The Big Lie That Shielded Arafat Contributed by John Werntz
column in yesterday's Jewish World Review is a real . Poor choice of word, actually. No mature and aware citizen can be shocked any more by evidence of collusion between the government and media to hide the truth from the people. But the story that she tells has to be near the top of anyone's list of Most Sickening Big Lies, right up there with the litany of Vietnam falsehoods and distortions.
Briefly, she reveals that a declassified State Department cable--its release by the State Department historian ideally timed in the Christmas season to be widely ignored--establishes that ever since the Nixon Administration the government has had irrefutable proof of Arafat's direct personal involvement in monstrous acts of terror. Whether the actual perps were called Fatah, Black September, or the Aksa Martyr's Brigade, they were all Arafat's boys. Our government pretended for "reasons of state" to be convinced by Arafat's denials.
The long excerpt in the sequel relates a single incident of hostage-taking and murder that the cable analyzes. The excerpt is an appetizer. If it interests you, by all means follow the link and regale yourself at the banquet that follows. But be sure to keep a barf-bag handy.
By Caroline B. Glick
<snip>
ON MARCH 1, 1973, eight Fatah terrorists, operating under the Black September banner stormed the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the US Embassy's Chargé d'Affaires George Curtis Moore. The terrorists took Moore, US Ambassador Cleo Noel, Belgian Chargé d'Affaires Guy Eid and two Arab diplomats hostage. They demanded that the US, Israel, Jordan and Germany release PLO and Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorists, including Robert F. Kennedy's assassin Sirhan Sirhan and Black September commander Muhammed Ahwad (Abu Daud), from prison in exchange for the hostages' release.
The next evening, the Palestinians brutally murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid. They released their other hostages on March 4.
Arafat denied any involvement in the attack.The US officially accepted his denial. Yet, as he later publicly revealed, James Welsh, who served at the time of the attack as an anayst at the National Security Agency intercepted a communication from Arafat, then headquartered in Beirut, to his terror agents in Khartoum ordering the attack.
In 1986, as evidence of Arafat's involvement became more widely known, more and more voices began calling for Arafat to be investigated for murder. As the New York Sun's online blog recalled last week, during that period Britain's Sunday Times reported that 44 US senators sent a letter to then US Attorney General Edwin Meese, "urging the American government to charge the PLO chief with plotting the murders of two American diplomats in 1973."
The article went on to note that the Justice Department's interest in pursuing the matter was making senior State Department officials uneasy: "State Department diplomats, worried that murder charges against Arafat would anger the United States' friends in the Arab world, are urging the Justice Department to drop the investigation."
<snip>
So it was that for 33 years, under seven consecutive presidential administrations, the State Department denied any knowledge of involvement by Arafat or Fatah in the execution of its own people.
The "banquet" that rounds out Caroline Glick's article is solid food for thought. She ponders the evil consequences of this gross abandonment of the truth and the good that might have followed if our leaders had pursued the honorable course. As an exercise in editorial comment this brief essay merits the Pulitzer for which it will never even be considered. The coda wraps it all up:
Imagine how our future would look if rather than stealthily admitting the truth, while trusting the media not to take notice, the US government were to base its current policy on the truth, and the media were to reveal this truth to the world.
We owe thanks to her for doing the job the media purports to do. Meanwhile, Pilate lives!
Contributed by John Werntz on January 3, 2007 at 08:15 AM in , , |