03-28-2004, 10:00 AM
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Too lazy to set a custom title
Industry Role:
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Posts: 29,795
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Congratulation Sharon: nice work...
Here is the new guy... you will wish to get the wheelchair one back!
Quote:
Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who has taken over the leadership of the militant Islamic movement Hamas in Gaza, is one of the most forceful spokesmen against compromise with Israel.
He has consistently argued that Palestinians have a right to resist Israel by any and all means, including the suicide bombing of civilians.
"They are not terrorism," he said of such attacks.
"They are a response to Israeli terrorism, individual and governmental, against Palestinian civilians," he told the Arabic newspaper Kut al-Arab in 1998.
Mr Rantissi describes himself as one of seven founders of Hamas.
He was considered second in importance only to the group's frail spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated in an Israeli missile strike in March 2004.
Khaled Meshaal - Hamas' politburo chief living in exile - was declared the group's overall leader after Yassin was killed.
Even before the killing, Mr Rantissi was the top political leader of the Palestinian militant Islamist movement in Gaza City.
In 2003, he survived an Israeli assassination attempt similar to that which killed Sheikh Yassin.
Born in 1947, he trained to be a paediatrician.
While studying in Egypt in the 1970s, he became attracted to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement outlawed in the country.
He rose to prominence with Hamas during the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Arrests
He was arrested by Israel several times during the intifada, spending as much as two and a half years in prison on one occasion.
Then, in late 1992, he was among more than 400 Islamic militants deported to Lebanon. He became a spokesman for the deportees in his camp, Marj al-Zahour.
After his return to Gaza, he proved no more popular with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority than he had been with the Israeli government.
Palestinian officials arrested him in 1998 after he demanded that a number of senior Palestinian Authority figures resign.
He accused the Palestinian Authority of collaborating with Israel in causing the death of a Hamas bomb maker.
The Palestinian High Court of Justice ordered his release some two months after he was arrested.
He has remained a regular critic of the Palestinian Authority, condemning it for its apparent willingness to compromise with Israel as part of the roadmap peace plan.
He resisted former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's call for a ceasefire to give the US-backed peace plan, known as the roadmap, a chance to work.
He blasted Prime Minister Abbas - also known as Abu Mazen - for participating in a conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and US President George W Bush in Jordan in June 2003.
The Palestinian prime minister's "whole speech was a terrible mistake; even Abu Mazen's ministers, even his son opposed it", Mr Rantissi told the Jerusalem Post newspaper.
"It was unacceptable," he said.
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I know that Asspimple is stoopid ... As he says, it is a FACT !
But I can't figure out how he can breathe or type , at the same time ....
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