[Peace-discuss] Just who is a terrorist?

[Lisa Chason]

published in the in a paper from California called the Sacramento Union,
on PeaceAndDialogue at yahoogroups.com (it's by one of the regular
contributors to the forum).


Just Who Is the Terrorist?

By Khalid Amayreh

November 18, 2004

I normally refrain from responding to opinion articles spewing malice
and
vindictiveness. In most cases, these reflect moral bankruptcy and
intellectual shallowness; they don't merit a serious engagement.

However, Mark Williams's manifestly hateful, Nov. 12 screed, "Finishing
What
Hitler Started," exceeded all boundaries of decency and civility. It
merits
an appropriate response, not so much because I believe hatred and racism
(such as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism) are a legitimate viewpoint, but
rather because I think the readers of The Sacramento Union deserve to
know
the truth about Yasser Arafat, not from a rabid, though famous, Jewish
extremist, but rather from a Palestinian critic (and occasional victim)
of
Yasser Arafat's rule.

True, Yasser Arafat was not an icon of moral excellence. His political
exploits, despotism, and nepotistic way of governance largely
characterized
his long reign. As president of the Palestinian Authority, a police
state
without a state, he held all the reins, took all the decisions, and
controlled all the money. He went too far in trying to appease Israel
and
the United States, so much so that he often valued the legitimacy that
came
from foreign acceptance more than that which came from his own people's
acceptance.

Nonetheless, Arafat was a bona fide Palestinian nationalist and true
seeker
of peace with Israel. He recognized Israel within the 1967 boundaries,
revoked the Palestinian National Charter and agreed to share Jerusalem
with
the Jewish state.

During the so-called Oslo period (1995-2000) he violently repressed and
imprisoned opponents of peace with Israel to the point of violating the
civil and even human rights of his own people.

Moreover, Arafat always condemned attacks against civilians, Israelis,
and
Palestinians alike.

This obviously was not sufficient for Israeli leaders, especially Ariel
Sharon and his cohorts, who demanded that Arafat act and behave like a
quisling.

People may thoughtfully and sincerely differ over Arafat. Ultimately,
God
will judge him as He will all of us.
But to compare Yasser Arafat with Adolf Hitler is, in my opinion,
nothing
short of a linguistic adultery.

How could any serious person, with any modicum of intellectual honesty,
call
a helpless and desperate man, who in the last 1000 days of his life was
a
prisoner in his own living room, an Adolf Hitler?

How could any honest person accuse a nearly decimated people who spend
half
of their time languishing under sinister military curfews and the other
half
standing in long queues at ubiquitous Israeli army roadblocks (manned by
trigger-happy soldiers) of seeking to finish what Hitler started?

Even before the inception of the current Intifada, Arafat couldn't leave
Gaza or the West Bank without an Israeli permit. Indeed, Arafat's every
move
and action were coordinated with Israel, often in a humiliating manner.

How can a man as such be compared to Hitler, the Nazi beast who occupied
and
destroyed the bulk of Europe and caused the death of tens of millions of
people?

To be sure, Arafat was not a Mahatma Ghandi. But, most certainly, he was
no
more of a terrorist than David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan,
Menachem
Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Sharmi, Shimon Peres, and, not the least,
Ariel Sharon?

These Israeli leaders lived all their lives as terrorists.

Wasn't Yitzhak Rabin arrested by the British and imprisoned in the Rafah
camp in the early 1940s?

Wasn't Yitzhak Shamir arrested as a terrorist and exiled by the British
to a
prison camp in Eritrea?

Was not Menahem Begin branded as a terrorist, with a price on his head,
after blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with a hundred
civilians
killed, in 1947?

And, as we all know, the four became prime ministers of Israel.

And Sharon, the "hero" of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres of 1982?
Well, it
is a great shame that this wild beast remains at large. It is also
lamentable that in this age of the Internet and satellite television
there
are people who still are not aware of the man's real nature.and others
who
would even give him the benefit of the doubt.

Doesn't this amount to an indictment of our time?

Two years ago, Gerald Kaufman, a conscientious Jewish member of the
British
Parliament, wrote that "Ariel Sharon has made the Star of David look
like
the Swastika of Hitler."

Last year, the former Israeli minister of education Shulamit Aloni wrote
in
the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahranot that "We, Israelis, have become a
barbarian people."

And in 2002, two Israeli Jewish journalists wrote a book titled The
Israeli
Holocaust Against the Palestinians.
It is true, there are no gas chambers in the streets of the West Bank
and
Gaza.
But thousands of Palestinian civilians are being killed and maimed,
using
other means, all under the deceptive rubric of fighting "suicide
bombings"
and "terror."

Under this mendacious rubric, every conceivable crime has been committed
against innocent civilians, from demolishing civilian homes right on top
of
occupants to "hunting" Palestinian schoolchildren with M-16 bullets
while
sitting in their class rooms or on their way to school or from school.

Yes, many Palestinians have been guilty of suicide bombings, which often
targeted innocent Israeli civilians. I unhesitatingly condemn these
outrageous crimes.

However, it is grossly unfair to decontextualize these horrible
incidents by
utterly ignoring or overlooking the even more pornographic Israeli
crimes
which make the bombings inevitable.

In the final analysis, Israel (and the United States) can't push the
Palestinian people, already tormented by 37 years of a dehumanizing
Nazi-like military occupation, to the brink of physical annihilation,
and
then nonchalantly shout, "Suicide bombings! Terror! Hamas!!

Evil often breeds evil, as the famous American poet, Auden, said:

I and the public know,
What all school children learn,
Those to whom evil is done,
Do evil in return.

Some Israeli supporters might argue that Israeli terror is only a
reaction
to Palestinian violence.

This simply is not true. Israel had more than 32 years to reach a
settlement
with the Palestinians, to give them hope and at least a semblance of
justice.

However, instead of investing in peace, successive Israeli governments,
with
active American support, spent all these years building Jews-only
colonialist outposts, inhabited by racist Talmud-quoting Jews who
believe
that non-Jews are less than full human beings, vermin and dirty animals
that
ought to be exterminated. I know these facts too well since I live among
them and suffer the full effects of their racist ideology.

Like many people around the world, I hope and pray that the death of
Arafat
will herald a new era of peace and reconciliation between Israelis and
the
Palestinians.

However, I am afraid that Israel, a country that prefers land over
peace,
has already killed President's Bush's vision of two states, Israel and
Palestine, living peacefully side by side.

The intensive proliferation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank
simply
has left little room for the creation of a viable Palestinian state
worthy
of the name.

Hence, I believe the only remaining solution is a unitary democratic and
civil state in all of mandatory Palestine (Israel and the occupied
territories) in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims, can live together
as
equal citizens, much like California.

Will the U.S. government be bold enough to push for this most human and
moral solution? In any case, the only remaining alternative would be
more
hatred, violence, terror, and war. And all of us, Americans, Arabs, and
Jews
would continue to suffer.

Khalid Amayreh is an American-educated journalist living in the West
Bank
town of Hebron. He obtained a BA degree in journalism from the
University of
Oklahoma and a master's degree in the same field from the University of
Southern Illinois at Carbondale.

Visit Khalid Amayreh's website at www.sacunion.com

The following extract shows that Khalid's contention that 'racist
Talmud-quoting Jews' believe that Arabs are less than full human beings
sadly applies to many Americans too:

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 11/18/04) - A prominent national Islamic civil rights
and
advocacy group today called for an apology from the MSNBC cable
television
network over comments on its "Imus in the Morning" program that referred
to
Palestinians as "filthy animals" and suggested that they all be killed.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also
urged
that the program's host, Don Imus, be reprimanded for failing to
challenge
his colleagues' inflammatory remarks. CAIR, which says it received
numerous
complaints about the comments, quoted a transcript of Imus' November
12th
program in which he and his on-air colleagues engaged in the following
discussion about live coverage of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's
funeral:

DON IMUS: They're (the Palestinians) eating dirt and that fat pig wife
of
his is living in Paris.
COLLEAGUE: They're all brainwashed, though. That's what it is. And
they're
stupid, to begin with, but they're brainwashed now. Stinking animals.
They
ought to drop the bomb right there, kill 'em all right now.
IMUS: Well, the problem is we have (reporter) Andrea (Mitchell) there;
we
don't want anything to happen to her.
COLLEAGUE: Oh, she's got to get out. Andrea, get out and then drop the
bomb
and kill everybody.
COLLEAGUE: Look at this. Animals. Animals!




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