For some years, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin has been almost the sole faculty voice in the University of California system speaking out against harassment of Jewish students who support Israel. Here is an excerpt from a complaint she filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights in 2009:

Professors, academic departments and residential colleges at [The University of California, Santa Cruz] promote and encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish views and behavior, much of which is based on either misleading information or outright falsehoods. In addition, rhetoric heard in UCSC classrooms and at numerous events sponsored and funded by academic and administrative units on campus goes beyond legitimate criticism of Israel.  The rhetoric – which demonizes Israel, compares contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, calls  for the dismantling of the Jewish State, and holds Israel to an impossible double standard – crosses the line into anti-Semitism according to the standards employed by our own government. …

The impact of the academic and university-sponsored Israel-bashing on students has been enormous.  There are students who have felt emotionally and intellectually harassed and intimidated, to the point that they are reluctant or afraid to express a view that is not anti-Israel.

In the snake pit of academia, where unfashionable explicit Jew-hatred has morphed into enthusiastic and widespread over-the-top anti-Zionism, Rossman-Benjamin stands out — even among pro-Israel faculty members, most of whom are happy to  keep their mouths shut and their noses clean for the sake of promotions and tenure.

Now it seems that her enemies have decided to make an example of her, attributing to her the worst possible sins — the 21st century equivalent of witchcraft — racism and Islamophobia.

In the fantasy world of our universities, being accused of crimes against political correctness can get you in big trouble. And there is a degree of viciousness there that those of us who live on Earth and have real jobs can barely imagine. Rossman-Benjamin recently wrote a letter to University of California President Mark Yudoff, where she wrote in part,

… I have recently come under a vicious and unjustified personal attack from a pro-Palestinian student group on my campus, the Committee for Justice in Palestine (CJP) and members of affiliated Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) groups on other UC campuses. They claim that I made “openly racist” and “Islamophobic” comments about the SJP and Muslim Students Association (MSA) during a talk I gave at a synagogue near Boston last summer. …

Most recently, in response to a 2-minute video clip taken from a much longer video of my talk last summer, the UCSC CJP and affiliated SJP groups on other UC campuses have not simply voiced dissent but waged a virulent and harmful campaign to assassinate my character that includes: posting and promoting a defamatory on-line petition accusing me of racism and censorship and calling on you to condemn me; widely posting defamatory flyers about me on the UCSC campus; launching over a dozen videos about me on YouTube that wrongfully accuse me of being “hateful,” “dangerous,” and “Islamophobic;” instructing SJP studentsUC-wide to fill out hate/bias reports against me on their respective campuses; passing libelous resolutions condemning me for my “inflammatory, hateful, and racist assumptions” in the UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, and UC Irvine student senates; and, perhaps most egregiously, appearing to collaborate with groups sympathetic to terrorists (e.g. the International Solidarity Movement) and associated on-line publications (e.g.Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss) to more widely circulate these defamatory materials about me.

Please understand that the CJP/SJP’s targeted and well-orchestrated campaign of intimidation, harassment, and defamation has caused me to feel real concern for my safety and my ability to carry out my responsibilities as a faculty member at UCSC.

It is no longer remarkable that supporters of the most racist, misogynist, homophobic, intolerant, anti-free-speech and violent forces in the world today — for example, Hamas — take shelter behind Western concern for the complete opposite of all of those. They are expert at the game of political correctness (here is another example). At the same time, their behavior conveys veiled physical threats against their targets.

I find it interesting to recall the atmosphere on campus when I went to school, before the upheavals of the mid-1960′s. One significant difference was the attitude of the Jewish students, who weren’t cowed and apologetic, still not having been beaten into submission to the idea that the Jewish state was an evil, apartheid, Nazi-like oppressor of ‘indigenous’ brown Palestinians. How this happened is a long story, but there certainly is no hope for reversing it if the few faculty members who can serve as models and mentors for Jewish students are intimidated or even driven out.

Check out Rossman-Benjamin’s request for letters of support here.

Visit Fresno Zionism. Previous posts about Tammi Rossman-Benjamin are here and here.

There’s a sadly familiar feel to this story. It concerns a man about whom we have written here numerous times, and here’s how it is headed:

Top PA official: Israel ‘is our main enemy, resistance is still our agenda’ | Arab states should put their money where their mouth is to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem, says Jibril Rajoub, a signatory to the Geneva Initiative who had pledged he was Israel’s peace ‘partner’ [Times of Israel].

Click here for the JewishPress.com report and PMW video of Rajoub’s statements.

Jibril Rajoub, in his words, deeds, history and public profile, personally embodies much of what makes the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis so intractable.

Start with this. He is a perennial participant for the Palestinian Arab side in the negotiations for peace that have been part of the political landscape here for two decades. An ad campaign on behalf of the Geneva Initiative included him as one of its central media figures back in August 2010. Click below to view one of the ads – the Hebrew dialogue is translated via English subtitles:

Like the other high-profile Arabs who appeared in that very expensive media campaign, the words “I am your partner” are placed in his mouth and the mouths of other Arab personalities over and again. “There is a consensus in the Arab world”, Rajoub recites, “to recognize the existence of Israel in return for an end to occupation”.

The purpose of the Geneva Initiative campaign – and keep this in mind as we take a closer look at this exceptionally unlovely individual – was expressed in the following terms by the campaign’s spokesperson, Gadi Baltiansky:

The perception in the Israeli public is that there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side… We all want peace, but don’t believe there is anyone to talk to. We are trying to change this perception, to explain that there is a partner, and that the problem is actually with us. ["Shalom, this is Jibril" on Geneva Initiative website]

In reality, Rajoub rarely lets other people put words in his mouth. He actually appears much more comfortable spinning his own words and firing them off on cue, generally in the form of threats. Those threats have come with appreciable power accumulated via a series of publicly-funded roles he has filled over the years. He’s a man with the rare ability to be in the right place at the right time in order to exercise serious power.

Today Rajoub is one of twenty members of the Central Committee of Fatah, the highest decision-making organ of the Fatah political party, and the innermost circle of the Mahmoud Abbas clique. He stands at the head of both the Palestinian Football Federation and the Palestine Olympic Committee.

But his past is much less sporty. He was the head of the Preventive Security Force until 2002, when Arafat appointed him national security advisor. As advisor, he knew where to place his loyalties: his tenure was marked by the use of force in harassing and quashing Arafat’s political opponents by whatever it took, including resort to torture [Source: BBC]. When Hamas had to be taught lessons for being too religiously fundamentalist, Rajoub got the job of managing a crackdown and did it well enough [Wikipedia].

And before all of that, he was an ordinary terrorist who was sentenced to life in prison. Foreshadowing a process that has happened again and again, Israel released him and 1,150 other Arab prisoners in 1985 in order to win back the freedom of three Israeli hostages held one of the alphabet-soup factions of the Palestinian Arab terrorism industry. He was sent back to prison several more times for several more rounds of terrorism. He released exactly the same number of times, acquiring a smooth grasp of Hebrew and of Israeli culture along the way.

Now to Jibril Rajoub, 2013 edition. This prince of peace, this ambassador of the power of sport to build bridges across troubled waters, this recovered thug and reformed torturer, was interviewed on Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen television channel on April 30, 2013:

Resistance to Israel remains on our agenda… I mean resistance in all of its forms. At this stage, we believe that popular resistance – with all that it entails – is effective and costly to the [Israeli] side…” [Al-Mayadeen]

The Arabic-to-English media watchdog, Palestinian Media Watch, which translated and published [here] the contents of the Lebanese TV program for the benefit of people who think Rajoub is (or ever was) a peace partner, provides some useful interpretation. In saying “resistance in all of its forms”, Rajoub simply means violence against Israel. Israel is “the main enemy” of Arabs and Muslims. So why negotiate? Because, said Rajoub, the Palestinians still lack military strength:

“We as yet don’t have a nuke, but I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning.”

Does this mean he has stopped being a partner for peace? No. Rajoub is a man of principle, one who says what needs to be said (depending of course on who is listening in). And one of the principles that has served him well throughout a successful career in public life is the expedient value of violence. And really, all he’s doing is sticking to his guns.

But on the other hand, what are the salaried employees of the very well-funded Geneva Initiative (mostly by the governments of France, Belgium and Switzerland), those strategists who served up Rajoub as living proof that there actually is a partner for peace with beleagured Israel, saying now? Is “oops – sorry” even in their lexicon? Or is there a more subtle, peace-friendly way to interpret “If we had a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning“?

Visit This Ongoing War.

Contrary to the claims made by Palestinian leaders, various NGOs, and certain members of the international community, international law fully recognizes the Jewish people’s claim to Jerusalem, where they have historical roots dating back over 3,000 years and have been the largest ethnic group in the city since 1820.

Ernst Frankenstein, a British authority on international law said, for example, that the Jewish people have a right to their ancestral homeland and ancient capital city in Jerusalem based on the fact that the Jewish people never relinquished their historic claims to the area.

Furthermore, Frankenstein claimed that Roman, Byzantine, and other successors lacked a “continuous and undisturbed presence” in Israel that would dispossess the Jewish claim to the land. In fact, the Ottoman Turks, who owned the Land of Israel prior to WWI and the British Mandate, renounced their claim to all of the land of Israel in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. When the Balfour Declaration was drafted there was no Palestinian “nation.” In 1919, Palestine was a sparsely populated land where Lord Balfour claimed that only 700,000 Arabs lived, of whom a large number migrated within recent history.

In contrast, there were far more Jews in the world in need of a homeland in 1919 than there were Arab residents in Israel and there existed a significant Jewish minority that continued to live in Israel. As the Blackstone Memorial, signed by Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Melville Fuller, proclaimed in 1891, Israel, which included Jerusalem, is the “inalienable possession” of the Jewish people “from where they were expelled by force.”

The Balfour Declaration was drafted with the goal of establishing a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel. The “civil and religious” rights of the Arabs were to be respected, yet politically, the country was supposed to belong to the Jews. The Balfour Declaration was ingrained into international law at the San Remo Conference. Through San Remo, “The Jewish people have been given the right to establish a home, based on the recognition of their historical connection and the grounds for reconstituting this national home,” Jacques Gauthier, an expert on international law, had explained.

Thus, the Palestine Mandate, which included a united Jerusalem was established with the goal of guiding “towards independence and self-governance those races, peoples or communities who for various reasons are not yet able to stand alone” – in this case the Jewish people – according to J. Stoyanovsky writing in The Mandate for Palestine. Around the same period of time, the international community discussed setting up mandates to assist other nations in similar situations, such as the Armenians, although in their case it wasn’t implemented.

Contrary to Palestinian claims, none of the resolutions passed since the San Remo Conference renounce the Jewish claim to a united Jerusalem. U.N. Resolution 181, although it called for Jerusalem to be an international city, never held any force under international law and it was rejected by the Arab side. Furthermore, the resolution states that a referendum was to be held after 10 years to determine changes to the city’s status; since Jerusalem had a Jewish majority, it was expected that a united Jerusalem was to become a part of Israel after 10 years. Furthermore, U.N. Security Resolution 242, of which all peace negotiations are based on, deliberately makes no mention of Jerusalem and does not call upon Israel to withdraw from all of the territories it captured in 1967. And finally, when Jordan controlled east Jerusalem, Jordan’s annexation of the area was never recognized by the international community; and since that date, Jordan has relinquished all of her claims to Jerusalem.

Thus, Israel has the strongest claim to Jerusalem according to international law.

Visit United with Israel.

Originally published at the Gatestone Institute.

The Arab League foreign ministers who met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington last week were convinced that they had a mandate from the Palestinians to talk about possible land swaps between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

Ahead of their departure to the U.S., the ministers had met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Doha, Qatar, and discussed with him the land swap idea.

At the meeting, the Arab League decided to dispatch a high-level delegation to Washington to brief the U.S. Administration on the Arab position regarding the resumption of peace talks with Israel. Headed by Qatar’s Hamad bin Jasim al-Thani, the delegation which met with Kerry also consisted of Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Malki.

Yet the Palestinians seemed to be surprised, following the meeting with Kerry, to hear the Qatari representative talk about possible land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority’s initial response was to issue a statement in English — not Arabic — voicing support for the land trade proposal. The statement said that this was an old idea that had been discussed in the past between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.

But following strong condemnations from many Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority leadership took a step backwards.

First, the Palestinian Authority said that it was only prepared to discuss “minor” adjustments to the border between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

Later, as the denunciations grew, the Palestinian Authority took yet another step backwards, saying it was opposed to making any “down payments” to Israel before the peace talks resumed.

In other words, the Palestinian Authority is not prepared to talk about any territorial concessions to Israel before the Israeli government accepts the pre-1967 lines as the basis for a two-state solution.

Palestinian reactions to the land swap proposal seem to have angered Qatar and other Arab countries.

With the exception of a few Palestinian Authority officials, all Palestinian factions have come out strongly against the proposal. The anger has been directed especially against Qatar.

“Who gave the Qatari leaders the right to offer concessions to Israel on behalf of the Palestinians?” was the main charge leveled against the rulers in Doha.

Other Palestinians, including top members of Abbas’s Fatah faction, have also lashed out at the Arab ministers for “offering free concessions” to Israel on behalf of the Palestinians.

Although the Palestinian Authority leadership had in the past hinted that it would be willing to accept the land swap idea, it is now obvious that it would never be able to win the Palestinians’ support for such a proposal.

As leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian groups emphasized over the past few days, no Palestinian leader has a mandate to make any concessions to Israel.

Even worse, the Arab League proposal is being viewed by many Arabs and Palestinians as part of an “American-Zionist conspiracy” to force the Palestinians to accept Israeli “dictates.”

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank [Judea and Samaria -ed.] seem to have absorbed the message and are now back to demanding a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, which were never official borders.

For Kerry, who has taken it upon himself to try to resume the peace process, this is all bad news.

It is bad news that the Palestinian Authority still does not have the courage to tell the Palestinians that without some form of compromise there will never be real peace with Israel.

It is bad news because it has once again become clear that the Arab countries, including the wealthiest and most influential, have no influence on the Palestinians.

Judging from their reactions to the land swap idea, many Palestinians continue to despise the Arab regimes, accusing them of serving as pawns in the hands of the U.S. and Israel.

The U.S. Administration needs to understand that the Arab League is an incompetent and ineffectual body that has long been ridiculed by most Arabs. This is a body that has never played an instrumental role in solving Arab crises such as the Lebanese Civil War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait or the ongoing bloodshed in Syria.

It now remains to be seen whether Kerry and President Barack Obama will ever notice that they are betting on the wrong horses. Neither the Arab League nor the Palestinian Authority leadership has a mandate to offer any concessions to Israel or recognize its right to exist.

Today is Yom Yerushalayim – the 46th we have celebrated since the reunification of Jerusalem. From 1948 – 1967, Jews were barred from the Old City, from the Kotel and the Temple Mount – that was how the Jordanians and the local Arab population dealt with the issue of religious freedom – there was none. The U.N. did not condemn them; the world was silent while we could not visit our holy places.

In 1967, Israel was facing war with Syria and Egypt – the rhetoric and belligerent movement of their troops made their intention clear. Even as we launched a preemptive attack (though Egypt’s closing of the Straights of Tiran was clearly an act of war and intent), we sent a message to Jordan – stay out of this war. We don’t want to fight you….we will not attack.

Jordan sent back a clear message – we will fight with our brothers, and they attacked. Like the Egyptians and the Syrians, the Jordanians fell in days and what was known as the West Bank of the Jordan river, was conquered. Jews were allowed to their holy sites but we did not do what the Arabs had done. Though we found our holy places desecrated, we protected theirs. Centuries old Jewish grave stones were turned into bathrooms, smashed and crumbled, we rebuilt them.

We reunited Jerusalem – while allowing the Arabs access – virtually unrestricted – to all their holy places (there are times it is restricted to men over 40, for example – but this is usually when there is a clear danger of violence (or just after there was violence from there). We have never taken control and made it ours – as they did.

It was our Holy Temple – our Temple Mount – on which they built, centuries later, their mosques. If anyone is restricted today – it is Jews, who are warned they will not be allowed to visit the Temple Mount if they dare attempt to pray…can you imagine? Pray. We are not allowed to move our lips in a whispered prayer.

But for today, I will think of the greater celebration. The Temple Mount is not free, but the rest of Jerusalem is – free, free these last 46 years – for all.

Visit A Soldier’s Mother.

Pro-Palestinian political leaders, media outlets, and activists the world over continuously assert that the Palestinians should be granted a right of return according to international law. However, NONE of these claims hold water if one actually examines international law. For example, the Palestinians rely heavily upon the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “no one should be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his country.” Yet, can one consider Palestinians born in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and other Arab countries to be Israeli citizens and thus deprived of the right to enter their country?

Most of the Palestinians living across the Arab world were never born in Israel and have never lived in Israel. Secondly, even the minority who did live in Israel did so under the British Mandate, not under Israeli rule. They fled before they had a chance to receive citizenship rights and their Israeli blue ID cards, because their leadership was opposed to them coexisting with the Jewish people. Such peoples are about as Israeli as Turks who lived in Ottoman-controlled Greece yet left are Greek. So why should the Palestinians be any different? Based on international precedents, Palestinians are entitled to equal rights within their present countries, yet not Israeli citizenship.

Another document that pro-Palestine activists rely on when stating that there should be a Palestinian right of return is UN resolution 194, which states, “The General Assembly… resolves that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

UN General Assembly resolutions, however are never legally binding. Instead, they can be viewed as mere suggestions, which Israel can either listen to or ignore. But even if this resolution was legally binding, it states “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors.” This means that any Palestinian who doesn’t want to live at peace with their neighbors shouldn’t be given a right of return, thus implying that the decades of terrorism orchestrated by the Palestinian leadership and supported by the majority of the Palestinian population means that the Palestinians lost their “right of return.”

Furthermore, the resolution states at the “earliest practicable date.” This means that so long as this proposal cannot be practically implemented, it doesn’t need to happen yet. Because there have been decades of animosity and hatred between Israelis and Palestinians and since the cultural gap between Israelis and Palestinians is gigantic, the idea of a Palestinian right of return seems impractical and it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Given what has happened in Bosnia since the signing of the Dayton Agreements, where ethnic animosity and violence has prevented most refugees from returning to their homes despite the existence of such a right, it seems that a right of return isn’t a good solution for ethnic conflicts. Most Holocaust survivors didn’t want a right of return to Europe, preferring to be resettled in a new country that was free of the traumas that they experienced. Jewish refugees from Arab countries also generally have no desire to return to Arab states, for similar reasons. Given this, is it really in the Palestinians best interest to come to a foreign country whom they have been engaged with in a violent conflict for decades? While the Palestinian refugee crisis needs to be solved, it should be solved in the Arab world, not in Israel.

Visit United with Israel.

A report from The Tower replicates a tweet, including a photo, from the Twitter account of the English-speaking wing of the Hamas terrorist organization. Published Thursday, it shows children, presumably photographed somewhere inside darkest Hamas-controlled Gaza, role-playing a funeral. The proud message: children in the society we are creating here love death; they even incorporate funerals of children into their play.

Powerful forces at work inside Palestinian Arab society, largely ignored by observers in the West, have created a culture that grotesquely encourages children to embrace death as a way of advancing the political intrigues of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. In throwing this in the faces of observers, they appear to be offering an argument that demonstrates their determination and commitment. We wrote about this topic last week.

It’s certainly a mistake to think that it’s only the Islamist ultra-extremists of Hamas that are busy promoting self-destruction among the children of Palestinian Arab society. There is abundant evidence on-line testifying to how the ‘moderate’ Palestinian Authority regime of Mahmoud Abbas has done the same for years. (See for instance, out post here). It’s further proof of how Abbas and his circle of despots are fully engaged in creating the conditions by which a young generation will grow to become, in their words, fertilizer and dirt. That, incredibly, is the vision they and Hamas have marketed with distinction to their people. Child abuse more shocking and large-scale than this is hard to imagine.

The unabashed adoption of death-cult values is one of the factors behind the appalling statistics buried inside this past week’s monumental Pew Research Center global survey of Muslims. Based on 38,000 face-to-face interviews in 80-plus languages with Muslims across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, it provides some startling insights.

Globally, most Moslims reject suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians. But the country-by-country numbers reveal sizable minority views. Around 10% of U.S. Muslims now believe suicide bombing or violence against civilians in the name of Islam are “often justified”; a further 7% say it is “sometimes justified to defend Islam” [source]. Fifteen percent of Jordanians and of Turks see such attacks against civilians as a legitimate means of “defending Islam against its enemies.” This violent minority accounts for 26% of people in Bangladesh and 29% in Egypt.

Top of the list as the most enthusiastic proponents of killing those whom they see as enemies of their religion: Palestinian Arabs, 40% of whom are pro-suicide bombing. Fleshing the picture out a little, eighty nine percent of Palestinian Muslims favor the idea that women must always “obey” their husband, and want the imposition of Sharia law in their society.

It’s hard to argue that the strategy of the P.A. and the Hamas is not working.

Many civilized people looking on with rising horror from the outside, are asking themselves how much longer the world can tolerate the participation of child-abuse-friendly political figures in respectable multilateral discussions.

Visit This Ongoing War.

Originally published at Rubin Reports.

“Everything reactionary is the same; if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.” –Mao Zedong, The Little Red Book

It is amazing how many massive revelations pass people by completely. Consider this new gleaning from the British Archives from early 1948, which sheds much light on current events.

British officials in the Palestine Mandate were reporting as follows:

The [Palestine] Arabs have suffered a series of overwhelming defeats….”Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands. It is now obvious that the only hope of regaining their position lies in the regular armies of the Arab states.

This is confirmation from hostile British official sources of what Israel and its supporters have been saying for 60 years: that the origin of the Palestinian Arab refugee problem was due to the actions of the Palestinian Arabs themselves: first, their leaders decision to reject the partition into Arab and Jewish states, then their decision to go to war, and then their disorganization and poor leadership. The British Foreign Office even uses the word, “cowardice.”

Some things have changed since then; many have not. Today, as in 1948, the Zionist side is more eager for the existences of an independent Palestinian state living in peace inside permanent borders than is the Palestinian Arab leadership.

That statement might strike misinformed people as ludicrous, but it is nonetheless true, as they should have known since Yasir Arafat’s destruction of the Camp David summit meeting and rejection of the Clinton peace initiative of 2000. And that only followed on the earlier Palestinian rejectionism of the original Camp David summit in 1977, which offered a pathway to statehood, or various other initiatives.

And this pattern of behavior is being reinforced daily. Consider a recent incident. On April 30, an Israeli civilian father of five was stabbed to death by a Palestinian at the Tapuach Junction on the West Bank [Judea and Samaria -ed.]. The killer was a prisoner who had just completed his sentence and been released by Israel, just as Secretary of State John Kerry wants Israel to release hundreds of other prisoners before their sentences are done.

The killer is a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Note the following details:

For many years Fatah, the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), denied the link with the brigade. Legal cases were held in the United States over the murder of Americans by the al-Aqsa Brigade in which P.A. lawyers strenuously denied any connection. But in 2009, the Fatah Congress, that organization’s highest authority, admitted that the al-Aqsa Brigades were part of Fatah, a fact one might have known earlier since that’s what it said on the Brigades web-site.

Fatah proudly took responsibility for earlier terrorist attacks by the group.

In the case of the April 30 murder, the official al-Aqsa Brigades statement was very interesting, saying it had “received a green light to carry out military actions against Israeli targets in response to the deaths of prisoners Arafat Jaradat and Maysara Abu Hamdia in an Israeli prison.”

A green light from whom? Since the Brigades did not receive a green light from itself, this is an open admission that they were ordered to murder civilians by the Fatah leadership, in other words by those ruling the P.A., a Western-financed and supported entity.

The two Palestinian prisoners who had died had been examined at autopsies conducted in the presence of P.A. officials. Thus, the P.A. knew that these two men died of natural causes. It was thus lying to its own people to incite them into supporting murders of Israeli civilians that the P.A. was ordering.

In this case, however, a junior member of the Fatah Central Committee named Jamal Muheisen, while defending the attack, tried to distance his organization from responsibility:

The Za’atra action was a natural response to attacks by the occupation and settlers [on Palestinians], but it does not express the general policy of the Palestinian Authority and of Fatah, who have espoused [the option of] popular resistance to the occupation.

But it was Muheisen and not the killer or the al-Aqsa Brigades that was criticized universally by Fatah. Nobody came to Muheisen’s defense. On the contrary, the killer was praised as a hero who restored Fatah’s pride. No doubt, a street, a square, or something else will be named in his honor in future.