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| Official "moderate" Fatah logo, complete with weapons, hand grenade and map of all of Israel |
Fatah is planning to hold its Seventh Congress sometime next month.
These rare meetings are very important because Fatah is what dominates the PLO, which the Palestinian Authority answers to. So who controls Fatah controls the Palestinians.
During the Sixth Congress in 2009, Mahmoud Abbas violated all rules of transparency to hold onto power and marginalize any Fatah groups - like the Mahmoud Dahlan faction, the Marwan Barghouti followers, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - that disagreed with him. There was corruption in the voting process to ensure that Abbas loyalists would win.
Moreover, the final platform released by the "moderate" Abbas-dominated party still supports terror. and the destruction of Israel ("liberation of the homeland.")
The Seventh Congress already has been pushed back more than a year. Even so, Abbas is moving to consolidate his hold on the movement.
From Ma'an:
The Palestinian Authority's (PA) preventive security service arrested former spokesperson for the Jerusalem office of the Fatah movement on Tuesday night, shortly after he gave a televised interview commenting on his removal from office days earlier.The Fatah members who are being marginalized are generally more militant than Abbas and are just as unlikely to be interested in genuine peace as Abbas is. This is one reason why the West ignores his dictatorship, and pretends that there is some sort of democracy under the PA. And it is also why the West ignores the pro-terror messages from Abbas' official Fatah media.
Raafat Elayyan was arrested in his home in the village of Anata in the Jerusalem district of the occupied West Bank.
He was the second Fatah official to be removed from office over participation in a meeting attended by hundreds of local Fatah leaders on Saturday, which was dispersed by Palestinian security forces.
Former senior Fatah leader and lawmaker Jihad Tummaleh, who was also dismissed following the meeting, said on his Facebook page that the meeting was held to discuss "Fatah unity and awakening."
Anonymous Fatah sources at the time said that the meeting was considered “illegal” and that its participants were accused of “delinquency” by Fatah’s Anti-Delinquency Committee.He said there were also internal disputes over the membership of the upcoming seventh congress, expected to be held in November, and over the movement's strategies and priorities regarding international and local relations. "The Fatah movement has reached a point of unclear vision on how to manage relations with Hamas and Israel," Elayyan said.
Amid growing dissent within Fatah, the PA has come under fire for cracking down on Palestinians for criticizing the government, while the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) found in a 2016 poll that at least 64 percent of the Palestinian public are in favor of the resignation of Abbas.
It doesn't take much digging to see the corruption that Abbas is responsible for. It is a continuation of Arafat's corruption and two-faced nature, but without Arafat's charisma.