Sunday, July 4, 2010

Partners in Peace? With Friends Like These...

Today the New York Times reported that,
Mohammed Oudeh, a former math teacher who became the mastermind of the deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, died Friday in Damascus.
Sounds like good news, doesn't it? Actually, it doesn't, not only because of his feelings about his role in the murder of innocent Israeli athletes, but even more because of the reactions of Israel's current "peace partners." Although in 1996 Oudeh, "and several other former guerrillas were allowed back by to Israel in order to attend an assembly amending the Palestinian national charter," and "joined those voting to remove the charter’s call for an armed struggle to destroy the Jewish state," he didn't feel all that bad about the terrorism after all.
“Would you believe me if I tell you that if I had to do it all over, I would?” he said in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. “But maybe, just maybe, we should have shown some flexibility. Back in our days, it was the whole of Palestine or nothing, but we should have accepted a Palestinian state next to Israel.”
Thanks for that last part. Sadly, he never really changed his mind about being a terrorist mastermind. All he would have changed were his tactics; maybe not to kill all the prisoners - just some of them.
Of course, Hamas issued a statement mourning his death. But would you be surprised to learn that,
Amin Maqboul, secretary general of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization faction to which Mr. Oudeh belonged, praised him as “a fighter of the highest order.”
That's right - Fatah, the guys that we're supposed to be negotiating with in the West Bank. The group that the world wants Israel to give back territory to; our supposed partners for peace. These are the good guys, and they're mourning the death of a murdering terrorist.
At least Oudeh told the sad, unpopular truth: terrorism works. The Munich Olympics really did put the PLO on the map, and set the stage for the Palestinian Authority that we have today. So it's not so hard to understand why he would do it all over again today.
But if he would, wouldn't the people mourning him do it as well?
And these are the people that we're supposed to trust?

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