Tag: Yasir Arafat

He was a staunch supporter of the Jewish State throughout his public career, although his views on Jewish-related issues fluctuated over the years.

Carter developed a fondness for Arafat believing “they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God”

The Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO have always been in violation of international law. Israel, therefore, has always been obligated to abrogate these non-treaty agreements. A comparable argument could be made regarding PLO/PA obligations, but this would make little jurisprudential sense in light of that non-state party's antecedent incapacity to enter into any equal legal arrangement with Israel.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. From its imperiled beginnings, from the plainly one-sided inception of Oslo, the so-called "Middle East Peace Process" never gave Israel a chance. Widely animated by a distinctly lascivious Arab will to exploit the agreement in order to hasten Israel's incremental elimination, a Final Solution to the Israel Question, it remains, even today, little more than an enemy Trojan Horse. Ironically, from the standpoint of current U.S. and other national foreign policies, the "Peace Process" is now routinely characterized as a road map.

October 23 is a date the Monitor will always remember, and so should you. It was on that day in 1995 that Mayor Rudy Giuliani threw Yasir Arafat out of a UN event – and in so doing brought down upon himself the opprobrium of the Clinton administration, New York’s political elite, and not a few feckless Jewish “leaders.”

Some military and diplomatic failures should come as no surprise. One of these is surely the so-called "Peace Process" in the Middle East.

When I agreed to take over the Media Monitor column (the first with my byline ran 10 years ago this week), both it and I were relatively recent additions to the paper.

For years many of us believed the Nobel Peace Prize could not possibly be debased any worse than it was when Shimon Peres and mass murderer Yasir Arafat were honored for plunging the Middle East into an endless cycle of terrorist aggression against Israel and for putting Israel's very survival in jeopardy.

Israel and the United States still think of counter-terrorism as a narrowly military and geopolitical task. What both fail to realize is that Arab/Islamic terrorism in general, and Palestinian terrorism in particular, are driven by religious notions of sacrifice. As these notions are common to both Fatah and Hamas, the developing Bush/Rice/Olmert plan to aid the former against the latter is misconceived. This plan will fail promptly and calamitously. Othman Abu Gharbiya, Deputy Chief of the National and Political Guidance Bureau of Fatah (Al-Hayat al-Jadida, May9, 1998)

New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Erlanger is so openly pro-Palestinian in his reporting that he’s beginning to call to mind perhaps his most biased predecessor in that post – the truly execrable Deborah Sontag, whose transparently one-sided dispatches would invariably read as though she wrote them with a PLO flag draped over her word processor.

From the way world leaders reacted to the death of Yasir Arafat, you could be forgiven if you had mistakenly believed that Mother Theresa had died.

Neturei Karta is a small sect of ultra-Orthodox "Jewish" extremists, best known for marching arm in arm with Yasir Arafat and endorsing every anti-Israel terrorist and anti-Semite on the planet as part of its jihad against Israel.

On Rosh Hashana eve, at around 9:00 p.m. on September 26, a very heroic Palestinian "freedom fighter" knocked on the door of a trailer home in Negahot, where 30 religious families live quietly on two barren hilltops, and jubilantly murdered a seven-month-old girl.

As it turns out, there really is linkage between what is going on in Iraq and the Intifada. Not the kind of linkage Yasir Arafat, Tony Blair and the European Union are suggesting - that thenecessary next step after "regime change" in Iraq is setting an arbitrary timeline for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

I suppose everyone has seen lists of the ?World's Shortest Books.? Since I think we Jews
could use our own special list, I have, as a public service and in the spirit of Purim, prepared the
first annual Official Jewish List of the World's Shortest Books.

Readers will recall that a few months back the Monitor had words of uncharacteristic praise for Mike Wallace, who had just conducted an interview with Yasir Arafat that was far more skeptical than the fawning media treatment usually accorded the Palestinian leader.

The Monitor is still trying to catch up with some of the more striking examples of media bias in the coverage of Israel's recent anti-terrorist operations in the Palestinian areas. Topping this week's list is the insufferable Ted Koppel and his separate interviews with Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat, both of which aired on the May 1 edition of ABC's "Nightline."

Further observations on the generally poor performance of the American media in covering Israel's military actions in Palestinian areas:

America's pundits and editorialists have for the most part been supportive of Israel's side of the story in the capture of the weapons-laden Katrine-A. Several examples of that support are offered below (the Monitor thanks Zionist Organization of America National President Morton Klein for the compilation), but first, a splash of frigid water from Reuters correspondent Jon Immanuel.

"Peter Jennings, Palestinian sympathizer first, journalist second?" is how the conservative Media Research Center (MRC) put it in its CyberAlert of Dec. 4. "Israel," the alert went on, "was the victim of a murderous terrorist attack by a terrorist group, Hamas, which claimed credit.

In principle, we disagree with the notion of U.S. public support for a Palestinian state. The record is clear that, whatever Yasir Arafat and his crowd may claim to the Bush Administration, the Palestinians have no present intention of living as a peaceful neighbor with Israel.

The picture in Monday's edition of The New York Times of Yasir Arafat holding a gun should be an eye opener, if one were still needed, as to what Yasir Arafat is all about.