Home  |  Web Resources  |  Free Advertising

Change Your Life!

“Look before you leap”

News
Sports
Chat
Travel
Dhaka Today
Yellow Pages
Higher Education
Ask a Doctor
Weather
Currency Rate
Horoscope
E-Cards
B2K Poll
Comment on the Site
B2K Club

FILE -- First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, kisses Soha Arafat, wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, during a visit to the West Bank town of Ramallah at a ceremony to commemorate a $3.8 million U.S. grant for health care in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Thursday, Nov. 11, 1999. Clinton's opponent, Rep. Rick Lazio, has attacked Clinton for embracing Arafat's wife. In the Sunday, Sept. 10, 2000, edition, the New York Post published a 1998 White House photo of Rep. Rick Lazio shaking hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, just days after Lazio criticized the president for shaking hands with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. (AP Photo)

September 12, 2000 

NEW YORK (AP) - First the kiss, now the handshake.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's rival for New York's open senate seat found himself under fire after a photograph of him shaking Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's hand two years ago resurfaced.

The photograph, which appeared in Sunday's New York Post, was taken by a White House photographer in 1998 when Rep. Rick Lazio visited the Mideast with President Bill Clinton and other U.S. officials.

Lazio, the Republican Senate candidate, has in the past criticized his Democratic rival, Mrs. Clinton, for hugging Arafat's wife after she delivered a contentious speech last year.

"Be careful when you start throwing stones," said Democratic state Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn, an Orthodox Jew who has not yet made an endorsement in the Senate race.

"Everyone in my community and beyond is shocked as to why he embraced Yasser Arafat so warmly. Rick Lazio has avoided defining himself," Hikind said. "He's done nothing other than saying 'I'm not Hillary Clinton.' Now he's being defined by this handshake and he's got a big problem."

The photo surfaces just two days after Lazio criticized President Clinton's impromptu handshake with Cuban President Fidel Castro at the United Nations Millennium Summit last week, saying: "We send the wrong message when we embrace, whether it's Mrs. Arafat or Fidel Castro."

Lazio criticized the White House for releasing the photo. "It sure sounds like taxpayer money was once again used to further the Clinton campaign," he said at a parade near upstate Troy.

Mrs. Clinton, asked about the propriety of the release, said: "You'll have to ask the White House about that. I think from the White House perspective, he attacked the president."

Lazio, visiting an Irish fair in Brooklyn late Sunday, insisted that his shaking hands with Arafat was "absolutely nothing like what Mrs. Clinton had done. ... It wasn't a kiss, it wasn't a hug, it wasn't a call for a Palestinian state."

Mrs. Clinton has been questioned many times about her own embrace of Arafat's wife, Soha, last fall. The two women hugged after Mrs. Arafat accused Israel of using poison gas against Palestinians, but the first lady has defended the embrace as a formality akin to a handshake, and said she would have caused an international incident had she rebuffed Mrs. Arafat that day.