Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His bi-weekly column appears regularly in newspapers around the globe. His website, DanielPipes.org, is one of the most accessed internet sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam.
Fri Jul 23, 2004 9:53 am Palestinian Descent into Chaos
Palestinian Descent into Chaos
By Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
July 20, 2004
"There is a crisis. There is a state of chaos." That's what Ahmed Qureia said after announcing his resignation from what some call the Palestinian Authority's prime ministry. "We have an absolute state of chaos," echoes the mayor of Jenin, a West Bank town. That chaos, growing since Yasir Arafat initiated the Oslo War in September 2000, has prompted the PA to declare a state of emergency; it could signal the end of the PA itself.
According to an April poll of the Gaza-based General Institute for Information, 94 percent of Palestinians believe that a state of lawlessness and chaos prevails in Palestinian Authority territories. As Palestinian security forces have fragmented and dissolved, armed groups of unknown identity have taken their place, using strong-arm tactics against a hapless population. The Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group finds that "weapons possession has become socially legitimized in Palestinian society."
In gang-dominated Nablus, for example, some deaths have resulted from spiraling criminal activity and reckless accusations of "collaboration" with Israel. But, Reuters explains, most casualties involve mistaken identity or plain bad luck. In two typical stories dating from February 2004, "Amneh Abu Hijleh, 37, entered a pharmacy to buy cough syrup for her infant daughter only to be shot dead in a botched abduction. Firas Aghbar, 13, was killed when he walked into a gang battle on his way to the barber for a birthday trim."
As explained by the Washington Post, "the Palestinian Authority is broke, politically fractured, riddled with corruption, unable to provide security for its own people and seemingly unwilling to crack down on terrorist attacks against Israel." One unnamed Fatah member estimates that 90 percent of gang activity is carried out by Palestinian Authority employees.
In February, for example, one Palestinian police officer died and eleven were wounded when rival police factions fought each other within the confines of Gaza's police headquarters. Things climaxed on July 16, as Al-Fatah terrorists ambushed and seized Gaza's police chief for several hours; and then some recently-sacked Palestinian policemen abducted the director of military co-ordination in the southern part of Gaza.
The UN's Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, has offered choice comments on the spreading anarchy, telling the Security Council that "Clashes and showdowns between branches of Palestinian security forces are now common in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian Authority legal authority is receding fast in the face of the mounting power of arms, money and intimidation." He also reached the startling conclusion that "Jericho is actually becoming the only Palestinian city with a functioning police."
This descent into chaos prompts four observations.
* The PA has joined other parts of the Greater Middle East (Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan) in the general trend toward lawlessness.
* Mr. Arafat predicted in 1994 that "Either we build a Singapore in our country or fall into the trap of the tragic Somali model." He thus acknowledges that the PA's slide to Somali-like anarchy symbolizes his own failure.
* The Islamic proverb, "Better a thousand days of tyranny than one day of anarchy," has an element of truth, for life in the PA territories has truly become hellish.
* Although Mr. Arafat launched the Oslo war nearly four years ago with the intent to destroy Israel, he is, ironically, destroying not Israel but his own proto-government.
The question now facing Palestinians is whether they have learned the right lessons from their bitter experience. That for once they are not blaming Israel for their problems gives some reason for optimism. Cox News Service notes that, "as the disorder spreads, Palestinian intellectuals and politicians are increasingly looking past Israel as the usual scapegoat and admitting they share a part of the blame." National Public Radio quotes a Palestinian saying that the PA is in trouble "because many people are being killed or kidnapped or robbed. … We are all accusing the government of not doing anything." A poll by the Gaza-based General Institute for Information finds that just 29 percent of Palestinians hold Israelis responsible for the PA's failure to enforce law and order.
This is a good start. But to emerge from their political predicament requires Palestinians coming to terms with the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. So long as they resist this change of heart, the Somali model remains their fate.
Comment on this article using the "Post Reply" button
Funded by the Soros and Whiting foundations and created at Northeastern University, the guide presents its goal as shaping "a basic curriculum for future law enforcement and community training activities." At first glance, this sounds promising, as it offers ways to take advantage of Arab, Muslim and Sikh unique "linguistic skills, information, and cultural insights" to develop new counterterrorism initiatives.
But the guide's authors, Deborah A. Ramirez, Sasha Cohen O'Connell and Rabia Zafar, quickly alert the reader as to their true agenda. "The most dangerous threats in this war" they write, "are rooted in the successful propagation of anger and fear directed at unfamiliar cultures and people." The most dangerous threat, they say, is not the very real violence of Islamist terror but the alleged bias of American authorities against some minority populations. The guide might present itself as an aide to counterterrorism but its real purpose is to deflect attention from national security to the privileging of select communities.
In this spirit, and ignoring the fact that those who are making war on America act explicitly in the name of Islam, the Promising Practices Guide renounces any approach to law enforcement that focuses on "religion or national origin." Islamic charities, a known source of terrorist funding, should not be given special scrutiny lest "this creates an impression of unjust, religious, and/or national origin-based targeting." Nor apparently should those suspected of plotting terrorism be detained for lesser crimes such as immigration violations or firearms offenses, as to the community, "these may appear to be ‘pretext' investigations." Using the guide's logic, no one should be singled out, not even would-be terrorists, not even for questioning.
The guide grants Arab and Muslim concerns a higher priority than standard law enforcement practices. For example, the routine rotation of law enforcement personnel is said to obstruct a sense of belonging; Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council complained that "Once you know somebody [within law enforcement], they move [on]." The guide's authors accept that constant rotations reduce the chance of corruption but nonetheless advocate that these communities be excepted and allowed to develop cozy relations with law enforcement.
The authors sympathetically relate that some community organizations (including a branch of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) refused to cooperate with them due to a skepticism about operational-level discussions with law enforcement. They were convinced instead that the root of the problem lies elsewhere – in "unjust legislation from the highest levels of government and the American public's acceptance of racial profiling." To address this type of concern, the guide recommends that police efforts move away from a traditional focus on making arrests and toward developing community partnerships that consist of explaining immigration law and airport security policy.
Rather than concentrate on leads to protect the country from terrorism, the "best and brightest" in law enforcement should be recruited to work on community outreach initiatives. This special consideration flows from many reasons, including a supposed view of law enforcement by Arabs and Muslims as "an extension of U.S. policies or actions that concern them, such as the current war in Iraq and U.S. foreign policy in Israel."
And the C.A.T. Eyes training program – adopted by law enforcement to "assist local communities to fight against domestic terrorism and racial profiling" – was (horrors!) developed in part by an Israeli police officer. C.A.T. Eyes may emphasize that it "educates people on the indicators of terrorism not race or religion," but for the guide's authors, the "general negative reaction members of the Muslim and Arab communities" to any training based on "Israeli perceptions, intelligence, or notions of policing" could be reason enough to scuttle the program.
The guide stoops to promoting non-existent problems to establish unfairness by law enforcement. It cites, for example, two cases from 2002. In Florida, a supposedly Jewish perpetrator of an attempted bombing of mosques and Islamic centers was charged with weapons possession and "conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Muslims;" while in Los Angeles, Arabs and Muslims are supposedly "under the impression" that a Muslim killer of two individuals at the El Al airport counter was charged with terrorism. Wrong: the El Al perpetrator was shot dead on the spot – and so was never charged with any crime; more than that, law enforcement actually stated that "there's nothing to indicate terrorism" in the LAX case and proposed that a work dispute might have been the cause of the violence. So the guide provides an unreasonable error in perception, then puts the onus on law enforcement to correct such misperceptions.
Instead of crafting a genuine counterterrorism initiative, this George Soros-funded guide promises to help terrorists in the United States avoid arrest. The FBI's Washington Field Office should reconsider its cooperation with the Promising Practices Guide and other law enforcement agencies should shun it.
Comment on this article using the "Post Reply" button
View previous topic • View next topic 
