HRW: Child suicide attacks 'must stop'

An international human rights group has called on Palestinian militants to stop using children in suicide bombings and military attacks.

Human Rights Watch made the call after a 16-year-old bomber blew himself up in a Tel Aviv marketplace on Monday, killing three Israeli civilians.

The New York-based group claimed at least 10 bombers aged under 18 have attacked Israel in the past four years.

The group behind Monday's attack has said it does not recruit children.

'Any attack on civilians is prohibited by international law, but using children for suicide attacks is particularly egregious,' said Jo Becker, advocacy director for children's rights at Human Rights Watch.

'Palestinian armed groups must clearly and publicly condemn all use of children under the age of 18 for military activities, and make sure these policies are carried out.'

A senior member of the political wing of the group behind the Tel Aviv attack, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, admitted to the BBC the group had made a mistake by recruiting 16-year-old Amer al-Fahr.

The organisation was looking at improving checks on applicants' ages, he added. (How any news organization, even the BBC, can write this sentence with a straight face is beyond me. - EoZ)

The other main Palestinian armed groups have also publicly disavowed the use of children in suicide attacks.

Yet the Human Rights Watch report claimed that the three most active militant groups - Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade - have all despatched under-age bombers during the four-year-old conflict with Israel.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade has been accused of sending four child bombers into Israel.

Three attacks by 17-year-olds were linked to Islamic Jihad, Human Rights Watch said.

Hamas and the PFLP have been linked to two attacks each, the group added.

Some senior militant figures have said they consider children of 16 as adults, the organisation said.

TEENAGE SUICIDE BOMBERS
Jan 2002: Safwat Rahman, 17
Mar 2002: Ayat al-Akhras, 17
May 2002: Issa Badir, 17
Jun 2002: Hamza Samudi, 17
Mar 2003: Sabih al-Saoud, 16
Aug 2003: Islam Qteishat, 17
Aug 2003: Khamais Gerwan, 17
January 2004: Iyad al-Masri, 17
Source: Human Rights Watch

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Arab News Op-Ed on Bush

Taheri is a good writer and I am pleasantly surprised that the Saudi Arab News published this. - EoZ
W2: But Who Is He?
Amir Taheri, Arab News

JEDDAH, 4 November 2004 — With President George W. Bush re-elected for a second term, the Middle East and the Muslim world beyond would do well to take a second look at the man who would lead the American “superpower” for four more years.

Who is George W. Bush? Is he a bumbling, low IQ rich kid, playing dummy for sinister ventriloquists? Or is he the populist demagogue in blue shirtsleeves out to sell the gullible Americans a bill of good?

If he is any of those things one must wonder how he has succeeded in persuading more than 50 million Americans to vote for him for a second time.

Is it not possible that he may be a traditional conviction politician of the kind that became endangered species after the cultural revolutions of the 1960s?

The first thing that we need to note is that Bush returns in a stronger position. He becomes the first candidate since 1988 to win the US presidency with a majority of the popular vote. He is also the fourth American president in more than half a century to win a second term. Also, he is the first US president since 1901 to enter a second term with his party in control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. He has won more votes than any president in all American history in an election that also saw the largest voters’ turnout ever in the US. This point merits attention because some people outside the US had assumed that Bush, having “stolen” the 2000 election, did not represent the American people.

Such assumptions enabled many people to present themselves as “anti-Bush” rather than plain anti-American. Now, however, it would not be easy to disguise anti-Americanism as anti-Bushism.

The second point to understand about Bush is that he is the first US president for half a century to be prepared to use American power, including military force, in a decisive way and, when necessary, regardless of what the global glitterati and the “international community” might think. The fact that he is able to do so is due to the 9/11 events that changed America forever.

Bush’s victory underlines another often overlooked fact.

The United States, far from being the hedonistic liberal society represented by Hollywood elite, is, in fact, a conservative traditional society. This enables Bush to assume a missionary posture that would be unthinkable in other democracies, especially in Europe.

Unlike European, and some American, politicians, who deal in shades of gray, Bush sees the world in black and white terms. When Bush says: You are either with us or against us, he really means it. He perceives of good and evil as physical realities, and not metaphysical abstractions, affecting the lives of both individuals and nations. French President Chirac likes to call Bush “a cowboy” while Japanese Premier Koizumi describes him as “Gary Cooper at High Noon”.

According to an old Arab saying a man is best known through his enemies rather than his friends. The logic of this is that a bad man might choose good friends. Well, here are some of Bush’s enemies: Mulla Omar, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and, oh yes, the speculator George Soros.

Some world leaders have tried to understand George W. Bush based on what they know of his father’s tenure as president. The older Bush, however, was a classical style balance of power player raised on a fare of Cold War politics. To him the highest call of politics was to defend and perpetuate the status quo. The younger Bush, on the other hand, is a change-maker, as evidenced in his domestic and foreign policies.

Love him or hate him, W will be around for four more years. And, unlike in his first term in which he was dogged by memories of the 2000 dispute in Florida and cast by his foes as a usurper, he is now the undoubted leader of his people.

In the past four years some countries and leaders adopted a waiting-it-out policy in the hope that Dubya will not get a second term. That policy is no longer a realistic option.

The Palestinians cannot wait four more years in the hope that George W. Bush’s successor will, once again, unroll the red carpet for Yasser Arafat to the White House. If they want to talk to Washington they have to come up with a new leadership.

The mullas cannot afford to wait four more years in the hope that Bush’s successor would swallow a nuclear-armed regime in Iran. Syria cannot ignore the latest Security Council resolution on Lebanon for four more years. Iraq’s enemies cannot hope to fight for four more years to prevent stabilization and demcoratization.

While the world must accommodate and work with W2, it is also important that George W. Bush, too, should review its policies and, above all, style, in the second term. Dubya could repeat Ronald Reagan’s experience who, despised by many in his first term, ended up by winning virtually everyone’s admiration in his final four years at the White House.

W2 would need to modify the needlessly abrasive style of sections of his administration. It needs to ruffle fewer fathers when there is no need to do so. Having shown that he is capable of waging war in military terms he now needs to also show that he can make more effective use of diplomacy, both official and public, and the magnetic pull of American culture and values. More urgently, Bush needs to explain the United States’ involvement in Iraq more convincingly to his own people. Many enemies of Iraq and the US have built their strategy on the hope that rising doubts about the necessity, not to say legitimacy, of the war might sap public support for the president’s ambitious dreams for a new Middle East.

The American people have decided to give George W. Bush the rare privilege of a second term. There is no reason why the rest of the world should not also do so.

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More Palestinians Watching TV

Don't they look like they live in squalor, poor and desperate circumstances forcing them to have to blow themselves up? - EoZ
Wed Nov 3, 4:05 PM ET
Palestinian men look at US presidential candidates Republican George W. Bush (L) and Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) on TV in the West Bank city of Hebron.(AFP/Hazem Bader)

Now, these guys are in a Lebanese refugee camp, where they haven't fought Israelis for years. But they have to keep their guns with them at all times, just in case! -EoZ
Thu Oct 28, 8:40 PM ET
Palestinian fighters watch news on Arafat at their post in the Ain el-Helweh Refugee camp in southern Lebanon.(AFP/Mahmoud Zayat)

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Blair wants Bush to pressure Israel

British Prime Minister Tony Blair devoted much of a brief speech congratulating President George W. Bush on his reelection Wednesday night to a call for a new coordinated effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Describing the need for such a solution as the 'single most pressing political challenge in our world today,' Blair urged the president to seek peace 'between Israel and Palestine' with the 'same energy' that he has pursued his agenda in Iraq. Blair placed this quest in the context of 'resolving the conditions and causes on which the terrorists prey.'

Blair's dramatic emphasis on the issue, and his pledge to work with Bush to advance it, underlined the British prime minister's desire to be seen as seeking a dramatic Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough in order to pacify the vast contingent of critics, inside and outside his own Labor party, of his firm alliance with Bush over the Iraq war.

And as we all know, devoting energy to I/P means pressuring Israel to keep giving Palestinians whatever they are asking for. -EoZ

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Palestinians kicking back, watching the tube

See? They're just like us - only with assault rifles! - EoZ

Wed Nov 3,10:31 AM ET
Palestinian gunmen watch a television news report on the US presidential elections at the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon.(AFP/Mahmoud Zayat)

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Does Arafat have AIDS?

(Paris) As French doctors continue to run tests on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat some medical authorities not connected directly to his case are suggesting that he may have HIV/AIDS.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath Monday said that all types of cancer had been ruled out.

Arafat has been visibly ill for more than two weeks. Last Wednesday he collapsed and briefly lost consciousness. Initial blood tests performed in the West Bank revealed a low blood platelet count. The Palestinian leader was airlifted to France where he is undergoing more tests.

But, with leukemia and other forms of cancer ruled out, the list of possible diseases is narrowing.

A low blood platelet count is a sign of a weakened immune system. In addition to cancer, the low count could be attributed to bleeding ulcers, colitis, liver disease, lupus, or HIV. It is believed that ulcers and colitis have already been ruled out.

Arafat has lost a considerable amount of body weight. Hopital d'Instruction des Armees de Percy, southwest of Paris, also has some of France's best HIV/AIDS doctors.

For several years there have been suggestions that Arafat was bisexual.
Ion Pacepa, who was deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence under the Ceaucescu regime and who defected to the West in 1978, says in his memoirs that the Romania government bugged Arafat and had recordings of the Arab leader in orgies with his body guards.

If the suggestions that Arafat has AIDS are true, it is doubtful it would be made public.

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Israel to offer $10 million for Ron Arad info

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed on Sunday morning that the Israeli government has decided to allow the offer a US$10 million reward for significant information on the fate of air force navigator, Ron Arad, who was shot down over Lebanon 18 years ago, Channel 2 TV reported Saturday.

The Israeli government agreed to offer the reward owing to the urgings of a special committee devoted to locating the missing navigator.

The committee, which was established two years ago, has been pressing the matter since its conception, but security forces objected until now, saying that such an initiative would interfere with other efforts to obtain information regarding the fate of Arad, Israel Radio reported.

According to Army Radio, the reward money would be funded in part by the government and in part by private contributions.

The station said the offer would be published worldwide on December 1.

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Major terror attacks thwarted

The Shin Bet security services and the Israel Defense Forces said yesterday they have in recent weeks arrested 16 Bethlehem residents who are suspected of having planned a series of large-scale terror attacks in Jerusalem.
The cells are said to have planned to dispatch two pairs of suicide bombers to the Mea She'arim neighborhood in the capital, and to carry out a terror attack using an explosive-laden ambulance. Also attributed to one of the cells is a plan to attack a bus carrying worshipers to Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem.

Based on details released by security forces yesterday, Hamas was meant to provide the suicide bombers for the missions, while Islamic Jihad was supposed to supply the explosive devices. Some of those arrested, including four teenage would-be suicide bombers, served in the Palestinian national security services. Among those arrested is Hamed Dar'awi, an active member in the PA's national security services, who is said to have been the planner of the ambulance attack.

The cells are said to have received instructions from Palestinian militant leaders in the Gaza Strip.

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Harvard prof: Palestinian suffering not Israel's fault

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse said on Friday that Israelis should not be blamed for the hardships of Palestinians in a talk that focused on a speech last week by pro-Palestinian activist and Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein. On-campus flyers advertising Epstein’s speech two weeks ago compared images of Jews in Nazi Germany to Palestinians at Israeli security check points.

The event was sponsored by Chabad at Stanford, in conjunction with the Jewish Law Students Association, Jewish Med Students Association, Jewish Business Association and Israel Peace Initiative.

“We felt a speech by Professor Wisse would be a constructive response to the events,” said Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of Chabad at Stanford.

Greenberg told The Daily that Wisse’s talk was not intended to directly refute Epstein’s, although in a press release about Wisse’s talk Greenberg said that “students are clearly outraged about Hedy Epstein’s remarks.”

While her audience ate Challah bread and drank champagne for the Kiddush, Wisse discussed the origins and effects of anti-Semitism. Her most pointed remarks related to the current political situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Of course the Palestinian people suffer — it is genuine, it is undeniable, they can’t advance; the Jews would love to cure that suffering, but it is not a problem that the Jews created, and it is not a problem that the Jews can solve,” she said. “The Jews want to do anything to accommodate at any price, but this will not solve the problem. We can not afford to do this, it does not help.”

One student asked Wisse about the extent of Israel’s mistakes in its treatment of Palestinians.

“Could we do it better? Of course, but the one thing we cannot bear is one who believes that we are responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians,” Wisse said. “People who believe this are lying, and that lie is disastrous for both Jews and Palestinians.”

Wisse placed blame instead on the Arab world and on Palestinian politics.

“Why have the Palestinians insisted on keeping refugees?” she asked. “The greatest scandal is that the Palestinians have allowed their people to remain refugees. This is not a creation of Israel, it is a creation of Arab rulers.”

Wisse said the Arab world continuously launches attacks against the Jews, who remain silent and want to be accepted. She said this attempt to “be nice” has led many Jews to willingly accept responsibility for the Palestinian suffering.

“Anyone who takes responsibility for something that they neither did nor can correct is adding to the sum of the evil. The Arab rulers are responsible for the Palestinian conflict and they have to resolve this problem.”

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The victims of the Tel Aviv bombing

The victims were identified as Shmuel Levy, 65, of Jaffa; Leah Levine, 64, of Givatayim; and Tatiana Ackerman, 32, of Tel Aviv. Shmuel Levy was laid to rest at 1 p.m. in the Yarkon cemetery. Leah Levine was buried at 2 p.m. in the Yarkon cemetery.

Fourteen of the wounded remain in Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital, six of them with serious injuries and the rest with moderate-to-light wounds, a hospital spokeswoman said.

In the Wolfson Hospital in Holon five people remain hospitalized with only one in moderate condition. The remaining four suffered light injuries.

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Suha Arafat's millions

If anything was guaranteed to annoy the Palestinians, it was a comment made by Yasser Arafat's wife after the birth of their daughter, Zahwa. As Suha Arafat proudly showed off the Palestinian leader's only child at the �1,100-a-night hospital in Paris in July 1995, she declared: 'Our child was conceived in Gaza, but sanitary conditions there are terrible. I don't want to be a hero and risk my baby.'

Her remarks highlighted the widening gulf between the Palestinian 'first lady' and her people - many of whom live on little more than �3 a day per family.

The spendthrift image of Mrs Arafat was further enhanced when French authorities launched an investigation into claims that $11.4 million (�6.22 million) had been transferred from Switzerland to two of her French bank accounts between July 2002 and 2003.

The sums were on top of an allowance of $100,000 (�54,500) which Mr Arafat, 75, sent his 40-year-old wife each month. Mrs Arafat and Palestinian representatives in Paris described the claims as Israeli propaganda.

Mrs Arafat, however, failed to deny the transactions outright in an interview with the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al-Hayat. 'Prime minister Ariel Sharon is responsible for this vicious leak,' she said. 'What's strange about the rais [president] sending money to his wife overseas, especially when I handle Palestinian matters and interests?'

Mrs Arafat was born in Jerusalem to a wealthy family. She spent her formative years in Nablus and Ramallah, where her Oxford-educated father was a banker. Her mother, Raymonda Tawil, an outspoken author, was frequently placed under house arrest by the Israeli authorities.

Mrs Arafat has always had strong connections with the French capital and spent much of her youth in Paris, staying at her mother's flat and reading politics at the Sorbonne.

She has lived in Paris full-time since 2000, ostensibly so that Zahwa - named after Mr Arafat's mother, who died when he was five - could receive treatment for leukaemia, although close friends suggest that she was also worried by the second intifada. At all events, until Friday's mercy mission, she had not returned to Ramallah and has been granted French citizenship.

In November last year, the American television network CBS investigated Mrs Arafat's way of life. The programme claimed that she lived on an entire floor of the exclusive Bristol Hotel in Paris at an estimated cost of �8,700 a night for more than a year. The hotel, however, claimed it had never seen her.

Last year, Mrs Arafat bought a multi-million pound flat in the chic 16th arrondissement, in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe and handy for the Champs-�ly�es. She owns another property in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

She is often seen in the front rows of Paris fashion shows, or shopping with the wife of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the sister of the King of Morocco. She favours the haute couture designer Louis F�raud and the upmarket shoe-maker Christian Louboutin. Her hair is expensively highlighted.

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Arafat financed Aksa Martyrs' Brigade - New Book

Yasser Arafat pumped millions of dollars into the Aksa Martyrs Brigades even as he let his disillusioned security forces go without pay for months, according to a forthcoming book by Matt Rees, the Time Magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem.

The revelation comes as Palestinian officials announced this week that the Palestinian Authority was unable to pay the salaries of its civil servants and security personnel for November. Arafat, who is receiving medical treatment in Paris, reportedly phoned his finance minister to order him to pay the salaries on time.

In an incident described in 'Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East,' due to be published this month by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Rees reveals how Arafat sent $2 million to the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza in June 2002 but provided only a pittance to pay the salaries of his official security forces.

According to 'Cain's Field,' an advance copy of which has been obtained by The Jerusalem Post, two senior Palestinian intelligence officers visited the home of Major-General Abdel Razak al-Majaideh, commander of Arafat's Gaza National Security Forces, in June 2002. The intelligence officers, who had not been paid for several months, learned from Fatah contacts that Arafat just sent $2 million to the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza. An outraged Majaideh complained to them that Arafat sent him only $30,000 to pay the wages of all the Palestinian security officers in the Gaza Strip.

'It was the equation of Arafat's interests,' writes Rees. 'Two million dollars against $30,000. Arafat was working against his own people, ignoring them while he shoveled wads of cash to gunmen.'

For the first time, Rees reveals the inside story of Arafat's divisive, self-destructive rule, detailing what the gunmen did with the cash they received from Arafat.

He shows how the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, ruled Palestinian towns like gangsters in defiance of security officials who gradually learned they didn't have Arafat's backing.
Rees also recounts the shocking story of a Christian girl from Bet Jala, near Bethlehem, who was coerced into sex and then murdered by Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leaders in Bethlehem.

After killing the girl, the group's leaders released a statement saying that they 'wanted to clean the Palestinian house of prostitutes.'

Rees writes that the 'thugs sexually degraded her, punished her for it, and then claimed the position of moral champions from a society that they more than anyone were responsible for sullying.'

'Cain's Field' also reveals the story of the deputy chief of General Intelligence in Gaza, Zakaria Baloush. He tired so much of Arafat's double game that he announced he would run against him for the job of president.

Arafat never held the elections, but he did try to persuade Baloush to return to the fold. When Baloush told Arafat he could no longer work for the head of General Intelligence in Gaza, Amin al-Hindi, Arafat said: 'So kick him out. Throw him into the sea.'

Rees says that Arafat ran the Palestinian Authority just as he had the PLO - as a personal fiefdom where no one ever knew whom to trust. 'He never made the transition to a responsible, orderly government,' said Rees.

Relations with Israel, even during the Oslo years, were also subject to Arafat's duplicity. Rees writes of a Palestinian intelligence officer who wanted to give information to the Shin Bet about Israeli MIAs from the battle of Sultan Yakoub in 1982. When the intelligence officer brought the Israeli officials to Arafat, the Palestinian leader rebuffed them, saying that the intelligence officer was sick and needed to stay home for medical treatment."

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Israeli Arabs volunteer for the Civil Guard

On the same day that three Israelis were killed and more than 30 were wounded by a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv's Carmel Market, a report was released by the police about Israeli Arabs' volunteering for the Civil Guard.
In the northern police district, where 11 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by police in October 2000, the increase in volunteers, from 700 to 4,400, was most impressive. The volunteers, some in police uniforms and others in their civilian clothes, patrol Jewish and Arab communities and help the police in community affairs where the difficulties are the greatest.

This is an amazing achievement, first and foremost for the police. It is true that police attitudes toward Arab citizens still suffer from many flaws and failures, including outright harassment, according to the Mossawa Center for Arab Rights in Israel.

However, based on much evidence from the local authorities and Arab citizenry, the volunteers' work succeeds in easing negotiations between the citizenry and police. Therefore, at least some of the wall of alienation and hostility that rose dramatically after the October 2000 events has been cracked, and a new foundation has been formed for welcome cooperation between Jews and Arabs.

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Thousands of Israelis voting for US President

It's not too late for some Americans living in Israel to send in their absentee ballots, Haaretz has learned. For residents of certain states, including key battleground states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, today is the deadline for overseas residents to send in their vote, provided the ballots are postmarked on November 2.
'People at the county board of elections are bending over backward to accommodate overseas voters,' said Mark Zober, chair of Democrats Abroad in Israel. 'They want to do everything in their power to avoid the appearance of trying to prevent people from getting out to vote. The election in 2000 was a mess, and what's going on now is defiantly a reaction to that.'

Although many states' deadlines were 'rock rigid' only one month ago, election boards in places like New York will now accept ballots up to 13 days after election day.

'Most registered voters living [in Israel] have already sent their ballots,' Zober added, 'but the extension is good news for some people who still haven't.'

Estimates of votes originating from Israel range, but even the lower estimate, some 30,000, is nearly double the turnout in the 2000 election. Some party activists put the number of voters as high as 60,000; Democrats and Republicans agree that the turnout is unprecedented.

'I've never seen anything like this,' said Marc Zell, one of the founders of Republicans Abroad in Israel, as he distributed ballots at a registration event in Efrat last week. 'The number of Americans [in Israel] coming out to vote in the 2004 election is unquestionably unprecedented. I worked hard to get the vote [out] in 2000, but the numbers weren't even close to what we have here. People were still under the impression that their votes didn't matter.'

Though the vast majority of Americans in Israel are registered Democrats, many have discarded party loyalties in hopes of reelecting President Bush. Registration events aimed at Americans in the ultra-Orthodox communities who identify with Bush's conservative stance on issues like abortion and gay marriage have also given the Republican ticket a boost here.

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Tribute to a Terrorist on Campus

From lgf:

LGF reader moshe28 forwarded a scanned image of a poster from the Muslim Students Association at Northeastern Illinois University, advertising an event at the college this week paying tribute to the so-called “spiritual leader” of the genocidal Hamas terror gang, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—a man personally responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, who met his end earlier this year thanks to an IAF missile.

Hamas is on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, and no person more symbolized their evil agenda than Yassin. It’s outrageous that the MSA would openly pay tribute to this monster, and that university facilities will be provided to them for such an abhorrent purpose. For more information, see this post from moshe28.

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