Page 2 of
2 'The
world' according to
Washington By Noam
Chomsky
year, apart from repeated Israeli
attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to
elicit some PLO response that could be used as a
pretext for the already planned invasion. Its
actual purpose was not concealed at the time by
Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the
Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank.
It is of some interest that the sole
serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine:
Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this
propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from
Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion.
The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate
efforts were made to find some phrase that could
be misinterpreted, but this glaring error - the
only one - was
ignored. Reasonably, since it
satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful
doctrinal fabrications.
Killing without
Intent Another allegation is that
Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's
embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing
29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put
it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hezbollah
leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in
southern Lebanon". About the assassination, there
is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took
credit for it. The world might have some interest
in the rest of the story.
Al-Mussawi was
murdered with a US-supplied helicopter, well north
of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern
Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the
village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the
memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli
forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife
and five-year-old child. Israel then employed
US-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing
survivors of the first attack to a hospital.
After the murder of the family, Hezbollah
"changed the rules of the game", Prime Minister
Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no
rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then,
the rules of the game had been that Israel could
launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at
will, and Hezbollah would respond only within
Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.
After
the murder of its leader (and his family),
Hezbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in
Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter
is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin
launched an invasion that drove some 500,000
people out of their homes and killed well over
100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far
as northern Lebanon.
In the south, 80% of
the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a
"ghost town", Jibshit was about 70% destroyed
according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who
explained that the intent was "to destroy the
village completely because of its importance to
the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon". The
goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of
the earth and sow destruction around them", as a
senior officer of the Israeli northern command
described the operation.
Jibshit may have
been a particular target because it was the home
of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought
to Israel several years earlier. Obeid's home
"received a direct hit from a missile", British
journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the
Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and
three children". Those who had not escaped hid in
terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial
Times, "because any visible movement inside or
outside their houses is likely to attract the
attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who …
were pounding their shells repeatedly and
devastatingly into selected targets". Artillery
shells were hitting some villages at a rate of
more than 10 rounds a minute at times.
All
of this received the firm support of President
Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct
the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game".
And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of
peace, so different from the two-legged beasts,
grasshoppers and drugged roaches.
This is
only a small sample of facts that the world might
find of interest in connection with the alleged
responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory
terrorist act in Buenos Aires.
Other
charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare
Hezbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable
terrorist crime by the standards of "the world",
which understands that the US and its clients must
face no impediments in their just terror and
aggression.
The more vulgar apologists for
US and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while
Arabs purposely kill people, the US and Israel,
being democratic societies, do not intend to do
so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence
not at the level of moral depravity of their
adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of
Israel's High Court when it recently authorized
severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza
by depriving them of electricity (hence water,
sewage disposal and other such basics of civilized
life).
The same line of defense is common
with regard to some of Washington's past
peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the
al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack
apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands
of people, but without intent to kill them, hence
not a crime on the order of intentional killing -
so we are instructed by moralists who consistently
suppress the response that had already been given
to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.
To repeat once again, we can distinguish
three categories of crimes: murder with intent,
accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge
but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S.
atrocities typically fall into the third category.
Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power
supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West
Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder
the particular people who will die from polluted
water or in ambulances that cannot reach
hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the
bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that
it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human
Rights Watch immediately informed him of this,
providing details; nevertheless, he and his
advisers did not intend to kill specific people
among those who would inevitably die when half the
pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor
African country that could not replenish them.
Rather, they and their apologists regarded
Africans much as we do the ants we crush while
walking down a street. We are aware that it is
likely to happen (if we bother to think about it),
but we do not intend to kill them because they are
not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say,
comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas
inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather
differently.
If, for a moment, we can
adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask
which criminals are "wanted the world over".
Noam Chomsky is the author of
numerous best-selling political works. His latest
books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power
and the Assault on Democracy and What We
Say Goes, a conversation book with David
Barsamian, both in the American Empire Project
series at Metropolitan Books. The Essential
Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a
collection of his writings on politics and on
language from the 1950s to the present, has just
been published by the New Press.
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