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-----Original Message-----
From: Aref Assaf, AAFNJ [aref@americanarabforum.org]
Sent: 1/30/2006 2:37 PM
To: McMahon, Josh
Subject: op-ed draft "Hamas can change"

On Transforming Hamas
Aref Assaf, President
American Arab Forum
Paterson, NJ
www.americanarabforum.org
973-960-2673


Can today’s terrorists become tomorrow’s political leaders? Yes, they can. Much is being said about Hamas’s links to terrorism and how it will be impossible for them to be integrated into mainstream Palestinian political life. I believe this is possible for a couple of reasons. The Palestinian people have chosen peaceful negotiations as the venue for resolving their conflicts over land with Israel. Most Palestinians want a two-state solution living peacefully alongside Israel. Hamas, as the new caretaker of the Palestinian government will have no choice but to abide by this public mandate. Secondly, one needs to look at past Israeli leaders and groups, which were designated as terrorists and actually engaged in terrorism against Palestinians and the British but later on were integrated into regular Israeli polity. The Lehi Group (short for "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel") was a self-described terrorist group fighting to evict the British from Palestine toward the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Soon after, we came to know it as the Stern Gang after Commander Avraham Stern. Stern believed that Palestine's Jewish population should fight the British rather than support them in World War II and even made independent contact with Nazis proposing alliance with Germany in exchange for a Jewish state in Palestine.

Lehi assassinated British police and soldiers and in 1947 and conspired to send mail bombs to British politicians in England. Lehi also sabotaged railroads, bridges and oil refineries, terror operations financed by private donations, bank robbery and extortion.
On Nov. 6, 1944, Lehi assassinated a British government official, Lord Moyne, in Cairo. This murder outraged Winston Churchill and the British captured two Lehi assassins and executed them. In 1948 Lehi and another Jewish terrorist group, Irgun attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin alongside other "irregular" forces resulting in the cold murder of over 250 Arab civilians. Lehi was successfully integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces on May 31, 1948 and Lehi leaders received amnesty from prosecution, though Lehi did later assassinate UN-envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem.
Yitzhak Shamir, a former Israeli prime minister, was Lehi's "Terror Master" when Lehi assassinated Britain's minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. Shamir also directed the attempted the assassination of Harold MacMichael, high commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, and oversaw the 1948 Bernadotte assassination. Although Bernadotte had secured the release of 21,000 prisoners headed for Nazi extermination, Shamir still judged him an agent of Lehi's "British enemy".
Finally, Ariel Sharon, the ailing former Prime Minister has a legacy full of Palestinian blood. From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the Arab village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants -- men, women and children -- still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air. Close to four thousand Palestinians were brutally massacred. An Israeli state inquiry in 1983 found Sharon, then the defense minister, indirectly responsible for the killings. The Israeli inquiry forced Sharon's resignation. Yet, Sharon was described by President Bush as a man of peace.
Given the constraints of governance, international and domestic de facto, Hamas too can change- and we must encourage it to become a partner to rebuilding the Middle East. END
Aref Assaf



Here is the short response we got from the Star Ledger:

Aref: I don't see that there is anything to gain in a public discussion of how bad the other guys were... sorry, josh.

From: HASSELL, JOHN [mailto:JHASSELL@STARLEDGER.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 5:59 PM
To: Aref Assaf, AAFNJ
Subject: RE: op-ed draft Hamas can change

 Here is the response we got from John Hasselll who in lieu of our piece suggested another one:

Dear Mr. Assaf,

 Thank you for sending this my way.

 Regrettably, I won't be able to place it in our Perspective section because of space constraints and a prior commitment to another writer who is addressing this topic from a slightly different angle for this Sunday. 

Please do stay in touch.

 Best,

John

The piece he was talking about is an op-ed by Deborah Cohen  titled a Daughter's revenge- a deliberate attempt to malign the tragedy of the Palestinian  people and the true cause of their suffering. Click here to read it.