Iran: Fund to 'demolish' Israel set up
05.22.2006  A group of Iranian students announced Sunday at an event attended by a high-ranking member of the elite Revolutionary Guard that they were setting up a fund to destroy Israel.
Although the initiative's name - "The Student Fund for Demolishing Israel" - brings to mind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call last year to destroy the Jewish state, an organizer said its goal was to support the cash-strapped Palestinian government.
Some 300 students attended the event hosted by a group calling itself the Movement of Justice-seeking Students at the University of Tehran.
"This is a symbolic move to attract public attention to the Palestinian cause at a time when Western countries have halted financial support to the Hamas-led government," Javad Miri, the group's spokesman, told The Associated Press.
Miri said the group was collecting money that it will send it to the Hamas-led Palestinian government. "When an elected government is in power in Palestine and Israel is pressuring it, everybody should help the Palestinians."
The United States and the European Union halted most of their aid to the Palestinian Authority following Hamas' victory in Palestinian legislative elections in January, requiring that the group renounce violence and recognize Israel.
Popular campaigns to collect money for the Palestinians have been launched in several Arab countries.
'We are ready to support Palestinians by any means'
A general in the elite Revolutionary Guards, Saeed Ghassemi, struck a militaristic note in his address to the crowd. "Resistance is the only solution for Palestinians," He said. "If you abandon the sword, that will be the beginning of your end," he advised Hamas.
But the response to the call for donations was hardly overwhelming. About 10 students dropped money into a box labeled with the fund's name. They also put stones in the box in a symbolic gesture of solidarity that alluded to the first Palestinian intefadeh, or uprising, when youths pelted Israeli soldiers with rocks.
"I hope it's the start of popular financial support for the Hamas government," Einollah Zarrinjoo, 21, a male student of philosophy said.
Mahin Rezai, 20, a female Persian literature student said, "We are ready to support Palestinians by any means. Silence could make the situation worse."
In April, Iran said it would give the Palestinian Authority USD 50 million in aid. Last year, Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust was a myth and that Israel should be wiped out. Apparently taking a cue from the president, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced plans to hold a conference to examine evidence of the Holocaust.
The hard-line Association of Muslim Journalists has also proposed a similar event. Dates have not been set for either.
Iran is currently home to about 25,000 Jews who are represented by a Jewish lawmaker in parliament. About 75,000 left the country after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Al Qaeda..'Abu Mazen next in line'
05.22.2006.09:31
 DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report the bulletin, released from Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s main strongholds in Iraq Sunday at 8:22 am, claimed the attempted assassination of Gen. Tariq Abu Ghajab, GI chief, who survived the huge, remote-controlled explosion, which ripped through the fortified GI HQ building in Gaza Saturday, May 20, killing his bodyguard and injuring 9 officers. The notice contains circumstantial details of the attack, indicating its authenticity. Abu Ghajab was taken to Tel Aviv Ichilov Hospital in critical condition at Abbas’s request.
DEBKAfile’s sources explain the Zarqawi network’s first major operation in Gaza as an attempt to make a statement: the Palestinian people’s fate will not be determined between the Palestinians and Israel – in reference to the talks held Sunday at Sharm al Sheikh by Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli ministers Tzipi Livni and Shimon Peres, or Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s meetings with both sides - but by the will of al Qaeda.
Israeli officials did their best to cast doubt on al Qaeda’s claim to have hit Abu Ghajab when it was first aired by Hizballah’s al-Manar television station in Lebanon early Sunday.
On April 28, DEBKAfile exclusively quoted the al Qaeda cell in Gaza as threatening attacks on Palestinian and Israeli targets as soon as final orders came through rom Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s Iraq chief. The Palestinian targets named for the “traditional slaughter of the infidels” were Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah leaders closest to him: former interior minister Mohammed Dahlan, West Bank spokesman Yasser Abd Rabbo, deputy director of preventive security in Gaza, Samir Mashrawi, and Fatah leader in Rafah, Abu Ali Shiahin.
On May 14, DEBKAfile disclosed the influx into Gaza of some 100 al Qaeda fugitives on the run from Egyptian security forces in Sinai. They were primed for terrorist operations against the Palestinians and Israel.
It is not yet clear whether al Qaeda or Hamas, which is locked in an armed leadership struggle with Fatah, planted the 70-kilo bomb aimed against another pro-Abbas security chief in Gaza, Rashid Abu Shebak, on Sunday. His security officials discovered the bomb in time and defused it.
Debka
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