On Aug. 18, 1988, after eight months of riots in Israel that today are called the first intifada (uprising), the Arab leaders orchestrating the attacks against unsuspecting Jewish civilians went public with publication of their founding Covenant. Surprisingly, the leaders were not from the then already 30-year-old Fatah organization, but were a new, heretofore unheard of terror operation called Hamas, which, as a name, followed the template of its rival Fatah. Fatah means "conquest" but, more precisely in its cultural context, connotes the "Islamic conquest" that results from a jihad against the infidel. When Yasser Arafat and seven confederates founded Fatah in 1959, they chose this name to satisfy the two factions. All of the original Fatah founders had been raised in the Muslim Brotherhood and half of them, Arafat among them, still saw themselves as Muslim Brothers-versus the other camp that admired the secular, nationalist political language used by the FLN's "freedom fighters," who, that year, were rebelling against French rule by murdering Europeans living in Algeria-at random-in acts of gruesome, terrorist atrocities.
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