If so-called Palestinian terrorism is brought to America in the near future, the role of Benjamin Netanyahu and his intelligence networks in Israel and the United States should be investigated.
On April 10, former Israeli Prime Minister and full-time thug Benjamin Netanyahu spent an entire day in Washington, D.C., threatening the United States with terrorist attacks that would allegedly come from Palestinian groups. At the National Press Club, Netanyahu, rehearsing for his events later in the day before the U.S. Senate, and before an "adoring" crowd at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), center of the fascist policies of the Conservative Revolution, defended the slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Forces going on that very hour in the refugee camps of Jenin, and the streets of Nablus. His message: The United States had better stop trying to "rein in" Israel's invasion of the West Bank, or else the next suicide terrorist attacks will be "your buses, and your malls," to be hit again and again. With eerie certainty, Netanyahu was warning that the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will be coming to the United States.
Then, punctuating his threats with forceful gesticulations, Netanyahu said that he was in Washington to lead the United States in declaring war on "six regimes," in retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
There are two problems with "Bibi" Netanyahu's spiel. First of all, his so-called "devotion" to President George Bush's "war on terrorism," is a total sham. The Israeli intelligence and military services themselves are contaminated with a fascist current going back to the 1923 theories of Vladimir Jabotinsky, and are tied, in an intricate but undeniable way, in the networks that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
As EIR Founder and 2004 Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche wrote in his groundbreaking strategic analysis, "Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th" (EIR, Jan. 11, 2002), the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were "an inside job," from a domestic network within the U.S. military, which was capable of compromising all security measures, and was operating so as to implement to an imperial plan among certain Anglo-American policymaking circles, to launch a "Clash of Civilizations" war against Islam.
Netanyahu's justification of the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians is therefore based on the Goebbels-style Big Lie that Islamic terrorists working for Osama bin Laden carried out the Sept. 11 attacks—a charge that is totally discredited in the Special Report on the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks, issued by candidate LaRouche's campaign.
Hamas Is the Israeli Right Wing's Baby
The second of Netanyahu's Big Lies, is the genesis of the suicide terrorist campaigns inside Israel. As the following summary details, to stop suicide terrorism in Israel and the occupied territories, one must look into the dirty terrorist operations of the Israeli Likud (the party of Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon), and the security agencies, Shin Beth and Mossad—including controls over Hamas!
These links between Israeli secret service operations and the suicide bombings are becoming more and more exposed, as more of Sharon's Israel's Nazi-like operations in the West Bank become known.
The Israeli roots of Hamas were already beginning to be questioned back in December 2001, when Sharon and his generals began their "final solution" assault on the Palestinian administrative government, and put Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat under house arrest. In fact, the move against Arafat came almost immediately after the Palestinian leader had denounced terrorist attacks in a national radio address to the Palestinian people, and just after U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer dropped a political bombshell at a Jersualem forum on Dec. 20.
Speaking at a seminar on religion and politics sponsored by Oz V'Shalom-Netivot Shalom, a largely Anglo-American organization that promotes peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Kurtzer said that the growth of the Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories in recent decades—"with the tacit support of Israel"—was "not totally unrelated" to the emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their terrorist attacks against Israel. Kurtzer explained that during the 1980s, when the Islamist movement began to flourish in the West Bank and Gaza, "Israel perceived it to be better to have people turning toward religion rather than toward a nationalistic cause." It therefore did little to stop the flow of money to mosques and other religious institutions, rather than to schools. Kurtzer thus made the connection between the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Israel's promotion of the Islamist movement as a counter to Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
According to the Dec. 21, 2001 Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Kurtzer was joined at the forum by Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, the head of Har Etzion Yeshiva in Alon Shvut, who is an active advocate of a just regional peace. Kurtzer said that as a result of the growth of Islam at the expense of education, there are now Palestinians who are "determined terrorists that use religious beliefs in a perverted way to appeal to the masses." He added that there is no "inherent component" in Islam that advocates violence. In Islam, the concept of jihad (resistance), "in classic religious associations connotes religious belief and fervor, not violence." But extremists have distorted the meaning of jihad, so it now has a connotation of violence in the service of a religious purpose.
These remarks provoked the wrath of the Likud, whose leading member of the Knesset (parliament) denounced Kurtzer, an observant Jew, as "a little kike"—one of the most disgusting anti-Semitic slurs that can be made.
Despite the attacks on him, Ambassador Kurtzer's remarks were right on target, and are known to be true by any serious Middle East observer.
The point was also made by Arafat, in an interview on Dec. 11, 2001 to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. "We are doing everything to stop the violence," he said. "But Hamas is a creature of Israel, which at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Shamir [in the late 1980s] gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities, and mosques. Even [the late Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of [Egpytian President Hosni] Mubarak."
Israeli toleration, if not initial sponsorship of the Islamist movement, has also been acknowledged and well documented in Israeli sources. In 1997, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University published a study, "Hamas: Radical Islam in a National Struggle," authored by Anat Kurz and Nahman Tal. It stated that the Islamic Association, "the platform of which contained no nationalist clauses, obtained a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration in 1979 to conduct its activities. The permit was apparently consistent with the Israeli policy of strengthening Islamic bodies as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalist groups."
The history of how the Israeli hawkish leaders have used Hamas, and its leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, for more than 20 years, was documented by EIR in its Jan. 18, 2002 issue, in an article, entitled "The Israeli Roots of Hamas Are Being Exposed."
Now, in a series of extraordinary statements that have come out since the beginning of Sharon's Good Friday invasion of Ramallah and other Palestinian cities, the question of an Israeli hand behind the suicide attacks is being more boldly raised. The pattern is being questioned as well: Why is it that every time a serious peace initiative is taken—the most recent being the breakthrough at the Arab League summit on March 27-28, which endorsed Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace initiative—there is a suicide terrorist attack that allows Sharon to attack Arafat? And there is no question that Sharon's ultimate aim is to kill the Palestinian leader.
One of the most poignant questions was published by David Langsam, an Australian Jew writing in the Melbourne daily, The Age. Langsam asks, "What is a Jew with a moral conscience meant to do in these dark days of 'Arik' Sharon's Palestinian putsch?... While Sharon spends much of his nation's resources fighting the Palestinian Authority, the facts are that most of the terrorist suicide bombings have been by Hamas and/or the smaller Islamic Jihad. And just as George Bush's Taliban and al-Qaeda were funded by his father, the fledgling Hamas was funded during the first Intifada by the Israeli security services, Shin Beth, under the guidance of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir," for the purpose of "creating an alternative to the PLO." He adds, "So, every time the religious fundamentalists kill a score of Israelis, Israel responds by attacking Hamas's secular rivals [Arafat and the Palestinian Authority].... To claim that Arafat is in control when he is holed up in the Ramallah ghetto is ludicrous."
In Russia, which has extremely close ties to approximately 1 million Russian immigrants who are now Israeli citizens, the Sharon/Hamas connection is also raising alarm bells, particularly since Russian communities have been hard hit with terrorism.
One Russian publication, Pravda.ru, in its English edition on April 4, had an article by Dmitri Litvinovich, stating that "Hamas and Israel Unite Against Arafat." The author reports that, according to Itogi, a Russian magazine, Sharon "follows the concept outlined in 1923 about an 'iron wall' by Vladimir Jabotinsky," the Jewish fascist admirer of Mussolini, who believed that all Palestinians should be crushed and driven out of "Greater Israel."
Pravda.ru writes, "What is the power that the Israeli Prime Minister stakes on? No matter how strange it may seem, he has chosen Hamas." The author then reviews the history of Hamas, from its founding by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on Dec. 14, 1987 on the basis of two Islamic groups, which were officially registered as cultural and educational movements. "Hamas consists of political and fighting organizations.... There are shahid groups in Hamas, consisting of young suicide terrorists between the ages of 18-27, mostly from poor families. Israel believed the terrorists to be a counterbalance to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat, which is why Israel has been rendering financial support to the terrorist group for a very long period" (emphasis added).
The author writes that "two bitter enemies"—Sharon and Hamas—"are ready to conclude an armistice against the third one, Yasser Arafat namely. Both of them are working on tactical problems now: Sharon is leveling Arafat's influence, at the same time getting rid of a peace plan that is unfavorable for Israel. The Hamas leader assumes command over the Palestinian opposition, while Arafat is isolated to his Ramallah residence."
That this is "not a delirium," the author says, is shown by the following: "Israel, which has already declared its intention to liquidate centers of terrorism, does not disturb Hamas, which claims responsibility for several recent acts of terrorism. This is rather strange. The previous connection between Israel and Hamas confirms the statement. An Eastern wisdom says that ... 'a possibility of a victory is contained in your enemy.' That is why the union was created to win."
A week later, on April 11, in the Moscow Times, Russian military expert Pavel Felgengauer similarly exposed that the strategic reality of the "Israeli pogroms" in the West Bank, is that "the Sharon regime and Hamas are acting as allies" to destroy the peace process. Israel "has already killed hundreds of Palestinian fighters, policemen, and civilians," but in its main stronghold in the Gaza Strip, Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the March 27 Passover Seder massacre that allegedly triggered the Israeli offensive, continues to operate, "even gloating at what Israel is doing to the more moderate Palestinian Arab leaders." Instead of hitting Hamas there, "the Israeli military is ripping apart the West Bank, harassing and isolating Yasser Arafat, the first Palestinian leader who recognized Israel's right to exist, and signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state."
Felgengauer charges: "The main target of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield is clearly not terrorism, but the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 that formed the Palestinian Authority."
Bibi and the Killing of Rabin
Netanyahu has been bellowing gleefully at his American appearances that "Oslo is dead!" and therefore Israel does not have to abide by the provisions—particularly those that require ending the Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands. While Netanyahu blames Arafat for "killing" Oslo, there is no question that it was the intention of the right-wing Israeli groupings to kill the peace accord, when their "disposable" agent, religious fanatic Yigal Amir, killed Prime Minister Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995.
The still-incomplete investigation into the networks that protected Amir could shed further light on what underlies Netanyahu's threats that the United States had better "fully support" Israel, or be hit with another assault of Sept. 11-style terrorism.
Netanyahu's inflammatory campaign of verbal terror was implicated time and again in setting up the conditions for Rabin's murder. For example, in his bloodthirsty drive to become Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu rushed to scene of a bus bombing in 1994, where TV cameras filmed him denouncing Labor Prime Minister Rabin as responsible for the terrorism, while the maimed victims were being carried out. Bibi said that Rabin preferred "Arafat and the residents of Gaza over the security of the residents of Israel." Just more than a year later, after months of covert cooperation between Bibi's Likud and the Yesha Council of the radical right-wing settlers, one of these pro-settler terrorists, working with the Council, killed Rabin, for "betraying" the Jews. After a few more bus bombings during the subsequent election campaign, Netanyahu became Prime Minister.
On April 15, 2002, Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Nafei, the former editor of the prestigious newspaper Al Ahram, warned that Israel may resort to instigating terrorist attacks in the Arab world and elsewhere. Speaking on the "Good Morning Egypt" TV program, a program which has also interviewed Lyndon LaRouche, Nafei said, although he was not a conspiracy-theory bug, there were indications that Israel might deploy terrorists, inside Arab nations, to destabilize their governments, and also in Europe and the United States. He referred back to the 1950s, when similar events occurred, and to the case of the Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard, as an example of the extent of Israeli intelligence penetration in the United States.
An International Challenge
Netanyahu came to the United States in order to impose a "reign of terror" against any critics, especially Jewish critics, who speak out against the war crimes being carried out against Palestinians by the Sharon regime. But his power to terrorize critics is worldwide.
Returning to the courageous article by Australia's David Langsam in The Age, the author writes about the threats that he expects: "Is it 'breaking ranks' to be Jewish and to criticize Israel's terrible government now that Israel has unilaterally declared war on the Palestinian Authority?... I know that by this paragraph, somewhere a pro-Israel lobbyist will be reaching for his or her keyboard to accuse me of being an anti-Semite, or a self-hating Jew, or a traitor. Some will reach for their telephones to deliver hate messages to my 85-year-old father.... Am I to be intimidated by the pro-Israeli extreme right just because Israel is wrong?"
Netanyahu's success depends on silencing critics; but a fresh investigation into his dirty operations could topple him again.
