Transcript for Monday, April 22, 2002, MSNBC Making Sense

KEYES: Now, one of the things that happened early on and actually led to an intensification of this conflict was the killing of 13 Israeli soldiers.

And apparently involved in that was a tactic where booby trap and suicide bomb approach was used.

I also found in an Egyptian newspaper where folks who referred to them as -- themselves as engineers, are quoted as saying that they had actually -- and I quote the article.

"We had made more than 50 booby-trapped around the camp.

We chose old and empty buildings, and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel, because we knew the soldiers would search for them.

We cut off lengths of main water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart throughout the houses in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas."

It would seem to me that if the Palestinian fighters were using this kind of tactic, wouldn‘t that also result in a lot of devastation to the buildings?

RAHMAN: That‘s Israel's propaganda. No one will do that to his own family, Mr. Keyes. You know that.

Those people were in the camp. Most of them are police officers. They are with their families.

The Israelis attacked with hundreds of tanks, with Apache helicopters, and bombarded the refugee camp.

You have to be blind not to see those atrocities in the camp.

I have seen footages on American television, on French television, on Arab television. And what I saw is reminiscent of what the Nazis did in Europe in the Second World War.

KEYES: Well, actually, Mr. Rahman, you say that I shouldn't be able to believe that anybody would do this to their own family and all.

But the problem, I think, that exists right now for a lot of us is that, I wouldn‘t believe it if you told me folks were sending, 13-, 15- and 18-year-olds out with bombs strapped to themselves to blow up people in civilian areas and so forth.

I wouldn‘t believe any parent could send their child out to do that, but not only ...

RAHMAN: No one is sending their own children.

Egads, on the one hand you have members of the Palestinian Authority celebrating such people as martyrs, with Arafat's own wife wishing she had a son who could do such a thing, and here is a PA spokesman saying it doesn't happen. Argh! The entire transcript is a fascinating exercise in The Big Lie.

Amazingly, Rahman claimed that the story published in an Egyptian newspaper was Israeli propaganda. And there's Egypt, saying they'll go to war against Israel for a mere $100 billion....