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Unholy Terror

(Daily Telegraph-UK) Editorial - The near-simultaneous suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem ought to give the lie to the fashionable idea that Palestinian terrorism is somehow in a category apart - still dreadful, but somehow worthy of greater "understanding'' because of the plight of the Arab population of the Holy Land. Both acts were perpetrated by Islamist terror groups that are part of the same global network. The methods used in each of these atrocities were the same. The funding for the groups that launched them often comes from the same Saudi or Iranian sources. The malefactors often train together in the same "schools of revolution'' across the region. And their inspiration comes from the same well-spring, namely the dominant Saudi creed of Wahhabism. In some cases, the inspiration for the Islamists of Palestine and the jihadis now pouring into Iraq from Saudi Arabia even comes from the very same clerics. For them, the struggle against America, the West and Israel - and their corrupt allies in the Arab world - is one and the same. Perhaps some Islamists will be manhandled in through the front door of the bleak Palestinian jails, only to be released quietly through the back once the current crisis is over. But Abu Mazen has already made clear that there will be no large-scale dismantling of Islamist infrastructures. He continues to get away with this because the Israelis, for all their hardline rhetoric and tactical security clampdowns, refuse to make the Palestinian Authority pay a strategic political price. Thus, Arafat still sits in Ramallah, pulling the strings.
2003-08-21 00:00:00
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