Word: yasser
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...liberalization as a cure for what ails the region. It hardly seems tenable to go back to the pre-9/11 paradigm of wholeheartedly supporting "friendly" dictators like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. If our support for the Shah of Iran in the 1970s or Yasser Arafat in the '90s has taught us anything, it should be that secular strongmen cannot keep the lid on forever. Either we push for change now or we risk a fundamentalist explosion later...
...revenge, these militants, who belong to a splinter group of the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, struck back by seizing the two journalists, these sources said...
...standards of Arab strongmen, Hassan Nasrallah is a charmer. In televised appearances made from the undisclosed location where he shelters from Israeli bombs, the Hizballah leader appears more soothing than bellicose. There is none of Saddam Hussein's finger wagging or Yasser Arafat's eye-bulging lectures or Osama bin Laden's hectoring sneer. Instead, Nasrallah reads deliberately from notes, occasionally swallowing as if to catch his breath. Every so often, he looks into the camera and flashes a smile...
...things that because it's hard and turbulent, that we should wish for the good old days of the false stability of Saddam Hussein and his 300,000 people in mass graves and his chemical-weapons use and his two wars started in a period of 20 years. Or Yasser Arafat stealing the Palestinian people blind, watching the second intifadeh, the Passover Massacre. What Middle East are we talking about...
...transformation was swift in coming. Hamas' electoral landslide in Palestine just six months ago marked the political death of Yasser Arafat and the secular, vaguely socialist and entirely nationalist movement he represented. Hamas is fighting not to create a 23rd Arab state but, as its charter explains, to recover "an Islamic Waqf." Meaning? Territory claimed under the Islamic precept that "any land the Muslims have conquered by force ... during the times of [Islamic] conquests" more than a millennium ago belongs to Muslims forever because "the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations until the Day of Judgment...