UK -Politics & World Current Affairs

When the Munich Olympic Games started in 1972, hardly any one heard of ‘Black September Organisation’ BSO( Ayloul al-Aswad) the Palestinian terror organisation, apart from a handful of Middle East specialists and intelligence services’ agents following the deadly game of assassinations and counter assassinations between Palestinian guerrilla groups and Israeli intelligence service Mossad. The game, sometimes spectacularly violent, was often more about revenge rather than a pre-emptive step.
The BSO, a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO, was established ‘to avenge the blood of the martyrs of Black September’. The Name given by Palestinians and their Arab nationalist backers to Septembers 1970s ‘ battles of refugee camps’, when the mainly Bedouin Jordanian Army ( formally the Arab Legion of the British Aram), known for their unquestionable loyalty to King Hussein (1935- 1999) attacked Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO fighters who broke an agreement confining their activities to refugee camps (the 1969 Cairo Agreement established a framework of coordination between Palestinian guerrilla groups and governments hosting refugee following violent clashes in Lebanon and Jordan in 1960). Palestinian fighters challenged the late King Hussein’s sovereignty taking-over major cities, setting up checkpoints and collecting taxes from Palestinians who became Jordanian citizens. The Last straw for the Jordanian monarch came when groups belonging to Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine PFLP hijacked four civilian airliners, BOAC, Swissair, TWA and an Israel El-Al then landed them at Dawson airfield near Amman. The airport was totally controlled by Palestinian guerrilla blocking Jordanian security personnel from operating. BSO aim was to ‘ avenge the blood of 20,000 martyrs’, as the organisation literature circulated in refugee camps and university campus in the Arab world in 1970’s claimed (official figures by the Jordanians put the death toll at 1000). BSO, which was later aided by international terrorist groups like the German Bader Meinhoff, and the Japanese Red Army, targeted Arab regimes it accused of backing the Jordanian Army in September 1970.
In November 28, 1971, they assassinated Wasfi al-Tal, who was Jordan’s prime minister during the September refugee camps war, outside Sherton hotel in Cairo, earning the wrath of President Anwar Sadat, who later made peace with Israel, turning his back on Colonel Gamal Abdel Naser’s revolutionary Arab Nationalist agenda.
The chief of operation of Black September was a Mohammed Oudeh, a alestinan born former science teacher ( employed by the Jordanian ministry of education in 1960s), who was known by his nom de guerre Abu Daoud (Abu is father of… and Daoud was his father’s middle name which he gave to his only son). It took him five months to plan the operation using his contacts within Syrian intelligence – who took advantage of diplomatic privileges- as well as the Stasi (former East German ntelligence service) to smuggle equipment, explosives and weapons to Munich, as he later told me (his admission was completed over a number of years in different locations, including Amman, Damascus and Beirut) .
Mr Oudeh spent the evening of September 4, 1972 at a restaurant attached to Munich central railway station complex, briefing 11 of ‘operators’ from his organisation over dinner, and going over the final details with them.
A few hours later, just before dawn, armed members of BSO scaled the wall surrounding the Olympic athletes’ village, while the other three (who were never caught) helped them from outside. They managed to break into Israeli athletes sleeping quarters taking them hostages, and killing two who resisted. The Israelis’ say they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach, but Mr Oudeh years later said they were ‘armed Israeli secrete agents’.
BSO offered to release the nine Israeli hostages in exchange for 236 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but Golda Meir ( 1898-1978), Israelis Prime Minister at the time refused to negotiate and for 20 hours a tense standoff ensued while television images of an empty balcony on a grey, modern dormitory where the group and their hostage made their stand-off, were beamed around the world.

Mr Oudeh has been consistent, over half a dozen of personal conversations, in media interviews and in his 1998 book (min al-Qudus Illa Munich ‘From Jerusalem to Munich’, published in English a year later as ‘Memoirs of A Palestinian Terrorist), that in planning Munich operation his instructions were clear ‘ to avoid killing or injuring any one, including Israeli hostages’ whom he wanted to use as a bargaining chip to release Palestinian comrades in Israeli jails. But later he added that he was deliberately prolonging negotiation in order to maximise publicity ‘alerting the world to the Palestinian legitimate grievances’, in his own words.

Having aborted a previously rehearsed plan to storm the compound (Since world TV cameras were transmitting live the image of the outside building, which was also seen by the hostage takers) the West Germans finally agreed to transport both captors and their hostages, in two helicopters, to Furstenfeldbruck the military airfield, where an aircraft was waiting to fly them to Cairo (The Egyptians, infuriated by BSO terror activities had planned to arrest them, according to their official papers released in 2004).
To every one’s surprise, West German security staged a bungled attempt to rescue the Israelis at the airport, resulting in a chaotic gun battle. When the smoke cleared, five Palestinians, a German police officer and all nine hostages bodies were found on the tarmac, and on the plane.
Israeli government statement vowed to hunt down and kill any Palestinian who had survived or who had been involved in planning the operation; special squads were recruited from Mossad for the mission, which went on for years.

Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. Trained as a teacher in Amman, Beirut and Cairo, he taught maths and physics in Westbank secondary schools (Administered by Jordan’s ministry of Education). He later studied law and helped draft PLO charter (constitution) and other legal issues after joining the Palestinian National Council (parliament).
He remained in East Jerusalem until captured by Israel in 1967 Six Day War when he moved to Jordan to join the PLO. He later admitted that he had been in contacts with PLO as a ‘ sleeper’ of the PLO largest Arafat lead subgroup, Fatah, of which he was one of the founders. He claimed to taking part in Al-Karama battle in 1968 when Israeli forces using air cover attacked refugee camps run by the PLO, inside Jordan near the village of al-Karama, which was the first time Palestinian ‘resistance’ fought Israeli army face to face instead of hit and run or bomb planting operations they started in January 1965.
He had major disagreement with Arafat over priorities. While Arafat exploited the contradictions between Arab regimes, Oudeh was more of a revolutionary puritan who saw regimes not aiding the Palestinians, or making bilateral peace deals with Israel, as ‘ enemies who should be fought before fighting Israel.’
He went underground moving into Lebanon via Syria after 1970s camps wars. He moved between Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, then to Europe.
After the 1972 attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and moved back to Lebanon early 1975. When the Lebanon civil war broke out later that year, he participated for a few months, then moved to Jordan. He changed residence to Ramallah in the West Bank following 1993 Palestinian Israeli Oslo peace accords.
When his memorise on Munich was published, the Israelis banned him from returning to Ramallah following a trip to see his doctor in Amman. He finally settled in Syria - the only country that would take him, and the most militant regime in the anti-peace Arab bloc.
Oudeh narrowly escaped assassination in what he claimed to be a Mossad operation in a hotel lobby in Warsaw in 1981. Despite being shot several times in his left wrist, chest, stomach and jaw, he chased his assassin (whom he claimed to be Palestinian double agent), to the hotel entrance where he collapsed.
He remained defiant to the end. In his last interview with Aljazeera 1999, he said he would do Munich all over again as he had no regret. “Today, I cannot fight you anymore,’’ he said in a statement to the Israelis shortly before his death of a kidney failure last week, “but my grandson will and his grandsons too.”
Abu Daoud is survived by his wife, five daughters and a son Daoud.

Majority of Britons think Islam is unfair to women, lacks justice and is linked in their minds with extremism and terrorism, according to a recent opinion poll. The poll, conducted by You Gov on behalf of Explore Islam Foundation, a moderate Islamic organisation trying to promote Islam as a faith for peace and self discipline, found that 58% of Britons linked Islam with extremism while half of those asked associated the faith with terrorism. Last week’s poll also discovered that 69% of Britons believe Islam encourages the oppression of women while less than four of out ten asked thought Islam was having a positive impact on society. Only 13% believed it was a religion based on peace, while a mere six percent associated Islam with justice.
The finding came as a mega disappointment for the foundation as they were preparing for ‘Mohammed Project,’ a campaign to promote Islam. But other findings might give them a bit of hope that their campaign might win some minds and hearts. Sixty percent admitted their ignorance of most details of Islam, while a third of those polled said they wanted to know more about Islam as a religion.
A Foundation spokesman said the figures might be disappointing, but it would help them redesign their ‘Mohammed project’ aiming at providing individual Britons with Islam as a philosophy for peace with oneself. The main drive of the project relies on posters and leaflets explaining ‘the positive aspects of Islam’. However, as a journalist with four decades of experience, I am sceptical of the effect of campaigns relying solely on posters or public addresses in large meetings.
Foundations like Exploring Islam need to wake up to reality. The fact of the matter is that Muslims themselves, and no one else,  are responsible for giving the rest of the British population a negative impression about Islam; and only them, as Muslims, can gradually change their fellow Britons’ perception.
Various terror groups have politicised Islam, turning the faith from what started as a spiritual experience enjoyed by the individual or a traditional rituals practiced by congregations in worshipping places, into a political ideology.
Evil minded and psychologically damaged preachers selected Quarnic verses, out of their historic or symbolic context, to literary translate into texts justifying murder and violence against the ‘other’. Such interpretation manifested by deeds or loud demonstrations linked Islam with violence and terrorism in the minds of Britons.
Take other non Islamic 20^th century violent groups like the Basque separatist ETA in Spain, or the Irish Republican Army (IRA), they never linked themselves to a faith, nor did they adopt God, names or images of prophets or saints on their banners.
On the contrary, perpetrators of massacres against tourists in upper Egypt have declared their names gamaat Islamiyah  (Islamic Group)  and Islamic Jihad (Islamic Crusade); in Gaza, Hamas is short for   Islamic Resistance Movement  ( And consider the contrast  between Britons’ sympathy towards the Palestinian people with televised scenes of Hamas’s armed gangs pushing their former coalition partners from Fateh over roof-tops and sending suicide bombers to blow up civilians in restaurants and buses ). Those who put bombs in cinemas and theatres,  beat up unveiled-women and assassinated judges who tried their fellow terrorists in Egypt call themselves ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, a group from its very womb  more violent groups like al Qaeda were born, with leaders like Ayman El- Zawahiri proudly declaring himself as an MB disciple. The ‘Army of Mohammed,’ group claimed responsibility for blowing up Shia mosques in Baghdad. The group, which invented blowing up embassies by suicide-explosive trucks and organised several air-hijacks, has topped all groups in hijacking  the most prominent name for all Muslims calling themselves Hezbollah, (Hezb-o-Allah)  literary the party of god.  So if responsibilities of such acts are claimed by groups whose very names are associated with Islam, what would Muslims expect a British public to think of Islam?
If you count all members of these parties and groups together, they wouldn’t count for more than 1000.0% of Muslims within the area of their activities; yet they managed to have a huge impact focusing the minds and attention of media consumers on their evil actions as ‘ Islamic activity’, through operations deliberately designed as mass murder for a maximum impact. The  9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda were a deliberate genocide, so was the attack on tourists in Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor, or exploding two bombs during a wedding party killing scores in a hotel in Amman, or several attacks by hand grenades and machine guns against residential compounds in Saudi Arabia. All designed for maximum murder, terrorising impact and to reach the front pages of press worldwide.
Meanwhile Muslims in Britain never marched en-mass to protest against such atrocities, or at lease to distance themselves from those murderers who claimed to be defending Islam; yet you see hundreds of angry British Muslims on the streets burning books they haven’t bothered to read, or stone embassies in protest against publications in other countries they assumed to have believe insulted Islam.
To make matters worse, many Muslims in Britain, when talking privately with their non-Muslim neighbours or colleagues,  try to justify such insane acts of violence as ‘a frustrated Muslims’ response to the occupation’ of Palestine or Iraq, as if one immoral act would justify an equally immoral response. Two wrongs never can make one ‘ right’.
These justifications are totally unconvincing to a British public brought up on a Christian moral foundation of turning the other cheek.
Another disastrous reason for a negative impression of Islam, is Muslim’s apparent resistance to a full integration into British society while continue to reject the culture and the way of life of the majority. The irony is the Muslims, mainly from the Indian sub-continent chose  to emigrate to Britain (and some paid bribes to human traffickers, told lies and used other methods, forbidden by Islam, to secure a visa or sneak to Britain or sought asylum). I haven’t come across a single Muslim who was forced to come to Britain or to stay against his or her will, unlike majority of African Americans who were sold as slaves in the New World in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.
Muslims here openly attack the British way of life in public, describing the way British and secular women dress as  ”sinful”, while hardly any of them used the term ‘ sinful’ to refer to murdering fellow human beings. Other Muslims deliberately provoke disgust ( Like killing sheep in Adha festival out in the open scaring children in a society where keeping pets is a way of life, while they could simply ask a butcher to perform the rites in a specially designated slaughter houses ).
Muslims lead by ignorant Imams who neither speak English nor read Arabic (the original language of Quran) into self isolated cultural, and sometimes geographical, ghettos, refusing to mix with indigenous whites.
In my view, Exploring Islam Foundation money and effort are likely to be wasted without having the slightest impact on British population. The view will only change when British Muslims change their own view of Britain as a home they chose for themselves and their children. White Britons’ impression of Islam will only began to change when mainstream  British Muslims take the initiative to condemn violence and terror committed by other Muslims from the lunatic fringe, by coming out  of their ghetto into the main British street in support of British values of justice, fairness and championing the underdog.  
However, the picture is not all gloomy. There are, so far, successful attempts by enlightened Muslims. The most successful in its efforts to   fully integrate in British society, is a group made of Muslims and other followers of Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic faiths, is the Conservative Arab Network CAN. Chaired by Egyptian born British GP Dr Wafik Moustafa and its Parliamentary Chairman the Conservative MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham Daniel Kawczynski, himself a polish immigrant.
Dr Moustafa insists on CAN being inclusive, hence its members consist of several generations of immigrants from the 22 nations of the Arab League, they include Muslims, Jews, Yazidi, Baha’i’s and many others, Arabs and non Arabs like Kurds, Assyrians, Nubians, Copts and Berber. They are proud of their eastern heritage and their British nationality and culture.
A few weeks ago, a group, of mainly Muslim Arabs, led by Dr. Moustafa went to Wooten Bassett in south-west England, where coffins of British soldiers died in Afghanistan pass on their way from the RAF base nearby. CAN members, stood alongside the villagers, paying respect, and each praying to his/her own god for the souls of young men and women, who made the ultimate sacrifice defending British way of life and British principles of liberty and democracy, to which the Muslims of Afghanistan aspire.
 This positive action was recounted by Dr. Moustafa at the reception held by CAN for the newly elected members of Parliament in Westminster last week, and was attended by more than a hundred MPs and Lords, all gave a standing applaud to this patriotic gesture by British Muslims.

CAN positive feature is its integration into British life, and resisting separation. I wish CAN every successful and I hope the group resist attempts to politicise its activities by radical Arabs who turn any Arab or Islamic grouping into a propaganda platform for radical Palestinian causes. The integration of British Arabs into their British society where they vote, and pay taxes is, for them, as crucial as a future independent state is for the Palestinians.
——————————————————————————————————————– 

© Copyrights Adel Darwish 2010, not to be quoted, lifted or reprinted in part or as whole without prior permission from Adel Darwish
 

This is the original piece, which was printed in Arabic in Asharq al-Awsat Saturday January 2, 2010, but then they back-translated into English (http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=19420 )which made little sense, hence I had to put it on the blog ( which I normally wouldn’t do with pieces published in the media)

ONCE AGAIN  the derogatory term “Londonstan”, resonated among world security chiefs referring to Britain as soon as it was revealed that that Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to trigger explosives on a passenger flight approaching Detroit airport, had been radicalised by Islamists extremists during his three years study in Britain.

(more…)

London september 4, 2009 

Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his dealing with the shambles of operation Megrahi seemed to be more of a Mr Muddle ( as in Mr men books) than a statesman. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer  who was found guilty, by a Scottish court in 2000, for plotting the explosion that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in1988 killing over 200, was released by Scottish justice minister Kenny McCascail ‘ on compassionate’ grounds with 19 years remaining of his sentence; after three doctors ( paid by the Libyans) decided he had a terminal prostate cancer.
(more…)

6 July 2009

When former Prime Minister Tony Blair was giving oral evidence to a House of Common Select Committee last month,  a leading New labour figure was overheard whispering to a colleague ‘ my god, what have we done !’.
Appearing in his current role as the Middle East Peace Quartet (EMEPQ) envoy before the all party Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FASC) Mr Blair articulated his assessment of how to overcome obstacles impeding the peace process towards the two state solution in Palestine, while remaining in a calm control of the two and half hour session.
(more…)

Adel Darwish - 27 Dec-2007

These are the first thoughts and observations after the assasination of the Pakistan opposition Leader Benazir Bhutto. There is the usual, wrong spin from the left making the wrong conclusion, while there is real fear of what might happend next.

(more…)

London- 11 August :

A group, of mainly British Muslims, was plotting for the past eight months, to smuggle chemicals aboard planes and assemble liquid bombs during the flights and blow them above the Atlantic or above US cities, three at a time, causing maximum death. But fighting terror by security measure alone is not enough; we must fight the ideology of the terrorists, and free young Muslim minds from the hands of evil clergy who preach violence and terror. By  Adel Darwish.

The stress to Londoners and the tension engulfing the place, not to mention to mention financial and economic losses especially among British Muslims, were only comparable to those that followed the terrorist attacks on 7/7 last year, which claimed more than 50 lives, and injured more than a hundred of from several ethnic and religious backgrounds including Muslims. If it wasn’t for a mixture of luck – or divine providence –, alertness of MI5, Special Branch and other security agencies and the cooperation from many British Muslims, the disaster would have been of a much larger scale than 7/7 and the loss of life would have been much higher than that of last July, and even the losses at of Bali, Taba, Sharm al-Shaykh, and perhaps 9/11.

(more…)

I penned this coulmn a few hours after the terror attack on London 7/7

Published Friday, 8, July, 2005 

London - Adel Darwish 
 
The barbaric terrorist attacks in London yesterday were condemned by all civilized nations. In addition to condemning the atrocities, Muslim and Middle Eastern leaders were among the first to send messages of support, sympathy and solidarity with Britain.

Words of condemnation and solidarity are fine and great in their symbolic value, but they are not enough unless backed by practical measures in cooperation with Britain and the rest of the civilized world to defeat the evil forces of terrorism.

(more…)

This column was first published  on Wednesday, 6, April, 2005

London - Adel Darwish
President George Bush vowed to correct flaws in intelligence gathering exposed by a bipartisan presidential commission concluding that US intelligence was “dead wrong’’ on Iraq and that flaws were still all too common among America’s intelligence community. The report outlined 74 recommendations for improving information sharing among the agencies and fostering dissent.

(more…)