Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia
Titolo: The World's Most Wanted

The World's Most Wanted 
by Noam Chomsky 
TomDispatch  
On Feb. 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hezbollah, 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story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama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 percent in Mexico to 16 percent 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 the 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 "k*ke" or "n*gger." 
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'
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 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
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 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. 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 5-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 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 percent of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a
"ghost town," Jibshit was about 70 percent 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 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 
 
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 by Noam Chomsky 
Il presidente della repubblica italiana, il comunista Giorgio Napolitano 
  ha detto:
No all'antisemitismo "anche quando esso
si travesta da antisionismo".
"Antisionismo", ha detto il capo dello stato, "significa negazione della 
fonte ispiratrice dello stato ebraico, delle ragioni della sua nascita, 
ieri, e della sua sicurezza oggi, al di là dei governi che si alternano 
nella guida di Israele".

 Il 
è interessante far vedere che in questo ng i paladini difensori delle
porcate di Tel Aviv siano dei fascisti italiani e ungheresi come arduino e
tonibaruch


 Arduino ha scritto:
Il presidente della repubblica italiana, il comunista Giorgio Napolitano 
  ha detto:
No all'antisemitismo "anche quando esso
si travesta da antisionismo".
"Antisionismo", ha detto il capo dello stato, "significa negazione della 
fonte ispiratrice dello stato ebraico, delle ragioni
della sua nascita, ieri, e della sua sicurezza oggi.

 Il presidente della
non ti fare scudo di Napolitano, lordura fascista d'un arduino.
The World's Most Wanted
by Noam Chomsky
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Following the Terror Trail
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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 -
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Car Bomb
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"Terrorist Villagers"
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this glaring error - the only one - was ignored. Reasonably, since it
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Killing Without Intent
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of Israeli artillery spotters, who ... were pounding their shells
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crime on the order of intentional killing - so we are instructed by
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Following the Terror Trail
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Car Bomb
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"Terrorist Villagers"
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Killing Without Intent
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Copyright 2008 Noam Chomsky
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