The Most Wanted List.: International Terrorism

By: Tomgram:

-- - One of Noam Chomsky's latest books --
a conversation with David Barsamian -- is entitled
What We Say Goes. It catches a powerful theme of
Chomsky's: that we have long been living on a one-way
planet and that the language we regularly wield to describe
the realities of our world is tailored to Washington's interests.

Juan Cole, at his Informed Comment website,
had a good example of the strangeness of this targeted
language recently. When Serbs stormed the
U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, he offered the following
comment (with so many years of the term
"Islamofascism" in mind): "…given that the Serbs
are Eastern Orthodox Christians, will the Republican
Party and Fox Cable News now start fulminating
against 'Christofascism?'"

Of course, the minute you try to turn the
Washington norm (in word or act) around, as
Chomsky did in a piece entitled What If Iran Had Invaded Mexico?,
you've already entered the theater of the absurd. "Terror" is a
particularly good example of this. "Terror" is something that,
by (recent) definition, is committed by free-floating groups or
movements against innocent civilians and is utterly reprehensible
(unless the group turns out to be the CIA running car bombs
into Baghdad or car and camel bombs into Afghanistan, in
which case it's not a topic that's either much discussed, or
condemned in our world). On the other hand, that weapon
of terror, air power, which is at the heart of the American way
of war, simply doesn't qualify under the category of "terror"
at all -- no matter how terrifying it may be to innocent civilians
who find themselves underneath the missiles and bombs.

It's with this in mind that Chomsky turns to terror of every
kind in the Middle East in the context of the car bombing
of a major figure in Lebanon's Hizbollah movement. By
the way, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove),
a new collection of his writings on politics and on language
from the 1950s to the present, has just been published and
is highly recommended. Tom

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 Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally hurled
out to sea. 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 D-9 Caterpillar bulldozers
demolished his home in Jenin with
his family still 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

Comment: When the CIA's Bill Casey was setting off
car bombs in Beirut in the 1980's no one accused the
US of terrorism. One of those car bombs massacred
80 Lebanese children as the CIA dogs 'slinked'
away like so many barfbags.