We are all capable,” the writer George Orwell once warned, “of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts to show that we were right.” But, he added, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against a solid reality” – and “usually on a battlefield.” Orwell’s warning is certainly applicable on the battlefield of the Israel-Islamist conflict, where mistaken assumptions are often uncritically heralded as truths.
Sean Durns..
Opinion/JPost..
13 May '19..
Link:
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/How-moderate-and-secular-is-Fatah-589608
We are all capable,” the writer George Orwell once warned, “of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts to show that we were right.”
But, he added, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against a solid reality” – and “usually on a battlefield.”
Orwell’s warning is certainly applicable on the battlefield of the Israel-Islamist conflict, where mistaken assumptions are often uncritically heralded as truths.
One such belief – championed by press and pundits alike – is that Fatah, the movement that dominates the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization, is both “moderate” and “secular.”
Evidence, however, suggests otherwise.
To be sure, Fatah is both more moderate and secular than its Gaza-based competitors like Hamas – a Muslim Brotherhood derivative – or Iranian proxies like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees. But make no mistake: Fatah is neither moderate nor particularly secular, as those terms are often understood. The group’s history makes this clear.
Fatah was formed 60 years ago this October, when 20 or so men gathered in a Kuwaiti home. They chose the name Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya (Palestinian Liberation Movement), whose acronym reversed spells Fatah – meaning “conquest.”
The movement had a decidedly immoderate objective: the destruction of the Jewish nation of Israel.
Yasser Arafat, Fatah’s leader for the next 45 years, proved adept at making broad statements that wouldn’t alienate potential followers.
As Arafat explained, “We do not have any ideology – our goal is the liberation of our fatherland by any means necessary.” As for the means, Arafat exhorted: “It is the commandos who will decide the future” of the Palestinian movement.
Indeed, not only did Fatah embrace terrorism, its dehumanizing rhetoric and depiction of the Jewish state as an illegitimate “other” practically demanded that it do so. Israel, Arafat said, was “an embodiment of neo-Nazism... intellectual terrorism and racial exploitation.”
As Arafat said in a March 29, 1970, interview with The Washington Post, “The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromise.”
ACCORDINGLY, throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, Fatah carried out numerous terrorist attacks that targeted Israeli civilians. The group fed regional instability by carrying out assaults from Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, with varying levels of support from those governments. Many of the attacks were planned by Khalil al-Wazir, a top Arafat aide who went by the nom de guerre Abu Jihad (“father of jihad”).
On March 1, 1973, Fatah operatives carried out an attack in Khartoum, Sudan, murdering an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission.
Although the terrorists identified themselves not as Fatah but as Black September, communications intercepted by the US National Security Agency led the CIA to conclude that “the operation was carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval” of Fatah head Yasser Arafat.
But some persisted in seeing moderation – despite evidence to the contrary. As the journalist Ronen Bergman recounts in Rise and Kill First – his history of Israel’s intelligence agencies – even after Khartoum, CIA officials wined and dined Ali Hassan Salameh, who was head of Fatah’s Force 17, its counterintelligence unit and Arafat’s bodyguards.
The CIA even gave Salameh a custom leather holster for his pistol and helped organize the terrorist’s honeymoon in Hawaii and Disneyland, in which a “senior official escorted the couple wherever they went, including on all the rides in the California theme park.”
Among Force 17’s star operatives was Imad Mughniyah, who would later join Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah.
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