The Palestinian spokespeople claim it wasn’t an assassination attempt:
Yasser Arafat’s interim successor escaped injury in a Gaza gunfight triggered by hostile militants on Sunday as Palestinian officials set Jan. 9 for elections to replace the late president and avert a feared power vacuum.
[ . . . ]
The incident began after gunmen from Arafat’s splintered Fatah movement shouting “No to Abu Mazen” — Abbas’s nickname — marched by him as he stood outside the tent, paused and began firing shots into the air.
The gunmen’s rifles were pointed upwards, not at Abbas and Palestinian officials said it was not an assassination attempt.
Members of Arafat’s presidential guard hustled Abbas, 69, into the tent and threw him to the ground for his safety as the militants burst in. Chaos ensued as gunmen and bodyguards began shooting at each other. In the end, two bodyguards lay dead and four other Palestinians were wounded, medics said.
As gunfire blazed about him, Abbas was hustled to safety in his local office. The gunmen withdrew and no one was arrested.
“We were paying condolences. Emotions were high. There was random gunfire and pushing in the crowd,” a calm-looking Abbas told reporters at his office afterward.
I wonder if the anyone actually believes that. I’m betting Abbas doesn’t.
Arafat’s barely cold in his grave and it’s starting already. It appears that nobody will even wait out the “40 days of mourning” before starting a civil war. And in this kind of civil war, the winners will be the most violent, the least moderate, and the worst enemies of Israel.
What was that about an “opportunity for peace”, Mr. Bush?
Where’s ol’ Hanthala when you need to gloat…
‘Moderate’?
Let’s dismiss this notion for once and for all to describe nationalist Arabs/Palestinians. You can’t be a nationalist and accept Israel and the same time. Only if you turn into a secular hedonisitc westerner who relates to his religion/tradition as ethnic ceremonial culture. Arabs have still not reached the point of that they can truly accept Israel sovreignty in the Middle East.
BTW,
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was the number two man in the PLO, under Arafat, for more than forty years, and was the architect of numerous mass-murder terrorist attacks against Jews.
Abbas said in Cairo on July 23, 2003, that “cracking down on Hamas,
Jihad, and the Palestinian organizations is not an option at all”; offered cabinet positions to leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad (N.Y.Times, March 31, 2003, Israel Radio, March 31, 2003); praised the Arab terrorists imprisoned by Israel as “political prisoners” and “heroes”; and authored a book denying that the Nazis murdered six million Jews.
Read here
Just because Abu Mazen has replaced his battle fatigues with a dark coloured suit doesn’t mean squat.
A simple question now: How many Jews will have to die before we dismiss any replacement of Arafat and finally expect the Arabs/Palestinians to accept responsibility, or will we once again tie our hands in appeasement in order not to ‘harm chances of the moderates’ to attain leadership?
Abbas isn’t a moderate. But the Western media paints him as one.
I’ve blogged on this in the past. See here for example.