While the world gets its hopes up over the new Mideast roadmap, a figure out of the past has reinforced yet again that the latest peace efforts are doomed to fail like all their predecessors.
Abu Abbas is an old killer, finally apprehended in Baghdad last month. It has been almost twenty years since he, with help from three accomplices, shot a wheelchair-bound 69-year-old, Leon Klinghoffer, and dumped his body off the Achille Lauro cruise ship. According to a wrenching firsthand account by Smadar Haran Kaiser in last Sunday’s Washington Post, he and his fellow terrorists had seized hostages on the Achille Lauro in order to press for the release of fifty imprisoned terrorists, of which only one was named: Samir Kuntar. Kuntar sits in an Israeli prison for killing Kaiser’s husband in front of their four-year-old daughter. “Then,” says Kaiser, “he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt.”
Over the years, we are told, Abu Abbas mellowed. He renounced terrorism, apologized for killing Klinghoffer, and settled down into a quiet life of delivering Saddam Hussein’s cash payments to the families of suicide bombers. He has evidently become such a model citizen that an aide to Yasser Arafat, Saeb Erekat, had the gall to ask the U.S. to release him, claiming that Klinghoffer’s murderer was covered by a 1995 accord signed by Bill Clinton, granting amnesty to fighters for Palestinian independence.
One may wonder, if the Palestinian Authority is at all serious about ending attacks on innocent civilians, why Erekat (and Arafat) wouldn’t applaud the capture of Abu Abbas. One reason may be that Erekat opted instead to pander to the sizable portion of his constituency that regards Abu Abbas as a hero. For although Abu Abbas has always been associated with Socialist Arab nationalist terrorist groups rather than religious ones, the increasing strength of radical Islam among Palestinians makes him more of a hero than ever, not only to nationalists but to the warriors of jihad as well. For the radical reading of Islamic law transforms the killing of Klinghoffer, and Kuntar’s killing of Kaiser’s husband and daughter, from regrettable but necessary actions (as they would be seen by nationalists) into heroic acts in themselves — even saintly ones.
Can it be saintly to indulge in the wanton slaughter of the innocent? Certainly — from the radical Muslim perspective. Many Muslims have pointed out since September 11 that Islam forbids killing the innocent, as well as the killing of women and children in jihad. Of this there is no doubt, but there is a key distinction: the Shafi’i school of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence, which holds sway at Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar University, stipulates that “it is not permissible . . . to kill women and children unless they are fighting against the Muslims.” (Emphasis added.) The Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya, a favorite of modern Muslim radicals, directed that “as for those who cannot offer resistance or cannot fight, such as women, children, monks, old people, the blind, handicapped and their likes, they shall not be killed unless they actually fight with words (e.g. by propaganda) and acts (e.g. by spying or otherwise assisting in the warfare).”
Abu Abbas told the Boston Globe in 1998 why he and his men killed Klinghoffer: “He created troubles. He was handicapped but he was inciting and provoking the other passengers. So the decision was made to kill him.” A decision in perfect accord with the radicals’ reading of Islamic law.
Similarly, the November 2002 communiqué purporting to be from Osama bin Laden states that “the American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq.” Such statements only make any sense in light of these provisions of Islamic law that allow for warfare against non-combatants.
In calling for Abu Abbas’s release, the Palestinian Authority reinforces this view of Abu Abbas’s deeds. By pandering to this religious element, Arafat and Erekat have guaranteed that the future belongs not to an independent Palestine existing in peace with Israel, or even to a homeland for Palestinian Christians as well as Muslims, but only to an Islamic state designed for the likes of Umm Nidal. She is the mother of a member of the radical Muslim terror group Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), Muhammad Farhat, who carried out a suicide attack on March 3, 2002. Umm Nidal rejoiced in her son’s death and told an interviewer: “Jihad is a [religious] commandment imposed upon us. We must instill this idea in our sons’ souls, all the time . . . Allah be praised, I am a Muslim and I believe in Jihad. Jihad is one of the elements of the faith and this is what encouraged me to sacrifice Muhammad in Jihad for the sake of Allah.”
How can there be negotiations or peaceful coexistence with someone who holds this point of view? When Arafat offers cabinet posts to Hamas (as he did most recently in 2002) and presses for the release of a man like Abu Abbas, he is strangling the latest peace process in its cradle. For Hamas believes that peace with Israel can never be won at the negotiating table. The only solution to the problems of the Middle East is Islam.
The Hamas Charter quotes Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pioneering modern Muslim radical group: “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” The Charter explains why peace talks avail nothing: “[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: ‘Allah is the all-powerful, but most people are not aware.’”
In laying out its aims in this way, Hamas and similar groups such as Islamic Jihad have painted themselves — and the Middle East — into a corner. The Muslim militants who see their struggle against Israel as part of their religious responsibility cannot recognize Israel’s right to exist, or reach any kind of negotiated settlement with “the Zionist entity,” without denying what it has identified as “part of its faith.” After all, according to a Muslim tradition the Prophet Muhammad himself warned Muslims that “the last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.”
By calling for the release of Abu Abbas instead of approving of his prosecution (to say nothing of actually turning him over to the U.S.), Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are only reinforcing this kind of thinking. And killing the peace — again.