(Interview with London's Al-Qods newspaper on "preparations for major operations" if Americans don't leave Saudi Arabia)

Al-Qods al-Arabi (8/13/96) reported that six veterans of the Afghan war who had been trained by bin-Laden had confessed to the Dhahran bombing and the Saudis were preparing a statement detailing their confessions. The daily said the six were from the al-Jamiyin group, Sunni fighters in Afghanistan who once had been supported by the Saudi government. The report, which cited informed sources and sources close to the group said the six were being held in Jubail prison and were being questioned by the director of general investigations under the direct supervision of the Interior Minister, Prince Nayef. The report also said the Interior Minister had banned any other party from questioning them. Pentagon and White House officials refused to comment on the report.

Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Focus

Like most Americans, Alison Weir, the editor of a small-town newspaper in California, knew very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, other than what she had gleaned from the evening news or newspaper headlines. As a journalist, her attention was on issues much closer to home. Neither a muslim nor a jew, she nevertheless became more curious about the topic of the Palestinian uprising. And as she researched it, she became increasingly suspicious that the American media were not telling us the whole story. Months later, she traveled to the occupied territories as an independent journalist to find out for herself what the U.S. media seemed to be omitting. Three months after returning from Palestine, Alison Weir quit her job and founded If Americans Knew, an organization dedicated to quantifying the ways in which the American media was misinforming the public about the conflict. Ms. Weir explains her group's methodology, analyzes the data, and reports on the key findings.

If Americans Knew can be linked to here:  http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sides.html

Alison Weir, in her documentary Off the Charts, noted the following:

Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshots to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. Oh, yes. Let's be fair. We did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.

In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed, in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel's armed forces were deep into terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continued its long occupation, the stealing of Palestinian lands.  

See Alison Weir's short documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America for the names, ages, places, and dates of these child killings.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Focus

To be accurate, there were sporadic bombing incidents engineered by Hamas extremists in Israel during the Oslo period. None at all occurred between 1998 and 2000. But the strong resumption of attacks after 2000, over fifty in the first year, was directly related to civilian and child killings by IDF, and it was not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations that were involved.
This Time.com article apprises of what motivated them:
"Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole--some might say brainwash--young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.
But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest intifadeh that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas--and they didn't require persuading. "We don't need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past," Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas' senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. "When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong," he explained."
From the mouth of Rantisi, but it also motivated Fatah supporters, to exact revenge for the killing of Palestinian civilians. Revenge is not a formal use of terrorism. See Alison Weir's film, Off The Charts, at Google Video.

(Why Suicide Bombing Is Now All The Rage)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020415-227546,00.html

This commentary is from an article by Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut newspaper, The Daily Star, which cynically denounced Olmert's statements professing concern for the well-being of Palestinian children:

(Ehud Olmert's Profound Ethics and Deep Lies)

http://www.ramikhouri.com/

"For anyone interested in the facts about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian children, a good place to start is the carefully checked data disseminated by the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organization Network (www.palestinemonitor.org). Their data is compiled and verified on the ground by the Ramallah-based Health Development Information and Policy Institute, which has been honored by the World Health Organization for its work in promoting Palestinian health needs. So these people know what they are talking about when it comes to health conditions on the ground in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the facts they provide are as follows.

In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:

• 383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.

• Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.

• 245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.

• The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.

• During the first two months of the intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.

• An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.

• There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.

Here is some commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber:

"If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.

Despite the "Man bites dog" news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly -- it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.

It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.

Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the "disengagement", the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.

Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.

Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family's lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.

Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.

Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its latest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organization, complacent Western societies and Fatma's memory."