ZGram - 11/5/2001 - "All kinds of terrorists."

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 5, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The pleasure of having Ernst Z=FCndel at my elbow, so to speak, is that I ca=
n
reveal my ignorance in many matters without fear.  After all, he has some
40 plus years of historical studies under his belt, whereas I, an
apolitical novice, only started seeing a larger picture on the Net in 1995.


So this morning, the following spirited exchange took place:

"Ernst, is Uri Avnery a Jewish name?

"Yes.  Absolutely."

"You mean you know who he is?"

"Of course.  He is a Jewish peacenick.  When 'peace' broke out 'after
Oslo', I even negotiated to buy his radio broadcast boat with which he sent
peace message in Hebrew and Arabic.  Poor fellow!  His activism landed him
in jail in Israel."

"You're kidding!"

"Well, no!  Of course I didn't contact Avnery himself.  It was another one
of my 'Jewish buddies', the late Max Lipson, who went to the Israeli
Embassy in Ottawa to see if he could lease the boat for me - naturally
without mentioning my name.  Tel Aviv beat me to it.  They made a museum
out of the boat, being perpetually in the museum mode, you understand."

"You mean to say we could have had a floating Revisionist short-wave radio
station?"

"Yep!  I had been working on that idea for decades.  The rest of the story
will be revealed as soon as Spielberg becomes a Revisionist and gets into
the meat of the matter."

"So is it safe to use Avnery in a ZGram?"

"Depends on what he says.  You can't even quote a Jew these days without
double-checking!"

Enjoy!

[START]

Uri Avnery

All Kinds of Terrorists

President Bush has  declared a "war on terrorism". Indeed?

Osama bin Laden is undoubtedly a terrorist. Killing 4800 civilians at the
World Trade Center was a  terrorist outrage. But the United States would
have declared war on bin Laden  even if he had been satisfied with killing
American soldiers in Saudi Arabia or  blowing up oil installations across
the Middle East. It is not the methods of  bin Laden that have caused this
war, but his aim: to get rid of the United  States and its satellites, the
Arab kings and presidents, throughout the Middle  East.

 In order to pursue its war, the United States has set up a world-wide
coalition. Everyone joining it  has been issued an American permit to call
his enemies "terrorists": Putin in  Chechnya, China in its Muslim regions,
India in Kashmir, Sharon in the occupied  territories - all are now
fighting against "terrorists". Everyone and his bin  Laden.

Many years ago I  coined a definition I am quite proud of:  "The difference
between  freedom-fighters and terrorists is that the freedom-fighters are
on my side and  the terrorists are on the other side." I am glad that this
definition has been  adopted by my biggers and betters.

Since the New York  atrocity, it has become fashionable to talk about
"terrorism". As a result, it  has lost all precise meaning.

"Terror" means extreme  fear. The root of the word is the Latin "terrere" -
to frighten or be  frightened. The modern term was first used to describe
the regime of terror  instituted by the Jacobins, one of the factions of
the French Revolution, to destroy their opponents by beheading them with
the guillotine during the years  1793-4. In the end, their leader,
Robespierre, suffered the same  fate.

Since then, the term  has acquired a more general use. Terrorism is a
method of attaining political  goals by frightening the civilian
population. It does not apply to the  frightening of soldiers. The Japanese
who attacked the American fleet in Pearl  Harbor were not terrorists.
Neither were the Jews who attacked the soldiers of  the British occupation
regime in Palestine.

[ZUNDELSITE comment:  That's not true!  The non-uniformed Jews attacked
British uniformed soldiers, who were there to enforce a League of Nations
Mandate, hardly an occupation force, even though it might have felt so for
the Jewish Partisans carving out a state from Arab-owned Palestine.]

Clausewitz said that  war is the continuation of politics by other means.
That is true for terrorism,  too. Terrorism is always an instrument for the
attainment of political aims.  Since these may be rightist or leftist,
revolutionary or reactionary, religious  or secularist, the term
"international terrorism" is nonsense. Each terrorist  body has its own
specific agenda.

There is hardly a  liberation movement that has not used terrorism.
Algerian woman put bombs in the  cafes of the French settlers (some of them
were caught and horribly tortured by  French parachutists). Nelson Mandela
spent 28 years in prison because he refused  to order his followers to
abstain from terrorism. The Maccabees were terrorists  who went around
killing Hellenized Jews. So were the Irgun fighters who in 1938  put bombs
in the Arab markets of Jaffa and Haifa in retaliation for Arab  attacks.
Shlomo Ben-Josef committed a terrorist act when he shot at an Arab bus
(and I joined the Irgun when he was hanged by the  British).

Generally, terrorism  is the weapon of the weak. A Palestinian "terrorist"
recently said: "Give me  tanks and airplanes, and I shall stop sending
suicide-bombers into Israel." But  big powers, too, can use terror.
Dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima was a  terrorist act, designed to
frighten the Japanese population into demanding that  their government
surrender. So was the Nazi blitz on London and the British  bombing of
Dresden. Churchill and Hitler were as different as day and night, but  they
used the same method.

Israel has used this  method from the day of its inception. In the early
50s the IDF committed  "retaliation raids" designed to frighten the
villagers beyond the border in  order to induce them to put pressure on the
Jordanian and Egyptian governments  to prevent the infiltration of
Palestinians into Israel. During the War of  Attrition in the late 60s,
Moshe Dayan terrorized half a million inhabitants of  the Egyptian towns
along the Suez Canal into fleeing, so as to put pressure on  the Egyptian
president to stop attacking Israeli strongholds along the Canal. In  the
1996 "grapes of wrath" operation, Prime Minister Shimon Peres terrorized
half a million inhabitants of South Lebanon by aerial bombardment into
fleeing  north, in order to pressurize the Beirut government into stopping
the Shi=EDite  guerrillas from attacking the Israeli occupation force and it=
s
mercenaries. It  is the same method that is  used in  the army when a
commander punishes all the soldiers in a company, so that they  will turn
against the one who made him angry.

 The trouble is, it  does not work in conflicts between nations. Generally,
it is counter-productive.  The Taliban have not turned bin Laden over but
have become more extreme in their  opposition to America. The IDF blockade
against Palestinian villages, which this  week denied them water and food,
does not isolate the "terrorists", but on the  contrary, turns them into
national heroes. The devastation caused by the  Russians in Chechnya did
not break - indeed, it strengthened - the opposing  guerilla forces.

Since terrorism is  always a political instrument, the right way to combat
it is always political.  Solve the problem that breeds terrorism and you
get rid of the terrorism. Solve  the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the
other flash-points in the Middle East,  and you get rid of al-Qaida. It
will wilt like a flower deprived of water.

No one has yet devised  another method.

[END]

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

"Opinions are like elbows. Everyone has at least two of them."

(-- The Iron Webmaster, 390)