Our World: The longest-running big lie
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 1, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467639999&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yasser Arafat was a master of the big lie. Since
he invented global terrorism with the founding of the Fatah terror
organization in 1959, Arafat successfully portrayed himself as a freedom
fighter while introducing the world to passenger jet hijackings, schoolhouse
massacres and embassy takeovers.
To cultivate the myth of his innocence Arafat ordered his Fatah terror cells
to operate under pseudonyms. In the early 1970's he renamed several Fatah
murder squads the Black September Organization while publicly claiming that
they were "breakaway" units completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself.
In 2000, as he launched the current Palestinian jihad, he repeated the
process by renaming Fatah terror cells the Aksa Martyr Brigades and then
claiming that they were completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself. This
fiction too, has been successful in spite of the fact that all Aksa Martyr
Brigades terrorists are members of Fatah and most are members of Palestinian
Authority official militias who receive their salaries, guns and marching
orders from Fatah.
Last week, with the quiet release of a 33-year-old US State Department
cable, a good chunk of the edifice of his great lie was destroyed.
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 Charges d'Affaires George Curtis
Moore. The terrorists took Moore, US ambassador Cleo Noel, Belgian Charges
d'Affairs 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 Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan and Black
September commander Muhammed Awadh (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 analyst 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 in the operation 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."
As late as 2002, in spite of President George W. Bush's pointed refusal to
meet with Arafat, the State Department continued to protest his innocence.
At the time, Scott Johnson, a Minneapolis attorney and one of the authors of
the popular
Powerlineblog weblog, inquired into the matter with the State Department's
Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. In an emailed response from the bureau's deputy
director of press affairs Gregory Sullivan, Johnson was told, "Evidence
clearly points to the terrorist group Black September as having committed
the assassinations of Amb. Noel and George Moore, and though Black September
was a part of the Fatah movement, the linkage between Arafat and this group
has never been established."
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.
Until last week.
THE CABLE released by the State Department's historian states, "The Khartoum
operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal
approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
(PLO), and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum
participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the
terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy."
Although clearly skilled in the art of deception, Arafat could never have
succeeded in creating and prolonging his fictions and with them, his crimes,
without the cooperation of the US government and the media.
In this vein, the release of the State Department cable raises two daunting
questions. First, how is it possible that the belated admission of a massive
33 year cover-up of the murder of senior American diplomats spanning the
course of seven consecutive presidential administrations has been ignored by
the US media? A Google news search for Cleo Noel brought up but a handful of
stories - none of which were reported by the major news networks or national
newspapers.
On the face of it, the released cable, which calls into question the very
foundation of US Middle East policy for the past generation is simply
stunning. The cable concludes, "The Khartoum operation again demonstrated
the ability of the BSO to strike where least expected. The open
participation of Fatah representatives in Khartoum in the attack provides
further evidence of the Fatah/BSO relationship. The emergence of the United
States as a primary fedayeen target indicates a serious threat of further
incidents similar to that which occurred in Khartoum."
The media's silence on the issue does not merely raise red flags abut their
objectivity. By not availing the American public to the knowledge that Fatah
and the PLO have been specifically targeting Americans for 33 years, the
media has denied the American people basic knowledge of the world in which
they live.
The media's abject refusal to cover the story raises an even more egregious
aspect of the episode. Specifically, what does the fact that under seven
consecutive administrations, the US government has covered up Arafat's
direct responsibility for the murder of American diplomats while placing
both Arafat and Fatah at the center of its Middle East policy, say about the
basic rationale of US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians? What would
have US Middle East policy looked like, and what would have been the results
for US, and international security as a whole, if rather than advancing a
policy that made Arafat the most frequent foreign visitor to the White House
during the Clinton administration, the US had demanded his extradition and
tried him for murder?
How many lives would have been saved if the US had not been intent on
upholding Arafat's big lie? How would such a US policy have impacted the
subsequent development of sister terror organizations like Hizbullah,
al-Qaida and Hamas, all of which were founded by members of Arafat's terror
industry?
Sadly, the release of the cable did not in any way signal a change in the US
policy of whitewashing Fatah. In contravention of US law, for the past 13
years, the State Department has been denying that Fatah, the PLO and the
Palestinian Authority are terrorist organizations, and has been actively
funding them with US taxpayer dollars.
This policy went on, unchanged even after Fatah gunmen murdered three US
embassy employees in Gaza in October 2003. This policy continues, unchanged
still today, as Fatah's current leader, Arafat's deputy of 40 years Mahmoud
Abbas works to form a unity government with Hamas. Indeed, the central
component of the US's policy towards the Palestinians today is the goal of
strengthening Fatah by arming, training and funding its Force 17 terror
militia.
In a November 14, 2006 interview on Palestinian television, Ahmed Hales Abu
Maher who serves as Secretary of Fatah in Gaza, bragged of Fatah's role in
the development of international terrorism. In his words, reported by
Palestinian Media Watch, "Oh warrior brothers, this is a nation that will
never be broken, it is a revolution that will never be defeated. This is a
nation that gives an example every day that is imitated across the world. We
gave the world the children of the RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenades], we gave
the world the children stone [-throwers], and we gave the world the male and
female Martyrdom-Seekers [suicide bombers]."
Imagine what the world would have looked like if, rather than clinging to
Arafat's big lie that he and his Fatah terror organization were central
components of Middle East peace, the US had captured and tried Arafat for
murdering its diplomats and worked steadily to destroy Fatah.
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 policies on the truth, and the media
were to reveal this truth to the world.
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