Hamas Leader: Arafat Ordered Hamas Attacks Against Israel in 2000

Khaled Abu Toameh
“President Arafat instructed Hamas to carry out a number of military operations in the heart of the Jewish state after he felt that his negotiations with the Israeli government then had failed” after the Camp David summit in 2000, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar revealed on Tuesday. Most of the “military operations” were suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians. This was the first time that a senior Hamas official disclosed that some of the Hamas suicide bombings during the Second Intifada were ordered by Arafat…more

Deganga Intifada?

For three days in September, anti-Hindu violence wracked the Deganga area in North 24 Parganas, only 40 kilometers from the West Bengal capital of Kolkata.  Though the violence has subsided, Hindu residents fear renewed attacks, which could have been the attackers’ intention all along.  West Bengal BJP member Tathagata Roy visited the area twice since the violence began and noted, “What struck me about the pogrom (not riot, because no Hindu hit a Muslim) is that no Hindu was physically hurt, and no Hindu woman was molested, a regular feature in all Muslim attacks.  But destruction of property and threats were both rampant.”  From that Roy concludes that “this was a well-thought-out, well-executed pogrom whose objective was to terrorize the Hindus no end without committing any major crime beyond arson. The ultimate intention can only be to cleanse the area of Hindus with a view to totally Islamize the area.”  That the matter is now fodder for political bickering instead of effective counter action only furthers the attackers’ objectives.

Bimal Pramanik, Director of the Kolkata-based Centre for Research in Indo-Bangladesh Relations, has noted a steady and deliberate effort to change Hindu-Muslim demographics in West Bengal.  Since the emergence of Bangladesh (East Bengal) as an independent nation in 1971, Hindus in that country have fallen from a little less than one in five to between seven and eight percent today.  At the same time, the Muslim proportion of West Bengal’s population has risen by 25 percent compared to an almost nine percent decline in the proportion of its Hindu population.  Between 1981 and 1991, moreover, Muslim population growth in West Bengal was nearly 35 percent compared to only 25 percent in Bangladesh.  “How can there be such a wide difference in growth rates between the two countries?”  Pramanik asked South Asia Forum’s Amitabh Tripathi and me in his Kolkata office.  His conclusion:  “Illegal immigration from across the border.”

The current political infighting is reminiscent of similar wrangling in the United States.  America reacted to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks by radical Muslims with a wave of patriotism and unity, bringing with it a collective will to defeat those who attacked America.  Over time, however, the initial fervor died down and the same sort of political bickering now taking place in India replaced it.  Democrats blamed the attacks on Republican President George Bush; Republicans blamed his Democrat predecessor, President Bill Clinton.  That the widely praised “9/11 Commission” found largely equal fault with both did not stop the charges and counter charges.  As a result, support for resolutely fighting the Islamists has been plagued by disunity and political jockeying; which also muddies the signal Americans get about their enemies and their intention.  Is this happening in India?

Almost 2000 years ago, ancient Israel was at war with its Roman occupiers.  With most of the country in enemy hands and Roman legions approaching the gates of the Hebrew capital, Jerusalem; defenders holed up in the Jewish Temple, located on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.  But instead of forming a united front against the enemy, they fell into three factions and spent more time attacking one another than the Romans.  When they eventually united, it was too late and Jerusalem fell.  The Jewish state was destroyed, not to be re-established until 1948.  Is this happening in India?

While the victims of yesterday and today expend their resources fighting one another, their Islamist enemies proceed in a united, strategic, and resolute manner.  The Deganga pogrom makes sense when viewed in parallel with another planned, jihadist event with similar goals:  the 2000 Palestinian intifada.  It also helps to note that Muslims today are given a free pass to express their individual or collective anger however they wish.  If Hindus do it, they are Hindu fanatics; Jews, Zionist oppressors; Christians, Islamaphobic.  If any of these groups attack Muslims, it is their fault.  If Muslims attack them, it is still their fault.  Arab terror attacks on Israel murdered over 1000 Israelis in the first few years of this century but were justified as anger over the so-called occupation.  The September 11th attacks on the United States were deemed expressions of Muslim anger for which Americans must atone.  When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad recently accused the United States of being the real 9/11 killers, many at the UN applauded enthusiastically.  Finally, virtually every international body and media outlet has determined that the 26/11 terror in Mumbai is insufficient cause to bring anyone to justice.  As American author and analyst Michelle Malkin wrote, “The eternal flame of Muslim outrage was lit a long, long time ago.”  Woe to any people it burns because the world’s elites will blame them for it.  The pattern is tediously familiar.

   Deganga Pogrom   Arab Intifada

The Pretext  Hindus stopped Muslim activists Then private citizen Ariel Sharon
   from tunneling between the   visited Jerusalem’s Temple Mount
   Deganga Mosque and a nearby
   Hindu Temple.

Background  As the area’s Muslim population Although it is the site of Judaism’s
   has grown, they have tried to stop Ancient Temple, Muslims claim that
   Durga Puja there and claim the  the Temple did not exist and that
   land for their mosque.  the Mount is a holy site for Muslims
        only.

What happened Angry Muslims gathered at the  Angry Muslims gathered on the
   Mosque after Iftar (giving it  Temple Mount by al Aqsa mosque
   religious significance) and began (giving it religious significance) and
   attacking Hindus, their temples, began attacking Jewish worshippers
   homes and shops.  When troops below.  When troops responded to
   arrived to restore calm, they  restore calm, they launched a terror
   moved against defenseless Hindu war against Israel that included
   villages in the interior.  suicide bombings and other terror.

Government  While it stopped the immediate While it defeated the uprising, it     violence, it has not made any  allowed the enemy’s claims to be    arrests, defended Hindu religious given legitimacy.   It has not pressed    sentiments, or defined the    the case for Jewish rights and even     actions or claims as illegitimate. released arrested terrorists as
“goodwill gestures.”

Media   Events have been under reported Media took the case of the Muslim    domestically and blacked out  attackers as a cause célèbre and did    internationally.  No media has mentioned the rights of the Jewish    discussed the rights of the Hindu victims.
   victims.

The Result  The Muslim attackers and their Arab claims to Jewish land are seen
   instigators see that they can   as more legitimate than before the     attack Hindus in India without terror; i.e., terror works.  Their
   consequences.  Their claim to false claim that the ancient Jewish
   Hindu lands remains active and Temples did not exist and that Jews
   stronger, and they can press it have no title to the Temple Mount
   Further.    remains; and both are ongoing
        Arab demands for a cessation of
        violence.

The attackers and their backers frequently object that identifying the pogromists as Muslim and the victims as Hindu violates principles of secularism and unfairly smears an entire faith.  To the extent that religion should not be an important issue, they are correct.  But to the extent that the attackers have made religion important, it needs to be identified.  As noted above, there was a deliberate effort to give the Deganga and Palestinian violence a religious overtone.  It was also on full view in 2004 when Yassir Arafat personally apologized to the father of a 20 year old murdered in a terror attack as a case of “mistaken identity.”  The terrorists were gunning for Jews, and the victim was Christian.  In 2006, there were deadly riots worldwide over cartoons that depicted the prophet Mohammed.  The rioters were not Hindus, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, or anyone else—but Muslims who called the cartoons blasphemous; that is, Muslims, not Jews or Hindus, have made this a religious fight.  More frightening, the rioters were not Al Qaeda; neither were the Deganga pogromists.  They were just Muslims.  Draw what conclusions you may, but the religious component injected by Muslims is a fact.

The Deganga riots might appear to be a blip on the radar screen of life in India; but they are far more than that.

7 Hizbut Tawhid activists held

Dhaka ( bangladesh) Police arrested seven activists of Islamist outfit Hizbut Tawhid including four women and seized around 200 books, CDs and leaflets from Budhpara area in Rajshahi city on Sunday. Read more

Islamization of Northeast India no Coincidence

On February 15, 2010, I sat in a cab while it made its way through a traffic-clogged Kolkata to the office of Bimal Pramanik director of the Kolkata-based Centre for Research in Indo-Bangladesh Relations. Pramanik expressed serious concerns about the decades-long pattern of demographic changes in West Bengal (and Assam), and we discussed the context in which we can better understand them. Amitabh Tripathi, founder of the South Asia forum and a tireless activist in the fight against radical Islam, arranged the meeting and was a key participant in it. Read more

Why Would Anyone Want to Blow Up Times Square?

When news comes of Muslims engaging in violence, the triad of politicians, law enforcement, and media invariably presumes that the perpetrator suffers from some mental or emotional incapacity. (For a quick listing of examples, see my collection at “Sudden Jihad or ‘Inordinate Stress’ at Ft. Hood?”). Read more

Practical Jewish-Hindu Cooperation

On Sunday, April 25, 2010, there was a large rally held in front of the Israeli embassy in New York. Its purpose was to show support for the State of Israel and protest the current US administration’s policies that demonize the Jewish State. The day before, I was among three recipients of the Vishwa Hindu Ratna award at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago. The rally, organized largely by Jewish groups, was notable for the significant presence of Hindu and Sikh groups. The award was given to me, a Jew, for my principled and ongoing defense of Hindus, especially in Bangladesh. Participants at both events recognize that radical Islam and its passive tolerance threaten the very existence of Jews and Hindus respectively. (And for the record, all of us are Americans, too, another favorite target of Islamists.) Read more

Buying the peace on higher cost

“Peace” has always been a beautiful and highly romanticized word humanity ever invented but no period of time in history passed without a war the more long period without war more devastating the war have been.  Since last one century word “peace” has been used as many times as now it has lost its meaning.  Modern European history which has been more or less interpret rated as history of the modern world is full of wars but students of history always hope for a peaceful world in their generation where there would be no war. The whole world looks in one direction and works for one aim that how permanent peace could be achieved but what is the reason that peace has always been a distant dream and not reality. The biggest reason which I see is very much different what others perceive and that reason is that over emphasis on peace is always a wrong goal to achieve because once you told others that you want to establish peace it implied to others that you are ready to achieve this goal at any cost. Once any individual, group or nation commits itself for peace onus goes on his side to establish peace at any cost and it gives breathing space for other rivals who are not interested in peace and they use this humanistic and romanticized view as their major weapon to intimidate and blackmail. Rather than peace word must have been used “Justice”. Justice is a phenomenon which is always relative to circumstances and self conscience. Read more

Why this silence on organised anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh?

Reports began trickling out of Bangladesh this spring about an anti-Hindu violence in the heart of its capital carried out in three stages: March 30, April 17, and April 29. A community of approximately 400 Hindus was reportedly going about its business when “hundreds of Muslims” suddenly descended on them and demanded they quit the homes where they and their families had lived for the past 150 years. Witnesses also report that police watched passively while attackers beat residents and destroyed a Hindu temple. Read more

The Limits of Terrorism

Does terrorism work, meaning, does it achieve its perpetrators’ objectives?

With terror attacks having become a routine and nearly daily occurrence, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the conventional wisdom holds that terrorism works very well. For example, the late Ehud Sprinzak of the Hebrew University ascribed the prevalence of suicide terrorism to its “gruesome effectiveness.” Robert Pape of the University of Chicago argues that suicide terrorism is growing “because terrorists have learned that it pays.” Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz titled one of his books Why Terrorism Works.

But Max Abrahms, a fellow at Stanford University, disputes this conclusion, noting that they focus narrowly on the well-known but rare terrorist victories – while ignoring the much broader, if more obscure, pattern of terrorism’s failures. To remedy this deficiency, Abrahms took a close look at each of the 28 terrorist groups so designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001 and tallied how many of them achieved its objectives.

His study, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” finds that those 28 groups had 42 different political goals and that they achieved only 3 of those goals, for a measly 7 percent success rate. Those three victories would be: (1) Hezbollah’s success at expelling the multinational peacekeepers from Lebanon in 1984, (2) Hezbollah’s success at driving Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 1985 and 2000, and (3) the Tamil Tiger’s partial success at winning control over areas of Sri Lanka after 1990.

That’s it. The other 26 groups, from the Abu Nidal Organization and Al-Qaeda and Hamas to Aum Shinriko and Kach and the Shining Path, occasionally achieved limited success but mostly failed completely. Abrahms draws three policy implications from the data.

Guerrilla groups that mainly attack military targets succeed more often than terrorist groups that mainly attack civilian targets. (Terrorists got lucky in the Madrid attack of 2004.)
Terrorists find it “extremely difficult to transform or annihilate a country’s political system”; those with limited objectives (such as acquiring territory) do better than those with maximalist objectives (such as seeking regime change).
Not only is terrorism “an ineffective instrument of coercion, but … its poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself.” This lack of success should “ultimately dissuade potential jihadists” from blowing up civilians.
This final implication, of frequent failure leading to demoralization, suggests an eventual reduction of terrorism in favor of less violent tactics. Indeed, signs of change are already apparent.

 

 
At the elite level, for example the former jihad theorist, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (a.k.a. Dr. Fadl), now denounces violence: “We are prohibited from committing aggression,” he writes, “even if the enemies of Islam do that.”

On the popular level, the Pew Research Center’s 2005 Global Attitudes Project found that “support for suicide bombings and other terrorist acts has fallen in most Muslim-majority nations surveyed” and “so too has confidence in Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.” Likewise, a 2007 Program on International Policy Attitudes study found that “Large majorities in all countries oppose attacks against civilians for political purposes and see them as contrary to Islam. … Most respondents … believe that politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, cannot be justified.”

On the practical level, terrorist groups are evolving. Several of them – specifically in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria – have dropped violence and now work within the political system. Others have taken on non-violent functions – Hezbollah delivers medical services and Hamas won an election. If Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden represent Islamism’s first iteration, Hezbollah and Hamas represent a transitional stage, and Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, arguably the world’s most influential Islamist, shows the benefits of going legitimate.

But if going the political route works so well, why does Islamist violence continue and even expand? Because they are not always practical. Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group explains: “Engaged in a divine struggle, jihadists measure success not by tangible victories in this life but by God’s eternal benediction and by rewards received in the hereafter.”

In the long term, however, Islamists will likely recognize the limits of violence and increasingly pursue their repugnant goals through legitimate ways. Radical Islam’s best chance to defeat us lies not in bombings and beheadings but in classrooms, law courts, computer games, television studios, and electoral campaigns.

We are on notice.

War on Terror and has turned into war between Obama and Osama

Since new president Barak Obama has took reigns in United States few things has changed. One of them is the security atmosphere in South Asian region as well as priorities of new administration of Oval office in this region. Last week when president of United States Barak Obama announced his new policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan which has also been  called Af-pak policy it was first chance to judge the diplomatic competence of this young charismatic president of United States.

I want to remind readers that I was one of the rarest of rare in India to predict that policies of Barak Obama will not be helpful for India. My prediction was based on a reason that Barak Obama has some different design in his mind as for as south Asian region is concerned and this design is based on the regional solution. Although president George W Bush has done not any favor to India in its fight against cross border terrorism but he filled all the dots of local Islamic separatist groups in one global jihadi ambition but Barak Obama is going to deal the situation of Islamic terrorism not merely as an ideology but according to local geo-political realities. To some extent from theoretical point of view it seems very lustrous but its consequences are different. Read more

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