[Peace-discuss] Murderers

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Incidentally, Chomsky elsewhere notes that Samantha Power employs the argument 
of the "vulgar apologists" mentioned near the end of this article.  --CGE]

	Published on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
	The Most Wanted List: International Terrorism
	by Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was 
assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” 
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 has 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 U.S. 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that he was “superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden” after 9/11 
and so ranked only 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 George Bush when 
he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. 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 U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in 
Panama, and that support was conditional upon the culprits being identified 
(they still weren’t eight months later, the FBI 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 
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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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 U.S.-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 U.S.-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 U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide 
truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 
1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the 
U.S. 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 Hizbollah. 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 U.S. and French forces 
were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and 
shortly after the U.S. 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 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 Hizbollah 
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 U.S.-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 U.S.-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 Hizbollah would 
respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah 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 Hizbollah defenses against the 
2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by 
the standards of “the world,” which understands that the United States and its 
clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, 
while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. 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.

Copyright 2008 Noam Chomsky

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/27/7322/