The CBS program 60 Minutes carried two consecutive
programs after the World
Trade Center
destruction.
During the first program a
small group (about 5-6 people) were interviewed in Egypt during which time they had
the opportunity to express their views.
One of the group was an Egyptian housewife. By her dress and appearance, I would place
her in the upper middle-class. She very
clearly stated that the United
States “deserved what had happened.” Two others were a businessperson and a
financial type both of whom stated that while they disagreed with the bombing
they were not surprised. A fourth in the
group was a college graduate who spoke at length of the “myth of the United States
being an untouchable super-power” being permanently
destroyed. The remaining person or
persons were, as I recall, in the newspaper business and felt that the
attack was a terrible thing to have happened.
The second program was
broadcast the following week and had two publishers and three Islamic Clergy in
attendance. One of the three was very
vocal on the Koran forbidding such actions.
In his opinion, people who perform such acts expressing the view that
they are following the teachings of the Koran, are not Muslims and are deluding
themselves or are being deluded by their leaders into believing that they are
following the teachings of the Koran. He
challenged anyone to cite the Koran passages supporting their acts. A second cleric agreed with the first, but
not as strongly. The third cleric, while
agreeing with the overall views of the first, stated that the United States
was guilty of complicity in the attacks because of its support of Israel. The first publisher thought the attacks were
terrible acts of vengeance that had no place in the Muslim community. The second publisher stated that his initial
opinion was that the Israel
government perpetrated the attacks, that no Muslim would kill innocent people
as the terrorists had done. He continued
that after a search using his own resources he was now, as he put it, “sadly
convinced” that the atrocity was performed by Muslims in the mistaken belief
that the Koran supported their actions.
Today is October 7, 2001. I do not know if CBS intends to continue the
series, but whether they do or not, the small sampling of opinions from the two
interviews does provide some abbreviated indication of the mixed views of the
Islamic populace.
In actions directed by hate,
Palestinians massacred the Israel
athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and blinded by their success, stormed a
diplomatic reception in 1973 at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum.
Many forget that Sirhan Sirhan, the Robert Kennedy assassin, was a
Palestinian. When President Nixon
refused to release Sirhan Sirhan and others held in Israel and European prisons, the
Palestinians executed American Ambassador Cleo Noel and George Moore. For the two following decades, hundreds of
Americans were subjected to attacks, all abroad, killed in hijackings of ships
and planes and in kidnappings and bombings.
Even Nile river tour boats and visits
to the pyramids were unsafe. Most
prominent among the attackers were Palestine
guerrillas, Lebanese Shiites, Egyptian Sunnis, and a variety of agents from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, and North Korea. Another terrorist nation, Libya, has seen
the light. Through the imposition of world
sanctions totaling $24 billion, Libya
was convinced that terrorism was no longer a profitable business. They still have no love of the free world,
and especially the United
States, but have reduced their participation
in terrorism to more clandestine activities.
Organizations that the
reading public is most familiar with include al Qaeda, Al Jihad, Hamas, the
Islamic Group, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.
There are others, of course, such as the new, current Palestinian Intifada. There is an interesting item that tells of a
Hezbollah group kidnapping three Soviet diplomats in Lebanon during the early days of
Hezbollah. Moscow never expressed any outrage nor made
any threats. They simply sent in their
KGB assassins. Soon, dead Shiites
started showing up in garbage dumps all over the Lebanese capital, castrated
and horribly tortured. Hezbollah never
bothered the Soviets again. To a lesser
extent, this is the approach that the Israel government has taken. The effectiveness and success of the Israelis
action has to be measured against the level of protests the assassinations have
generated by the Palestinians.
The many peace groups that
exist in the United States
and throughout Europe preach peace and
negotiation, not war and violence. While
the position of these groups is admirable and shouldn’t be ignored, they fail
to explain how peace and negotiation is to be accomplished with terrorist nations
and organizations who have repeatedly demonstrated no interest in peace and
negotiation.
The Mitchell report, prepared
by U.S. Senator George J. Mitchell and endorsed by U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell, demands that the Palestinians stop shooting and bombing and that
the Israelis stop building. Sounds reasonable
and it does replace war and violence with peace and negotiation. In the spirit of the United States
efforts at peace and negotiation, the former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud
Barak at Camp David during July 2000, offered
to withdraw from about ninety percent of the territories, dismantle a majority
of settlements and concentrate those remaining into three blocs. Six months later, during negotiations at
Taba, Barak offered to withdraw from 95 percent of the territories and
compensate the Palestinians for at least part of the remaining five percent
with Israeli territory. The offers were
rejected, even though the actual built areas of the settlements – as opposed to
imaginary development lines on the map – occupy no more than 1.5 percent of the
territories. What the Israeli government
did not offer was the dissolution of the State of Israel, a prime target of the
Palestinians since the U.N. partition plan of 1947.
After the 1972 and 1973
slaughters in Munich
and Khartoum,
we must also remember the 1983 Beirut
car
bombs that killed about 300
Americans and other civilians at the U.S. Embassy, the Marines, in Lebanon on a
peaceful mission to attempt stabilizing the region, killed while they slept in
their barracks, and the subsequent kidnapping of 90 Americans and foreigners
during the balance of the decade. These
atrocities were followed by over 20 years of continued killings of Americans
and others including the first bombing of the World Trade
Center and the 2001
destruction of the towers with the further killing of thousands of civilians
from over 80 nations. Not to be
forgotten is the over fifty years of conflict imposed on Israel by the
various Palestinian organizations attempting to “drive them into the sea” as
the terrorists profess.
The United States
has absorbed these attacks with little, if any, response – generally, economic
sanctions that have been mild at best.
Until the post-September 11th period, the United States
has never retaliated. Each atrocity has been
followed by ineffective “talks” which have served only to embolden the
terrorists and lead to further acts of terrorism.
The United States
and other free nations respect civil rights and the rule of law. The result, we are soft targets for terrorists
and will probably suffer future attacks, costly in lives, property and
treasure, despite increased security efforts.
Based on our early Libya experience, making terrorism an expensive
activity for the terrorist nations and organizations may be our best defense. Whatever you choose to call it, we are at
war!
Prepared from material
broadcast by CBS on 60 Minutes, and
from articles appearing in The Record on
June 22, 2001, September 28, 2001and October 1, 2001, and other information
generally known and in the public domain.
November 2001
LFC
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