At the National Review, Andrew McCarthy blows the lid on Fatah’s relationship with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (which claimed responsibility with Islamic Jihad for this week’s Eilat attack):
The murderous Aqsa Brigades, however, put the lie to Fatah’s charade rather embarrassingly. They were officially designated by the United States government as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2002 after executing a series of atrocities conjoined to Arafat’s orchestration of the second Intifada, which began in late 2000 and has never officially ended.
There is no question the Brigades are part and parcel of Fatah. Documents seized by the Israeli Defense Force established that Arafat was paying them directly. Moreover, in a 2004 interview with the Arabic daily, Asharq al-Awsat, Fatah’s Ahmed Qurei, then Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, proclaimed: “We have clearly declared that the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are part of Fatah[.]… We are committed to them and Fatah bears full responsibility for the group.” Qurei maintained that they “will not be dismantled,” and that each of the Brigades’ members had “the right to play a political role within the framework of Fatah.” ….
Abbas keeps close ties to the Brigades. His wary confederation with Marwan Barghouti, a formative Brigades figure currently serving a life sentence in Israel for multiple murders, was essential to his 2004 election as Palestinian Authority president. The support of Barghouti and the Brigades remains key to Abbas’s hold on Fatah’s reins. Indeed, the German weekly Welt am Sonntag reported last March that Abbas has appointed another Aqsa heavyweight, Zakariya Zubeidi, to head the police force in Jenin — only after personally witnessing a demonstration of the wild popularity Zubeidi and the Brigades enjoy in that West Bank cauldron (Hat tip to the Vital Perspective Blog).
