(Continued from p.2)
organizations in the Conference of Presidents criticized Lauder for having even spoken up for a united Jerusalem as an individual!In a January 23 letter to the President's Conference, Tom Neumann, executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a Conference member, sharply criticized the behavior of the Conference: "Jerusalem has been the focal point of Jewish identity and Jewish hopes for more than 2,000 years. Nevertheless, the Conference chose a posture of supine weakness on our core issue for fear of upsetting those who can't assert even a minimal demand for respect for Jewish patrimony....Ronald [Lauder] should be commended for acting on the strength of his individual conscience when the Conference was unable to find its communal voice."
On page 4 of this issue of Outpost, we publish an article by Ariel Kahane (originally published in December 2000 in the Israeli journal Nekuda) on the extent to which Israel has armed its enemies since 1993. A confirmatory update: on January 17, Brigadier General Yair Naveh, commander of the Israeli army for the Gaza region, announced that Gaza, under Arafat, has become "the largest weapons storehouse in the Middle East."
In a fresh idiocy, Barak has taken to convening something called "The Peace Cabinet" which then issues various policy proclamations. It includes selected members of the cabinet plus assorted other sympathetic Knesset members -- the full roster of Peace Cabinet members is a mystery. It clearly includes Peace Prime Minister Barak, Peace Defense Minister Barak,Peace Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, Peace Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, Peace Minister for Regional Cooperation Shimon Peres, and Peace Minister of Diaspora Affairs Michael Melchior. (They presumably stand in opposition to the "War Ministers" who make up the rest of Barak's cabinet.) Sample of the Peace Cabinet at work: On January 4, it agreed to establish a trilateral Israeli-American-Palestinian apparatus to deal with the prevention and reduction of violence. The only problem here is that this apparatus has already been established at least three times so far by the Barak government!
Barak's antics have reached the point where Aaron Lerner of IMRA (Independent Media Review and Analysis) is forced to send out the above "news" plus assorted other pronouncements by Barak and his government under the warning heading "This is Not a Parody."
Some of the best articles on the Middle East come from the pen (today one should say computer) of courageous Lebanese Christian Joseph Farah. In his January 17 column, Farah reports that on Feb. 28, 1973 James J. Walsh, the National Security Agency's Palestinian analyst, was summoned by colleagues about a communication intercepted from Arafat that told of an imminent Black September operation in Khartoum.The decision was made to send a highest priority message to the U.S. embassy there, but someone at the State Department decided the warning was too vague and its urgency was downgraded. The next day, eight members of Arafat's Fatah stormed the embassy, took the ambassador and others hostage, and a day later machine-gunned them to death, all this on the direct orders of Arafat.
Walsh, who kept silent for 28 years, was impelled to speak out by Clinton's frequent invitations to Arafat to the White House. He has been on a one-man mission to uncover the tape recordings and transcripts of the intercepts between Arafat and Fatah leader Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in Khartoum. He has found little cooperation in Congress, he says, with no one wanting to be responsible for "derailing the Middle East peace process." Walsh knows they exist because he has seen and heard them but expects the tapes will never be released, at best their existence acknowledged after Arafat's death. Walsh sums up: "I know Yasser Arafat was a direct player in the murder of our diplomats and so has every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon's." That means the Bush administration will know as well. Will Bush, like his predecessor, rush to embrace the murderer of our diplomats?
In a surprisingly blunt three-part series in January, the New York Times reported on the web of organizations established to wage worldwide jihad by Osama bin Laden. The indifference to human life shown by the young Islamic "idealists" recruited for this campaign should give pause to the many American policy-makers who are without any understanding of what Israel faces and cling to the notion that "conflict resolution" can resolve anything in the Arab world.
In Part III of the New York Times series, journalist Judith Miller described Muhammad Khaled Mihraba as a polite, soft-spoken 26 year-old Pakistani who thinks he has already killed at least 100 people, maybe more. (He was trained in making bombs, planting mines and how to kill noiselessly in Afghanistan.) At present, Mihraba is in prison somewhere in Afghanistan, captured by rebels against the Taliban. The Times reports that he says, if released and asked to do so, he would go to London, Paris or New York and blow up women and children for Islam. "'Yes, I would do it,' he said quietly, without hesitation."
February 2001 - 11 - Outpost