Khaled Abu Toameh is an Israeli-Arab journalist who currently writes for the Jerusalem Post and the U.S. News and World Report. An Arab-Muslim, he has been extremely critical of Hamas and the PLO, and has spoken his mind on the threat of extremist Islam.

Abu Toameh spoke today at Boston University. He said that both parties leading the Palestinians, Hamas and Fatah, are ‘bad guys’, contrary to Condoleeza Rice’s assertion that it is a struggle between good guys (Fatah) and bad guys (Hamas). He highlighted the fact that the Palestinians have gotten rid of Fatah in elections, and therefore, Abbas does not have any mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians. Furthermore, he would not have the ability to implement any agreement, rendering negotiations with him futile.

Recently, IDF concerns over a Hamas-orchestrated mass march on the fence separating Israel and Gaza have grown stronger. Hamas would like to capitalize on its success in toppling the wall between Gaza and Egypt. But the situation here is quite different. Hamas does not control the kilometer leading up to the fence in Gaza, and would have great difficulty reaching the fence, let alone blowing a hole in it.

The fence around Gaza is not uniform. Most of the fence consists of a four-foot high barbed wire coil fence about fifty yards inside of Gaza, and a twelve-foot high sensory fence on the border. The area around the Erez crossing on the northern fence is a large concrete wall. There are many locked gates in the fence that do not have the barbed wire in front of them.

The IDF has fixed and mobile defense elements on the border. There are a series of two-story circular concrete structures called “pillboxes” every several hundred yards. Pillboxes usually have heavy machine guns observation equipment in them. There are also a series of cameras and listening devices along the border, manned 24/7 by highly trained female lookouts.

A study headed by Robert Brym, son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, concluded that suicide bombers are not inspired by extreme poverty. This conclusion discredits the widespread belief that terror grows out of poverty and deprivation. As the argument goes, if the Palestinians’ wealth approached that of the Israelis, they would stop attacking Israeli civilians.

However, the study also downplayed the importance of religion in motivating suicide bombers. This conclusion is difficult to accept, given the specifically Islamic religious  terms that suicide bombers speak in on tapes before attacks and family members praise them in after.

The following article is from Haaretz.

TORONTO – In an extensive study of Palestinian suicide bombings, three University of Toronto researchers have concluded that the bombers were not psychologically unstable and were often motivated by personal vengeance, not religious zeal.

The study was carried out by political sociologist Robert Brym, with the assistance of two Ph.d students, Palestinian Bader Araj and Israeli Yael Maoz-Shai.
Writing in the academic journal Social Forces, Brym noted, “The organizers of suicide attacks don’t want to jeopardize their missions by recruiting unreliable people. It may be that some psychologically unstable people want to become suicide bombers, but insurgent organizations strongly prefer their cannons fixed.”

He also found that the suicide bombers did not experience extraordinary high levels of economic deprivation.

Furthermore, in his study published in Contexts, Brym concluded that a majority of bombers, like Palestinian female lawyer, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, 29, who killed 21 civilians in a 2003 bombing at Maxim restaurant in Haifa, were “motivated by the desire for revenge and retaliation.”

Jaradat acted to avenge the killings of her brother, an Islamic Jihad militant, and cousin by Israeli security forces.

Brym concluded, “In its origins and at its core, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not religiously inspired, and suicide bombing, despite its frequent religious trappings, is fundamentally the expression of a territorial dispute.”

This reasoning is intellectually comfortable, because it leaves open the possibility for a full and comprehensive peace. But, upon thinking the logic forward, one uncovers its weakness. When Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, attacks only increased. Does anyone really believe that if Israel pulled back to the 1967 lines, motivation for attacking Israel would decrease significantly? Suicide bombings were not a phenomenon in the days of total Israeli control over Palestinian areas.

Brym and Araj identified the organizational affiliation of 133 out of 138 suicide bombers between September 2000 and July 2005. Sixty-four per cent were affiliated with Islamic fundamentalists groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while the rest were aligned with secular groups such as Fatah.

In analyzing data pertaining to Israeli counterterrorist operations, Brym said “we do know that of the nearly 600 suicide missions launched in Israel and its occupied territories between 2000 and 2005, fewer than 25 percent succeeded in reaching their target. Israeli counterterrorist efforts thwarted three-quarters of them using violent means.”

If he looked only at those attacks attempted after Defensive Shield, when Israeli tactics became more intense, the percentage of successful attacks would be far lower.

However, his study found that harsh repression can intensify bombings and prompt bombers to devise more lethal methods to achieve their aims.

“In general, severe repression can work for a while, but a sufficiently determined mass opposition will always be able to design new tactics to surmount new obstacles. One kind of ‘success,’ usually breeds another kind of ‘failure’ if the motivation of insurgents is high.” In an interview, Brym said: “I’m no fan of Hamas, but I believe that Israel and Hamas at some point have to sit and negotiate.”

In a paper to be published in Studies in Conflict on Terrorism this year, Araj concludes that harsh state repression “should not be perceived only as a reaction to suicide bombing” but “often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing.”

Imad Mughniyeh, one of leading terrorist masterminds of our times, was killed by an unknown party last week. Perhaps by Israel, perhaps America, quite possibly another Arab terrorist group. Predictably, there were those who were not thrilled by the death a man responsible for hundreds of deaths of Westerners.

Old friend Robert Fisk took the opportunity to attack- who else – President Bush and compared the United States military to al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad.

Mougnieh, Lebanese by birth, was a man of frightening self-confidence, of absolute self-belief, something he shared with Osama bin Laden and – let us speak frankly about this – with President George W Bush. Islamic Jihad, it was said, tortured its enemies. So does al-Qa’ida. And so, as we all now know, does Mr Bush’s army.

Tom Gross’ analysis is here.

BBC reporter Humphrey Hawkesley said, “The army is on full alert as Lebanon remembers two war victims with different visions but both regarded as great national leaders.”

Don Mell, former AP photographer in Beirut, attacked the parallel, writing that

For you to refer to former prime minister Rafik Hariri and Imad Mughniyeh as ‘great national leaders’ in the same sentence is beyond belief. One was an elected leader who spent years and millions of his own money rebuilding his country. The other was probably the world’s second most notorious terrorist, who was responsible for, in addition to running a major criminal enterprise, destroying the US Embassy, the French and US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983; the hijacking of TWA 847; the bombing of the Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires, [and] the kidnapping and murder of many Westerners in Lebanon, including Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, John McCarthy.”

The BBC apologized, and said

“While there is no doubt that supporters of Hizbullah did regard Mughniyeh in such terms [as a great leader], we accept that the scripting of this phrase was imprecise. The description of Imad Mughniyeh should have been directly attributed to those demonstrating their support for him.”

The war in Iraq is often compared to Vietnam by critics. They see a direct parallel in Iraq to America’s experience in Vietnam. But there is a similarity that they do not realize, argues Arthur Herman in the February 6th issue of  The Wall Street Journal. In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the defeatist reporting of the mainstream media ignored the tangible tactical successes, and ultimately had a direct and primary influence on the outcome of the conflict in question. The media sees what it wants to see, and believes what it wants to believe, and those biases shape policy and perception back in America.

On January 30, 1968, more than a quarter million North Vietnamese soldiers and 100,000 Viet Cong irregulars launched a massive attack on South Vietnam. But the public didn’t hear about who had won this most decisive battle of the Vietnam War, the so-called Tet offensive, until much too late.

Media misreporting of Tet passed into our collective memory. That picture gave antiwar activism an unwarranted credibility that persists today in Congress, and in the media reaction to the war in Iraq. The Tet experience provides a narrative model for those who wish to see all U.S. military successes — such as the Petraeus surge — minimized and glossed over.

The City Council of Berkeley, California, has shocked the nation once again with its disrespect for the United States military. They passed a resolution by a vote of 8-1 telling the Marine Corps that they are unwelcome, and that they should move their recruitment center out of the city. In addition, the City Council waived the permit fee for Code Pink protesters, and gave them a permanent parking spot in front of the recruitment center. Let us not forget that Code Pink is the same organization that urges its members to protest with signs reading, “Military Predators out of our Community!”