The Most Wanted List: International Terrorism
By Noam Chomsky
TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 26 February 2008
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world over," an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded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."
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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.
