Many
people write to me and ask: "Why do you hate Israel so much?" My answer to them
is: No, I don't hate Israel but I am beginning to hate Israel's government,
and here's why: "Israel's
missile attack on a densely populated area of Gaza City provoked worldwide condemnation
yesterday, but the Israeli Government defended its action robustly. The West and
the Arab world united in denouncing the attack, saying it violated international
law by targeting innocent civilians. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister,
hailed the killing of the Hamas commander Salah Shehada as a great success. The
deaths of 14 others, including nine children, were said to be regrettable." Okay,
so it's a war, and bad things happen in wartime, unavoidable deaths, "collateral
damage," etc. etc., you know the drill. But why does Israel's Prime Minister find
it necessary to hail the killing of nine children as "one of our great successes"
and congratulate
his trained killers for a job well-done? Is he an out-of-the-closet sadist,
loud
and proud in his desire to inflict maximum pain? Sharon
later backtracked, somewhat, acknowledged that a "mistake" had been made in firing
a heavy-duty missile at a thickly-populated apartment complex in the Gaza strip,
and tried to shift the
blame onto "misleading intelligence." According to the new story, Shin
Bet hadn't told them that innocent civilians were in the area. This
was met with widespread disbelief. After all, firing a one-ton missile at an
apartment complex you know, a place where families live could have
had but one result. "To suggest anything otherwise," John Ryan, Ireland's UN ambassador
said in the Security Council the other day, "is disingenuous." Which
is just a hifalutin' way of calling someone a bloody liar. Even
Sharon's poodle, otherwise known as the President of the United States, was moved
to remark that the Gaza massacre was somewhat "heavy-handed"
although naturally the official US denunciation, as always, reiterated this
administration's unconditional support for Israel. As presidential spokesman Ari
Fleischer put it: "The
president's concern here is there is loss of innocent lives. The president has
been and will continue to be the first to defend Israel. In this case the president
sees it differently.
This was a deliberate attack on this site, knowing that
innocents would be lost as a consequence of this attack." Is
it finally beginning to dawn on the White House that what we are dealing with
in the Sharon government is evil, pure and simple as evil as Hamas.
Probably not, but the unmistakable evidence of something rotten in the state of
Israel grows, such as this
sickening story in the Jerusalem Post about an IDF company commander
and a soldier in the reserves who tortured and sexually abused a Palestinian youth.
The Post reports: "The
two were carrying out searches for a man when they discovered his son. The commander
threatened the youth with a loaded rifle, before commanding him to remove his
pants and underwear. The two then held a flame near the youth's genitalia. In
addition the two are charged with sexually abusing the boy and beating him." The
incident occured three months ago, just as Israel's amen corner in this country
was declaring the moral superiority of the IDF over the suicide bombers, because,
you see, they don't target civilians. If innocents are killed, or injured, by
the IDF it is always a "mistake" and that's why there's no "moral equivalence"
between the two sides. Or so the Israel Firsters aver. But here we have even the
President's own spokesman acknowledging the obvious: what happened in Gaza was
no accident, but a deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians. Although
I'm sticking to my original opinion that
to compare the Israelis to the Nazis is overstated, the gap between rhetoric and
reality is rapidly closing. Stylistically, at any rate, what that IDF commander
and his accomplice did to a mere child evokes images of leather-jacketed Stormtroopers
indulging in their favorite sports. What's
more, these horrors are enacted while Sharon and his advisors bark like a pack
of mad dogs, reined in only by the qualms of their American handlers. As
if Sharon is testing the waters to see how much the Americans are willing to put
up with, the Israeli government keeps announcing the most heinous measures establishing
exclusively
Jewish land holdings, collectively
punishing the families of suicide bombers and pulling back only after an
outpouring of criticism. But the Israelis are always careful not to push us too
far, and their timing, I must say, is impeccable: wasn't it fortunate that Congress
had already
completed the final legislation authorizing an extra $200 million in US aid
just as those nine kids were being blown to smithereens? Just
how far does Israeli malevolence go? One
of the great unsolved mysteries of the period leading up to 9/11 is the extent
of an Israeli spy operation in the US
uncovered by Carl Cameron of Fox News
and widely reported, including in this space. As we all know, everybody
spies on everybody, "friends" and foes alike. But this operation is believed to
have been so extensive, and wide-ranging, that the real question in regard to
Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11 is, as one US federal agent put it to Cameron, "How
could they not have known?" Now, however, more evidence of the Israeli
connection is emerging
. Both
Israeli and US government officials scoffed at these charges as an "urban
myth." Their denials, however, were somewhat undermined by the leaking of the US government's
own report on "suspicious activities" by Israelis around US government offices
and military installations. The report, culled from information supplied by numerous
federal agencies, documents what is obviously a large-scale intelligence operation
directed against US government facilities. Now more documentary evidence of the
Israeli connection to 9/11 comes with the emergence of the US government's own
list of terrorist suspects, two versions of which Cryptome.com has obtained and
posted, with the following information as to their provenance: "A
Finnish list of FBI terrorist
suspects, dated 3 October 2001, first published about six months ago, may
be compared to a similar list published on
an Italian site, dated 22 May 2002. The two lists have many of the same
names but a fair number of names are unique to each, and the Finnish list provides
a 'function' and ID for each suspect." There
are also other differences. The Italian site indicates that this is an official
government circular originating with the American authorities and distributed
to various Italian financial institutions in an effort to trace the terrorist
trail. As far as I can see, all the names on the Finnish list are Arabic. The
Italian version, however, has a number of American names as well, one Frenchman,
and lo and behold! there is our old friend Dominik Suter,
listed right between Eyad Suleiman, a native of Kuwait, and Sheikh Amed Salim
Swedan, a Kenyan. Suter,
you'll
remember, is the fellow behind the mysterious Urban
Moving Systems, whose employees were arrested after neighbors reported them
laughing
and cheering as they watched the World Trade Center burn. These five "Middle
Eastern-looking men," as described by witnesses, were Israelis: they were found
with box cutters in their van, $4,000 in cash, and multiple passports. Police
interrogated them for hours, and transferred them to a maximum security facility,
where they were held for months. Their
van was registered as the property of Urban Moving Systems: A raid on the Urban
Moving Systems warehouse yielded computers, documents, and other evidence of
what, we don't know. Suter, the owner of the company, refused all comment, and
soon fled
the country to Israel. The
inclusion of Suter, an Israeli, and the front man for what even the Forward
acknowledges
was a Mossad operation, on an official list of terrorist suspects should silence,
for good, those who dismiss the Israeli connection to 9/11 as a "myth," urban
or otherwise. As a great patriot once said: "I
have in my hands a list
." On
that list, along with Mohammed
Atta, and Zacarias Moussaoui, is not only Suter, but also five other Americans
or, at least, non-Arabs with US addresses. What's up with that? Only
God, and the higher echelons of the US government, know for sure. What we do know
is this: it is no longer possible to deny that the US government believes Israel
had some connection to the events leading up to 9/11. The documentary evidence,
along with the reported testimony of patriots within law enforcement, is accumulating
to the point where it can no longer be ignored. Just
how far does Israeli malevolence go? I'm afraid we're about to find out
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