Abu Mazen’s Two Faces
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Wishful thinkers will no doubt make plenty of hay out of the interview with Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, that was published yesterday in Asharq al-Awsat. According to the Associated Press, Mr. Abbas, who is also known as Abu Mazen, called for nonviolence by the Palestinian Arabs. “Using the weapons was harmful and has got to stop,” the wire service quotes the Palestinian leader as saying, reporting that he said it is important to “keep the uprising away from arms.”
At yesterday’s White House press briefing, the first question was: “The interim Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is urging the Palestinians to drop their weapons in their struggle for a state. Does this mark a turning point for you in any way in the direction things are headed over there? “The follow up was, “is this an encouraging sign from Abbas?”
Well, it is an encouraging sign. But the context in which it occurred was full of some significant discouraging signs that have been buried, downplayed, or forgotten amidst the predictable press euphoria at the whiff of turning points and encouraging signs. Consider that last week, Mr. Abbas made a little-noticed visit to Damascus. There, as the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick recounted it, “In Syria, the Palestinian ‘moderates’ met with dictator Bashar Assad and his underlings and agreed to coordinate their positions in future negotiations with Israel with him. That base covered, they went to meetings with the senior terror chieftains who make their homes in Damascus: Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas; and Ramadan Shalah, head of the Islamic Jihad.”
From those meetings, according to Ms. Glick’s account, a top aide to Mr. Abbas, PLO Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, emerged and said that between the PLO and the other blood-drenched terrorists, “There are no differences over the objectives.” It’s an episode worth remembering amid the euphoria that will attend Mr. Abbas’s professions of nonviolence.
