Assalamu Alaikum,
The Mideast Mirror issues for the dates 24, 25 and 26 Jan are ready. We will send them at a later date. We still have numerous articles to send first.
--MSANEWS Editors
A leader of the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas, says the group has no assets in the United States or anywhere else outside the occupied territories.
The Hamas leader, Imad Falouji, told Mideast Mirror in a telephone interview from Gaza that the American decision to freeze the assets of Hamas and 11 other organizations, most of them Arab, was an exercise in posturing to "appease Israel and consecrate America's biased policy."
A Hamas suicide bomber who killed 22 people in Tel Aviv last October triggered an American effort to find ways to stem an alleged flow of funds to that organization from the U.S.
Another suicide attack by two Islamic Jihad members last weekend killed 19 Israelis, apparently precipitating the executive order.
In addition to the 12 organizations, President Bill Clinton's directive, issued Tuesday shortly before his State of the Union address, covers 18 Arab individuals, including Hamas's blind leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who has been in an Israeli prison for years.
Like Hamas, two other Palestinian organizations on the list -- Islamic Jihad in Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) -- told Mideast Mirror Wednesday that they had no assets in America.
Both said Washington was welcome to any assets it could find, hoping that the money would help America solve its economic and social problems and give the U.S. president a hand in his various personal court battles -- an apparent reference to the Whitewater scandal and the charges of sexual harassment against Clinton.
But Islamic Jihad leader Fat'hi Shakaki characterized the presidential directive as a new "Crusade" against Islam, and DFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh said it was an instance of "superpower terrorism." Hawatmeh added that the directive's failure to distinguish between extremist Islamist organizations that reject any peace with Israel and moderate groups like the DFLP, which want a realistic two-state settlement, was like "mixing salt with sugar."
() ISLAMIC JIHAD: "To begin with," said Islamic Jihad's Shakaki, who is himself on the list, "we emphasize that we have no assets in any American or foreign bank. If the American president finds any assets, we will make a gift of them to him so that he can solve his economic problems and his personal court problems.
"They can be sure that we are fighting from below the poverty and starvation line. If we had the alleged assets, we would have dealt with Israel differently."
The Islamist leader added: "And yet, I consider this decision tantamount to a war on Islam, a new Crusade against the Arab and Islamic nation.
"America gives Israel billions at the expense of the American taxpayer and is now the biggest theater for the collection of donations for the Jewish organizations and for the building of settlements in the (West) Bank and Gaza (Strip).
"This latest position by President (Bill) Clinton indicates that America itself is trying to impose its terms and hegemony -- and not a just peace -- on the region.
"Finally, I would advise the American president to freeze the accounts of the Mafia and drug dealers who are rotting American society and leading it to the grave."
() HAMAS: Imad Falouji, a Hamas leader in Gaza, told Mideast Mirror in a telephone interview:
"First, Hamas has no assets in the United States.
"Second, I believe Clinton forgot that Sheikh Ahmad Yassin has been in an Israeli cell for over five years and has never been to America, and so has no accounts in America. And Hamas as a whole has no accounts in America."
Falouji added: "The purpose of the decision is to appease Israel and confirm and consolidate U.S. policy towards Israel. It is a propagandist decision to appease Israel and consolidate America's biased policy."
Hamas, he said, "has no deposits (in countries outside the U.S. either). It is a popular, grassroots movement that relies primarily on its strength in the occupied land, not outside it."
() DFLP: DFLP leader Hawatmeh condemned the American presidential directive as an instance of American "superpower terrorism," which he said the White House tried to cover up with the "lie" about the targeted people's and organizations' funds in the U.S., which were nonexistent.
Talking to Mideast Mirror by phone from Damascus, Hawatmeh, who is also on the list, said that "Clinton's decision has a political function that is much larger than its purported financial function, and that is to increase the pressure on the democratic, liberal, nationalist Palestinian forces now that the political and social base of the Oslo accord is rapidly eroding and (PLO Chairman Yaser) Arafat's self-government authority is becoming weaker.
"The sweeping majority of our people oppose the Oslo agreement because it does not fulfil a minimum level of the Palestinians' rights as defined by international legitimacy and has not brought the Palestinians or the Israelis peace, security and stability.
"Our people in the occupied land have reaped Oslo's poisonous fruit: expansionist colonialism, the accelerated Judaization of Jerusalem, the confiscation of land for roads to bypass densely populated areas, continued colonialism in 40 percent of Gaza, along with unemployment, collective punishment, hunger and cholera in Gaza, instead of the shower of dollars promised by the Oslo accord, and multiplying bloody incidents in the occupied land and Israel.
"And so the Clinton decision came to wield superpower terrorism against the opposition forces. It mixed salt with sugar when it lumped the democratic forces together with the Islamist forces. This is to encourage Arafat to curb the opposition forces and justify the continuing Israeli suppression.
"At the same time, it (Clinton's measure) applies pressure to Syria by putting it on the list of state supporters of terrorism until it bows to the models of Oslo and the Jordanian-Israeli treaty, which Syria refuses to do. It also applies pressure to the Arab states, especially the states of the Alexandria summit (Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia), now that the incompatibility has emerged between those states and the American-Israeli plan for a new Middle East that would ensure Israel's economic and technological hegemony and marginalize Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
"At the same time, (the measure) is meant to exert pressure on the states of the European Union and Russia, which are looking for Middle East roles and opening channels of dialogue with the democratic, liberal Palestinian forces in search of an alternative to the Oslo accord and Arafat's corroding authority."
Those, Hawatmeh said, were the real objectives of the American president's directive.
"As for the talk about assets," he said, "this is total misinformation and demagoguery. We say, 'The American administration is welcome to those alleged assets, in the hope that they will help it solve some of the economic, social and health problems in America's economic infrastructure.'
"The talk about assets is a lie to cover up the American political terrorism aimed at bringing the Middle East to its knees in accordance with the model of the Oslo accord and the Jordanian-Israeli treaty, and at turning the Middle East into an American-Israeli lake instead of the realization of the Arabs' rights, the Arab common market, and the Arab people's ambition for national democratic revival."
Hawatmeh added: "Clinton knows very well that it was the American administrations that trained and funded many of the Islamist movements in the Arab countries -- once against Nasserism, another time against the leftist, democratic Palestinian and Arab forces, and a third time to mobilize them (against the Soviets) in Afghanistan.
"That is why the American administration has hosted personalities like (Egyptian Islamist) Omar Abderrahman, (Algerian Islamist) Anwar Haddam, and (Hamas member) Dr. Mousa Abu-Marzouk.
"And that explains why, in Algeria, for instance, people from all European countries are being killed, but not Americans."
Hawatmeh concluded with a repetition of his objection to being lumped together with Islamist extremists:
"Mixing the Palestinian organizations that seek a two-state settlement and a solution to the refugee problem on the basis of (UN) Resolution 194 with the extremist movements that reject realistic political settlements on the basis of the resolutions of international legitimacy and withdrawal to the lines of June 4 1967 in return for full peace -- that's like mixing salt with sugar," he said.
() THE EXECUTIVE ORDER: In addition to ordering the assets of the 12 organizations and 18 individuals frozen, Clinton's executive order prohibited any financial transactions with them.
"I have authorized these measures in response to recurrent acts of international terrorism that threaten to disrupt the Middle East peace process," the president said in a letter to Congress explaining his actions.
In his State of the Union speech, he again extended his sympathy to the families of the victims of last Sunday's suicide attack at a bus junction in Israel, but he implored both sides to continue working towards peace.
"I know that in the face of such evil, it is hard to go forward. But the terrorists are the past, not the future," he told a joint session of the Republican-led Congress.
"We must -- and we will -- persist in our pursuit of a comprehensive peace between Israel and all her neighbors in the Middle East," he said.
Clinton also urged "our allies, and peace-loving nations around the world, to join us with renewed fervor in the global effort to combat terrorism."
He vowed to send Congress this year new legislation to "strengthen our hand in combating terrorists, whether they strike at home or abroad," adding Washington was determined to "hunt down terrorists and bring them to justice."
Clinton, who toured the Middle East in October and witnessed the Israeli -Jordanian peace deal signing, said the terrorist activities threatened U.S. interests.
"Fund-raising for terrorism and use of the U.S. banking system for transfers on behalf of such organizations are inimical to American interests," he said in the letter.
The president's executive order, issued under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, took effect at 0501 GMT on Tuesday.
PLO Chairman Yaser Arafat praised Clinton's decision.
"I do appreciate this decision because as you know they are using this money and this cover in different ways. We waited for this decision for a long time," he told Reuters in Gaza.
() 12 GROUPS: The 12 groups included two Jewish organizations and 10 Arab groups.
The two Jewish organizations are:
1. The Kach movement founded by the late extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who was shot dead in New York on November 5, 1990.
The American-born rabbi was a former member of Israel's Knesset. In the 1960s he founded the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the United States.
Kahane, who began his career as a Brooklyn rabbi, founded the JDL because he was worried about attacks on Jews by blacks. He first won election to the Knesset in 1984 by calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day war. But in October, 1988 his party was banned for its "Nazi-like" stance which violated a 1985 electoral law.
Kahane got his first taste of activism as a teenager when he joined the New York chapter of Betar, the youth movement of former prime minister Menachem Begin's right-wing Herut Party.
At 15, he smashed the car windows of visiting British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin as part of a protest against the British Mandate over Palestine. It was the first of many arrests. In all, Kahane estimated he had spent more than three years in prison in the United States and Israel.
He was suspended from the Knesset for three weeks in June 1987 for at first refusing to take the oath and declare loyalty to the laws of Israel lest he lost his American passport. But in August 1988 he gave up his U.S. citizenship to comply with a new Israeli law forbidding Knesset members from holding dual nationality.
Kahane used to travel to the United States several times a year to lecture and raise money for his party.
2. The Kahane Chai (Hebrew for Kahane lives) movement, whose international head is Binyamin Kahane, son of the slain militant rabbi. Kahane Chai was outlawed last year in Israel, after a follower of the group killed at least 29 Moslem worshippers at a Hebron mosque.
Binyamin Kahane denied on Tuesday his organization was a terrorist group. Saying that President Clinton's freeze order was "an insane analogy tantamount to comparing Bill Clinton to Adolf Hitler," he admitted his group "has no more than $ 2 million in the United States."
Kahane made his remarks at a late-evening news conference at a midtown hotel in New York.
The 10 Arab groups were listed in the executive order as:
1. Hamas (Arab acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine), the secular PLO's main rival in the Occupied Territories, which was founded in the Gaza Strip on December 14, 1987. The group, which is headed by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and claims up to 50 percent support among the two million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, has become the most active opponent of the PLO's Oslo agreement with Israel. Some 14 Gazans were killed and 200 wounded, most of them Hamas activists, when PLO police opened fire on Friday worshippers outside Palestine Mosque in Gaza City last November 18.
2. Islamic Jihad in Palestine, another Moslem guerilla group opposed to the Israel-PLO deal and facing a crackdown in PLO-ruled Gaza, where its chief spokesman is Abdallah Shami. The group is headed by Fat'hi Shakaki who has been based in Damascus since his deportation from Gaza in 1988. PLO police detained Shami twice on Tuesday, two days after the militant group said it killed 19 Israelis in a suicide bombing. Shami said on Monday the bombing in central Israel was a legitimate attack against Israeli occupation soldiers and part of an "open-ended struggle against the enemy."
3. The Abu-Nidal Organization (ANO), also known as the Fateh Revolutionary Council (FRC), a group which broke away from Arafat's mainstream Fateh movement in 1973. The group is believed to have been behind the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London in June 1982. The group is also believed to have been behind the killings of Jordanian ambassadors in Rome and New Delhi as well as of PLO representatives in Britain, France, Belgium, Rome and Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s. An Abu-Nidal loyalist assassinated two of Arafat's closest aides -- Salah Khalaf (Abu-Iyad) and Hayel Abdelhamid (Abul-Hol) -- in Tunis in January 1991.
4. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a constituent member of the PLO headed by Dr. George Habash. The group, currently headquartered in Damascus, was formed in December 1967 and has spawned several splinter groups.
5. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), formed by Ahmad Jibril in 1968 when he became disenchanted with George Habash's leadership of the PFLP. The group serves as Syria's cat's-paw in the Palestinian movement and actively participated in the eviction of Arafat and his loyalists from north Lebanon in 1983.
6. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) led by Nayef Hawatmeh, another constituent faction of the PLO formed in 1969 which has fallen out with Arafat and is now headquartered in Damascus.
7. The Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), formed with Iraqi support in 1977 by Mohammad Abbas (Abul-Abbas), in opposition to PFLP-GC leader Ahmad Jibril's backing for the Syrian incursion into Lebanon in June 1976. When suspending its dialogue with the PLO in June 1990, the U.S. cited in particular the aborted seaborne raid on a Tel Aviv beach by the PLF, a constitutional faction of the PLO.
8. Hizbollah, the Iranian-inspired Lebanese Shiite movement which has emerged as Israel's toughest and most relenting enemy. The group was formed in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 1982, when some 2,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards moved to the mainly Shiite Bekaa Valley to drive the Israelis out of the country.
The recruiting grounds were southern and eastern villages of Shiite Moslems, Lebanon's poorest, most downtrodden population group, and the Beirut slums to which many Shiites migrated during the 1975-1990 civil war.
The group was at one time believed to be the umbrella organization for hostage -takers who made Lebanon a no-go zone for Westerners in the 1980s.
Hizbollah, the only militia not to be disarmed by the Lebanese government so far on the grounds that it is resisting Israeli forces occupying part of South Lebanon, scored sweeping victories in Lebanon's 1992 parliamentary elections, the first in 20 years. The group won eight mandates in the 128-seat assembly.
9. Islamic Gihad (Egypt's Gihad Group), and
10. Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya (Egypt's Islamic Group).
The confusion that surrounds the organization of the multi-faceted Islamic fundamentalist movement in Egypt was underscored in a November 1992 interview with one of the many Islamist extremists in Cairo's Torra prison.
The convict, Hassan Abdallah al-Suhaimi, has been in jail since 1974,
His group was wiped out by execution and imprisonment in 1974. It called itself "Mohammad's Youth" but was popularly known either as the "Saleh Sirriya Organization" or the "Military Tech Organization" -- this last being the name that stuck.
The name derives from the Military Technical Academy in Cairo, which the group tried to raid in 1974.
Organized by a Palestinian fundamentalist -- Saleh Sirriya, a Jaffa native who was at one point a member of the Central Council of Arafat's Fateh movement -- Military Tech is reputed to be the first Islamist group to take up arms against the Egyptian government since the late president Anwar Sadat began to lift the restrictions his predecessor, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, placed on the Moslem Brotherhood, which was the only significant Islamist organization in Egypt at the time.
The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, turned violent with the establishment of Israel in 1948, assassinating an Egyptian prime minister that year and plotting the assassination of Abdel-Nasser in 1954. Abdel-Nasser foiled the plot, executed the Brotherhood's leaders and imprisoned thousands of its members. In 1965, claiming to have uncovered another plot, he jailed another thousand Brotherhood members and executed the organization's leading intellectual, Sayyid Qutb.
Abdel-Nasser died five years later, and Sadat lost little time reversing his policy and releasing most Brotherhood prisoners. Many in Egypt believe that Sadat was trying to strengthen the hand of the Islamists in order to use them as a counterweight to the Nasserists and other leftists. If this is true, Sadat can accurately be described as a Middle Eastern Frankenstein who unleashed a force that quickly turned against him.
Although Abdel-Nasser's iron fist had turned many of the Brotherhood prisoners less extremist in their views, it had embittered others and made them more determined than ever to overthrow the "infidel regime."
Military Tech, which, like all other Egyptian Islamist groups, was a descendant of the Brotherhood, belonged to the latter group and became a post-Nasser pioneer in Islamic violence.
In 1974, the group plotted to raid the Military Technical Academy with the help of some of its officer and cadet followers in the college. The idea was to get hold of weapons, attack the ministry of defense, the headquarters of the Central Committee (where the top government leaders would be killed or captured), and the television station as a prelude to declaring Egypt an Islamic state.
Around 120 "Moslem Youth" raiders attacked the Academy on April 19, 1974 and were routed. Most members of the group were rounded up and put on trial. Most were acquitted, but the top leaders, including Sirriya, were executed; second -level leaders, including Suhaimi, were given the maximum jail sentence of 25 years to life; and 14 others were jailed from seven to 15 years.
The Military Tech survivors are believed to have formed Islamic Gihad, which finally managed to assassinate Sadat in 1981, two years after it was founded.
Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya is believed to have been founded around the same time, and the two groups are reported to have formed a close alliance under a joint leadership, so that when Gihad was crushed after the Sadat assassination, it lived on through the Gama'a.
There are over 40 separate Islamist groups in Egypt today, but there is a growing belief now that there is order in the country's Islamist madness, and that the Gama'a stands behind most of these organizations, pulling the strings and applying a well thought out plan aimed at "Islamizing" the nation by a combination of force, persuasion and social services.
() 18 INDIVIDUALS: Clinton has also frozen the U.S. assets of 18 individuals suspected of involvement in Middle East terrorism. They are:
1. Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the wheelchair-bound founder of Hamas who is now serving a life prison sentence for ordering the killing of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. Israeli prosecutors dropped charges he ordered the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a last minute plea-bargain.
2. Fat'hi Shakaki, who until his deportation from the Gaza Strip to Lebanon in July 1988 served as a doctor at the Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem and owned a pharmacy in Tal Sultan camp in Rafah. Currently based in Damascus, he had been sentenced by an Israeli court to three years in prison in 1986 on charges of membership in Islamic Jihad in Palestine.
3. Sheikh Abdelaziz Odeh, a former activist in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, was deported from the Gaza Strip by the Israeli authorities in 1988 on grounds of inciting people to take part in the intifada. He is currently living in Damascus and has reportedly ceased involvement in political activities since his deportation. He was a mosque preacher and university teacher of Islamic studies in Gaza.
4. Abu-Nidal, the nom de guerre of Sabri al-Banna, who in the past was based in Iraq (heading the PLO's Voice of Palestine radio in Baghdad), Syria and Libya. His current whereabouts are unknown.
5. PFLP leader George Habash, a medical graduate of the American University of Beirut known to his followers as al-Hakim -- Arabic for "the physician" and/or "the wise man."
6. PFLP-GC chief Ahmad Jibril, a former officer in the Syrian army.
7. Talal Naji, PFLP-GC chief Ahmad Jibril's second in command.
8. DFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh, a native Jordanian born in Amman in 1937.
9. Palestine Liberation Front leader Mohammad Abbas (Abul-Abbas), of Achille Lauro hijacking fame.
10. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, named leader of Lebanon's Hizbollah movement after the February 1992 assassination in an Israeli helicopter ambush of his predecessor, Sheikh Abbas Musawi.
11. Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual guide of Hizbollah.
12. Subhi Tufayli, a former leader of Hizbollah.
13. Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, believed to have masterminded the hostage-takings that made Beirut the kidnap capital of the world. Mughniyeh, who left Lebanon years ago and now lives in Iran, is suspected of abducting Westerners including Associated Press (AP) correspondent Terry Anderson, British Anglican envoy Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland, dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut. His brother Fuad Mughniyeh, a 30-year-old member of Hizbollah, was among the victims of a car-bomb last month in Bir al-Abed, a poor Hizbollah-dominated suburb of Beirut. The Beirut government blamed the car bomb on a local agent of Israel's Mossad intelligence service.
14. Sheikh Omar Abderrahman, accused by the Egyptian government of being the mentor of the militant al-Gama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), is imprisoned in the United States in connection with a conspiracy to blow up the United Nations and other landmarks. The alleged conspiracy was also involved in the bombing of New York's World Trade Center in February 1993. A blind and diabetic graduate of Egypt's prestigious al-Azhar, he was sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian court last year to seven years hard labor for inciting a riot and attempting to kill two policemen in 1989. Abderrahman, who lived in the New York metropolitan area since 1990, had been tried in Egypt on charges of sanctifying the assassination of president Anwar Sadat in 1981 but was acquitted. The Egyptian government says his tape-recorded sermons and leaflets direct militants to overthrow it and set up an Islamic state.
15. Abboud al-Zumr, born in Cairo in 1946, is a former officer in Egyptian military intelligence who was accused of trying to assassinate the late president Anwar Sadat in September 1981 in Mansoura. That attempt failed and Zumr fled. He was arrested a few days after Sadat's assassination in October 1981, and is serving a life sentence for his role in the assassination and for membership of the Islamic Gihad group, which is accused of trying to topple the regime and set up an Iranian-style Islamic republic. He made an unsuccessful bid to escape from prison in February 1986. In response to rumors spread by his family that year that the authorities killed him in prison, the government arranged for him to hold a press conference in jail. Reputed to have been responsible for the military wing of Gihad, he is accused together with another jailed Gihad military chief, Safwat Abdelghani, of planning the June 1992 assassination of secularist author and journalist Farag Foda from prison, using lawyers, friends and wives as go-betweens.
16. Mohammad Shawki Islambouli, the elder brother of Khaled Islambouli, assassin of president Anwar Sadat, was in prison at the time of the assassination, but was tried and sentenced for membership of Islamic Gihad. After his release from jail, he was reported to have travelled to Afghanistan, but his current whereabouts are unknown. He is wanted in Egypt for membership in Gihad.
17. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, a physician and leading figure in Egypt's Islamic Gihad organization, was granted political asylum in Switzerland in 1993 and is currently based there.
Zawahri, jailed for three years in connection with Sadat's murder, left Egypt in 1985 for Peshawar and reportedly lived in between several countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Iran.
He is accused of relaunching the New Gihad in Egypt under the name of the "Vanguard of Conquest" -- a revival of the group that shot dead Sadat at a military parade in 1981 and which was smashed after Sadat's murder.
Charges against him include ordering the "Vanguard of Conquest" group to carry out the attempted assassination of interior minister Hassan al-Alfi in August 1993. He is said to have run a Gihad training camp near the Afghan capital, Kabul.
He is one of four leaders for whom arrest warrants were issued in December 1993. They are said to have been instrumental in conveying orders to militants inside Egypt.
18. Talaat Fuad Kassem (alias Abu-Talal al-Kassemi), spokesman for Egypt's al -Gama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), was given asylum in Denmark in early 1993.
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