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2 'The world' according to
Washington By Noam Chomsky
On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior
commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated in
Damascus. "The world is a better place without
this man in it," US State Department spokesperson
Sean McCormack said. "One way or the other he was
brought to justice." Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh
had been "responsible for more deaths of Americans
and Israelis than any other terrorist with the
exception of Osama bin Laden".
Joy was
unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the US and
Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice,
the London Financial Times reported. Under the
heading, "A militant wanted the world over", an
accompanying story reported that he was
"superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin
Laden" after
September 11, 2001, and so
ranked second among "the most wanted militants in
the world".
The terminology is accurate
enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American
discourse, which defines "the world" as the
political class in Washington and London (and
whoever happens to agree with them on specific
matters). It is common, for example, to read that
"the world" fully supported President George W
Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan in
2001. That may be true of "the world", but hardly
of the world, as revealed in an international
Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced.
Global support was slight.
In Latin
America, which has some experience with US
behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16%
in Panama, and that support was conditional on the
culprits being identified (they still weren't
eight months later, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation reported), and civilian targets
being spared (they were attacked at once). There
was an overwhelming preference in the world for
diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand
by "the world".
Following the terror
trail In the present case, if "the world"
were extended to the world, we might find some
other candidates for the honor of most hated
arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this
might be true.
The Financial Times reports
that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are
unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times
when his involvement can be ascertained with
certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in
1985 in which a US Navy diver was killed". This
was one of two terrorist atrocities that led a
poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in
the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the
other was the hijacking of the passenger liner
Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon
Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered. That reflects
the judgment of "the world". It may be that the
world saw matters somewhat differently.
The Achille Lauro hijacking was a
retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a
week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and
Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to
shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly
reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli
journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated
by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the
bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet
and US intelligence could not have been unaware of
the impending attack. Secretary of State George
Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak
Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy
for the Israeli action", which he termed "a
legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks", to
general approbation. A few days later, the UN
Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing
as an "act of armed aggression" (with the US
abstaining). "Aggression" is, of course, a far
more serious crime than international terrorism.
But giving the United States and Israel the
benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser
charge against their leadership.
A few
days after, Peres went to Washington to consult
with the leading international terrorist of the
day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil
scourge of terrorism", again with general acclaim
by "the world".
The "terrorist attacks"
that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for
the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three
Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as
Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis,
though they might have had Syrian connections.
Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was
defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an
extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be
killed there.
The Larnaca killings, in
turn, were regarded as retaliation by the
perpetrators: They were a response to regular
Israeli hijackings in international waters in
which many victims were killed - and many more
kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly
to be held without charge for long periods. The
most notorious of these has been the secret
prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal
can be learned about it from the Israeli and
foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of
course, known to editors of the national press in
the US and occasionally receive some casual
mention.
Klinghoffer's murder was properly
viewed with horror and is very famous. It was the
topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV
movie, as well as much shocked commentary
deploring the savagery of Palestinians -
"two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem
Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a
bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like
grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should
be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just
"Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or
"nigger".
Thus, after a particularly
depraved display of settler-military terror and
purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of
Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even
Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political
analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task
of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of
innocent people just because they are Araboushim
living in territories that God promised to us", a
task that became far more urgent, and was carried
out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim
began to "raise their heads" a few years later.
We can easily assess the sincerity of the
sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder.
It is only necessary to investigate the reaction
to comparable US-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for
example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled
Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by
Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp
of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body
and the remains of his wheelchair were found by
British reporters, along with the remains of the
white flag he was holding when he was shot dead
while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then
drove over him, ripping his face in two and
severing his arms and legs.
Jamal Rashid
was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's
huge US-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished
his home in Jenin with his family inside. The
differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has
become so routine and so easy to explain that no
further commentary is necessary.
Car
bomb Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a
vastly more severe terrorist crime than the
Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which
Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with
certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis
bombing had competitors for the prize for worst
terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year
of 1985.
One challenger was a car-bombing
in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off
as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It
killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead
were girls and women, who had been leaving the
mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned
babies in their beds", "killed a bride buying her
trousseau", and "blew away three children as they
walked home from the mosque". It also "devastated
the main street of the densely populated" West
Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years
later in the Washington Post.
The intended
target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad
Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was
carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies,
with Britain's help, and was specifically
authorized by CIA director William Casey,
according to Washington Post reporter Bob
Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret
Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known
beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous
adherence to the doctrine that we do not
investigate our own crimes (unless they become too
prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be
limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were
naturally "out of control").
'Terrorist
villagers' A third competitor for the 1985
Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres'
"Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese
territories then occupied by Israel in violation
of Security Council orders. The targets were what
the Israeli high command called "terrorist
villagers". Peres's crimes in this case sank to
new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary
murder" in the words of a Western diplomat
familiar with the area, an assessment amply
supported by direct coverage. They are, however,
of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain
uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual
conventions.
We might well ask whether
these crimes fall under international terrorism or
the far more severe crime of aggression, but let
us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel
and its backers in Washington and keep to the
lesser charge.
These are a few of the
thoughts that might cross the minds of people
elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the
world", when considering "one of the very few
times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a
terrorist crime.
The US also accuses him
of responsibility for devastating double suicide
truck-bomb attacks on US Marine and French
paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing
241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a
prior attack on the US Embassy in Beirut, killing
63, a particularly serious blow because of a
meeting there of CIA officials at the time.
The Financial Times has, however,
attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to
Islamic Jihad, not Hezbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of
the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and
on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was
taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad".
A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for
all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It
has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of
Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge,
evidence is sparse.
The opinion of the
world has not been sampled on the subject, but it
is possible that there might be some hesitancy
about calling an attack on a military base in a
foreign country a "terrorist attack", particularly
when US and French forces were carrying out heavy
naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and
shortly after the US provided decisive support for
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed
some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while
leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally
called off by President Reagan when international
protest became too intense to ignore after the
Sabra-Shatila massacres.
In the United
States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is
regularly described as a reaction to Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on
northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making
our crucial contribution to these major war crimes
understandable.
In the real world, the
Lebanese border area had been quiet for a
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