From Knight Ridder: Israel called 'Zionist enemy'.
Palestinian interim leader Mahmoud Abbas yesterday called Israel the "Zionist enemy" after an Israeli tank killed seven Palestinians, four of them young brothers, in a northern Gaza strawberry field.The violence and Abbas' increasingly harsh words raised questions on both sides about whether the presidential election on Sunday, which Abbas is widely expected to win, will lead to a resumption of peace talks. Abbas' image has been as a moderate peacemaker.
As Charles Johnson has repeatedly noted, Abbas is not a "moderate"; he is a holocaust denier and advocate of Palestinian terrorism. The list of atrocities by Palestinian terrorists is long, but we learn today that they have increased the use of women and children in terrorist attacks.
There was a substantial increase in the use of Palestinian women and children to carry out terror attacks in 2004, the Israel Security Agency said on Wednesday. And while suicide bombings were down, mortar and rocket attacks rose. The number of people killed in terror attacks dropped 45 percent, but a report issued by Israel's intelligence service said that's not for lack of motivation on the terrorists' part. ... The ISA credited the controversial security fence as a key tool in thwarting terror attacks.
If Abbas is elected president of the Palestinian territories this Sunday, it will be a continuation of Yasser Arafat's horrible legacy of war against the free state of Israel.
UPDATE -- January 7: A must-read op-ed from Charles Krauthammer: Time to Vote. (Via LGF)
Has no one learned anything?Posted by Forkum at January 6, 2005 10:01 PMOn Sept. 13, 1993, I was on the White House lawn watching the signing of the Oslo accords. I also watched the intellectual collapse of the entire Middle East intelligentsia -- journalists, politicians, "experts'' -- as they swooned at the famous handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin and refused, that day and for years to come, to recognize what was obvious: that Arafat was embarking not on peace but on the next stage of his perpetual war against Israel, this one to be launched far more advantageously from a base of Palestinian territory that Israel had just suicidally granted him.
Why was this so obvious? Because Arafat said so -- that very night (in an Arabic broadcast to his own people on Jordanian television) and many times afterward. The Middle East experts refused to believe it. They did not want to hear it. Then came the intifada. Thousands of dead later, they now believe it. The more honest ones among them even admit they were wrong.
Now Arafat is dead, Mahmoud Abbas is poised to succeed him, and the world is swooning again. Abbas, we are told, is the great hope, the moderate, the opponent of violence, the man who has said the intifada was counterproductive.
The peacemaker cometh. Once again, euphoria is in the air. Once again, no one wants to listen to what is being said.
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