Who Rules the World? (4 page)

INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR CHOICES

Returning to the two categories of intellectuals, it seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another. The pattern goes back to the earliest records. It was the man accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock, much as Dreyfusards were accused of “corrupting souls, and, in due course, society as a whole” and the value-oriented intellectuals of the 1960s were charged with interference with “indoctrination of the young.”
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In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary standards are dissident intellectuals, called “prophets” in the English translation. They bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, denounced the prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first “self-hating Jew” or “anti-American” in the modern counterparts. The prophets were treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who would later be condemned as false prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.

As for the responsibility of intellectuals, there does not seem to me to be much to say beyond some simple truths: intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

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Terrorists Wanted the World Over

On February 13, 2008, Imad Mughniyeh, 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.”
1
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Mughniyeh had been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”
2

Joy was unconstrained in Israel, too, as “one of the US and Israel’s most wanted men” was brought to justice, the London
Financial Times
reported.
3
Under the headline “A Militant Wanted the World Over,” an accompanying story reported that Mughniyeh 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.”
4

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 percent in Mexico to 16 percent 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).
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There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by “the world.”

FOLLOWING THE TERROR TRAIL

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
reported that most of the charges against Mughniyeh 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 US Navy diver was killed.”
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This was one of two terrorist atrocities that led newspaper editors, in a poll, 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.
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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. Among other atrocities, his air force killed seventy-five Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk.
8
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, to general approbation, he termed “a legitimate response” to “terrorist attacks.”
9
A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an “act of armed aggression” (with the United States abstaining).
10
“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 to general acclaim from “the world.”
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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.
12
Tunis was a preferable target, however; it was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra benefit: 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, commonly to be held for long periods without charge in Israeli prisons. The most notorious of these prisons has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press.
13
Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the United States, 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, who have variously been deemed “two-headed beasts” (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), “drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle” (Israeli Defense Forces 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The differential reaction, or rather nonreaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.

CAR BOMBING AND “TERRORIST VILLAGERS”

Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than either the
Achille Lauro
hijacking or the crime for which Mughniyeh’s “involvement can be ascertained with certainty” in the same year.
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But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize of 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.
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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
.
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The intended target had been the Shiite 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”).

A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres’s “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.”
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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.
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They are, however, of no interest to “the world” and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions. We might well ask again whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us once more 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 incidents that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world when considering “one of the very few times” Imad Mughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.

The United States also accuses Mughniyeh of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on the barracks occupied by U.S. Marines and French paratroopers 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.
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The
Financial Times
has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah.
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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.”
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A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Mughniyeh 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 United States provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some twenty thousand people and devastated the southern part of the country 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 and Shatila massacres.
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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 his repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion.
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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.