As the late Robin Cook, former British Foreign Secretary of the House of Commons, and Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, revealed last year, “al-Qaeda” is short for Qeidat il-Maaloomaa, a database initially located in a communications computer dedicated to the of the Islamic Conference’s secretariat and used to track members of the CIA-ISI contrived mujaheddin in Afghanistan. “Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property,” writes Bunel. “The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.”

In Israel, the idea is not so much to make money hand over fist as turn “al-Qaeda” into a nightmare for Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah. In due time, Hamas, the democratically elected representative of the Palestinian people, will be synonymous with “al-Qaeda.” As recent history demonstrates, it is easier to get “TV watchers” to accept mass murder if you preface the cold-blooded act with repeated references to a scary “al-Qaeda” monster and the ghost of Osama bin Laden—not that the Israelis need an excuse to kill innocent men, women, and children.

As the clockwork precise assassinations of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abed al-Aziz Rantissi demonstrate, Shin Bet effectively penetrated Hamas long ago. In fact, Hamas, initially spun off the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization long ago penetrated by British and American intelligence (see Peter Goodgame) and used as a cudgel against the dangerous pan-Arabism of Egypt’s Gamal Abd an-Nasser, was nurtured by Israeli intelligence in order to combat Palestinian nationalism (see Richard Sale). As Brig. Gen. Yithaq Segev, the onetime military governor of Gaza, told UPI, he helped fund “Islamic movements as a counterweight to the PLO and communists.”

Last December, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s former military chief of staff, told the American Zionist press (in this instance, Forward), that “al-Qaeda” is “already there to take advantage of the negative potential in Gaza: the instability, the chaos, the lack of Palestinian Authority control. They will use it to establish an operational base or to control, from there, Al Qaeda cells in the West Bank.”

Ori Nir adds color to the fantasy: “Following the invasion of Iraq … Al Qaeda began focusing greater attention on pro-Western Arab regimes and began taking a greater interest in Israeli targets, according to several experts and government officials. After Israel began its pullout from Gaza in August, Al Qaeda began to see the area as a safe haven, said Ya’alon, now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,” a neocon “think tank” founded by Martin Indyk, the former research director of AIPAC and U.S. ambassador to Israel. “Israel has become a more attractive target for Al Qaeda with the growing influence of the organization’s leader in Iraq, Abu-Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, who places a higher priority than Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden did on attacking Israeli and Jewish targets,” Nir adds, perpetuating and exploiting the discredited role and existence of al-Zarqawi (the real Abu-Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, a semi-literate Jordanian criminal initially touted as a Palestinian, was killed in the Sulaimaniyah mountains of northeastern Kurdistan “during the American bombing” of Ansar al-Islam positions in late April 2003, according to the Allahu Akbar Mujahedeen and Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online).

In late 2002, the Palestinians arrested “al-Qaeda poseurs” and accused Israel of creating bogus “al-Qaeda” cells in Gaza. “The Palestinian Authority arrested a group of collaborators who confessed they were working for Israel, posing as al-Qaeda operatives in the Palestinian territories,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

“On December 7, the British news service, Reuters, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV network, all reported that the Palestinian Authority had accused the Mossad of creating a phony al Qaeda cell in the Gaza Strip,” write Michele Steinberg and Hussein Askary. “Ha’aretz reported, ‘the head of Palestinian Preventive Security’ in the Gaza Strip, Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, said on December 6, ‘that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to “work in the Gaza Strip under the name of al Qaeda.” He said the investigation was ongoing and evidence would be presented soon.’ Al-Jazeera TV added that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian ‘collaborators with Israeli occupation’ in Gaza, involved in the operation.” Shbak told Islam Online that the PA “investigated the origin of … calls [placed by the poseurs], which used [cell phone] roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel.”

Of course, none of these allegations were mentioned by the corporate media and the original Sydney Morning Herald article has since disappeared from the internet (it is however archived on the Propaganda Matrix website, see above link). In addition to attacking Israelis and the illegal Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim in the Gush Katif bloc in the Gaza, the preposterous “Qaeda Organisation of the State of Palestine” has now decided to kill Mahmoud Abbas.

Naturally, this is designed to pitch the Palestinians into more self-destructive internecine warfare and taint their struggle against the illegal occupation of their land as the work of crazed terrorist thugs, an entirely legal struggle predictably given short shrift by the corporate media as it follows a dogeared script written to portray Arabs and Muslims as irrational serial murderers. If it takes the adaptation of a database and well-documented ruse in the existence of “al-Qaeda,” that is precisely what the Israelis will do, as “TV watchers” in America are easily fooled and convinced Muslim boogiemen are lurking out there, diabolically plotting the murder of Jews and Christian goyim alike.