Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Saudis vs. Arafat? The terrorism documents captured on the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces contain fascinating details about the friendly relations between Saudi Arabia and...
...Help Wanted THE WEEKLY STANDARD is looking to hire an art director...
...The story concerned a failed CIA attempt to kill Gulbuddin Hekmat-yar with a drone-fired missile...
...military presence, sought to disrupt British forces involved in operation Snipe near the Pakistan border, and agitated for the overthrow of Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai...
...The documents concern discussions held in Riyadh between the Palestinians and the Saudis on this issue...
...The terrorism documents captured on the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces contain fascinating details about the friendly relations between Saudi Arabia and Hamas, and consequent tensions between the Saudis and the Palestinian Authority...
...And political fights haven't come much nastier than the Newark mayoral race—a classic "machine" versus "reform" collision, in which the machine last Tuesday prevailed...
...Much of it is unsurprising, including the advocacy of a "principled noninterventionist approach to foreign affairs...
...So not only did we sort of have it coming to us for ignoring Cato's foreign policy wisdom, but there's a particular villain...
...Referring to correspondence between the Palestinian Authority and the Saudis in December 2000 and January 2001, the IDF commentary notes: "In these documents, Arafat complains about the fact that the Saudi aid is not transferred to the PA areas via the PA, and it does not reach the Fatah, but is given to Hamas and radical Islamic groups associated with Hamas, thus weakening the PA...
...Mail résumé, work samples, and cover letter with salary requirements to Personnel Department, The Weekly Standard, 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505, Washington, DC 20036...
...Typically, national media outlets don't pay close attention to most mayoral races, let alone Newark's...
...Not content to leave things at the level of aspirational generality, however, Cato's president and chairman, Edward H. Crane and William A. Niskanen, go on—in the report's jointly signed introductory "message"—to assert that "the dangers of accepting the role of the world's policeman are clearly evident" right now, in particular, what with this al Qaeda terrorist business and whatnot...
...Not that f-word, but "faggot" (as in "faggot white boy...
...Magazine or other publishing experience is preferred...
...Hekmat-yar, once a maverick warlord in the fight against the Soviet occupation, today leads Afghanistan's terrorist Hezb-e-Islami movement, which maintains links to al Qaeda...
...Life During Wartime THE SCRAPBOOK has not seen a better illustration of how the world has changed since September 11 than an article by Walter Pincus and Thomas Ricks that ran in the Washington Post on May 10...
...3. The U.S...
...Maybe, we hoped, we were reading a little too much into it...
...government has turned against its onetime protégé with such a vengeance that one "senior administration official" is quoted as saying, "Sadly, he survived...
...THE SCRAPBOOK confesses that it was a bit unsettled by the America-sorta-had-it-coming atmospherics of this little lecturette...
...But because of the downright dirtiness of the campaign, in which four-term Democratic mayor Sharpe James defeated Ivy-league upstart Democrat Cory Booker, there was a lot of coverage...
...That could be more easily done if he'd stop calling people faggots, not that he has to worry about reporters reprinting the epithet that dare not speak its name...
...The article ran on page A24...
...Cato Entangled The lavish 2001 Annual Report of the Cato Institute—which doubles as a celebration of the 25 th anniversary of the eminent libertarian think tank— has just landed in The Scrapbook's inbox...
...Indeed, it only reinforces the suspicion that the Saudis' gambit in publicly injecting themselves into the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation has a sole aim: to divert attention from their involvement in the events of September 11...
...But no—there's an astonishingly tasteless two-page spread later in the report...
...Aside from columnist George Will, the first part of the remark went all but unreported...
...2. The CIA is involved in trying to kill hostile foreign leaders...
...In his victory speech, James, miraculously transformed into a healer, suggested that "We must come together to continue to rebuild our city...
...In each of the aforementioned news organizations' accounts, Booker alleged that the black James had called him a "white boy...
...A Sharpe Stick in the Eye If there's one thing reporters tend to enjoy most—even more than, say, free stuff—it's a nasty political fight...
...From the Associated Press to the Daily News, from the New York Post to ABC World News Tonight, every detail was lovingly recounted: the campaign poster theft, the vans blaring sound at each other's campaign events, the nutcake allegations by Sharpe that Booker was a "closet Republican," who was "aligned with the Jews," and who took money from the KKK and the Taliban...
...If there is anything to be learned from the captured documents, it is that the Saudis must remain suspect as partners for either the Israelis or the Palestinians in any resumption of peace negotiations...
...Over a full-color photograph of the second September 11 jetliner exploding with a giant ball of flame into the World Trade Center, Cato has superimposed its favorite George Washington quotation: "It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world...
...one cannot pass through a single paragraph in the story without running across material that would have been a front-page revelation nine months ago: 1. The CIA operates aircraft that fire missiles...
...our ideal candidate is someone with excellent design sense and strong production skills...
...He has resisted the U.S...
...The most standout detail, however, was suspiciously edited...
...The reason: to supplant the secular nationalist politics of Arafat with the Wahhabi ideology favored by Riyadh...
...The United States, after all, has but a single "entangling alliance" in the Middle Eastern "portion of the foreign world...
...This is newsworthy not only because Booker himself is black, but because according to Booker, James prefaced his slur with the f-word...
...Expertise in QuarkXPress and Photoshop is required...
...That would be with Israel—American friendship for which, the Cato Institute apparently believes, is somehow responsible for the deaths of 3,000 New Yorkers...
...In hindsight, it can be stated that Arafat failed in his attempt to persuade the Saudis to channel the financial aid via the PA, and the phenomenon of transferring Saudi funds to Hamas elements continued and continues until the present...
...The documents seem to confirm the long-circulating rumor in Arab and Muslim circles that the Saudis want to displace Arafat in favor of Hamas, and have used their financial and political resources to that end...
...If their funding of Hamas makes their peace gestures to the Israelis two-faced, it makes their standing as supporters of the Palestinians—the vast majority of whom are non-Wahhabi, given local traditions of secularism and the influence of Arab Christians in the nationalist movement—even more dubious...
...4. The CIA now functions in such a way that we read about such missions in the paper...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 36
