Gaza Strip Now Hamastan – The Greater of Two Evils
June 16, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The Fatah terrorist group was, from its inception, no more than a large conglomerate of street gang thugs with leaders full of corruption and graft which never really induced a spirit of patriotic fervor at their core. It was always on the take almost as if to blackmail the West to keep the peace. To the general Palestinian population, Fatah consisted of street thugs parading in uniform, with their hands in the till of foreign aid flowing in from The West. There was never a remote possibility that Fatah could ever be a legitimate peace partner in any peace process. They did not even have control over their own splinter groups, let alone Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which is the primary reason Yasser Arafat did not want to sign a final peace arrangement with Israel, he knew he was unable to control the other terrorist groups.
The Hamas terrorists were more dedicated to their cause, no matter how misdirected it was – They were better organized and trained by Syrian and Iranian in-country training camps. The corruption and graft was much less in their structural complex than what existed in the Fatah organization.
The following article was extracted from the Jerusalem Center for Public Information – Daily Alert, and the second from DEBKAfile.
Article 1
Hamastan
Barry Rubin
Wall Street Journal
June 15, 2007
With the seizure of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, a new Islamist state is being established and it doesn’t bode well for the West or regional stability.
Since the peace process began in 1993 with the Oslo Accords, the Fatah leadership made hardly a single effort to move Palestinian society toward peace and moderation. Fatah did have an attractive alternative it could have offered: We will get a state, return the refugees to live in it, develop our economy and culture and enjoy large-scale international aid in exchange for ending the conflict.
Instead it continued to glorify violence, spread hatred of Israel and America, and raise a new generation with a belief in eventual “total” victory and the extinction of Israel.
Unwilling to make peace and uninterested in governing well, Fatah dug its own grave. Why should anyone be surprised that Hamas replaced it?
Let’s get this straight: There is no near-term solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
There is no Palestinian side with which a compromise agreement can be negotiated.
Western and especially U.S. policy must get beyond an obsession with solving this conflict.
It is going to go on for decades.
Hamas will not be persuaded to moderate – why should it when it expects victory at home and appeasement from Europe? Hamas is the enemy, just as much as al-Qaeda, because it is part of the radical Islamist effort to seize control of the region, overthrow anything even vaguely moderate, and expel
any Western influence.
It is time to support Israel proudly and fully. Israel has done everything possible for peace, taking great risks to do so.
The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center.
Begin Article 2 – DEBKAfile Article
DEBKAfile Exclusive: Hamas – and its Syrian and Iranian sponsors – capture priceless Palestinian Authority intelligence archives in Gaza putsch
June 15, 2007, 8:48 PM (GMT+02:00)
The Fatah-led general intelligence and security services caved in too fast to shred, wipe or burn documents, computer disks and archives. The entire collection fell into Hamas’ hands when they seized Palestinian Preventive Intelligence HQ at Tel Awa (henceforth Tel al-Islam) and the Palestinian General Intelligence center near Gaza port.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources say: Never before has a bonanza of Western intelligence secrets on this scale ever reached an implacably hostile Islamist terrorist gang. The US, British and Israeli intelligence services may have suffered their greatest debacle in the war on Islamist terror. It will take them many years to recover.
Hamas has taken possession of hundreds of thousands of documents cataloguing the clandestine operations of Western intelligence services in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates. It is now the owner of complete archives of Palestinian undercover links with foreign intelligence services going back decades, with names of spies, political collaborators and double agents. The documentation covers the secret ties Palestinian intelligence maintained from the 1970s, when Yasser Arafat was based in Lebanon, with the Americans, the British, the French, the Israelis and many others.
Most intelligence experts say Israel should have bombed the two buildings and destroyed their contents rather than letting them fall into the hands of an organization and country dedicated to its eclipse.
For Hamas, this booty is priceless – and not only as the repository of bombs for planting under Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts.
The Palestinian group’s Syrian and Iranian sponsors will pay a king’s ransom for this unique collection of explosive secrets hidden by many a Western intelligence agency and government.
Damascus and Tehran will be hugely empowered with the means to stay a jump ahead of American moves in the region and tools to sabotage US policies at any time. They will have a store of national secrets and compromising information to hold over the heads of Western leaders and officials, lists of undercover agents, and records of covert operations carried out by the Israeli Mossad, Shin Bet and Military Intelligence, CIA, British MI6 and other Western agencies. Iran, Syria and Hamas will know the names of politicians, including Israelis, who worked secretly with Palestinians and their shady deals.
One intelligence expert said that the Gaza hoard left in enemy hands by Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan are the crown jewels compared with the Saddam Hussein’ s intelligence archive
s.
In the Palestinian security service building, Hamas found computer hard disks covering years of undercover activity and a complete set of sophisticated wiretapping and surveillance equipment and sensors which the CIA and MI6 gave Mahmoud Abbas and his forces. It was all in perfect condition ready to switch on.
After the Nazi regime was defeated at the end of World War II and Eastern Germany fell in the 1990s, there were officials willing to make a desperate effort to destroy or hide their intelligence treasure. Palestinian intelligence officers did not burn a single page.
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