Another Free Pass to The Palestinians

By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 23, 2005

The Palestinian Authority has yet to comply with even one agreement they have signed since the Oslo Accord. They have violated the Oslo agreement Oslo II, and the Road Map. Each agreement required the PA to disarm its terrorists and to empower its â€œsecurity forces” to protect the safety of Israelis as well as Palestinian Arabs.

On September 13, 1993, after Arafat signed a Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn, he appeared on Jordanian TV to explain that the agreement was simply part of the PLO’s staged plan for Israel’s destruction. “Since we cannot defeat Israel in war,” he said in that broadcast, â€œwe do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.”

Indeed, from 1993 through September 2000, while the Oslo negotiations were still ongoing, the Palestinians killed 256 Israeli civilians and soldiers and wounded thousands more. Since then, 1,086 more people have been killed, and nearly 6,5000 were wounded in more than 26,000 Palestinian terror attacks.

Not to break with tradition, the PA announced plans to breach the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing, implementation of which was scheduled for November 25. The agreement requires, among other things, that â€œa liaison office, led by the 3rd party, will receive real-time video and data feed of the activities at Rafah and will meet regularly to review implementation of this agreement, resolve any disputes arising from this agreement, and perform other tasks specified in this agreement.”

But PA Director of Borders and Crossings, Salim Abu Safiyyeh declared on November 17, â€œthat there won’t be any live video streams to the Israeli side via the surveillance cameras installed in Rafah terminal,” according to a press release posted by the Palestinian National Authority State Information Service. He went on to elaborate that “even the joint control room will not receive these live feeds, and will be only for the presence of the third party that will monitor the borders.”

The Rafah Crossing agreement was initiated by the European Union, which is also, the 3^rd party assigned to observe its fulfillment. The PA, encouraged by the EUâ€™s lack of respect for international law as was demonstrated by its refusal to designate Hizballah as a terrorist organization, declared that it will not honor the agreement.

In October, EU officials met with Hizballah representatives in Lebanon, arguing that such meetings would help to moderate the organization. Todayâ€™s attacks on Israel by the Hizballah, attest to the complete failure of such diplomacy.

The EUâ€™s willful blindness concerning terrorism against Israel is not limited to Hizballah. The EU was the major funding source for the PAâ€™s security services during the Intifada. Not even Palestinian records documenting that EU funds were diverted to pay for terror attacks against Israel, committed by PA security forces (Tanzim, Force 17, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade), convinced the EU to stop its funding.

Considering the past, if the US is serious about achieving peace in Israel, it should not leave this task to the EU, but demand that the PA comply with the Rafah agreement as well as all the other agreements it failed to keep.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financedâ€”and How to Stop It, is director of American Center for Democracy and member of the Committee on the Present Danger and Alyssa A. Lappen is a freelance journalist who frequently contributes to FrontPageMagazine and other online journals.

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For a Feminist Foreign Policy

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 22, 2005

Review: Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, by Phyllis Chesler, Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pp., $24.95

It is a great tragedy in America that whenever someone calls for balance and fairness in political discussions, the media and the academy, they are often denounced as fanatical, hateful, right-wing zealots. They are accused of McCarthyism. Their work is refused publication in many mainstream outlets. They are blacklisted and smeared.

Unfortunately, that has been the experience of noted feminist and former-leftist Phyllis Chesler. Aside from being closed out of (among others) The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which once published her work, she was also recently purged from a women’s email list-serve for daring to challenge a consensus view among its members–that Palestinian Arabs are the victim of Jewish aggression rather than the other way around. (Never mind the fact that a debate over Israel ought to have little if any place in an honest discussion of either U.S. or global women’s rights). In 2003, she had also dared to write The New Anti-Semitism.

Worse, Chesler in 2003 also took Swedish film producer Lukas Moodysson to task for refusing to show “Lilya 4-ever,”–on sexual slavery–in Israel. And she exposed the issue in FrontPageMagazine. This, according to the list members, amounted to a full-scale abandonment of reason, a defection to the enemy, and required that she be silenced. The same attitude prevailed when Chesler wrote in FrontPage on gender cleansing in Sudan. What mattered most to the list was not what she wrote, but where. After President Bush was reelected in 2004, Chesler was shut out of the women’s email group all together, effectively at the behest of Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. Continue reading “For a Feminist Foreign Policy” →

The Middle East Studies Association in 2005

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2005

The Middle East is changing faster than anyone could have imagined, Iraqis have voted for a constitution, popular protests have help push Syria out of Lebanon, and elections in Egypt have exposed just how fragile the Mubarak regime is. But academic specialists on that region remain stuck in the past.

Their obsolete and petty obsessions will be on full display when the Middle East Studies Association holds its annual meeting from November 19 to 22 at the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington D.C. The coronation of Juan Cole as MESA’s new president will, for example, make the organization’s public face a leading proponent of the theory that the Zionist-Likud cabal controls American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

Indeed, MESA’s members display a disproportionate interest in Israel. Nearly 9 percent of the program-14 sessions-is devoted to something called “Israel/Palestine” and Israel, as usual, is routinely equated with South Africa. Thus, a panel titled “Palestine and South Africa: A Fruitful or Futile Comparison” will feature Haifa University’s notorious Ilan Pappe as the key discussant. A double session on “Middle Eastern Refugees: Global and Local Perspectives” will focus on Palestinian refugees. Jewish refugees from Arab countries number nearly 1 million but they seem not to count when MESA is deliberating. Continue reading “The Middle East Studies Association in 2005” →

Creating Hamastan

By RACHEL EHRENFELD AND ALYSSA A. LAPPEN
Jerusalem Post | Nov. 1, 2005 | Updated Nov. 2, 2005 11:55

President George Bush could give his plan for winning the war against Islamic radicalism a major boost if he publicly demanded from the Palestinian Authority that it prohibit Hamas’s participation in the upcoming Palestinian election. But judging from how Hamas is dealt with by the US administration, you would not know that it sits at the heart of the Islamo-Fascist movement, which Bush has been repeatedly condemning for the past three weeks.

In his recent press conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Bush refrained from clearly objecting to Hamas participation in the Palestinian Authority election next January. This, despite the fact that Hamas’s ideology and goals fit squarely with those the president described as Islamo-Fascist: “Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies… they seek to end dissent in every form, to control every aspect of life, and to rule the soul itself, while promising a future of justice and holiness, the terrorists are preparing a future oppression and misery.”

Compare Hamas statements and its charter to those of al-Qaida, Hizbullah and other Islamist organizations. All strive to establish a caliphate encircling the globe. Al-Qaida says: “We will turn the White House and the British parliament into mosques,” as documented by Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, director of Orient Research Group in Toronto.

Similarly, Qatar-based sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi says “Islam will take over Europe by Dawa.” The spiritual leader of Hamas, the late Ahmad Yassin said: “The 21st century is the century of Islam,” and his successor Mahmoud Zahar says, “Israel will disappear and after it the US.”

Bush also said after his meeting with Abbas, “the way forward is confronting the threat armed gangs present to the creation of democratic Palestine.” Indeed, the Palestinian Authority has promised, yet again, to disarm Fatah and the other terrorist groups under its umbrella.

Meanwhile, the PA, with US assistance, is planning to retrain all terrorists and incorporate them into the its security forces. Adding Hamas to this fray would guarantee that terrorism remains part of the Palestinian agenda.

PA negotiator Saeb Erekat responds that allowing Hamas to participate in the election would be the terror group’s first step toward giving up its weapons. However, even Erekat knows this is wishful thinking. Unlike the Irish Republican Army, which at last laid downs it arms after being part of the political process for decades, Hamas does not wish to lay down its arms. It wants to use the democratic process to gain power, which would ultimately eradicate democracy.

The major difference between the IRA and Hamas is that the IRA’s goals were limited to affecting British policy in Ireland. Their intention was never to spread Catholicism around the globe. Hamas, in its charter, says “We must spread the spirit of Jihad among the [Islamic] Umma, clash with the enemies and join the ranks of the Jihad fighters.”

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar has laid out the goal of an Islamist Palestinian state “based on the principles of the Sharia and… part of the Arab Islamist Umma.” In the Sharia-led Palestine, mixed dancing will be prohibited, Zahar states: “If a man is holding the hand of a woman and dances with her in front of people, is this a way to serve the national interest?” Zahar defines homosexuals and lesbians as “a minority of moral and mental deviants” who will have no rights.

IN SHORT, as Zahar told Newsweek in August, Palestine “should be Hamastan.”

Despite such candor, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan argues that Israel should allow Hamas to participate in the election and that the Palestinian Authority relax its pressure on the terrorist group to disarm. This follows Annan’s well-established pattern of legitimizing Hamas which, despite being listed on the US and EU terrorist lists, is still missing from that of the UN. At least 90 percent of the vote in the 2003 UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) workers union election was won by Hamas, according to Hamas’s London magazine Filastin Al-Muslima.

Supporters of Hamas would have us repeat the errors of the Oslo era. In 1993, Israel gave the opportunity to one of the world’s most notorious terrorists to lead the newly created Palestinian Authority. In 1996, two years after receiving the Nobel peace prize, Arafat was elected president.

But legitimizing Arafat did little to change his terrorist agenda. His intifadas cost the lives of thousands of innocent Israelis and Palestinians, while destroying the PA economy.

It should go without saying that an Islamist Palestinian state spells the end of any process of negotiations with Israel. As Zahar puts it, “It is in our national interest to stop the cooperation with Israel in any field.”

According to Zahar, Hamas will use all the weapons at its disposal to extend Palestine across all of Israel. This goal is not unlike Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that Israel should be “wiped off the face of the earth.” Allowing Hamas to participate in the coming PA election contradicts Bush’s promise to keep “an untiring vigil against the enemies of rising democracies.”

Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It, is director of the American Center for Democracy. Alyssa Lappen is a freelance journalist.