October 22, 2005

OUR GOOD FRIEND, MAHMOUD ABBAS

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
---George Orwell

        Mahmoud Abbas, Holocaust denying disciple of Yasser Arafat, is now pretending to be a peace seeking moderate. He issues pious pronouncements deploring violence---on both sides, of course. Meanwhile, since Israel withdrew from Gaza what has occurred? Savagery and barbarism--except it is the so-called Palestinians who are murdering one another. Horsefeathers confesses to feeling some pleasure at this development. Since we believe the Palestinians are about as capable of organizing a functioning democratic state as our dog is of learning to speak Arabic, we'd prefer they kill each other and leave the rest of the world alone.
        Mr.Abbas once again tried to play the victim card during his visit with President Bush. Accounts indicate (See Debka file)that the President wasn't buying. A particularly revealing demand was that the President lean on Israel to release imprisoned terrorists, or rather, in Mr. Abbas's words, "prisoners of freedom".
        Bret Stephens reminds us what those prisoners of freedom were doing before they were caught. ".. One is Ibrahim Ighnamat, a Hamas leader arrested last week by Israel in connection to his role in organizing a March 1997 suicide bombing at the Apropos cafe in Tel Aviv, which killed three and wounded 48. Another is Jamal Tirawi of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades: Mr. Tirawi had bullied a 14-year-old boy into becoming a suicide bomber by threatening to denounce him as a "collaborator," which in Palestinian society frequently amounts to a death sentence.
        And then there is 21-year-old Wafa Samir al-Bis, who was detained in June after the explosives she was carrying failed to detonate at an Israeli checkpoint on the border with Gaza. As Ms. Bis later testified, her target was an Israeli hospital where she had previously been treated--as a humanitarian gesture--for burns suffered in a kitchen accident. "I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews," she explained at a press conference after her arraignment..." See the rest here.
        President Bush believes that freedom is a universal yearning. For many Arabs that means the freedom to murder innocent Jews. Turning that murderous impulse inward against themselves is a preferrable outcome. Even Abbas's honeyed words, his efforts to blame Israel, cannot conceal the horror at the heart of Arab darkness.