List of terror organizations is missing one - Fatah

 

The U.S. must put Fatah on its list of terror groups

Even Fatah officials admit that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades is the “military arm” of the party. 

By Stephen M, Flatow

Imagine if the ruling party of any country announced that it had begun carrying out terrorist attacks. Imagine the shock and horror if the U.K. Conservative Party, Canada’s Liberal Party or the U.S. Democratic Party made such a declaration. Yet that is exactly what Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, just did—and the international community is silent.

Logo of the Al Aqsa
Martyr's Brigades

After the killing of an IDF officer near the city of Jenin in Judea/Samaria on Sept. 14, the official Fatah Facebook page featured a video praising the murder. A translation by Palestinian Media Watch states that the video referred to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades organization as Fatah’s “military arm.” It further declared that Fatah “takes responsibility for the operations of its military arm” and that the Brigades “is officially announcing” that it will be carrying out additional “operations.”

Nobody had ever heard of the Brigades until the autumn of 2000, when the Palestinian Arabs launched what they called the second intifada. That campaign of terrorism was led by what was described by the media as a “new” group called the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

But it was obvious that a terrorist group couldn’t spring up fully-formed overnight, with an entire network of highly trained bombers and shooters already in place. And it didn’t. The Brigades was a front group constructed by Fatah in order to continue the violence the party had promised, in the Oslo Accords, to give up.

The most notorious of the attacks by the Brigades were a Jan. 2002 assault on a bat mitzvah celebration in Hadera that killed six and wounded 33; a March 2002 suicide bombing in front of Jerusalem’s Yeshivat Beit Yisrael that killed 11 (including two infants) and wounded more than 50; and a suicide bombing at the Tel Aviv central bus station in January 2003 that killed 23 and wounded more than 100.

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