mao Tse-Tung puts it, “There is nothing in this world but matter in motion.” The material
world is made up of a thesis (the status quo) and an antithesis (the change agent, or revolutionary). Out of the clash
between these two opposites, a new socialist society will one day be born.
In an operational sense, the revolutionary rolls back the status quo wherever possible and gives ground wherever the
status quo holds firm. Hence, the dialectic is best understood in terms of the analogy of a hammer hammering in a nail.
The hammer smashes down onto the nail, driving it further into the wood. At that point the force is expended and no
further progress towards the goal is possible. The hammer then draws back and re-gathers its force before smashing down
again. Marxist-Leninists therefore view any retreat or concession as merely temporary and tactical.
The Palestinian Arab leadership employs the dialectical tactic of “peace” and/or violence, often offering both at the
same time, at strategically advantageous points on the road to its ultimate goal of destroying the Israeli state.
What are the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict? Within hours of the historic 1948 United Nations decision to create a
Jewish state, Israel was attacked without warning by six Arab nations promising to complete Hitler’s work. Despite
repeated assurances from Jewish leaders that all non-combatants would remain unmolested, many Palestinian Arabs then
fled to refugee camps in Lebanon and the Gaza strip, at that time part of Egypt.
They expected to return to their homes in a few days once the Arabs armies were victorious. But the unthinkable
happened. The Jews won. Ever since that time, the Palestinian Arab leaders have kept their people trapped in squalid
refugee camps as a political weapon.
This demonstrates Yasser Arafat’s mastery of another Marxist-Leninist political tactic, “The National Question.” Based
on the works of Lenin, Marxist-Leninists have for decades encouraged the independence aspirations of indigenous peoples
and minority groups to bring about the overthrow of the existing social order, and eventual socialist control.
Arafat’s Soviet instructors soon helped him to see that world opinion could be mobilised behind his cause if the
refugees became “Palestinians” rather than Arabs. By becoming “Palestinians,” the Arabs succeeded in turning the
Arab-Israeli conflict from a war of annihilation against the Jews into a struggle of dispossessed natives against
colonialist invaders.
On all the evidence, Yasser Arafat is no Palestinian nationalist. He is a professional Soviet-trained revolutionary who
has hooked into a group of people with a grievance and seamlessly shaped them into a political force in the pursuit of
his socialist nightmares.
While the Soviet Union and its Evil Empire has imploded and Moscow is no longer the epicenter for world socialist
domination, the political strategies set in motion by the Soviets decades ago continue to find expression in the
present-day Arab-Israeli conflict.
The barrier to co-existence between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, most of whom want peace and economic prosperity, is
a Palestinian Arab leadership wedded to Marxist-Leninist ideology and endorsed in its hatred, division and violence by
Western intellectuals who have bought their spin.
Reuben P. Chapple
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Israeli Apartheid
Sir,
In a recent column, Natalia von Zawidowski claimed that Israel "is the only democracy in the Middle East", and
that "it is the only country in the Middle East with civil rights for all its citizens, Jews and Arabs". This reminded
me of an article I read a number of years back on Salon.com, which described the actual conditions and rights enjoyed by Israel's Arab minority. They are forced to live in certain
areas, denied employment and economic opportunity, and forbidden to buy land. If they go to court to enforce their
supposedly equal civil rights, the rulings are ignored. It's a familiar tale, reminiscent of the pre-MLK American South,
of apartheid- era South Africa, or indeed of the very conditions inflicted upon Jews in parts of Eastern Europe in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. There's a depressing sort of irony there, I guess.
I also note that Ms von Zawidowski was careful to only claim civil rights for Israeli citizens. The Palestinians in the occupied territories of course are not citizens, and thus don't enjoy the democracy, civil
rights and free press Ms von Zawidowski is so proud to claim for Israel. They are legally fair game, subject to Israeli
law whenever the Israeli government so wishes, but without any voice in how that law is made. Even if we grant Ms von
Zawidowski's claim that those in Israel proper enjoy equal civil rights, until Israel extends those rights to its
occupied subject peoples - or simply leaves them the hell alone - then it has nothing to be proud of.
Yours,
Nomen Nescio