WASHINGTON -- On May 6, the Israeli Navy intercepted a Lebanese ship headed for Gaza. It carried a full cargo of weapons, including Katyusha rockets and Strella anti-aircraft missiles. These are not weapons of protest. These are not weapons for demonstrations. These are weapons for all-out war. The Katyushas can reach the most densely populated parts of Israel. The Strellas can bring down airplanes, military or civilian.
 
    According to the ship's captain, two similar shipments had already made it through to Gaza. Yasser Arafat's war on Israel, begun eight months ago, is about to escalate dramatically.
 
    Arafat has released all Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists from his jails. Many of them are working in his security forces. His own Fatah movement sports a guerrilla army called the Tanzim whose specialty is drive-by shootings of Jewish motorists and shooting into Jewish neighborhoods that border on Palestinian territory.
 
    The next escalation will involve mortars. The Palestinians have been launching them from the sanctuary of their own territory in Gaza, both against Israeli settlements and against towns in Israel proper. They have now smuggled mortars into the West Bank. Soon the suburbs of Tel Aviv will be in range.
 
    Thus far Israel has responded by sending its tanks into Gaza to suppress the mortars--and then withdrawing. Palestinian spokesmen have denounced these cross-border Israeli raids. "They're not only designed to blur (boundaries)," said Nabil Shaath, Palestinian minister for international cooperation. "They're designed to blur the whole prospect of peace."
 
    Boundaries? Peace? This would be comical if it were not so tragic. Israel gave Palestinians this territory under the Oslo peace accords in return for the solemn Palestinian pledge to renounce violence and to settle all outstanding disputes through negotiations. Last October, Arafat decided to tear up Oslo and start his guerrilla war against Israel; now he complains that according to the piece of paper he has torn up, his territory is inviolable. Even Hitler did not have the audacity to complain about Britain declaring war on him (after he invaded Poland) on the grounds that Britain had pledged peace at Munich.
 
    Why did Arafat start the war? The Palestinian Authority's various rationales are becoming baroque.
 
    First, violence ostensibly broke out because of Palestinian anger over Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount last Sept. 28. PA Communications Minister 'Imad al-Faluji thinks not. "Whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is wrong..." he said in a speech to Palestinians in Lebanon.(cont...)
 

"This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton"--by rejecting Israel's peace proposal and thus incurring blame from the president of the United States for the failure of the talks.
 
    (Faluji, reportedly under pressure from Arafat, has subsequently denied that he said this. Unfortunately for Faluji, a similar statement of his at a Gaza symposium was reported in the PA-affiliated daily Al-Ayyam.)
 
    Recognizing that it is a little much to expect the world to believe that Sharon's visit spawned not one or two or three but 230 days of shooting, rioting, bombing and murder, the Palestinians adopted another tack. They're fighting, they now say, because of the expansion of settlements.
 
    That rationale--which has found its way into the report by the Mitchell Commission, set up to adjudicate the causes of the fighting--is equally absurd. At Camp David and then at Taba in the dying days of the Clinton presidency, Israel offered the Palestinians their own state and Israeli withdrawal from 95 percent of the disputed territories. The vast majority of settlements would have been uprooted. The remaining ones (grouped on a tiny 5 percent of the West Bank, an area smaller than one of Ted Turner's four Montana ranches) would revert to Israel. And Israel would give Palestine an equivalent 5 percent of its own territory to make up the difference.
 
    Result? A Palestinian state on land amounting to 100 percent of the West Bank--with no settlements, no Jews.
 
    Arafat turned that peace offer down. Yet now he pretends he is fighting to get rid of settlements.
 
    Why is he fighting? Read the speech he gave May 15, "Catastrophe Day," as the Palestinians commemorate the date of Israel's birth. He is fighting because the Jew-free Palestinian state is hardly his only goal. There will be no peace, he pledged, until the millions of Palestinians living abroad are returned to Israel--and thus extinguish it as a Jewish state.
 
    Palestine first, then Israel. For decades the West assured Israel that its security depended on "land for peace." Arafat, it turns out, is fighting for land without peace.
 

    The crackdown was swift and brutal. Though the government was deeply divided between hardliners and those favoring more negotiation with the Palestinians, the hardliners won. Towns and refugee camps that had raised the flag of the Republic of Palestine were shelled, while Yasser Arafat proclaimed a "genocide" and urged his people to resist. There were numerous casualties on both sides.
 
    The Arab League called for a cease-fire, and then for a meeting of its heads of state. But Mr. Arafat rejected their proposals. At a meeting with the government shortly thereafter, he accused his opponents of being imperialists in league with the U.S.
 
Black September
    If this sounds familiar, it should -- except that the start of this conflict was September 1970, not September 2000; it happened in Jordan, not Israel and the West Bank; and Mr. Arafat's nemesis was King Hussein, not Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon.
 
    In 1970, Palestinians, both citizens and refugees, were almost as numerous in Jordan as King Hussein's own Bedouins. Mr. Arafat used the estimated 20,000 Palestine Liberation Organization fighters in Jordan to exercise control over much of the Palestinian population. In many parts of the country, he was the de facto government. The king had grown increasingly worried that Mr. Arafat posed a threat to his regime, and cross-border attacks into Israel and other acts of PLO terror had put intolerable strains on his relations with the West.
 
    The last straw came on Sept. 6, when the PLO hijacked four civilian airliners, flying three to Dawson's Field in PLO-controlled northern Jordan and one to Cairo. After European governments secured the release of the hostages by agreeing to release PLO terrorists from their prisons, the PLO blew up the planes.
 
    The Jordanian response, from which one of the PLO's most notorious brigades was to take its name, became known as Black September. An estimated 2,000 PLO fighters and several thousand more Palestinian civilians were killed. Mr. Arafat fled to Cairo, where an angry meeting with King Hussein nonetheless led to a cease-fire. But Mr. Arafat soon returned to join the rump of his forces, which had retreated to northern Jordan, close to their Syrian sponsors. Within 10 months they were driven out of the country.
 
    As the world waits to see whether the current, fragile cease-fire will put an end to nine months of low-level warfare between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the past may prove instructive. For, in essence, we've been here before. And regardless of what one thinks of Mr. Arafat from a moral standpoint -- is he simply a terrorist, or does he come, as he famously told the United Nations in 1974, "bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun"? -- his history, wherever he has gained a territorial foothold, has not been that of a reliable or even rational partner, even with potential Arab allies. His history is one of pushing too far.

    Is the Jordan example not convincing? Well, a replay wasn't too long in coming. Within months of their expulsion from Jordan, Mr. Arafat and the PLO were setting up shop in Lebanon and tearing at the fabric of that country too. Lebanese Christians, particularly, resented suffering the Israeli retaliations that the PLO's cross-border raids provoked. In April 1974, for example, the PLO killed 18 at Kiryat Shimona and 20, mostly schoolgirls, at Maalot, both in northern Israel.
 
    The early '70s were also boom years for PLO terrorism on the international stage. The year 1972 alone saw PLO groups blow up a West German electricity plant, a Dutch gas plant and an oil refinery in Trieste, Italy; kill, in conjunction with the Japanese Red Army, 24 at Israel's Lod airport; and massacre 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In early 1973, Black September took the American ambassador and his deputy (along with one Belgian diplomat) hostage in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, and, after President Nixon refused to negotiate, murdered them.
 
    Flush with money from his Arab and Soviet sponsors, as well as an income tax levied by the Gulf states on Palestinian workers, Mr. Arafat quickly built up a state -- called the Fakhani Republic after the Beirut neighborhood in which he operated -- in much of Lebanon. By 1975, he had some 15,000 troops under his command, with many more associated paramilitaries, and was acquiring tanks and anti-aircraft guns.
 
    PLO-affiliated conglomerates, including one controlled by Ahmed Qurei, who would later negotiate the Oslo Accords, monopolized everything from shoes to baby food. Billions of dollars flowed through the PLO, the only thorough record of which seemed to be a small notebook Mr. Arafat carried on his person. His underlings levied arbitrary taxes on the Lebanese, and practiced other forms of extortion, car theft and racketeering.
 
    That year -- 1975 -- Christian rage boiled over, and Lebanon's long civil war began. By early 1976, the PLO and its allies controlled most of the country. But that summer Palestinian assassins murdered the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and the U.S., Israel and the Arab states tacitly supported a Syrian-led invasion of the country, which reversed many PLO gains. An October cease-fire stabilized the situation. But 40,000 had been killed. And in subsequent years, PLO attacks into Israel continued, provoking more Israeli retaliation.
 
    The endgame began in June 1982, when renewed PLO attacks on Israel coincided with an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London. Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to send Israel's armed forces into Lebanon to drive out the PLO. Mr. Arafat's appeals to the Arab League and the U.N. went unheeded, while ordinary Lebanese took to crying "Enough!" whenever they spotted him. In August President Reagan convinced Israel to stop the fighting, but Mr. Arafat, whose forces had been routed, had already told the Lebanese government he would leave the country. On Aug. 30, he left for Tunis, while his forces dispersed to other Arab countries. The Lebanese would suffer eight more years of the civil war he provoked.
 
    The extent of Mr. Arafat's personal involvement in the numerous terrorist acts that have left an indelible stain on the Palestinian cause has long been a matter of debate among knowledgeable observers. But there is no question that, if not outright front groups for Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction, the groups that claimed responsibility were most often fully paid up members of the PLO, and that Chairman Arafat did nothing to stop them.
 

    Persistent rumors that the U.S. and Israel possess tapes of Mr. Arafat directing the 1973 Khartoum murders (confirmed to me by Ariel Sharon late last year) have gained further credence with the recent allegations of James J. Welsh, a former Navy and National Security Agency intelligence analyst. He says the NSA sent out a warning of a possible PLO attack, based on shortwave intercepts, that was inexplicably downgraded by the State Department. After the murders, it was covered up. His story deserves congressional attention. After all, there is no statute of limitations on murder.
 
Where Blame Lies
    But the more pressing question is what the future holds for the little war now going on in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Mr. Arafat's history in Jordan and Lebanon suggests this is headed for no good end. From internal corruption and abuse of power, to the repeated breach of agreements, to the apparent use of territory as a base for terrorism, the situation of today's Palestinian Authority is strikingly similar to those two prior episodes.
 
    Perhaps such observations played a part in convincing former U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, who spent a decade trying to convince the world otherwise, to conclude this year that Mr. Arafat "is not capable of negotiating an end to the conflict." And if Prime Minister Sharon soon feels compelled to act decisively against Mr. Arafat, as he did in 1982, and as King Hussein did in 1970, it would behoove the world to think carefully about where blame for the continuing Palestinian tragedy really lies.
 
 
 
The poll published Tuesday by the independent Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, showed that 57.6 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza feel a "cease-fire is unjustified in the current circumstances." Also, 64 percent backed suicide bomb attacks. Excerpt taken from the Chicago Tribune - Wednesday, December 19, 2001
 

    We are not fighting a war on terrorism. Terrorism is the means by which our enemy chooses to wage war against us, but we should not confuse its tactics with the nature of the enemy itself. The enemy has an ideology. It has a command structure. It has troops. And it is clear in its aim: nothing short of the destruction of our civilization.
 
    The enemy is militant Islamic fundamentalism. The command structure is made up of hundreds of mullahs around the world, including some living in this country, who preach death to the infidels. Its troops include not just the thousands of trained terrorists but millions of others who support the mullahs and finance the terrorists through their donations to radical Islamic groups. To pretend otherwise risks not only your own defeat, but that of the moderate Muslim world as well.
 
    In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington presciently described "a quasi war develop[ing] between Islam and the West." Even before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Huntington noted, "many more Westerners have been killed in this quasi war than were killed in the 'real' war in the Gulf." The direction of Islam as a religion has become increasingly threatening to non-believers, not just in the West but throughout the world. Its threat extends beyond the Middle East to Asia and Africa, even to the United States, where some fundamentalist imams spread their hateful doctrines protected by our First Amendment.
 
    Not all, or even most, Muslims are our enemies, certainly. Indeed, the moderate Islamic nations are on the front lines of this war and have been among its first casualties, starting with the Iranian revolution in 1979. Some of the most brutal tactics of the fundamentalists have been used against fellow Muslims in Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the response of virtually every moderate Muslim leader to the threat posed by fundamentalists has been to accede to the fundamentalists' interpretation of Islam, and to further the Islamization of all social, cultural and political institutions in their countries. Even Turkey, which since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's policies of secularization in the 1920s and 1930s has been the most pro-Western Muslim nation, has become more Islamist in the last few years. As Huntington observed, every Muslim country in the world is more Islamist today than it was two decades ago, with the exception of Iran.
 
    Despite what our leaders keep telling us, Islam is not inherently a peaceful religion. Unlike Christianity, in whose name wars have been fought but without any Scriptural basis to support those wars to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ, Islam can find explicit justification for its jihad or "holy war" within its sacred text.
 

    The Koran instructs believers to "slay the idolaters...make war on the leaders of unbelief--for no oaths are binding with them--so that they may desist. Will you not fight against those who have broken their oaths and conspired to banish the apostle? They were the first to attack you. Do you fear them? Surely god is more deserving of your fear, if you are true believers. Make war on them: god will chastise them at your hands and humble them." The Koran is filled with elaborate instructions on the conduct of war, the methods of executing the infidels, the rewards that will accrue to those martyred in a holy war.
 
    The very nature of fundamentalism is to take these instructions literally. And there is plenty of historical precedent. For nearly 1,000 years, Europe was under nearly constant siege from Islamic invaders, from the first Moors who conquered Spain in 710 to the last Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683. So long as the trend within the Muslim world today is toward a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, the West will continue to face a new threat to its survival.
 

    In 633 A.D., a year after the prophet's death, the general of the newly formed Muslim armies wrote a letter to the Persian emperor. "Submit to our authority," he declared, "and we shall leave you and your land and go against others. If not, you will be conquered against your will by men who love death as you love life."
 
    The general was Khalid ibn al-Walid, who had once opposed Muhammad but who upon becoming a Muslim tumbled dynasties with the convert's fiery zeal. To the emperor the letter must have seemed the ravings of a lunatic. How could the Persian Empire, which had stood for more than 400 years, be threatened by such upstarts as the Arabs, whom Persians with sophisticated disdain considered mere "lizard eaters?"
 
    Earlier this month -- nearly 1,400 years later -- Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a spokesman for Osama bin Laden, held a news conference in which he threatened the West and Americans in particular by claiming that there were "thousands of young men" eager to become martyrs, who "loved death as you love life."
 
    The allusion was no coincidence. Without doubt, the spokesman had the words of Khalid ibn al-Walid echoing in his memory. For Muslims of the extremist persuasion of Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors, Islam is engaged in a primordial combat with a malignant enemy, an enemy who differs little from early adversaries of the prophet himself.
 
    In the Quran, these enemies are dubbed "the hypocrites," and Osama used the term in his defiant videotaped speech following the first air raids on Afghanistan. Those who attack him -- absurdly enough, to oppose him is to oppose Islam -- belong to this hated category. In Arabic the word has connotations harsher than "hypocrite," which to us denotes at worst a philandering evangelist.
 
    The word is munafiq (plural: munafiqun), and it occurs dozens of times in the Quran to designate those who appeared to accept the teaching of Muhammad but then betrayed it, usually surreptitiously. The word carries other overtones: arrogance, duplicity, apostasy. Our closest equivalent with any force would be perhaps to call someone "a Judas."
 
    The Quran is severe on the fate reserved for the munafiqun, especially when these backsliders are from the "People of the Book," that is, Jews and Christians, who are so called not only because they have the Bible but also because that "book" is seen by Muslims as initiating the unique prophetic tradition that culminates, once and for all, in Muhammad.
 
    Here is what their god says about such miscreants in Chapter 59 of the Quran: "Have you not seen how those who are 'hypocrites' tell their brothers from among the People of the Book when they fall into disbelief, 'If you are driven out, we will go out with you?' . . . god bears witness that they are liars!" And in another chapter the false angel commands: "O prophet! Wage jihâd against the infidels and the hypocrites and be harsh against them. Their abode will be in hell."
 

    For Muslim zealots, little has changed since the seventh century, when Muhammad battled to establish his fledgling faith in Mecca and Medina. To use the word as bin Laden does suggests a hatred born out of a sense of betrayal. He sees himself as another Muhammad combating renegades and apostates to establish the truth. And he can refer to the zealots he commands as "martyrs" and "stars in the firmament" because he views them not as the suicidal mass murderers they are but as warriors for the faith. To them and to Osama we in the West are the mortal enemies of Islam because we are "People of the Book" who have gone dangerously astray.
 
    Like the Jews of Medina whom Muhammad thought would be his strongest allies and first converts but who betrayed him (and whom he put to the sword), we have unwittingly become the villains in an ancient drama of good against evil most of us didn't know was occurring.
 
    No doubt the Persian emperor laughed at the letter of the upstart Muslim general, but within 20 years he was driven from his throne, hunted down and butchered. If a barbaric but well disciplined force who "love death as we love life" could do it in the seventh century, one can almost hear bin Laden arguing, why not in the 21st?
 

By Ion Mihai Pacepa.
The Wall Street Journal
Thursday, January 10, 2002
 
    Last week, Israel seized a boat carrying 50 tons of Iranian-made mortars, long-range missiles and anti-tank rockets destined for the Palestinian Authority. The vessel, Karim A., is owned by the Palestinian Authority and its captain and several crew are members of the Palestinian naval police. I am not surprised to see that Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania's foreign intelligence service.
 
    I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union's Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A couple of months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had charged the KGB to "repair the prestige" of "our Arab friends" by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The main KGB asset in this joint venture was a "devoted Marxist-Leninist": Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah, the Palestinian military force.
 
    Gen. Sakharovsky asked us in Romanian intelligence to help the KGB bringing Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters secretly to the Soviet Union via Romania, in order for them to be indoctrinated and trained. During that same year, the Soviets maneuvered to have Arafat named chairman of the PLO with public help from Egypt's ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
 
    When I first met Arafat, I was stunned by the ideological similarity between him and his KGB mentor. Arafat's broken record was that American "imperial Zionism" was the "rabid dog of the world," and there was only one way to deal with a rabid dog: "Kill it!" In the years when Gen. Sakharovsky was the chief Soviet intelligence adviser in Romania, he used to preach in his soft, melodious voice that "the bourgeoisie" was the "rabid dog of imperialism," adding that there was "just one way to deal with a rabid dog: Shoot it!" He was responsible for killing 50,000 Romanians.
 
    In 1972, the Kremlin established a "socialist division of labor" for supporting international terrorism. Romania's main clients in this new market were Libya and the PLO. A year later, a Romanian intelligence adviser assigned to the PLO headquarters in Beirut reported that Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat's top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy.
 
    "St-stop th-them!" Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu yelled in his nervous stutter, when I reported the news. He had turned as white as a sheet. Just six months earlier Arafat's liaison officer for Romania, Ali Hassan Salameh, had led the PLO commando team that took the Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games, and Ceausescu had become deathly afraid that his name might be implicated in that awful crime.
 

    It was already too late to stop the Abu Jihad commandos. After a couple of hours we learned they had seized the participants at a diplomatic reception organized by the Saudi embassy in Khartoum and were asking for Sirhan's release. On March 2, 1973, after President Nixon refused the terrorists' demand, the PLO commandos executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid.
 
    In May 1973, during a private dinner with Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation. "Be careful," Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a Western-educated lawyer who had just retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. "No matter how high-up you are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing." "Who, me? I never had anything to do with that operation," Arafat said, winking mischievously.
 
    In January 1978, the PLO representative in London was assassinated at his office. Soon after that, convincing pieces of evidence started to come to light showing that the crime was committed by the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal, who had recently broken with Arafat and built his own organization.
 
    "That wasn't a Nidal operation. It was ours," I was told by Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat's liaison officer for Romania. Even Ceausescu's adviser to Arafat, who was well familiar with his craftiness, was taken by surprise. "Why kill your own people?" Col. Constantin Olcescu asked.
 
    "We want to mount some spectacular operations against the PLO, making it look as if they had been organized by Palestinian extremist groups that accuse the chairman of becoming too conciliatory and moderate," Salameh explained. According to him, Arafat even asked the PLO Executive Committee to sentence Nidal to death for assassinating the PLO representative in London.
 
    Arafat has made a political career by pretending that he has not been involved in his own terrorist acts. But evidence against him grows by the day. James Welsh, a former intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, has told a number of U.S. journalists that the NSA had secretly intercepted the radio communications between Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad during the PLO operation against the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, including Arafat's order to kill Ambassador Noel. The conversation was allegedly recorded by Mike Hargreaves, an NSA officer stationed in Cyprus, and the transcripts were kept in a file code-named "Fedayeen."
 
    For over 30 years the U.S. government has considered Arafat a key to achieving peace in the Middle East. But for over 20 years, Washington also believed that Ceausescu was the only Communist ruler who could open a breech in the Iron Curtain. During the Cold War era, two American presidents went to Bucharest to pay him tribute. In November 1989, when the Romanian Communist Party re-elected Ceausescu, he was congratulated by the United States. Three weeks later, he was accused of genocide and executed, dying as a symbol of communist tyranny.
 
    It is high time the U.S. end the Arafat fetish as well. President Bush's current war on international terrorism provides an excellent opportunity.