Abbas Accuses al Qaeda of Supporting Hamas

Forget the fact that Abbas didn't provide any actual evidence of such a claim. That didn't stop him from pulling out the west's bogeyman in an attempt to link them to Hamas. I guess it wasn't enough for the Bush administration to blame Iran. Now they've decided to try and up the ante, using Abbas as their spokespuppet, in an attempt to further demonize Hamas and to justify their interference in Palestinian politics.

In an interview on Monday with the RAI television network of Italy, Mr. Abbas said, “Thanks to the support of Hamas, Al Qaeda is entering Gaza.”
[...]
A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said today that Hamas has “no links” to Al Qaeda and that Mr. Abbas “is trying to mislead international opinion to win support for his demand to deploy international forces in Gaza.”

Hamas has always tried to distance itself from Al Qaeda and that group’s agenda of global jihad, saying that Hamas’s own struggle is confined to the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

Because that's what it is confined to.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza keeps getting worse with the west and Israel funding Abbas in the West Bank while Gazans suffer. And on Monday, the UN suspended all of its construction projects in Gaza "citing a concrete shortage it said was caused by Israeli closures of a border crossing".

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) funds scores of building projects in the largely impoverished Gaza Strip. It buys its materials from Israeli housing companies and hires mostly Palestinian contractors.

"Some 93 million dollars worth of projects are on hold because cement and other building supplies have run out," said John Ging, UNRWA's director in Gaza, citing the crossing closure.

Christopher Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said some concrete was transferred from Israel to Gaza in recent weeks but it was not enough. The suspension of the projects would affect thousands of Palestinians, he and Ging said.

That can only further exasperate the situation. Gunness said there was "a risk of a public health disaster" if the facilities UNRWA had been funding were not maintained.

So, while Abbas is busy doing Bush's work - using the threat of al Qaeda to call for an international force in Gaza which Hamas would only view as being "hostile" - the crisis is at a standstill.

Next week, the Do-Nothing Imperialist Duo - Rice and Blair - are scheduled to make an appearance in the ME to...do nothing again. Meanwhile, Olmert cancelled a meeting he was due to have this week with two members of the Arab League citing scheduling conflicts (no doubt deciding to wait until the imperialists give him his marching orders first).

Just how long will this crisis go on while ordinary Palestinians continue to suffer as politicians refuse to budge and up the rhetoric in an attempt to escalate an already very fragile reality?
 

When the bad guys are the good guys...

It's incidents like this that make absolutists' heads explode.

The extremists (Hamas) got the extremer extremists (the Army of Islam) to free Alan Johnston:

The release of BBC reporter Alan Johnston on Wednesday drew rare praise from the British government for militant Islamist group Hamas, just hours after the veteran correspondent was freed from nearly four months in captivity in Gaza.
[...]
on Wednesday, Britain's new foreign secretary highlighted Hamas's role in securing the release of Johnston, who had marked his 45th birthday in captivity.

"The release of Alan is the product of very close work between the government, the BBC and the leadership in the region," David Miliband said Wednesday.
[...]
"I'd also like to recognize the priority that has been given to this issue by President Abbas and also by the leadership of Hamas, including Ismail Haniyeh."

During his press conference alongside Haniyeh, Johnston praised Hamas for winning his freedom.

"If it hadn't been for that real serious Hamas pressure, that commitment to tidying up Gaza's many, many security problems, then I might have been in that room for a lot longer," he told reporters.

For Hamas however, this "propaganda victory", as it's being called, along with pleas to Abbas "for reconciliation" are being met by deaf ears. Now that Abbas is fully and openly supported by the west (ie. his marching orders are clear), he's loathe to compromise on anything that might jeopardize that stature.

And just a side note aimed at those who don't believe in the power of protests:

Mr Johnston said he was aware of efforts to free him because he had constant access to the BBC World Service on the radio.

News of global demonstrations in his support was a source of comfort to him, he said.

Rallies worldwide had called for Mr Johnston's release. An online petition was signed by some 200,000 people.

He thanked colleagues, international media and ordinary people for organising "the most extraordinary international campaign" for his release.

"The thing you don't want is to be left behind, buried alive, and have the world go on around you," he said.

Your voice does matter. Make it heard.
 

Quote du Jour: IDF Forces Kill a 12 Year Old Palestinian Boy

Via Reuters:

A 12-year-old lay in the street, his arms twisted at odd angles, near a house in a Gaza City neighborhood where residents and medical workers said a shell fired by an Israeli tank exploded.

He was pronounced dead in a hospital along with two men, their bodies shredded by shrapnel. Residents said the men were civilians.

A military spokesman in Tel Aviv said a tank shell fired in Gaza City's Shejaia neighborhood was aimed at a gunman, and he had no information about a house being hit. [Oh, they just never do, do they? -catnip] Residents said tanks in the area later withdrew towards the Israeli frontier.

Two Israeli soldiers were wounded by an anti-tank missile during operations that Israel's deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, described as "preventive measures" [pre-emptive strike, anyone? -catnip] to foil rocket attacks from Gaza.

And Abbas, who is now being funded by not only the US and Egypt, but by the Israeli government as well, released this canned statement:

Commenting on the raid, Abbas told reporters: "We strongly condemn these criminal acts, either in Gaza or the West Bank. We are against violence in all its forms and also we are against launching rockets (at Israel)."

And what about the fact that the IDF just killed 12 of your people, Abbas, including a 12 year old boy? Or is that just too sensitive for you to comment about now?
 

This is Just So Wrong

Via The Guardian:

Tony Blair has landed a major diplomatic job as the international Middle East peace envoy, responsible for preparing the Palestinians for negotiations with Israel. His role, to be announced today, will be largely to work with the Palestinians over security, economy and governance.

Working from an office in Jerusalem, and possibly another in the West Bank, Mr Blair will become the special representative for the Middle East quartet of UN, EU, US and Russia. The announcement comes on the eve of his departure from Downing Street tomorrow and is privately welcomed by Gordon Brown.
[...]
The idea of Mr Blair doing this job is understood to have originated with the prime minister himself in conversation with George Bush, who then suggested it to the UN. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is said to be a keen supporter and Washington was reported last night to have mounted "an enormous push" to ensure Mr Blair got the post.

A man who lied his country into war with Iraq is thought to have enough integrity and dignity for such a post?

It was being stressed last night that Mr Blair's role - in the short term at least - would not be to act as a mediator between the Palestinians and the Israelis, or to become a negotiator for the road map to peace. He might, however, be responsible for trying to persuade the Palestinians to accept the conditions for ending the international boycott of Hamas. The now defunct Hamas government has not received any international aid since its election in March 2006, although aid has been sent directly to the poorest Palestinians through a temporary international mechanism.

The quartet says aid can only be conditional on the Palestinians accepting the right of Israel to exist and giving a commitment to exclusively peaceful means and to abide by all previous agreements.

Well, that all sounds quite lofty and simple but Charley Reese offers a realistic perspective on what life is like for the Palestinians while politicians pontificate:

Alas, President Bush discovered that he didn't like democracy after all. In his mind, democracy is only good if the election produces the results he wants it to produce. He immediately cut off aid and contact to the Palestinians, boycotted them and began a campaign to get other countries to withhold aid. These actions only harmed innocent Palestinian people. Since Hamas officials, unlike Fatah, were not in the habit of squandering public money on personal luxuries, the only people deprived by Bush's actions were ordinary people.

Now the president is pretending that the Fatah gunmen, whom he has been arming, were just sitting peacefully in the shade recently, trying their hand at knitting or crocheting, when all of the sudden those bad Hamas guys came up and started shooting. Regardless of Bush's lies, the truth is that Hamas fought back in self-defense. Between Fatah's gunmen and Israeli assassins, the Hamas guys must have felt like targets in a shooting gallery.

The Gaza Strip is a hellhole. It's a small patch of land, 41 kilometers long and about 6 to 12 kilometers wide. Its 360 square kilometers are crammed with 1.4 million Palestinians, about 1 million of them refugees from Israel's earlier wars. Unemployment is over 50 percent, and the poverty level is 60 percent. Nearly 18 percent of all children there suffer from malnutrition.

Israel controls its water supply and its air and land routes, and subjects its people to frequent closures, not to mention military attacks. It's true that some members of Hamas have resorted to terrorist acts, but the ratio of Israelis killed by Palestinians is small in comparison with Palestinians killed by Israelis. In the year 2006, according to B'Tselem, a respected Israeli human-rights organization, 660 Palestinians, including 141 children, were killed by Israelis, while only 23 Israelis were killed.

Try to visualize, if you can, 141 children. That's about the population of four average classrooms. Now visualize a heap of dead children. Those shot in the head are probably not recognizable, but you can see the bullet holes in the young, tender bodies of the others. If you can visualize this, then maybe you will get an inkling of the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israelis.

Blair will certainly not be rattling the Israeli government's cage, so how can anyone expect that he will advance anything - let alone peace? And the more western governments divide and punish the Palestinian people by backing Abbas, the worse the situation will become.

There are no easy solutions and Palestine is not Northern Ireland. Blair lacks international credibility to be considered an impartial diplomat in this situation. Once again, he'll get his marching orders from Washington and Israel - from people who deliberately put the road map on hold and who chose to fund Abbas in an attempted military solution (ie. coup) thinking somehow that more violence is the answer. As with Iraq however, they're just creating more resistance in the Palestinian territories. Blowback - the thing they never plan for.

Related: Olmert promises to release 250 Fatah prisoners

Shalit's father: If Hamas wants talks, Israel must make deal

With friends like these...:

It is difficult to think of an American president who has caused more damage to Israeli interests than the president who is considered one of the friendliest to Israel of all time. No leader has done more than Bush - by commission as well as omission - to destroy the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.