From BBC.com Palestinian anger as US sidelines Arafat Powell said Arafat's leadership was "flawed" The Palestinian Authority has reacted angrily after US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington would no longer deal with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Palestinian officials said sidelining Mr Arafat would lead to anarchy and violence, and called on Palestinians not to meet Israeli or American delegations in response. But thousands of Palestinians who took to the streets in Gaza to protest against high levels of unemployment they say is caused by Israel's policies also turned their anger on the Palestinian Authority. Speaking on US television on Sunday, Mr Powell said the US had no plans to speak to Mr Arafat either now or in the future. His comments came days after US President George W Bush urged Palestinians to replace Mr Arafat with a leader "not compromised by terror". Relations 'stagnant' Mr Powell said that the White House was still talking to "a variety of Palestinian leaders" but had not spoken to Mr Arafat since President Bush delivered his speech on 24 June. He said contacts with the Palestinian leader were unlikely to be revived "because his [Mr Arafat's] leadership is flawed". The secretary of state said it would not be possible to move the Middle East peace process forward unless there was a change in the Palestinian leadership. He said the White House backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but achieving it "begins with new leadership that is fighting against terror, not tolerating terror or even encouraging terror". 'Chaos and anarchy' Palestinian officials denounced Mr Powell's comments and warned of the consequences of replacing Mr Arafat. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told CNN that the alternative to Mr Arafat was "chaos, anarchy [and] more violence", Palestinian cabinet secretary Ahemd Abdul Rahman urged Palestinians not to meet American or Israeli officials "as long as the Palestinian people are under siege". He said Mr Bush had "no plan, no agenda, no road map, no process, no substance" in his policy towards the Middle East. Another senior Palestinian politician, Hanan Ashrawi, told the BBC that the American policy was "entirely short-sighted, undemocratic and counter-productive". She said that if the US rejected Mr Arafat, it might end up having to talk to radical Islamic parties instead. Street protest More than 4,000 demonstrators in Gaza held a protest initially aimed at the high levels of unemployment suffered by Palestinians since Israel banned them from crossing checkpoints to work. But their anger also turned to the Palestinian Authority which they accused of failing to help ordinary people and of hoarding millions of dollars of international funding. In the West Bank, the militant Islamic group Hamas vowed revenge after Israeli troops killed one of its top bomb-makers. Muhanad al-Taher, 26, and one of his deputies died when Israeli special forces raided a house in the city of Nablus on Sunday. Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said al-Taher, known to Palestinians as the Engineer-4, was responsible for the deaths of more than 117 Israelis in suicide attacks. He said al-Taher's death was "the most important operation of the past two months". Hamas, which has carried out scores of suicide attacks against Israeli targets said al-Taher's "assassination will increase [its] determination to continue jihad [holy war] and resistance".
Although this may make things a little tougher right now, I think that this is a good step and will hopefully bring long term peace to the middle east. Arafat has been a terrorist too long to be a peaceful leader. They may not like who is left to deal with though.
Lets make a bet. I bet if we kill arafat,then small pox gets released in america,how would that be victory? arafat is right as always.According to some posters here,we should take the easy road and just nuke em.lol,like that wouldnt make the arabs hate us even more. You guys are so short sited its sad.And so is bush.DId you see how the stock market crashed on 9/11? Did you notice the stocks fall sharply this week,imagine if small pox was released on july 4,then say goodbye to your retirement. For a city,that has enron,I would expect you guys to have enough common sense to know that war = no early retirement.I guess I was wrong.
Know this, I never said getting rid of him would be a good thing, just to say bye bye to him, but you can bet something's bound to happen!
War at times has been used to pull an economy out of a recession and or depression by utilizing government debt to push capital back into the economy. An example of this is World War II and how it pulled us out of the depression, through increased production for war. Keynesian economics adhere's to a theory that in times of financial despair or lagging growth, the government should create a budget deficit to propel the economy through government spending and then should decrease that deficit during a strong cycle. In the short run adverse world news is going to negatively affect the market, but each event has will only change prices as to the fundamental change over the long run. In regards to Arafat, I think there is just so much animosity between Arafat and Sharon that the US knows they cannot make them get to the table and accomplish anything. And with the US's unilateral support of Israel and Congress's vote of a full support of Israel (which is a precedent) they would rather force the Palestinian's to change leader's rather than the Israeli's. I think this is just another showing of our biased support in the region and how the pain of displacing a people and creating the largest refugee population in the world: the Palestinians is on our hands.
