Huzzahs for Hussam

Reading Isabel Kershner’s Fatah postpones elections but Extends Conference, I wonder if I’m missing anything. Kershner informs us that the younger members of Fatah want a greater say in its governance. Are they more moderate? She doesn’t tell us. But she does report:

Some of the younger generation of reformers, who are hoping to increase their power within the movement, complained that the traditional leaders had packed the conference with their own supporters at the last minute.

“They brought their relatives, their secretaries,” said Hussam Khader, a firebrand Fatah leader from Nablus who has long campaigned against corruption in the movement.

Well apparently Kuddar has done more than campaign against corruption. The Guardian sat profiled him last year.

Khader was arrested at his home in March 2003 and convicted of being a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah movement that played a key role in the second intifada, and of helping fund the group through connections to Hizbullah and Iran. He was sentenced to seven years in jail but released after five and a half. It was his 24th time in an Israeli prison – he was first arrested at age 13 for taking part in a demonstration against the Israeli occupation.

So he funded a terrorist group through Hezbollah and Iran. So “reformer” then isn’t necessarily such an innocuous term in this case.

Khaled Abu Toameh observed recently that Fatah was being radicalized and that …

… one of the most disturbing signs of the growing radicalization of Fatah can be seen in calls by top representatives for a “strategic alliance” with Iran’s dictatorial and fundamental regime.

Kershner doesn’t tell us if Khader is one of those advocating for that alliance, but given his arrest, it’s hardly a stretch to believe that he is. But of course, all we know him as is a “firebrand” reformer.

Later on Kershner writes:

Delegates have come to Bethlehem from as far as Yemen and the United States. They include people as diverse as Sari Nusseibeh, an intellectual from Jerusalem who has championed nonviolence, and Khaled Abu Asba, who took part in a notorious attack in 1978 in which an Israeli bus was hijacked and about three dozen Israeli civilians were killed.

Barry Rubin observed that the AP didn’t report:

… the cheers for terrorists who murdered Israelis but were present at the meeting.

And neither did the New York Times. Again I think it’s safe to assume that Abu Asba was applauded. Kershner, though, simply used him as an example of the “diversity” of those attending the conference. I don’t know that “diversity” is a virtue when it involves including and honoring murderers.

So when Kershner reports that

One point of consensus reached on Thursday was the notion that Israel was responsible for the death of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader and Fatah founder, who died in 2004. In the convention hall, delegates blamed Israel for having kept the ailing Mr. Arafat under siege in his headquarters in the West Bank. Fatah officials said they would continue to investigate the circumstances of his death, and suspicions that Israel poisoned him.

it sounds more bizarre than malicious. It’s indicative that Fatah is still less interested in fighting corruption than in fighting Israel or in creating an independent state. (h/t memeorandum) But without more information – that Kershner could have provided – we can’t get a sense from her report how the Fatah conference has improved or hurt the chances for peace. Given those omissions, my suspicion is that the latter is true. That’s the sort of news that’s not fit to print.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.