Say ‘No!’ to a Palestinian state

Yasser Arafat received the Nobel Prize for Peace from the Norwegians, in spite of his multiple murders and crimes, both against individuals of many nations, and against humanity[i]. Will the Israeli government truly now give to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Arafat’s other heirs, a state of their own on Israel’s ancient land?

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The PLO’s murderous trend took root in its earliest history, and has since targeted not only Jews and Israelis, but also other nationals, journalists, diplomats and even Palestinians who failed to toe its line.

Yasser Arafat’s first ever murder victim was Rork Hamid, a 20-year-old Palestinian suspected of disloyalty. When Arafat subsequently heard that Hamid had been innocent, he was far from upset. On the contrary, this revelation simply left him with the belief that, as his first personal victim, Hamid had served a valuable “Ikhwanite” (Muslim brothers’) purpose.

As Amim Hegoub told Thomas Kiernan:

“The shooting of the Hamid boy put an end to any temptations we might have had not to take [Arafat] seriously. It was like an initiation rite for him … after that our guerilla activities became a deadly serious business.”[ii]

A former friend of Arafat, today Egyptian petroleum engineer Walid Jiryis, relates the following:

In my opinion, winning the presidency of the PSF turned Yasser into a power-maniac… He used to say that he could no longer have close friends because there might be times when he had to discipline or dismiss or even punish someone, and if he was a friend …

There was an occasion when he did this. There was a student whose parents had sent him out of Palestine in the ’48 war to live with relatives in Cairo… When the war ended … the Israelis would not allow the boy to return to his parents… He had no sense of himself, but would follow the lead of anyone who showed any friendliness towards him. Yasser had recruited him… He worshipped Yasser.

Then – oh, a year later – Yasser discovered the [boy’s] parents were living in Israel [and] were apparently satisfied there. Yasser tried to get the boy to publicly denounce his parents. The boy would have done just about anything for Yasser. But this! This he could not do…

So, Yasser began to hold him up to ridicule. Still the boy would not agree to condemn his parents. Yasser, I would say, really loved the boy. He was delicate, sensitive, a flower. He was very much a part of Yasser’s inner circle – four or five boys who lived in the same place and, well, you can imagine what I mean. And what did Yasser do?

There was another boy – we used to call him The Scimitar – who came from Bedouin people. He was totally ruthless. Yasser held a kind of formal hearing for the boy whose parents lived in Israel, who wouldn’t denounce them … He cried as he pointed to the boy, he said, “My heart aches for Ahmed…” It was very dramatic. And then he said “But my Arab brother Ahmed cannot bring himself to be a true feday, so he must be taught.”

Thereupon the boy we called The Scimitar appeared with a knife. Yasser sobbed and sobbed as The Scimitar proceeded to castrate the boy. The next day the boy was dead. He had killed himself. After that, Yasser used to say he could have no friends.”[iii]

Murder and torture became an integral part of Yasser Arafat’s personality, and the character of his PLO movement. It resulted in the murders of countless innocent people around the world.

The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism defined terrorism as: “The deliberate, systematic murder, maiming and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear in order to gain political ends.” That, in short, has been much of the PLO’s sordid history, and the history of those terrorist groups associated with it.

In a statement at the conference, former Senator Henry Jackson submitted, inter alia:

• “A unanimous condemnation of terrorism without qualification or reserve.
• “Enforcement of an international convention against terrorism … which would cover the definition of terrorism as an international crime, the denial of political status for criminals so defined, common procedures for extradition, appropriate penalties, and the exchange of evidence.
• “A complementary agreement to take concerted measures, including diplomatic, economic and other sanctions, against states which aid terrorists …
• “An energetic and continuing effort to alert public opinion to the dangers of terrorism to civil liberties, and to the rights of individuals in a free society, and the need for effective measures to combat it.”[iv]

In the light of such clear conclusions, it is outrageous that there are politicians who suggest – for reasons of immoral political expediency – that a status of respectability be conferred on those who, at the very least, should be tried for crimes against humanity.

One wonders where the journalists were – those constantly ready to criticize Israel’s minutest offence – when the PLO in Lebanon was murdering their colleagues because they failed to report in accordance with Arafat’s wishes?

• Larry Buchman and Sean Toolan, correspondents for ABC TV;
• Mark Tryon, for the Free Belgium Radio;
• Robert Pfeffer, Der Speigel and Unita correspondent;
• Tony Italo and  Graciela Difaco, Italian journalists;
• Jean Lougeau, correspondent for the French TFI;

— All murdered.

And we have not mentioned those Arab journalists who, in their courageous and honest reporting, failed to toe the PLO line.

In line with the example of Dr Goebbels, both the PLO and the Syrians controlled the newspapers and broadcasting, the content of news reports, and all published comment; and both exercised censorship in the Lebanese and foreign press. This obviously meant that the news sent out of Lebanon was unlikely to be reliable, but the Western news media kept this information from their audiences.[v]

With stark clarity, Frank Gervasi of the Center for International Security explains the PLO’s seven-year reign of terror in Beirut:

Another of my informants was Frederick el-Murr, a 54-year-old civil engineer and prominent Lebanese industrialist. Like Dr Torbey, Mr El-Murr was convinced that what had happened in Lebanon from 1975 onward, following Arafat’s triumphal return from the United Nations, was not a “civil war,” as the press hastened to characterize it, but a conquest of my country by the PLO and the Syrians.

“The terrorists,” Mr El-Murr added, “virtually destroyed with artillery and Katyusha rocket fire, such Christian cities as Damour[vi] and Tyre, and badly damaged mostly Muslim Sidon. In West Beirut, hardly a building remains untouched…

“And we have seen mutilations and rape … A favorite method of ridding themselves of political opponents was to tie the feet of the male victims to separate cars speeding off in opposite directions. One such incident was witnessed by my 17-year-old daughter Nada.”

Intimidating the press

The outrages described by Dr Torbey and Mr El-Murr were comparable only to those perpetrated by the Nazis during World War Two, with refinements harking back to the Dark Ages. How did what both called “an organized gang of criminals” manage to impose a reign of terror and silence on a population of hundreds of thousands for more than seven years?

A partial answer was provided by Mr El-Murr, who said that the PLO had “plenty of money” with which to “persuade” Lebanese editors and journalists to write favorably about the PLO’s so-called “revolution,” or to remain silent. One editor whom the PLO could not “buy,” Mr El-Murr said, was his friend Salim El-Lawzi, owner of the independent Lebanese Arabic weekly El-Hawadess. Exactly how El-Lawzi was “silenced” I learned from other sources; Muslim newspapermen who preferred to remain anonymous.

El Lawzi was a Lebanese patriot from one of the wealthiest Muslim families in West Beirut and, above all, a courageous journalist. He began warning his countrymen against the Palestinian terrorist organizations back in the early 1970s, when he saw that their ultimate goal was the creation in Lebanon of a state within a state. Threats against his person started in 1975…

El-Lawzi ignored the warnings until two explosive charges went off one night in the building that housed the weekly’s presses, editorial rooms and administrative offices. The entire building collapsed. El-Lawzi moved to London where he revived his paper and continued his anti-PLO editorial policy. He stayed away from Beirut for three years, but the desire to visit members of his family whom he had left behind got the better of him.

After obtaining a “safe conduct” from his friend, then Prime Minister Salim al-Hus, El-Lawzi landed at Beirut Airport in July 1978. A few days earlier, the latest issue of his paper had appeared in the Lebanese capital with a blistering attack on those Arab oil countries which, the paper said, were buying insurance from PLO terror within their own borders, by financing the sojourn of the “gangs of murderers and thieves in Lebanon…”

At the end of his visit [El-Lawzi’s car] was stopped at a Syrian Army roadblock, where a group of armed men from the pro-Syrian terrorist organization known as As-Saiqa dragged him out…  El-Lawzi was taken to the notorious PLO mountain village of Armoun. There the victim was held for three days in the torture chambers. The fingers of his hands were cut off joint by joint. He was subsequently dismembered and his remains turned up scattered about the village. Horrifying photos of El-Lawzi’s mutilated body spread terror throughout the capital’s journalistic colony.

Over the years, the PLO terrorized into conformity, submission or silence the entire Lebanese press community, using arson, sabotage, assassination and bribery to gain its ends.

Knowledgeable Lebanese newsmen, able to speak freely after the Israelis had expelled Arafat and his trigger-happy followers from Beirut last summer, said that most of the capital’s press corps – national and foreign – entered into a “conspiracy of silence” during the long occupation by the Palestinian “mafia.”

It was not unusual for Lebanon’s journalistic opponents of terrorist activities to find on their doorsteps human limbs in plastic containers with warnings that unless they toed the mark editorially, they too would “wind up wrapped in plastic.” Small wonder, perhaps, that in this atmosphere even some staunch Western correspondents became extremely wary of incurring the wrath of the PLO, and saw more merit in the “cause” than it deserved.

Despite the harassment, however, responsible Lebanese journalists complied what they called “An Album of Terrorist Atrocities.” Published clandestinely in 1978, the document was quickly suppressed within Lebanon, and never saw the light of day abroad. Thus the outside world remained in ignorance of the true nature of the PLO, and utterly unaware of Arafat’s preparations for eventual jihad against Israel.[vii]

One would think that such brutal and intimidating practices would arouse among the members of the international press community – especially those with offices in the West – enough ethical and moral indignation, courage, and just downright consideration for their colleagues, to impel them to demand justice. But the opposite is true. The murderous Arafat, and more recently his spokespersons Hanan Ashrawi and (the late) Faisel Husseini remained, quiet incredibly, the darlings of the press. To this day, Dr Ashrawi seems to have no personal problems with the bloody practices of her beloved former leader.

When Arafat lied before the whole world, claiming “for the sake of the record, to renounce all forms of terrorism;” and when, as a result of this deceiving declaration, the United States agreed to open a dialogue with the PLO, thereby according the murderous organization respect, a journalist who was present in Geneva told me how euphoric virtually all his colleagues who were there with him at the time had been.

Washington assented to hold talks with the PLO, through Tunisian US Ambassador Pelletreau.

Here again, one would think that having finally obtained US recognition, the PLO would have ventured into its first meeting with the superpower with at least pretence at respect. Instead, the unbelievable occurred. One of the official members of the PLO delegation meeting with Pelletreau was Abu Tarig, ‘the man who 15 years earlier emptied the magazine of his Russian-made assault rifle into US Ambassador Cleo Noel, George C. Moore, and Belgian Charge d’Affaires Guy Eid.’ [viii]

It seems incomprehensible that the terror group did not field someone other than the untried murderer of Pelletreau’s colleague. But this was its brazen nature – and for the PLO it paid off.

Most the journalistic and diplomatic world seems to prostitute itself for one reason or another; venerating people like Ashrawi who have never gone on the record as condemning heinous PLO atrocities, and so showing themselves to be devoid of any character or backbone at all.

If Israel had committed a fraction of all these murders – had slain, say, just one unsympathetic foreign journalist (of whom there are plenty) – the world would have been too small to contain the outcry.

Perhaps, after all, it is not difficult to understand the deafening silence of most the world’s journalists – and hence of most of the diplomats – in the face of such horrific crimes. And that they were crimes against humanity was confirmed in blood and agony during the seven years of PLO-perpetrated terror in Lebanon; from 1975 until Israel expelled them in 1982.

“[Dr] Torbey confirmed that since 1975, approximately 100,000 people were massacred by Arafat’s minions and their Syrian partners. Many of the victims, he said, were not Christians but Muslims. Their deaths were callously used in a studied effort to make the world believe that what was happening in Lebanon was not a PLO takeover of the country, but a ‘civil war’ between its two main religious groups.

“As a physician, Dr Torbey was frequently called upon to attend to victims of PLO torture sessions, which were usually conducted at the terrorists’ detention center’ at Armoun, a village in the mountains east of Beirut.

“‘I know of cases,’ Dr Torbey said, ‘of people being thrown into acid tanks and reduced to unrecognizable masses of porous bone. Many young girls came to me for abortions after being raped by PLO gangsters. Very often, mine was the only car circulating the perilous streets of West Beirut after dark, to help some unfortunate victim or other of PLO or Syrian violence. I treated persons with arms severed by shelling, and men whose testicles had been crushed by torturers.

“‘I saw men – live men, mind you – dragged through the streets from fast-moving cars to which they were tied by their feet. All this, I am certain, was motivated in the early years by a desire to create an impression that a civil war was going on.

“‘In time, the Lebanese had nothing with which to defend themselves and no one to help them, so that it was easy for the terrorists to take over homes, shops, garages, apartment houses – anything they wanted. Our children were growing up in terror and our people, robbed of their homes and belongings, were reduced to living like Bedouins, moving from place to place, seeking refuge from the terror. The luckier ones were received by friends or relatives in the hills and mountains to the north or south. The less fortunate lived like hunted animals.’” [ix]

“The PLO made me hate them, not because they demanded their wounded be treated free of charge, nor behaved as if my hospital belonged to them,” Dr Ghassen Hamoud, owner-director of the largest, best equipped of Sidon’s eleven hospitals told Ma’ariv (16.7.82) and Ha’aretz (26.7.82). It was when they broke into the operating theater and forced us to stop surgery and treat their wounded instead … and badly beat one of our doctors who refused to obey them … that I realized they were beasts from the jungle.” [x]

(If that is what the PLO did to a friendly Arab country that had opened its doors to the Palestinians, small wonder the Palestinian PA and Hamas have subjected the Arabs of Gaza and the “West Bank” to a reign of terror, silencing all who dare disagree with them.)

If all this is not record enough, John Laffin, in The PLO Connections, lays out the bloody litany of an organization drunk on terror power:

Terrorism has become commonplace in many parts of the world since the PLO established it as a fact of modern political life. But the Palestinian groups [has held] various records in the field of terrorism. They include:

• The largest hijacking. September 1970, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four aircraft in a single operation. A Pan American plane was blown up at Cairo while Swissair, BOAC and TWA aircraft were destroyed near Amman. A fifth plane, from El Al, evaded hijack.
• The largest number of hostages held at one time. Following the multiple hijack 300 passengers were held hostage for political blackmail – the release of terrorists held by Britain, Switzerland and Germany. The blackmail was successful.
• The largest number of victims killed and wounded by a single booby-trap bomb. July 4, 1975, 15 Israelis were killed and 87 wounded by a PLO bomb planted in a refrigerator in Zion Square, Jerusalem.
• The largest number of casualties in a terrorist raid. March 11, 1978, Fatah terrorists killed 38 people and wounded 70 after seizing two buses of Israelis on a holiday outing. The operation was approved by Yasser Arafat.
• The worst mid-air explosion. February 21, 1970. A Swiss airliner blew up and 38 passengers and nine crew members were killed. The PFLP-General Command claimed credit.
• The largest number of people shot at an airport. December 17, 1973. Black September killed 31 people at Rome Airport; 29 were aboard a Pan Am plane.
• The most sustained terrorist campaign. Between September 1967 and December 1980, terrorists affiliated with the PLO carried out at least 300 attacks – bombings, shootings, hijackings rocket attacks, kidnappings – in 26 countries. Total casualties: 813 killed, 1013 injured. More than 90 percent of the 2755 hostages were not Israelis.
• The largest ransoms. In February 1972, the PFLP hijacked a Lufthansa aircraft to Aden and held the passengers to ransom for five million dollars, which Lufthansa paid. In October 1977 another Lufthansa plane was hijacked by the PFLP on behalf of the German Baader-Meinhoff terrorists and a 15-million dollar ransom was demanded. It was not paid because West German Special Forces freed the passengers at Mogadishu.
• The wealthiest terrorist organization. While it is impossible to give accurate figures, it is known that the PLO has an annual income of at least 800 million pounds sterling. In 1981 Saudi Arabia donated 30 million dollars.
• Greatest variety of targets. Between 1967 and 1980 the PLO committed over 200 major terrorist acts in or against countries other than Israel. They attacked 40 civilian passenger aircraft, five passenger ships, 30 embassies or diplomatic missions, and about the same number of economic targets, including fuel depots and factories.

It would be reasonable to assume that with such a background, the nations of the world, collectively, would have set themselves against the PLO forever. Instead, by 1980, the organization had achieved impressive diplomatic success and acceptance. It had been allowed to open 82 offices – which in some cases have quasi-ambassadorial status – in scores of capitals and major cities. It was given a permanent office, with its own representative, at the United Nations. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, was rapturously received at the United Nations, which he addressed – and nobody seemed to object to him wearing a pistol into the chamber.[xi]

Now, after all this, instead of holding a Nuremberg-type trial for the men of this organization, there have been and are Israelis spineless enough to want to talk to, or negotiate with, them. If Israel grants such respectability to people with Jewish and other blood saturating their hands, what right can this nation have to express moral outrage towards those who accommodate and negotiate with Nazis and other anti-Semites?

If all the above is not enough, the following must surely drive the reality home:

While searching a citizen of the town, the PLO found on him Israeli money and a pair of shoes made in Israel … His hands and legs were chained to the fenders of four vehicles. When a Fatah officer signaled with his pistol, the four cars raced away, tearing his body apart while the horrified spectators screamed. The cars raced through the streets with the bloody limbs dangling. People fainted.[xii]

This horrific story vividly evokes another account, experienced 40 years earlier, as related by Livia Bitton Jackson in Elli – Coming of Age in the Holocaust:

It was Friday night, and [Felicia’s] family sat around the dinner table. One of the soldiers put his gun in her hand and ordered her to shoot her family, all of them – her baby, husband, father and mother. Horrified, Felicia shrieked and gave the gun back to the soldier.

The soldier repeated his order, this time adding his condition: “If you don’t do it I will kill them. But not so simply. They will die in slow agony.”

“The Germans looked at each other and grinned,” said Felicia in a tormented whisper. “I shrieked like a mad woman. ‘No, I will never do that!’ The soldier, a tall, husky man in his late twenties, stepped over to the high chair where the baby sat. ‘Is this your baby?’ he asked. When I nodded he took the baby by the shoulders and said, ‘If you don’t do as I say, I will kill your baby.’ One of the soldiers then gave me a gun. ‘Shoot,’ said the first soldier. As I stood transfixed, immobile he swung the little boy upside down and called to one of his men to hold onto each of the baby’s feet. And then, each holding a foot, they tore my child in two … my child, my own little baby boy … right before my eyes …” Felicia’s sobs are howls of an animal.

Hiding her face in her hands she goes on: “‘This is what we will do to your family if you don’t shoot them. Tear them to pieces. Bit by bit. Do you hear? Now shoot!’ I screamed and screamed and began to shoot. I shot everyone, everyone. When I finished they quickly got the gun away from me. I wanted to kill myself last. But they did not let me! Do you hear? They did not…” She falls on her face and screams like a crazed beast. “They did not let me…” She is beating her head with her fists. “They did not let me die…”

We sat in stunned silence. My God, what unearthly horror. But she continues relentlessly: “They took me away with them and put me in a building with other Jewish women who were all separated from their families. I don’t know where their families were. No one spoke.

“We stayed there for several days or weeks, I don’t remember. Then they brought us here, into this camp. I was assigned a barrack as Blockalteste. The Germans said I deserved the position. I was a brave woman. I earned this position. Now you know.”

Felicia’s sobs continue all night. No one can ease her pain. We are silent in the face of her agony.[xiii]

*       *      *

• The PLO was formed in 1964, three years before the 1967 Six Day War – unquestionably, therefore, not to liberate the “West Bank” from Israeli “occupation,” as these territories were not under Israeli administration at that time.
• The name – Palestine Liberation Organization – says it all: Palestine, all of it, needs to be liberated from Israeli sovereignty. If only half of Palestine needed to be liberated the organization would have been called the HPLO.
• Every official letterhead and emblem of the PLO and its associated terror organizations depicts as their final target a map of the whole of Israel.
• PLO Spokesmen, and resolutions passed by the organization, as recently as late last year, are on record as stating that, if they succeed in obtaining sovereignty over the “West Bank,” it will be only the first phase towards the full “liberation” of Palestine.

In dealing with the PLO, then, Israel will not be assisting the peace process, but will be helping in the process that will culminate in the full dismantling of her own state.

Arafat and his PLO were warmly sympathetic to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and to Saddam Hussein even after all the massacres that accompanied the latter’s attempted annexation of Kuwait. After China crushed thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, Arafat telegrammed his congratulations to the Chinese leadership “for thus restoring order.” He backed the Communist hardliners in their putsch against Gorbachev–and got away with it.

And yet, in spite of everything, Arafat was received by Eastern and Western leaders seemingly devoid of abhorrence at what he had done. Surely Israel, at least, should show some integrity after all that has gone before?

Are the innumerable people – men, women and children – who have been viciously murdered, tortured and raped, not enough reason for Israel never to permit contact with the PLO – or at the absolute extreme bottom, until justice has been demanded, out of respect for their blood cry and agony, which has surely reached to Heaven?

Simon Wiesenthal wrote:

For the first time in my life I saw what enormous cowards the Nazis were. How, instead of dealing with their guilt, they tried to deny it, so that in the end they couldn’t see it themselves. Every one of us survivors was a witness and had the duty to bear witness. Most of all a surviving Jew. The realization that I remained alive while so many others – better ones, cleverer ones, more decent ones – had died, at some moments almost seemed to me an offense against justice. I could restore the balance only by ensuring that the dead received justice.[xiv]

For those interested in further examination of this extremely grave and important matter, go to the website at www.saynotoapalestinianstate.com

Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Director

International Christian Zionist Center