Celebrating its 52nd anniversary, Fatah names murderers and leaders of terror organizations as its role models and continues pushing its “phased plan” for the destruction of the entire State of Israel.
Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority (PA) head Mahmoud Abbas, celebrated the 52nd anniversary of its transition into a political party by lauding founders and heads of terror organizations responsible for murdering hundreds of Israelis.
The terrorists celebrated by Fatah include Ahmad Yassin, founder of Hamas; Fathi Shaqaqi, founder of the Islamic Jihad; mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi; arch-terrorist Abu Jihad, who orchestrated the murder of at least 125 people, and Abu Ali Mustafa, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Fatah was initially founded in 1959 as a political movement and became a political party in 1965, when Israel’s borders did not yet contain Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) or Gaza.
Fatah is a reverse acronym of the group’s full name, the “Palestinian National Liberation Movement,” meaning that the group sought to “liberate” the area on which Israel was located in 1959, i.e., Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashdod and Be’er Sheva. The West Bank was then part of Jordan, and the Arabs living there were Jordanian citizens. Fatah did not call them Palestinians and did not express any desire to “liberate” Ramallah or any other West Bank city from Jordan.
The acronym itself is also significant, as “fatḥ” or “fatah” means “conquering” or “victory,” and “fatḥ” is used in religious discourse to signify the “Fatḥ al-Sham of Islam,” the “conquering of the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean, including Israel), an area also referred to in the name of ISIS (Da’esh).
Fatah, a secular party member of the Socialist International, is the largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PFLP, a secular, revolutionary Palestinian Marxist–Leninist organization, has consistently been the second-largest.
Who is Mahmoud Abbas?
Fatah’s president,Mahmoud Abbas, also serves as chairman of the PLO and president of the Palestinian Authority.
Abbas “earned” his doctorate by writing a Ph.D. thesis denying the Holocaust. He titled his 1982 dissertation,“The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” arguing that “the Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination,” which in any case, he claims, is exaggerated. According to Abbas, one million is a more reasonable estimate of the number of Jews killed during World War II. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial’s incomplete list of Holocaust victims already includes the names of approximately 4.5 million Jewish victims.
Abbas is also known for his role in the Munich massacre, a terror attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany in which 11 Israeli Olympic team members were taken hostage, tortured and killed.
Of those believed to have planned the massacre, only Abu Daoud, the man who claimed that the attack was his idea, is known to have died of natural causes. In his autobiography, From Jerusalem to Munich, and later in a written interview with Sports Illustrated, Abu Daoud wrote that “Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, was responsible for the financing of the Munich attack.
‘Phased Plan’ to Destroy Israel
In the wake of Israel’s victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the PLO leadership came to the conclusion that it would not be able to destroy Israel militarily while Israel continued holding on to the West Bank. It therefore adopted the so-called “Phased Plan,” a new, three-stage strategy for Israel’s destruction, which it embodied in the PLO’s 1974 Political Program, adopted at the 12th Session of the Palestinian National Council in Cairo on June 9, 1974.
The plan has three main stages:
To wage an “armed struggle” [i.e., the first intifada] to pressure Israel to agree to establish a “national authority” [the PA] over any territory that is “liberated” from Israeli rule. (Article 2)
To continue the struggle against Israel [i.e., the second intifadahand continued terrorism], using the territory of the national authority [the PA] as a base of operations. (Article 4)
To provoke an all-out war in which Israel’s Arab neighbors “liberate all Palestinian territory” [i.e., destroy Israel]. (Article 8)
Oslo Accords Advance ‘Phased Plan’
The Oslo Accords accomplished the first objective, resulting in the creation of the “Palestinian National Authority,” the original name of the PA, echoing the call for the creation of a “national authority” in Phase 1 of the plan.
Speaking on September 1, 1993, just after the announcement of the 1993 Israel-PLO agreement, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat announced on Radio Monte Carlo that the Oslo agreement “will be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the Palestine National Council resolution issued in 1974… The PNC resolution issued in 1974 calls for the establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws or which is liberated.”
Arafat also cited the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, recorded in the 48th sura (chapter) of the Quran, as justification for his signing the Oslo Accords. That treaty, between Muhammad and the Quraysh tribe, was used by the Muslims to gain a peaceful period of time during which they were able to strengthen their position by obtaining many new converts to Islam, until the treaty was breached and Muhammad conquered Mecca.
On May 10, 1994, Arafat gave an “off-the-record” talk in English at a mosque in Johannesburg, South Africa. A South African journalist, Bruce Whitfield of 702 Talk Radio, secretly recorded the speech.
Arafat said of the Oslo Accords,
“I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca … we now accept the peace agreement, but [only in order] to continue on the road to Jerusalem.”
In the years following, Arafat has frequently mentioned the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah as a model for PA diplomacy. More recently, Abbas Zaki, a senior PA official with close ties to Abbas, explained on Syrian television how the current ongoing peace talks are a veneer for the “Phased Plan” to destroy Israel in stages, according the translated video appearing below:
Reconciliation with Hamas
According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Fatah has clarified that the planned reconciliation with Hamas is meant to facilitate joint terror against the Jewish state.
Fatah posted a photo of the chairman of the Information Committee of the Fatah Mobilization and Organization Commission, Munir Al-Jaghoub, holding a drawing of a handshake forming a gun with a Palestinian flag. The gun points at a flag with a Star of David on it with the text: “The Israeli occupation.” Text on the gun reads, “The Palestinian reconciliation” – referring to a desired resolution of the existing rift between Fatah and Hamas.
The posted statement urges Fatah to meet with Hamas “on the basis of the partnership that unites all of us.” According to the drawing, this unifying basis is violence against Israelis and a continuation of the “Phased Plan” to destroy all of Israel.
‘The Real Palestinians’
Fatah celebrated its 52nd anniversary by glorifying numerous Shahids, (“martyrs”), among them terrorist murderer Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for planning attacks that killed many Israelis; Karim Younes, who kidnapped and killed an Israeli soldier; Raed Al-Karmi, who was responsible for attacks that killed 9 Israelis; Abu Ali Iyad, who was responsible for several terror attacks in 1966; and Kamal Adwan, who was responsible for Fatah’s terrorist operations in Israel in the 1960’s and 1970’s and was a senior member of Black September.
As in the past, Fatah also glorified terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led a bus hijacking in which 37 Israelis were murdered in 1978, in another post, as the “Bride of Palestine.”
Abbas’ Fatah called these terrorists “the real Palestinians” and wished them a “good year” in a post on Facebook, parading them as the movement’s role models. Fatah predicted that “a people whose leaders are Martyrs [terrorists] … will undoubtedly triumph with Allah’s help.”
“Fatah embraces its people and praises the Martyrs. To be a real Palestinian, you must be a self-sacrificing fighter (Fida’i) … get used to having no time to cry over endings but rather to always have new beginnings. Long life to you and long live the anniversary of the Launch [of Fatah] and may it be a good year. A people whose leaders are Martyrs will undoubtedly triumph with Allah’s help…” Fatah wrote on its official Facebook page last week.
In another post, Fatah presented the same terror leaders as “heroic Martyrs” and ‘swore’ to “continue [its] revolution until victory,” leaving no doubt about the intentions of the Palestinian leadership to continue with its “Phased Plan” to destroy the Jewish state.
