Word: islamist
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...structured affinity, at that: Fatah militants on the ground have created "Popular Resistance Committees" in which they've forged a common front with the major Islamist groups and leftist factions. This grassroots "government of national unity" has no truck with internationally-brokered cease-fires; its objective is to wage war on the occupation. And that gives Arafat precious little room to maneuver. In July, when Gaza PA security operative Mousa Arafat had some local Hamas militants arrested, he found his home surrounded by armed men from Fatah, and Islamist and leftist groups - the standoff ended only after he agreed...
...have failed. And there's open hostility to new talks down on the streets, where recent opinion surveys found that two out of three Palestinians support suicide bombings against Israel, and where Arafat's own rank and file are engaged in grassroots alliances with the same Islamist militants he's under pressure to act against...
Anyone who was actually trying to rekindle the flames of Israeli-Palestinian violence couldn't be doing a better job than the leaders on both sides right now. Israeli forces on Tuesday killed eight Palestinians in a strike on a political office belonging to Hamas, the militant Islamist group whose suicide bombers have wrought havoc in Israel over the past decade. Two of the casualties were senior Hamas political leaders, while reports suggest that two Palestinian children playing outside the building at the time of the attack were also killed. The attack is almost certain to provoke a response from...
...Whether or not there's any basis to the claim, Bin Laden wants to be held responsible for that and any other attack for which the media is prepared to blame him. The reason he has spent the past decade offering assistance to a wide range of pre-existing Islamist groups is precisely because he wants to paint himself as the personification of the considerable anti-American sentiment inflaming much of the Arab world, a latter-day Salah el Din driving out the imagined Crusaders. The Western need to personalize the terrorist menace plays into his hands. Indeed, most experts...
...when groups involved in malfeasance around the world have had dealings with Bin Laden or those close to him, intelligence experts don't believe that the Saudi financier is necessarily pulling the strings when they act. What Bin Laden may in fact personify is the coming together of diverse Islamist groups during the Afghan war, and their identification of the U.S. as their primary enemy during the decade that followed. So lop off the head, and the body continues to function, because it remains a diverse and diffuse set of groups and cells with their own internal structures, driven...