Fatah's Armed Militias Warn Israelis: "You Must Leave!"

by Khaled Abu Toameh • May 20, 2015 at 5:00 am

The international community and the media often ignore the fact that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah has a number of armed groups. Their fight is to destroy Israel, eliminate the "Zionist entity" and achieve the "right of return" for millions of descendants of refugees.
The Palestinian Authority leadership has never distanced itself from the rhetoric and actions of these groups. Fatah's militias will be the first to reject any peace agreement that includes the slightest concession to Israel.
Several Fatah leaders, in fact, often speak in English about the need for reviving the peace process, while in Arabic they praise and endorse the Fatah gunmen.

Gunmen from Fatah's Abu al-Rish Brigades, which describes itself as the "military wing of Fatah," appear in a September 2014 propaganda video.

Many in the international community often refer to the Palestinian Fatah faction, which is headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, as a "moderate" group that believes in Israel's right to exist and the two-state solution.

What these people do not know is that Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), consists of several groups that hold different views than those expressed by Abbas and other English-speaking Fatah officials.

Some of these Fatah groups do not believe in Israel's right to exist and continue to talk about the "armed struggle" as the only way to "liberate Palestine and restore Palestinian national rights."

One of these groups is called The Aqsa Martyrs Brigade - El Amoudi Brigade.

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Murders in Bangladesh, Government Looks the Other Way

by Monir Hussain • May 20, 2015 at 4:00 am

Forty-seven percent of Bangladeshi Muslims said that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets could be justified to defend Islam from an enemy (compared to Malaysia at 18%, Indonesia at 9% and Pakistan at 3%).
It seems clear, therefore, why the dissidents, atheists and secularists in Bangladesh remain unassisted by the society and the government.

Ananta Bijoy Das (left) was hacked to death on May 9 in Bangladesh, with Islamist extremists taking credit for the attack. At right, police collect evidence at the murder scene.

A third brilliant blogger has been hacked to death in Bangladesh since February. On May 9, Ananta Bijoy Das, a banker by profession, and a blogger, was murdered, apparently by Islamist extremists.

Das was murdered in broad daylight on a busy street in the country's fifth largest city, Sylhet. He had written for Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), a website with which the Bangladeshi-American blogger, Abhijit Roy, had worked before being hacked to death himself in February by machete-wielding assailants.

Five weeks after Roy's death, yet another blogger, Oyasiqur Rahman, was also brutally murdered by three men in Dhaka.

Their deaths echoed the murder of Ahmed Rajib Haider on February 15, 2013, and the stabbing in Bangladesh of Asif Mahiuddin in January 2013.

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