Arafat calls on world for help By Jamie Tarabay ASSOCIATED PRESS RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat yesterday appealed for urgent international intervention as Israel tightened its fist around Palestinian areas in response to renewed violence. "The current situation is very dangerous," Mr. Arafat told journalists at his Ramallah compound. "I call on the international community to make an immediate move to rescue the situation before it explodes." Israeli tanks have surrounded Mr. Arafat's compound since Israeli troops lit up the night sky with a powerful explosion that wrecked the official Palestinian broadcasting building, dealing another blow to Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Witnesses in a village north of the West Bank city of Tulkarm said tanks entered the village last night, but the Israeli army denied the report, Reuters news agency said. An army official said the tank movement was related to maneuvers carried out as part of Israel's encirclement of five West Bank areas. Tanks from an Israeli military base entered Iktaba village and around 70 appeared to be moving nearby, witnesses said. The reported incursion follows an Israeli army raid Friday into Tulkarm in retaliation for a Palestinian shooting rampage Thursday night in the northern Israeli city of Hadera that killed six persons at a girl's coming-of-age celebration. Officials said Israel targeted the Palestinian media center because it was the source of what the Israelis described as incitement throughout the Mideast conflict. The Palestinians called the demolition part of an ongoing Israeli attempt to undermine their leadership. Israel last week bore down on Palestinian towns and cities, including Tulkarm, in response to a new wave of violence. Mr. Arafat met at his besieged compound with foreign visitors who included Italian lawmakers and the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans. Archbishop Carey urged Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table. "Religious leaders have a part to play in this," he told reporters. "Religion is not only part of the answer, but also part of the problem." Only hours after the Israeli operation at the broadcasting building in Ramallah in the West Bank, Palestinian broadcasting returned to the air. The Voice of Palestine operated out of several local radio stations in Ramallah while Palestine Television used alternative facilities here and in the Gaza Strip. A few miles from the ruined building, Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli troops who had taken up positions outside Mr. Arafat's headquarters. Demonstrators threw stones at Israeli vehicles, including armored personnel carriers and tanks that had moved near the edge of the compound a day earlier. Israeli troops responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades. Palestinian hospital officials said 22 persons were injured, 10 from rubber bullets and 12 from breathing tear gas. One youth, shot in the head with a rubber bullet, was in critical condition. The Israeli military and Palestinians also reported sporadic exchanges of live fire between the two sides, but there were no reports of casualties. Before dawn yesterday, about a dozen Israeli tanks surrounded the hilltop broadcasting building and Israeli soldiers entered the five-story complex. Palestinian Broadcasting Corp. chief Radwan Abu Ayyash said Israeli soldiers called over loudspeakers for the few remaining employees to evacuate the building. A few hours later, a huge controlled blast went off inside. Flames engulfed the top floor and quickly spread to lower floors. By the time the fire was extinguished, the interior was gutted and the exterior blackened. Shattered glass, a satellite dish and other debris littered the parking lot in front of the building. The Israeli army said in a statement that it had confiscated equipment before blowing up the building. Employees said a transmitter and editing equipment were taken. "The Palestinian television and radio station has been for a long time a center of incitement against the state of Israel, its citizens and against the Jewish people," Israeli government spokesman Arie Mekel said. But Mr. Abu Ayyash rejected the Israeli accusation. "This is not a [Osama] bin Laden training center, it is not a center for heroin or drug rackets, this is something cultural, civilian and human," Mr. Abu Ayyash said. Employees of the Voice of Palestine moved into the offices of the private local stations in Ramallah, including the Amwaj station. They resumed broadcasting a few hours later on an FM frequency, rather than the usual AM bandwidth. Mr. Abu Ayyash said two previous Israeli strikes against broadcasting offices forced his organization to make alternative arrangements. Yesterday's operation destroyed the building that housed the corporation's archives and radio and television studios. Mr. Abu Ayyash estimated the damage at millions of dollars. After nearly a month of relative calm, the past week saw a renewal of the retaliatory violence that has marked the recent conflict, now almost 16 months old. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement, said Thursday's attack against the Israelis was in retaliation for the death of its leader, Raed Karmi, killed in an explosion last Monday that was blamed on Israel. Mr. Arafat's seven-week confinement in Ramallah has him in a quandary. He is under pressure from the United States and Israel to dismantle militant groups, but such crackdowns are running into resistance from some Palestinians. Israel has said Mr. Arafat can leave Ramallah only once the accused killers of an Israeli Cabinet minister have been handed over to Israel. Palestinian police say they have arrested the head of the PLO faction that claimed responsibility for the October assassination. Since announcing a truce Dec. 16, Mr. Arafat's security forces have arrested some militants, triggering clashes with the suspects' supporters. Israel has said the arrests were merely cosmetic and that the detained militants often were not being held. http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020120-3530824.htm Arafat would be a dead man if I was an Israeli. His time is running out… Perhaps that’s what you get for killing thousands of people by terror? "Freedom Fighter" my ass. It's about time the Israelis blew up his propaganda station. I'd have done it a decade ago - while today's suicide bombers were still young enough to avoid wholesale brainwashing... I won’t shed a tear for him.
Heh... an eye for an eye? Does that mean that a few hundred Israeli houses should be torn down in the next few days? That was a very annoying situation. I can't believe Israel had the gall to claim they were tearing down only unoccupied houses in a region with a horrible housing shortage. The UN and the Red Cross have both contradicted this... looks like there are a few hundred more homeless Palestinians. Bah... an eye for an eye got us to this point. If you keep going that way, there'll be nobody left in the end. One of these groups needs to be "the bigger person" and halt it. I certainly don't expect that any time soon, though...
Yeah, the Israelis need to stop provoking the Palestinians with those dangerous pizza parlors and teenage discos.. When was the last time Israel struck at terrorists first? NEVER! My point being, the only people hurting the Palestinians are their extremists. The only way to get peace is through war. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and any other known terrorist organizations must go. After this happens, if peace is wanted, it will actually be a realistic thought. For now, lasting cease fires and peace agreements are pure FICTION. So Haven, IMO, Israel should be the bigger person and wipe out Hamas, I.J., and whoever is necessary to free the peace-loving palestinians from the insane ones.
Arafat's fate was sealed he was caught importing that ship load of offensive weapons from Iran. Arafat gave an interview to an Egyptian newspaper in which he claimed that the ship was owned by the Israelis, and they set him up. LMAO. Arafat is such a liar. The sad part of this story though is that those crazy fundamentalists in Egypt will believe Arafat. Hell, they still believe that the Mossad is responsible for 9/11.
Palestinians: 1. Have no right to vote. 2. Are deprived of access to about 1/2 the economic sector 3. Receive a mere fraction of the water ration that Israelis receive. 4. Often have their homes torn down illegally. 5 . Receive almost no funding for important projects such as education. 6. Are subject to Israeli laws despite no political representation in Israeli government. 7. Have had their territory illegally occupied for decades. I think some people are a bit naive on the issue. Conquest of territory does take place. Every country that currently exist, as far as I know, has conquered land. However, once you do so, it's necessary to make the populace of the conquered lands your own citizenry. Israel has not done this, quite frankly, because they would shortly be outnumbered if they did. But this does not excused treating Palestinians worse than America did African-Americans before the Civil Rights movement. Find out some facts before you open your mouth. Even treeman will stipulate that the Palestinians have almost no civil rights.
"An eye-for-an-eye and a tooth for a tooth just makes us blind and toothless. Living a life that is life affirming in some way (any way) is the way to change the world - one person at a time." Martin Luther King, Jr.
Wah wah wah.... Real life not idealism changes the world. The guy with the biggest stick wins. Israel should whipe out Hamas, and give the peace loving palestinians rights. DaDakota
Why am I not surprised to see this response from the guy who think Mohamad Ali is a coward? So explain how King Jr. and Ghandi had the big sticks? Not every problem requires a military solution.
Article by Edward Said (prof at Columbia U, famous essayist) concerning American biases toward Israel. He ultimately suggests that the only way Palestine can ever become free is through American support. He suggests that Palestinians should go "straight to the American people" in an appeal for justice, rather than engaging in high-level diplomacy. It's worth noting, that most of Europe already believes in the Palestinian cause. His repeated use of the term "Zionist" bothers me a bit. But he doesn't seem to be using it in the normal pejorative way that some anti-Semites do. Rather, he uses it in the historical context of the Jewish end of diaspora. The link is from zmag, which tends to be a bit too liberal even for me, but which does post very good articles upon occasion by people like Said. http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html
I also agree that the Palestinians should get their own state, however, every time they bomb innocent Israelis they put that inevitability farther and farther out. If the Palestinians REALLY want a homeland, they should wise up and stop terrorism, and help ROOT out Hamas, and Al-Jihad. They worship these groups....it is INSANITY. You can not deal rationally with the irrational. DD OH, and Ali was a coward, he is only viewed less stringently now because of his plight.
Edward Said is also a proven liar, and has no credibility. Here is a good article from Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe- ------------------ EDWARD SAID, the world's most renowned Palestinian intellectual, was exposed as a fraud last summer. The experience apparently taught him nothing. For decades, Said had passed himself off as an exile -- an Arab born and raised in Jerusalem only to be driven out by the Jews in the runup to the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. He had told the story often, lacing his narrative with poignant detail. "I feel even more depressed," he reminisced in March 1998, "when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al-Talbiyeh in east Jerusalem." In a BBC documentary he recalled his years at St. George's, an Anglican prep school in Jerusalem; he and a boy named David Ezra, Said recollected, used to sit together in the back of the classroom. He told another interviewer in 1997 that he could still identify the rooms in his family's former house "where as a boy he read 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'Tarzan,' and where he and his mother read Shakespeare to each other." All this was lost when his family fled from Talbiyeh in December 1947, driven out, as he explained, by the "Jewish-forces sound truck [that] warned Arabs to leave the neighborhood." But as Justus Reid Weiner showed in Commentary, the influential journal of opinion, Said's tragic tale was largely a fabrication. The Saids, it turned out, had lived in Egypt, not Palestine. Edward Said grew up and went to school in a posh neighborhood in Cairo, where his father had a thriving business. Now and then the family would visit cousins in Jerusalem; Edward was born during one such visit in 1935. But on his birth certificate, the Saids' place of residence was listed as Cairo; the space for indicating a local address in Palestine was left blank. Weiner looked into the expulsion of Talbiyeh's Arabs in 1947. It never happened. He checked the student registries at St. George's. There was no mention of Edward Said. He even interviewed David Ezra, the student with whom Said sat in the back of the room. Because of his bad eyesight, Ezra told Weiner, he had always sat up front. Said occupies a lofty perch in the world of letters: He holds an endowed chair in English and literature at Columbia University, he is a highly sought-after lecturer, and he has served, at various times, as president of the Modern Language Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. But he is known above all as a zealous champion of the Palestinian cause. For many years, he sat on the Palestine National Council, the PLO's "parliament in exile," and was a close advisor to Yasser Arafat. He has savaged Israel and pressed the Palestinians' case in every forum imaginable, from op-ed columns to radio broadcasts to congressional testimony. And his words were accorded great moral force, for wasn't Said himself a victim of Zionist usurpation? Hadn't he himself suffered displacement and exile? When the world learned that he wasn't and he hadn't, his moral authority shriveled. It was as if, one observer put it, "we found out that Elie Wiesel spent the war in Geneva, not Auschwitz." One might have thought that the embarrassment of it all would convince Said to stop lying about himself. And yet his fabrications continue. During a visit to Lebanon in July, Said was seen hurling rocks over the border into Israel. Throwing stones at Israelis has been a popular pastime among Arab tourists in southern Lebanon ever since Israel withdrew in May. This stoning has drawn little international attention, even though several Israelis have been wounded, some permanently. But when Agence France Press released a photo of the world's most famous Palestinian intellectual joining in the violence, it made the papers everywhere. Said was sharply condemned, even in quarters where he is normally only praised. The Beirut Daily Star was appalled that a man "who has labored . . . to dispel stereotypes about Arabs being `violent' would let himself "be swayed by a crowd into picking up a stone and lofting it across the international border." On Said's own campus, the Columbia Daily Spectator blasted his "hypocritical violent action" as "alien to this or any other institution of learning." His response was to shrug off the incident as merely "a symbolic gesture of joy" -- and to lie. His rock, he said, had been "tossed into an empty place." Witnesses told a different story. London's Daily Telegraph reported that Said "stood less than 10 yards from Israeli soldiers in a two-story, blue-and-white watchtower from which flew five Israeli flags." As for the damning AFP photograph, Said professed surprise: "I had no idea that media people were there, or that I was the object of attention." But AFP had a very different explanation -- as two Columbia professors, Awi Federgruen and Robert Pollack, found out when they contacted the press agency. What they learned, they wrote in the Spectator, was that "the photograph of [Said] throwing the rock was in fact delivered to this news agency by none other than Professor Said himself." For a man who has written that intellectuals are bound "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible," Said seems to have a hard time sticking to the facts about himself. Perhaps that is because he knows that there is no professional price to pay for his deceptions. When Weiner exposed Said's elaborate falsehoods last year, Columbia responded by doing -- nothing. "Amazingly, Professor Said was not sanctioned or reprimanded by the [university's] president,'' writes Weiner in a new essay in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. "Nor has the dean, the board of trustees, or the university senate publicly addressed Said's dissimulation." To anyone familiar with Columbia's history, this lack of interest in a professor's deceit is remarkable. For Said is not the first famous member of the English Department to be caught in a series of public lies. In the 1950s, a junior instructor named Charles Van Doren won national acclaim for his brilliant run on the NBC quiz show "Twenty-One" That acclaim turned to scorn when it emerged that the show was rigged, and Columbia made it clear at once that it would not keep a known liar on its faculty. "The issue is the moral one of honesty and integrity of teaching," said Dean John G. Palfrey, and "if these principles are to continue to have meaning at Columbia," Van Doren could not remain. The young teacher was contrite, but to no avail. He left Columbia and never taught again. No such punishment -- indeed, no punishment at all -- was meted out to Said, even though his fraud was clearly worse. (As Weiner points out, "while Van Doren had to be coaxed by the producers of the program to compete dishonestly, Said initiated and carried out his deceit by himself.") Why the double standard? When it comes to mere mortals, Columbia still insists on honesty. Just a few months ago, a 19-year-old Columbia student who falsely told a professor that he had been in a car crash (in order to get more time on an assignment) was suspended for two years. Yet Said, whose concocted tale of exile and dispossession was far more elaborate and misled far more people, has faced no discipline whatsoever. A professor who spreads untruths is like a doctor who administers poison or a judge who takes bribes. Each betrays his calling. Each is a menace to society. Doctors who kill can be stripped of their license; corrupt judges can be impeached. But a professor who deceives -- at Columbia, at any rate -- is free to go on deceiving. Is it any wonder that Edward Said is still telling lies?
Which of those statements were lies? Said accrued a brilliant reputation in academics for good reason. Whether he threw a rock, or not, isn't important to me.
1. The Palestinians are not friggin' Israeli citizens, and they don't live in Israel! What a silly observation. The Palestinians who do live in Israel, and are citizens, do vote and serve in the Israeli Knesset. 2. The Palestinians don't have access, because they keep killing Israeli children on purpose. How hard is this for you to understand? 3. through 7. See above points.
1. That's illegal. You can't simply occupy a region and not either greant it statehood or incorporate it's citizens. What's so hard to understand here. 2. The Palestinians were mistreated prior to your claim. Hence, it's invalid. Is that hard to understand? 3. How is that relevant? If you treat them fairly, then the violence becomes a non-issue. You're begging the question.
He has proven to the world that he is willing to lie to make a point, and in my opinion, is nothing more than a propaganidist. The Palestinians use the press as a tool to manipulate, not as a way to find truth.
The Israeli government has no credibility. They tore down several hundred 'unoccupied' homes last week. Guess what? The UN and Red Cross determined that several hundred people were made homeless, and the Israelis knew. Guess they're just worthless propogandists, eh? Said's work, regardless of the incident, has been terrific. Incidentally, your claims are meaningless. You truly believe it's just to repress an entire people simply because a few happen to be violent? Guess we should maltreat all the Arabs here, too, by your standards.
Incidentally, I don't know why I'm arguing so much about Said. I happen to like the guy's work, but it's not like the influence of Jewish-American PACS isn't well documented in various sources. I don't even think there's anything wrong with it... just the political process at work. The problem is really that Arab-American PACS are really pathetic right now. The process only works when each side is equally wealthy, well-connected, and well-organized.
1. What a laugher. The Palestinians have always wanted Israel to be destroyed, and still do as evidenced by the huge shipment of <b>offensive</b> weapons just siezed by the IDF. The Israelis are defending themselves, as they have had to do since 1947. What is so hard to understand here? 2. Semitic peoples have been mistreating eachother since the beginning of recorded time. What about the 800,000 Jews that were kicked out of Arab countries, and had their land and homes stolen with the founding of Israel? Get over it. Isreal and its Democracy is the best hope for the region. 3. Barak bent over backward to please Arafat, and Arafat the liar stabbed Barak in the back. If you think the Arabs want peace with Israel, I think you are living in a Palestinian apologist dreamworld. Arafat is a Dictator who would not even allow his people the right of self determination if he had control! When the Arab league meets, there are no Democracies present! What the F are you arguing in favor of??? The Arab people are killed and mistreated by their own governments, and you choose to attack Israel for defending itself??? Jeez, I hope you grow up quickly and get out of your annoying liberal phase.
