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Thursday, February 28, 2008

UN envoy calls Qassams "terrorism"; Abbas proud of Fatah terror

Yesterday, UN envoy Robert Serry gave a report to the UN Security Council. As can be expected, most of the report was more of the same - blaming Israel for how it is dealing with Gaza, blaming settlements for creating a humanitarian crisis (not quite sure how that works), claiming that Israel has not removed any outposts (um, remember Amona? Neve Daniel North? Tapuach West?) and similar naive statements.

As usual, he has no real idea about what Israel should do, only what it should not do:
A different and more positive strategy for Gaza was a humanitarian, security and strategic imperative, for Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.
Any idea what this strategy should be? Well, nothing that can possibly involve the remotest possibility of hurting civilians, of course, so possibly he is calling for Israel to move from "condemning" Qassam attacks into "deploring" them. Perhaps providing them with more potassium nitrate so they can fertilize their crops.

Buried in his speech, however, is something that I have never seen the UN say before:
His visit to Sderot, which had been the target of over 4,300 rockets since 2004, had brought out the physical and psychological damage to the population. Those crude rockets were aimed at hurting civilians and clearly constituted terrorism. Their continued firing was completely unacceptable and must be halted unconditionally.
The "T word" is hardly used even in the Western media to describe Qassams, with sickening words like "resistance" used far more often. The fact that the reliably anti-Israel UN classifies rocket attacks as terrorism needs to be publicized and the Arab terrorists and their friends need to be forced to respond, so that the world can see their sickening "logic" for what it is.

I, for one, would love to see if Mahmoud Abbas would agree with that characterization - unlikely given his statements yesterday:
"I had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965 and of being the one who taught resistance to many in the region and around the world; what it's like; when it is effective and when it isn't effective; its uses, and what serious, authentic and influential resistance is," Abbas said.

"It is common knowledge when and how resistance is detrimental and when it is well timed," he addad. "We (Fatah) had the honor of leading the resistance and we taught resistance to everyone, including Hizbullah, who trained in our military camps."

Let's ask Abbas what his distinction is between effective terrorism and ineffective terrorism, whether he has any moral rather than tactical problems with suicide bombings, and whether he is still proud over the early PLO airplane hijackings and mass murders.

This is what reporters should be doing.