Israeli radio reports today that senior Palestinian cabinet minister Mohammed Dahlan has reportedly demanded that as part of a future cease-fire accord, Israel free Marwan Barghouti, currently on trial for murder, and pardon a number of senior Palestinian officials, including Tawfik Tarawi and Rashid Abu Shbak, currently on Israel’s lists of wanted fugitives.
Maybe I am missing something, but the new palestinian cabinet is supposed to FIGHT terror, not support it. But then again, look at the credentials of their “prime minister”, Abu Mazen, taken from The Media Line:
“..He then continued to Moscow where he studied for his doctorate.
This doctorate, written in 1982 was entitled “The Truth about the Secret Nazi-Zionist Relations.” In this essay he asserted, while quoting Holocaust deniers, that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi Party, not only in order to confiscate the Jews’ belongings, but also to annihilate them. Moreover, Abu Mazen claimed in the essay that the Jews inflated the number of victims in the Holocaust when stating there were six million, when in fact there were no more than one million. This, claims Abu Mazen, was done in order to win international legitimacy to build the State of Israel.”
Perhaps even more disturbing than this is his alleged role in the Munich olympics massacre.
Some of you may ask “But should this man be condemned for actions/words from a long time ago?”
“On March 3rd [this year], Abu Mazen was interviewed by another London based newspaper, A-Sharq Al-Awsat. When asked of his statement regarding putting a stop to the armed struggle, he made a comment that caused anger in the Israeli media. “We didn’t say we would stop the armed struggle. We said that the militarization of the Intifada should stop.” He explained, “The armed struggle needs conditions and options which we don’t have in Palestine. We can’t compare the events in Palestine to Lebanon or Algeria. Therefore, military action under these conditions is not serious. This is why we said that there is no option but to stop it for a year [this was the subject of discussions in January at the Palestinian faction talks in Cairo] and it won’t be perceived as caving in on our side. The conditions are still insufficient.”
When pressed, Abu Mazen added, “It is our right to protest. The intifada must continue and it is the right of the Palestinian people to stage an uprising and use every means possible to defend its existence.”
Needless to say, I am somewhat apprehensive about trusting these guys to fight terror.
