Aksa Brigades Call for Murder of Palestinian PM
The al Aksa Martyr Brigades put out a leaflet advocating the assassination of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad.
Fatah’s armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, on Sunday called for the murder of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad for “collaboration” with Israel and the US. This was the first time the group has openly called for Fayad’s assassination. In the past, the group distributed leaflets strongly condemning Fayad and calling for his dismissal.
Fayad has been under heavy criticism from some Fatah leaders and activists, who accuse him of denying them public funds and plotting to undermine Fatah’s grip on power. Other Fatah leaders have also accused Fayad of seeking to consolidate his power with the hope of replacing Mahmoud Abbas as PA president.
The threat was made in a leaflet distributed by the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the Gaza Strip. Some Fatah officials in Ramallah sought to distance themselves from the threat, claiming that the leaflet had been forged. They even went as far as accusing Hamas of being behind it.
“The command of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the Gaza Strip calls on all its elements and striking forces in the West Bank to immediately eliminate the so-called Salaam Fayad,” the leaflet said. It claimed that Fayad’s Ramallah-based government was working for Israel and the US.
Lovely. This demonstration further illustrates that the Palestinians aren’t ready for self-government and thereby undermines the Aksa Martyrs Brigades’ putative objective. But the old adage “the perfect is the enemey of the good” is never more apt than in the case of the Palestinian radicals, who see anything less than the annihilation of Israel and the having every square inch of the 1948 territory under Palestinian rule as surrender.
I was just about to email you about that correction. 😉
Is it meaningfully different than, say, Ann Coulter saying “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee”?
I’m not sure how it’s meaningfully comparable, to be honest.
???
One person advocates assassination of a government official and the other… advocates assassination of a government official.
You don’t see any comparison there?
But the other is a Palestinian terrorist group, not me. The quote is a non sequitur.
I’m not following your argument here, Mr. Joyner.
Are you saying that because the al Aksa Martyr Brigades is “a Palestinian terror group” that their threat is more likely to be acted upon? If so I agree, but I don’t see how that changes the fundamental situation.
There are enough hard right whack jobs in this country who are just as willing to murder (the Oklahoma City bombing leaps to mind).
That still doesn’t have anything to do with the Coulter comparison…
As to “There are enough hard right whack jobs in this country who are just as willing to murder (the Oklahoma City bombing leaps to mind),” that strikes me as ridiculously disingenious. Yes, we have nut jobs. No, they’re not the dominant — or even a dominant — actor in US politics. By contrast, terrorism has been at the heart of Palestinian politics for decades.
We must be talking past each other because I can’t make any sense of your statement.
Well let’s talk about where the rubber meets the road. Accoring to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Martyrs'_Brigades#Activities
Al-Aqsa has had four “notable attacks” with a grand total of 54 deaths. Even assuming that is only a fraction of their total carnage, McVeigh killed nearly 200 and injured another 800.
When the entire Al-Aqsa brigade is overshadowed by one rightwing american nutjob I think it might be time to re-evaluate which country has had terrorism as a dominat factor (and notice that isn’t even mentioning things like the abortion clinic bombings, targetted assassinations of pediatricians, hate crimes agains gays/blacks/jews, et cetera).
See my point?
You have a group in a country advocating violence against a governmental figure. this statement is made to a population with a long established history of extra-judicial violence.
Now explain to me how the above statement isn’t applicable to both Coulter and the Al-Aqsa.
Palestinian leadership has been, since the 1940s, been coterminous with various terrorist groups. Terrorists play an integral part in the Palestinian polity. That shows no sign of abatement despite a decade of quasi-autonomy.
Timothy McVeigh, meanwhile, was merely a criminal who was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. His influence on American politics was essentially nil.
Well, I guess I just see it differently.
The Palestinian leadership is associated with a lot of groups who talk big and do very little. Terrorism against Israel is pretty consistently blow entirely out of proportion (consider that by third party accounts the Israelis have always killed far more civilians than the supposed hordes of arab terrorists which are generally believed to be besieging them).
On the other hand there has been a pretty consistent low grade terrorist push by the right in this country (particularly two groups- the militia movement which seems now to have adopted the anti-immigration cause ala the minutemen, and the fundamentalist “christianists”). While they are never, inexplicably, given much press as they keep on killing.
An analysis of domestic US terrorist groups reveals that over half are “Christian Identity” white supremacist groups. But instead of dealing with these murdering scum we have the FBI targetting the ELF/ALF who are guilty of only property damage.
Seem strange? Surely the priorities of the government couldn’t have anything to do with it, right? I mean we know our Department of Justice is immune to political pressure, right? Well…
So what do you have? You have a nation with a low level of terrorism that is blown entirely out of proportion and another country (that’s us) with low level terrorism which is ignored because it is politically expedient.
Even leaving aside the fact that I live here and am about a million times more likely to be killed or widowed by some douchebag calling himself christian than muslim, I find the case of terrorism that gets universally ignored a tad more concerning.