How Hypocrisy on 'Terrorism' Kills

Israel, a nation that was born out of
Zionist terrorism, has launched massive airstrikes against targets in
Gaza using high-tech weapons produced by the United States, a country
that often has aided and abetted terrorism by its client military
forces, such as Chile's Operation Condor and the Nicaraguan contras,
and even today harbors right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in
blowing up a civilian airliner.

Yet, with that moral ambiguity excluded from the debate, the
justification for the Israeli attacks, which have killed at least 364
people, is the righteous fight against "terrorism," since Gaza is ruled
by the militant Palestinian group, Hamas.

Hamas rose to power in January 2006 through Palestinian elections,
which ironically the Bush administration had demanded. However, after
Hamas won a parliamentary majority, Israel and the United States
denounced the outcome because they deem Hamas a "terrorist
organization."

Hamas then
wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, a rival group that once was
considered "terrorist" but is now viewed as a U.S.-Israeli partner, so
it has been cleansed of the "terrorist" label.

Unwilling to negotiate seriously with Hamas because of its acts of
terrorism - which have included firing indiscriminate short-range
missiles into southern Israel - the United States and Israel sat back
as the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza worsened, with 1.5 million impoverished Palestinians packed into what amounts to a giant open-air prison.

When Hamas ended a temporary cease-fire on Dec. 19 because of a lack of
progress in those negotiations and began lobbing its little missiles
into Israel once more, the Israeli government reacted on Saturday with
its lethal "shock and awe" firepower - even though no Israelis had been
killed by the post-cease-fire missiles launched from Gaza. [Since
Saturday, four Israelis have died in more intensive Hamas missile
attacks.]

Israel claimed that
its smart bombs targeted sites related to the Hamas security forces,
including a school for police cadets and even regular policemen walking
down the street. But it soon became clear that Israel was taking an
expansive view of what was part of the Hamas military infrastructure,
with Israeli bombs taking out a television station and a university
building as well as killing a significant number of civilians.

As the slaughter continued on Monday, Israeli officials confided to
Western journalists that the war plan was to destroy the vast support
network of social and other programs that undergird Hamas's political
clout.

"There are many aspects
of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because
everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against
Israel," a senior Israeli military official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, told the Washington Post.

"Hamas's
civilian infrastructure is a very, very sensitive target," added Matti
Steinberg, a former top adviser to Israel's domestic security service.
"If you want to put pressure on them, this is how." [Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2008]

Since the classic definition of "terrorism" is the use of violence
against civilians to achieve a political goal, Israel would seem to be
inviting an objective analysis that it has chosen its own terrorist
path. But it is clearly counting on the U.S. news media to continue
wearing the blinders that effectively limit condemnations about
terrorism to people and groups that are regarded as Washington's
enemies.

Whose Terrorism?

As
a Washington-based reporter for the Associated Press in the 1980s, I
once questioned the seeming bias that the U.S.-based wire service
applied to its use of the word "terrorist" when covering Middle East
issues. A senior AP executive responded to my concerns with a quip.
"Terrorist is the word that follows Arab," he said.

Though meant as a lighthearted riposte, the comment clearly had a great
deal of truth to it. It was easy to attach "terrorist" to any Arab
attack - even against a military target such as the bombing of the U.S.
Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 after the Reagan administration had
joined hostilities against Muslim forces by having U.S. warships lob
shells into Lebanese villages.

But
it was understood that different rules on the use of the word
"terrorism" applied when the terrorism was coming from "our side."
Then, no American reporter with any sense of career survival would
think of injecting the word "terrorist" whatever the justification.

Even historical references to acts of terrorism - such as the brutal
practice by American revolutionaries in the 1770s of "tar and
feathering" civilians considered sympathetic to the British Crown or
the extermination of American Indian tribes - were seen as somehow
diluting the moral righteousness against today's Islamic terrorists and
in favor of George W. Bush's "war on terror."

Gone, too, from the historical narrative was the fact that militant
Zionists employed terrorism as part of their campaign to establish
Israel as a Jewish state. The terrorism included killings of British
officials who were administering Palestine under an international
mandate as well as Palestinians who were driven violently from their
land so it could be claimed by Jewish settlers.

One of the most famous of those terrorist attacks was the 1946 bombing
of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where British officials were
staying. The attack, which killed 91 people including local residents,
was carried out by the Irgun, a terrorist group run by Menachem Begin
who later founded the Likud Party and rose to be Israel's prime
minister.

Another veteran of
the campaign of Zionist terrorism was Yitzhak Shamir, who also became a
Likud leader and eventually prime minister.

In the early 1990s, as I was waiting to interview Shamir at his Tel
Aviv office, I was approached by one of his young female assistants who
was dressed in a gray and blue smock with a head covering in the
traditional Hebrew style.

As
we were chatting, she smiled and said in a lilting voice, "Prime
Minister Shamir, he was a terrorist, you know." I responded with a
chuckle, "yes, I'm aware of the prime minister's biography."

Blind Spot

To
maintain one's moral purity in denouncing acts of terror by U.S.
enemies, one also needs a large blind spot for recent U.S. history,
which implicates U.S. leaders repeatedly in tolerance or acts of
terrorism.

For instance, in
1973, after a bloody U.S.-backed coup overthrew the leftist Chilean
government, the new regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet joined with other
South American dictatorships to sponsor an international terrorist
organization called Operation Condor which assassinated political
dissidents around the world.

Operation Condor mounted one of its most audacious actions on the
streets of Washington in 1976, when Pinochet's regime recruited
Cuban-American terrorists to detonate a car bomb that killed Chile's
former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker,
Ronni Moffitt. The Chilean government's role immediately was covered up
by the CIA, then headed by George H.W. Bush. [For details, see Robert
Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Only weeks later, a Venezuela-based team of right-wing Cubans - under
the direction of Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles - blew a Cubana
Airliner out of the sky, killing 73 people. Bosch and Posada, a former
CIA operative, were co-founders of CORU, which was described by the FBI
as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization."

Though the U.S. government soon learned of the role of Bosch and Posada
in the Cubana airline attack - and the two men spent some time in a
Venezuelan jail - both Bosch and Posada since have enjoyed the
protection of the U.S. government and particularly the Bush Family.

Rebuffing international demands that Bosch and Posada be held
accountable for their crimes, the Bushes - George H.W., George W. and
Jeb - have all had a hand in making sure these unrepentant terrorists
get to live out their golden years in the safety and comfort of the
United States.

In the 1980s,
Posada even crossed over into another U.S.-backed terrorist
organization, the Nicaraguan contras. After escaping from Venezuela, he
was put to work in 1985 by Oliver North's contra-support operation run
out of Ronald Reagan's National Security Council.

The Nicaraguan contras were, in effect, a narco-terrorist organization
that partially funded its operations with proceeds from cocaine
trafficking, a secret that the Reagan administration worked hard to
conceal along with the contras' record of murder, torture, rape and
other crimes in Nicaragua. [See Parry's Lost History.]

President Reagan joined, too, in fierce PR campaigns to discredit human
rights investigators who documented massive atrocities by U.S. allies
in Central America in the 1980s - not only the contras, but also the
state terrorism of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan security forces, which
engaged in wholesale slaughters in villages considered sympathetic to
leftist insurgents.

Generally, the major U.S. news outlets treaded very carefully when allegations arose about terrorism by "our side."

When some brave journalists, like New York Times correspondent Raymond
Bonner, wrote about politically motivated killings of civilians in
Central America, they faced organized retaliation by right-wing
advocacy groups which often succeeded in damaging or destroying the
reporters' careers.

Double Standards

Eventually, the American press corps developed an engrained sense of
the double standards. Moral outrage could be expressed when acts of
terrorism were committed by U.S. enemies, while studied silence - or
nuanced concern - would be in order when the crimes were by U.S. allies.

So, while the U.S. news media had no doubt that the 9/11 terrorist
attacks justified invading Afghanistan, there was very little U.S.
media criticism when President Bush inflicted his "shock and awe"
assault on Iraq, a war that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi deaths.

Though many
Muslims and others around the world have denounced Bush's Iraq invasion
as "state terrorism," such a charge would be considered far outside the
mainstream in the United States. Instead, Iraqi insurgents are often
labeled "terrorists" when they attack U.S. troops inside Iraq. The word
"terrorist" has become, in effect, a geopolitical curse word.

Despite the long and bloody history of U.S.-Israeli participation in
terrorism, the U.S. news media continues its paradigm of pitting the
U.S.-Israeli "good guys" against the Islamic "bad guys." One side has
the moral high ground and the other is in the moral gutter. [For more
on the U.S. media's one-sided approach, see the analysis by Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher.]

Any attempt to cite the larger, more ambiguous and more troubling
picture draws accusations from defenders of U.S.-Israeli actions,
especially the neoconservatives, of what they call "moral equivalence"
or "anti-Semitism."

Yet it is
now clear that acquiescence to a double standard on terrorism is not
just a violation of journalistic ethics or an act of political
cowardice; it is complicity in mass murder. Without the double
standard, it is hard to envision how the bloodbaths - in Iraq (since
2003), in Lebanon (in 2006) and in Gaza (today) - would be possible.

Hypocrisy over the word "terrorism" is not an innocent dispute over semantics; it kills.