Abu Mazen History

Ariel Natan Pasko has a great article that surveys democracy in the Middle East. He includes these bits on Abu Mazen.

Hand-picked by Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas -- Abu Mazen -- is a founding member of Arafat`s Fatah and has been Arafat`s second-in-command for as long as anyone can remember.

That`s Abu Mazen, as in Holocaust denier. He received his Ph.D in history at Moscow Oriental College. His doctoral dissertation claimed that the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust was not six million, but in fact fewer than one million, and that they were victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot. In 1983 he published his dissertation as a book, The Other Side: Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement. In 1984, he added an introduction to the book in which he raised doubts that gas chambers were used by the Nazis for the murder of Jews.

That`s Abu Mazen, as in financier of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. According to the mastermind of the Munich attack, Mohammed Daoud Oudeh -- Abu Daoud -- Abu Mazen provided the funds to carry out the Black September operation. Daoud made that charge in his 1999 memoir (published in French)
Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich and again in an August 2002 interview with Don Yaeger of Sports Illustrated magazine.

That`s Abu Mazen, who in a March 3, 2003 interview with the Arabic language Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper -- this was just before he was appointed prime minister -- called for the killing of Jewish “settlers.” Four days later, terrorists murdered Rabbi Eli and Dina Horowitz in Kiryat Arba. Recently Mrs. Bernice Wolf,
Dina Horowitz`s mother, filed a complaint with the Israeli police against Abu Mazen, charging him with incitement to murder.

To prove his credentials as a “moderate” and a democrat who wouldn’t think of excluding any group from political involvement in the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen called on Hamas to join the PA. He offered two cabinet positions, including control of the Ministry of Education -- meaning that Hamas would
oversee the curricula in all Palestinian schools. (Suicide-bombing 101?)

Hamas turned down the offer, but so much for those who thought “moderate” Prime Minister Abu Mazen would bring an end to incitement against Israel. So much for a changing of the guard at Terror Central.

His inclusion of these lines of reasoning aligns with my thoughts.

According to global common knowledge, or conventional wisdom, Jewish “settlements” in Judea and Samaria -- the West Bank and Gaza -- will have to be abandoned, and Jews transferred, voluntarily or forcibly, back to the new borders of the State of Israel.

The simple question, however, is Why?

Ethnic cleansing was condemned throughout the 1990`s. Bosnia`s power sharing government is a case in point. After the breakup of Yugoslavia and the war that followed, the EU, NATO and the U.S. did not help establish an exclusively Muslim state in Bosnia, but a state where Croats and Serbs were included. The 4th Geneva Convention, meant to protect residents from forced expulsion, was adopted after World War II with the Holocaust in mind. How could the U.S. or the Europeans even think of making parts of the historic Jewish homeland Judenrein?

If the Palestinian state-in-the-making is to claim the mantle of democracy, there would be no better test of its tolerance of minorities than asking that it grant citizenship to those Jews who would choose to remain in their towns, villages, and homes in Judea and Samaria.

Unless it pronounces itself ready to extend full and equal rights and privileges to Jews in Palestine -- which would include the possibility of Jews being elected to parliament and serving in the Palestinian government (rights enjoyed by the Arab citizens of Israel) -- democracy and peace are just empty expressions in the mouths of Abu Mazen and his cohorts.