Veteran leader Yasser Arafat dies

[ran 0]

Michel Barnier will represent France at Arafat's funerals.

[Postduifje 0]

Dutch minister of foreign affairs Bot said he would be there too, as a representative of the EU

[denoir 0]

Sweden is sending our prime minister, Göran Persson. It's the highest level representative any EU state is sending. All the others will be represented by their foreign ministers.

Of the representatives, the US is sending the lowest ranking one - the Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs from the State Department.

Both Sweden's and America's level of representation is pretty much telling on their opinions of the conflict.

The highest level of representation is from a number of Arab and muslim states around the world that are sending their chiefs of state.

----

Anyway, try picking which one of these UK newspapers are tabloids and which are at least semi-serious:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1....tm

See a pattern?

[pogingwapo 0]

I am thinking of parallels between Arafat and Aslan Maskhadov and also Shamil Basayev.

I really don'tt know what kind of a man Arafat is when he set up Fatah and then went on killing innocent Israelis all over the world. And then he turned into a peacemaker all of a sudden.

What if Shamil Basayev follows his path, will he also get the same reverence Arafat is getting right now in spite of his past?

Sometimes all this is like sending the message that you can start by killing innocent people and then rejecting your acts afterwards....and still be called "honorable".

[theavonlady 2]

Sometimes all this is like sending the message that you can start by killing innocent people and then rejecting your acts afterwards....

Arafat never rejected his acts.

[pogingwapo 0]

Acchile Lauro, Munich, and other terrorist acts. Avonlady please post a link to Arafat's opinions regarding these after he made "peace" with Israel.

[theavonlady 2]

Acchile Lauro, Munich, and other terrorist acts. Avonlady please post a link to Arafat's opinions regarding these after he made "peace" with Israel.

Yassir Arafat: 1929-2004

Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East

Arafat's Legacy

The Trojan Horse (hi-res) / The Trojan Horse (low-res)

Arafat's Legacy Of Lies (PDF)

Arafat's Words Of Hate

Arafat's Culture Of Hate and Violence (PDF)

I got a million of 'em - litterally.

Stupid naive world.

[Badgerboy 0]

Acchile Lauro, Munich, and other terrorist acts. Avonlady please post a link to Arafat's opinions regarding these after he made "peace" with Israel.

Yassir Arafat: 1929-2004

Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East

Arafat's Legacy

The Trojan Horse (hi-res) / The Trojan Horse (low-res)

Arafat's Legacy Of Lies (PDF)

Arafat's Words Of Hate

Arafat's Culture Of Hate and Violence (PDF)

I got a million of 'em - litterally.

Stupid naive world.

Don't worry Avon, I'm sure that horribly obese war criminal you call a leader will be dead soon too!

[theavonlady 2]

Don't worry Avon, I'm sure that horribly obese war criminal you call a leader will be dead soon too!

1. He's not a war criminal.

2. OK.

[pogingwapo 0]

Lots of articles

Do you also have a link about that Romanian Intelligence Officer's videos about Arafat?

[joltan 0]

According to Spiegel Online (german) Saudi-Arabia will send crown prince Abdullah.

Edit: Oh, I just saw that Iraq will send vice president Rowsch Nuri Schawais.

[brgnorway 0]

Lots of articles

Do you also have a link about that Romanian Intelligence Officer's videos about Arafat?

Why don't you try this: log on to yahoo/google or whatever - type whatever you are looking for and then press enter.

Have you read the title of this thread at all?

[theavonlady 2]

Lots of articles

A drop in the bucket.

Quote[/b] ]Do you also have a link about that Romanian Intelligence Officer's videos about Arafat?

I think I've found the video right here.

Otherwise, I found these:

Quote[/b] ]The KGB's Man

By ION MIHAI PACEPA

September 22, 2003

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

* * *

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naÄve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism" was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.

In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."

* * *

Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his -- all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.

Quote[/b] ]The Arafat I Knew

He hasn't changed since his days as a KGB-backed terrorist.

BY ION MIHAI PACEPA

Saturday, January 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

Last week Israel seized a boat carrying 50 tons of Iranian-made mortars, long-range missiles and antitank rockets destined for the Palestinian Authority. The vessel, Karim A., is owned by the Palestinian Authority, and its captain and several crewmen 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. Alexander 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 Palestine Liberation Organizaiton, 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," Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat's liaison officer for Romania, told me. 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 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 more than 30 years the U.S. government has considered Arafat a key to achieving peace in the Middle East. But for more than 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.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is author of "Red Horizons" (1987), a memoir.

As Denoir says:

Quote[/b] ]Both Sweden's and America's level of representation is pretty much telling on their opinions of the conflict.

Indeed.

[Bernadotte 0]

Sometimes all this is like sending the message that you can start by killing innocent people and then rejecting your acts afterwards....

Arafat never rejected his acts.

Did Israeli PM Menachem Begin ever reject bombing the King David Hotel, killing 91 people?

Did Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir ever reject his actions as leader of the outlawed terrorist group, LEHI?

[brgnorway 0]

Quote[/b] ]

Chaos as Arafat's coffin arrives

The security forces struggled to control the crowd

The arrival of the coffin of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is provoking chaotic and emotional scenes in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

BBC Article here

[billybob2002 0]

I was expecting that car to ram people...it came close.

Anyway,

Quote[/b] ]Both Sweden's and America's level of representation is pretty much telling on their opinions of the conflict.

How?

[Placebo 28]

Well this has become ME part 2 so expect it merged into the middle east thread shortly.

[MilitiaSniper 0]

All I can say is... I'm glad he is gone!

Maybe now the Isreali's can have a better chance at peace. (I'm hoping! )

Sincerely, MilitiaSniper

"OFF the WALL Team"

     

[IceFire 0]

I don't know how anyone could have any respect for such a lowlife.

He wasn't a statesman. He was just another terrorist who encouraged palestinians to blowthemselves up at bus stations. The only reason there is has been no peace in Isreal is because Arafat was so vehemently against the idea of peace. All he wanted was violence against all of Isreal. He only openly pretended to be a peacemaker so that the rest of the world wouln't let him be killed. But when not at some conference he made no secret of his way of mind.

[pogingwapo 0]

When he was still alive LOL!

[brgnorway 0]

I don't know how anyone could have any respect for such a lowlife.

He wasn't a statesman.  He was just another terrorist who encouraged palestinians to blowthemselves up at bus stations.   The only reason there is has been no peace in Isreal is because Arafat was so vehemently against the idea of peace.  All he wanted was violence against all of Isreal.  He only openly pretended to be a peacemaker so that the rest of the world wouln't let him be killed.  But when not at some conference he made no secret of his way of mind.

Yes of course. The israelis on the other hand are such a peace loving people and it's so unfair that they cannot steal other people's land without people freaking out. How unfair - I mean they won it fair and square right?

The only thing Israel is guilty of is some unfortunate collateral damage when they use rockets launched from gunships and every time accidentaly blows up a residential building housing some 50 families. And all this while they'r just defending themselves. And I really cannot understand why people complain when israeli bulldozers flatten the homes of suspected hamas members - like the rest of the extended family shouldn't be punished as well. And what is it with the palestinian parents? Don't they look after their kids anymore. Jesus, it's the palestinian parents fault every time an israeli soldier shoots and kills an eight year old palestinian kid.

And what the fuck has Shatila to do with the current prime minister? I mean what the hell!

[brgnorway 0]

When he was still alive  LOL!  

......while we're talking about corruption:

Sharon:

"There is reportedly a bank account owned by the prime minister's two sons where $1.5m suddenly appeared - and that doesn't happen with the average voter's bank account"

Amotz Asa-El,

Jerusalem Post

Link here!

....and Netanyahu:

"Israeli police have recommended that criminal charges should be brought against the former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara.

If Israel's attorney-general accepts the recommendation, Mr Netanyahu could be charged with accepting a bribe, fraud and breach of trust by a public servant.

His wife could face charges that include theft.

Link here!

[shinRaiden 0]

Sharon was the Defense Minister at the time of the intial foray into Lebanon. He took the fall for the rest of the administration after the Shabra and Shatila massacures, even though that was a localized event way down on the chain of command.

After Arafat sent out the bombers agao, the Israelis that had been willing to consider deals under Rabin and Barak decided "no more deals, we need some one who will fight fire with fire."

As I have repeatedly said before, the neutralization of a target in ME MOUT environments with a minimum of collateral damage is most effective in air strikes. Ground forces can not quickly penetrate those environments during times of opportunity without heavy civilian casualties.

When a terrorist blows themselves up, Saddam Hussein previously paid the families $35,000, and who knows what else whoever chipped in. Morally I believe in the liberty of individuals, but practially, a palestinian house is a clan refuge, and people inside do know what's going on. Unfortunately, the houses are buldozed as "illegal" or "unpermitted" structures, and Israel gets in trouble for claiming an unjustifiable false pretense, when the more sober real pretense is much more justifiable.

Nobody made even so much as a peep when Jordan occupied the West Bank from 1948 to 1967. They had zero claim to any land west of the Jordan, but headed over anyway. My understanding was that there was a private arrangement with Jordan just prior to the -67 war, where they'd get to hang on to the west bank provided that they stayed out of the Egypt-Syria action. The first few days went bad for Israel, so the Jordanians went back on their deal, and put some troops into the field only to get steamrolled as the units that had obliterated the egyptians in the Sinai raced north to reinforce the besiged Golan.

The Jordanians then inherited several million Palestinian refuges, and in the midst of all that Arafat started making raids on the IDF staging out of Amman. The Jordanians having learned their lesson and also eager to fix up their country had to throw Arafat and his minions out (into Beirut), much to the approval and support of the Jordanian public.

[shinRaiden 0]

The charges against Sharon and Netanyahu are quite old, they keep getting recycled. Nearly every Israeli leader is accused at some time of malfeasence and corruption, that comes from the creative and energetic politicing.

The difference is that Sharon is in hot water over a few loans made through his son that are suspected to be laundered campaign contributions. Arafat conversely controlled not only the entire monetary flow of the PA directly, but also paid directly the salaries of a large part of the Palestinian population. The result was that if you praised Arafat there was bread on the table; if not, no money, and no bread.

Sharon is not accused of having the entire Israeli monetary supply in his pocket, Arafat is.

[brgnorway 0]

The charges against Sharon and Netanyahu are quite old, they keep getting recycled. Nearly every Israeli leader is accused at some time of malfeasence and corruption, that comes from the creative and energetic politicing.

The difference is that Sharon is in hot water over a few loans made through his son that are suspected to be laundered campaign contributions. Arafat conversely controlled not only the entire monetary flow of the PA directly, but also paid directly the salaries of a large part of the Palestinian population. The result was that if you praised Arafat there was bread on the table; if not, no money, and no bread.

Sharon is not accused of having the entire Israeli monetary supply in his pocket, Arafat is.

As a politician you are supposed to have some principal integrity. Doesn't matter how much or who's the biggest crook. I happen to work in the hotel business, and it's strict as it should be. It doesn't matter if you steal a thousand pound or a penny - you'll still be fired!