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"superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden"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."
