[This is a promise you can’t take to your bank.]
“We reaffirmed to Secretary Rice our rejection of any temporary or transitional solutions, including a state with temporary borders, because we don’t see it as a realistic option,” Abbas told a joint news conference with Rice.
Two days after Mahmoud Abbas told Arabs to “raise your rifles” against Israel, Condoleezza Rice says the U.S. will prevent a repeat of previous attacks on Israel with arms supplied to PA forces.
“Shooting at your brother is forbidden,” PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told a rally in Ramallah. “Raising rifles against the occupation is our legitimate right.” He also railed against “the sons of Israel…who are corrupting humanity on earth.”
The United States has been supplying the Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman’s personal militia with weapons to give him a military edge over the rival Hamas militia. Terrorists have vowed that the weapons will be used against Israel, as they were in the 1990s when the Israeli government, headed by then-Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, gave the PA security forces thousands of rifles.
The Jewish State has since allowed other nations to send weapons to the PA, and Israeli intelligence officials have documented their use in attacks against Israel.
But U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, talking to reporters en route to Israel, said this time it will be different.
“This is a train-and-equip program that is going to move over time, so it is not as if you simply arm the Palestinians on Day One and then have no input or control over what happens from then on,” she said. “I think as a result you can maintain some control on what is being done.”
Referring to the weapons supplied during the Oslo talks and used against Israel, she explained, “It was envisioned that the Palestinian Authority would have security forces. The problem is those security forces broke [up] into essentially personal militias under Arafat. They broke into too many that were often warring with each other.”
Secretary Rice added that American military envoys have created “a plan for security forces that can be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And this plan is not just to equip them and train them, [but] it is also to professionalize them, to unify them, to put them under a single command.
“We continue to work on how to help Abu Mazen [Abbas] and how to help the Palestinian people to create governing structures and security forces that can actually secure the Palestinian people.”
However, Fatah Force 17 security officer Abu Yousef told WorldNetDaily that other terrorist groups will use the weapons. He added that many of the members of Abbas’ personal militia also are members of other terrorist organizations, including Hamas.
“Our organizations are infiltrated [by Hamas]. In the last elections campaign, our Fatah party was astonished at how many of our security members voted for Hamas. We thought our own forces would vote 95 percent vote for us, but it was 70 percent for Fatah and 30 percent for Hamas,” Abu Yousef said.
Hamas spokesman Abu Oubaida told WorldNetDaily last week that his terror group will obtain any American weapons transferred to Fatah militias or purchased by Fatah using the incoming $86.4 million in U.S. aid. “I can confirm 100 percent that this money and purchased weapons will find its way to Hamas,” said Abu Oubaida.
Secretary Rice nonetheless remained optimistic in her comments to reporters. “The Road Map is a useful document because it does have reciprocal responsibilities,” she said. She pointed out that Israel’s implementation of the Road Map has already succeeded in forcing Israel to expel Jewish residents and destroy their communities in the Gaza region. “They are out of Gaza. And so I think we want to look at what is still to be achieved,” she said.
Rice did not, however, mention the responsibilities of the PA, which included its promise to eliminate the terrorist infrastructure and cease incitement against Israel.
Condoleeza Rice has come in for a lot of scornful criticism for her seeming lack of knowledge of Middle Eastern history and politics, the nature of Islam and its unifying influence on Middle Eastern Muslim nations including the post 1967 Arab society dubbed Palestinians, part of which unity finds expression in intractable Jew/Israeli/Israel hatred.
While that criticism is much deserved, she is hardly alone when it comes to targetting others for criticism within the Bush administration and its host of advisers who in advocating as they have, are moved by their own perceptions of America’s best interests opposed to Israel’s best interests which are of lesser concern. If one considers the thinking of James Baker III from his statements over the years and from his views expressed in the recent Baker-Hamilton ISG report, Israel’s interests are really of little or no concern to America, unless those concerns can be addressed at little or no cost to American interests.
The Bush administration and C. Rice, like past American administrations continue to turn a blind eye to the mountain of evidence in Palestinians breaking every term of every agreement they ever signed onto with Israel. That evidence speaks volumes that the visionary dream America is pushing on Palestinians for an independent Palestinian state to be a condition absolute to any Israel-Palestinian peace agreement is not the same visionary dream that Palestinians have, though both call it a dream for an independent Palestinian state.
For the Palestinians and many Arab/Muslims supporters, the goal of an independent Palestinian state will be achieved in stages, the first being a temporary status achieved in the context of a peace agreement with Israel and then once Palestinians and their Arab supporters are strong enough, they will again attempt by war to destroy Israel and the ultimate independent Palestinian state will rise up on the ruins of Israel.
There is however good reason to expect that if Israel were destroyed and Israelis were forcibly evacuated from the land, the joy of Palestinians would be short lived as their stronger Arab bretheren would take over and Palestinian Arabs would again revert to just being Arabs ruled over by which ever Arab nation won the war to control the former land of Israel.
The Muslim Middle East continues to claim that stability and peace throughout the Middle East can only begin with the Israel Palestinian conflict being resolved. The Bush administration and Britain’s Tony Blair have bought into this, probably knowing it is rubbis, but playing along with the Middle Eastern Muslim nations nonetheless, believing that is the only way they can get them to have some regard for American and British interests and give them at least a bit of support when it comes to their presence in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as some modicum of support in the American/British led effort to strike at radical Islamists.
Now, just the other day a number of Muslim Arab states put out the word that they will come to America’s aid to help stabilize Iraq only if America brings about a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians that sees an independent Palestinian state emerge. This sounds very much like blackmail, but again America instead of saying so, appears to be redoubling her efforts to pay the blackmailers’ price.
Just what accounts for the passivity of pro-Israel advocacy in America in the face of such Arab/Palestinian anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian nonsense that America seems to be humoring, to at least a worrisome extent, is as puzzling as it is disconcerting.
The Palestinian/Arab war of words and terrorism against Israel is just one battle front in the same war that America is in with radical Islam.
Is there no one who has the balls and the credibility to speak up and get Americans and the Bush administration to get real, not only to save Israel, but to save themselves from the very same danger that threatens both their lives, their culture and their civilization?
RIGHT! We were told Hezbolla would be disarmed, because this time would be different. That didn’t go as planned now did it?