Published in American Spectator July/August 2004

by Rael Jean Isaac

Character assassination. A simplistic moral universe in which the U.S. is the villain and Israel the only country yet more villainous. Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. Far-out conspiracy theories. Con men as sources. Reputable sources misquoted. These constitute the decades-long MO of Seymour Hersh, the man now serving as star investigative reporter of the New Yorker.

Donald Rumsfeld is the target of Hersh’s most recent venture into character assassination. In the New Yorker of May 24, 2004 Hersh seeks to pin the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib directly on the Defense Secretary. Typical of Hersh, there is a lot more charge than substance. Supposedly, Rumsfeld approved a secret Pentagon program that “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners” and then, along with Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, expanded the scope of the program “bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib.”

Had Rumsfeld endorsed “sexual humiliation” of prisoners? Does the secret program Hersh describes exist at all? The Pentagon promptly declared the article’s charges “outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.” Given that Hersh’s sources are anonymous (a “former high level intelligence official” here, a “Pentagon consultant” there), what he says is impossible to evaluate. But given Hersh’s track record, the highest order of skepticism is warranted.

Did Hersh think his article could unseat the Defense Secretary? He has had success in this line before. In March 2003 Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board after a firestorm of publicity concerning supposed ethics violations which Hersh had launched in The New Yorker. Again, the article was short on facts, long on sinister speculation. Indeed its only substantive “fact” was that Perle met with two Saudi businessmen to discuss Iraq: Adnan Kashoggi, the longtime arms dealer and middleman, and Iraqi born Harb Saleh al-Zuhair. Kashoggi had arranged the meeting at the request of al-Zuhair, who claimed to have come from Iraq with a negotiating offer from Saddam. All three agree that the only topic discussed at the meeting was Iraq.

This did not stop Hersh from declaring that Perle’s “real” motive in meeting with the two Saudis was to obtain investment in Trireme, a venture capital company focusing on technology, goods and services useful for homeland security, in which Perle is a partner. Hersh suggests Perle’s hawkishness on Iraq stemmed from his business interests. Hersh writes: “’If there is no war, he [Kashoggi] told me, ‘why is there a need for security?’” Apparently Kashoggi had never heard of 9/11. Hersh hauls in Saudi Prince Bandar who had nothing to do with the meeting but states flatly: “I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took place.”

Like previous (and subsequent) victims, Perle could only explode in unavailing wrath. Asked what element of Hersh’s story was true, Perle told the New York Sun, “It’s all lies from beginning to end.” On CNN Perle called Hersh “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.” A few years earlier, The New Yorker (May 22, 2000) devoted almost its entire issue to a Hersh story that rehashed ten year old allegations (exhaustively investigated by the army and found to be without merit) that during the first Gulf War General Barry McCaffrey had commanded troops who opened fire on unarmed Iraqis. Defending himself in the Wall Street Journal, McCaffrey wrote that Hersh had told people he had contacted that he intended “to bury” McCaffrey. But McCaffrey, like Perle, ran into the problem that self-defense inevitably sounds self-serving.

Hersh’s most unforgivable exercise in character assassination was in his 1983 anti-Kissinger book The Price of Power. While the book was intended to be a hatchet job on Kissinger (who called Hersh’s allegations about him “slimy lies”), the chief victim turned out to be India’s former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Hersh quoted anonymous intelligence officials “recalling” Desai had been paid $20,000 yearly as a CIA informer during the Johnson administration. Desai, 87 years old, reacted in outrage, calling it a “sheer mad story” and brought a libel suit seeking $50 million in damages. By the time the suit went to a Chicago jury in 1989, Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the US. Kissinger testified on Desai’s behalf, flatly contradicting Hersh’s report in the book that he had been delighted to have someone of Desai’s stature on the payroll and had playfully chastised CIA officials elsewhere for failing to recruit Cabinet-level informers. He also testified that to his knowledge Desai had no connection to the CIA and that former CIA director Richard Helms had told him he would be on “safe ground” in testifying that Desai was not a paid CIA informant.

Nonetheless Desai lost. He could not prove that no one in the CIA had told Hersh that he was on the payroll because the judge ruled that Hersh need not identify his sources and Desai’s attorney was prevented from questioning anyone in the CIA’s employ. Hersh never even took the stand. Hersh’s lawyer announced that the outcome proved “that even a person as prominent as Morarji Desai cannot intimidate an American journalist entitled to his First Amendment protections.” What the case really showed was that as long as he did not need to reveal his sources, an irresponsible journalist could label any public figure a CIA agent with impunity.

Who are Hersh’s sources? Much of the time, given his massive use of unnamed individuals, it is impossible to say. Are they reputable people? Disgruntled individuals with an axe to grind? Figments of his imagination? Who knows? However, when Hersh does identify his sources they can be evaluated and he has a record of being taken in by conmen. (“Wanting to believe” is perhaps more accurate than “taken in”– conmen provide the sensational material on which Hersh thrives.) Hersh’s The Samson Option (1991) rests squarely on the fantasies of one Ari Ben Menashe. The theme of the book is that Israel, impelled by the megalomania of its leaders, built the Bomb, deceiving the United States (with the help of disloyal Jews) until the wicked deed was done. But apart from the conspiratorial anti-Semitic tone of the book, it had nothing to offer that was not already well-established – except for the “revelations” of Ben Menashe. Hersh identifies him as a former Israeli intelligence expert who served as adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir on intelligence affairs (both untrue). Among Ben Menashe’s more sensational revelations, Hersh reports that Prime Minister Shamir personally authorized purloined U.S. intelligence obtained through Jonathan Pollard to be “sanitized, retyped and turned over to Soviet intelligence officials” as part of Israel’s ongoing exchange of intelligence with the Soviets on U.S. weapons systems. (How this squares with another of Ben Menashe’s “disclosures,” that Israel was using its stolen U.S. intelligence to target the Soviet Union which “was always Israel’s primary nuclear target” is not explained.)

In fact Ben Menashe is a notorious tale-spinner who currently, in a scenario beyond the imagination of the most far-out screenwriter, serves as chief witness in Robert Mugabe’s farcical treason trial of the leader of the chief opposition party in Zimbabwe. Among fantasies too numerous to count (he was Israel’s top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation, planted a homing device in the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, declined an offer to become head of the Mossad) Ben Menashe claimed to have been with the first George Bush in Paris in October 1980 arranging for Iran to hold the hostages until after the Presidential election – this on dates when Secret Service logs show Bush engaged in a large number of appearances in the United States.) Newsweek’s John Barry, who looked into Ben Menashe’s claims, declared on CNN “If you were talking about the American civil war, he would tell you he was the guy who planned Lee’s campaign.”

Terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who described all this and more in a 1991 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, reports that Hersh was warned in advance about Ben Menashe but refused to listen. Emerson himself warned him. Hersh was also warned by Peter Hounam, the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times “Insight” team who had broken the story of the Vanunu affair, with documentation on Israel’s Dimona reactor. Ben Menashe had claimed a leading role in luring Vanunu back to Israel and Hounam offered to let Hersh go through his personal files on the Vanunu affair which showed that none of Ben Menashe’s claims held up. Hersh was not interested. (Much later even Hersh would admit that Ben Menashe “lies like people breathe.”)

It turned out that Hersh was doubly conned. Emerson writes that after Ben Menashe was publicly exposed, Hersh issued a six page statement insisting he had “documentation” from “a private detective” confirming part of Ben Menashe’s story. A few days later the Sunday Times revealed the “private detective” was actually Joe Flynn, a well known British hoaxer, who admitted he had deceived Hersh for money (almost 1300 English pounds delivered by Hersh’s British publisher). “I am a conman,” Flynn told the Times.

But Hersh’s best-known romance with a conman came several years later, when he was working on a Kennedy book eventually published in 1997 as The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh fell for a stash of phony documents peddled by one Lawrence S. Cusack (who went to prison in 1999 for defrauding more than 100 investors of $7 million in a scheme to sell them). Hersh assiduously wooed Cusack who claimed to have found in the files of his late father, a prominent lawyer, papers that included a contract in which Marilyn Monroe promised to keep silent about their affair in return for $600,000 and documentation linking Kennedy directly to mobster Sam Giancana. Amusingly, in one of his letters to Cusack Hersh wrote “We got along so well at that dinner Tuesday night because, I like to think, we are all what we seem to be.” Again, there was the same pattern of refusing to credit the warning signs, however glaring. In National Review, journalist John Miller observed that Hersh came up “with desperate rationalizations for skeptics who wondered why documents containing ZIP codes were dated before ZIP codes even existed.”

While Hersh pulled down a huge contract with ABC for a Kennedy documentary based on the documents, it fell apart when ABC concluded they were phony. In 1999 Hersh wound up on the stand as a prosecution witness and had to undergo a highly embarrassing three hour grilling by Cusack’s lawyer. Hersh was asked to explain a letter he had sent to Cusack claiming he had not only independently confirmed that Cusack’s father had known Kennedy through an interview with Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln, but had also “independently confirmed some of the most interesting materials” in the papers. “Here is where I absolutely misstated things” an embarrassed Hersh testified. (Hersh has a pattern of claiming to “corroborate” material that defies corroboration. In The Samson Option he says that “Ben Menashe’s account might seem almost too startling to be believed, had it not been subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot be named.”)

Cusack was exposed in time to spare Hersh the embarrassment of basing yet another book on the breathless recitation of a conman’s revelations. Instead Hersh provided what long-time Kennedy associate Theodore Sorenson described as “a pathetic collection of wild stories.” Even Thomas Powers, a friendly reviewer in The New York Times, described The Dark Side of Camelot as a “file cabinet,” holding up “in strict chronological order just about every report, claim, rumor or telltale clue” of everything the Kennedys and their friends would wish to keep secret. Notice the absence of the word “fact” in this list of the file cabinet’s contents.

The Dark Side of Camelot illustrates something else about Hersh’s use of sources: reputable sources tend to be misquoted or selectively expurgated if they do not forward Hersh’s personal agenda. The book claimed that Ted Kennedy paid off county chairmen in the West Virginia primary, among them Charles Peters, now publisher of Washington Monthly. Barbara Comstock, in National Review online, writes that Peters says Hersh interviewed him five times but simply ignored his claims that the payoffs did not happen. In The Samson Option Hersh cites Israeli scientist and government adviser Yuval Ne’eman as having told him that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 Israel went on nuclear alert twice. I asked Ne’eman about this in 1992, not long after the book was published. Ne’eman said he had spoken to Hersh and told him the United States – not Israel – went on nuclear alert twice during that war. Also in The Samson Option Hersh repeatedly cites former Israeli Defense Forces major Seth Mintz as source for the charge that Israel deliberately sank the USS Liberty during the 1967 war. On the contrary, Mintz says that the Israelis concluded the Liberty was an enemy ship masquerading as an American vessel after the U.S. embassy, twice queried, denied there was any American ship in the area.

Columnist John Lofton quotes Hersh in a 1984 interview with the University of Chicago magazine: “I‘m not interested in history because I’m trying to change things.” This may explain Hersh’s contempt for mere historical truth. In The Samson Option Hersh writes that the famed U.S. airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War was only undertaken because Israel blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately. There is no evidence for this and Hersh does not even pretend to offer any. Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley wrote to Richard Nixon in retirement and asked if there was any truth in what Hersh wrote. In a letter dated January 22, 1992 Nixon replied: “The story has no foundation whatever.” In the Nov. 12, 2001 New Yorker Hersh described an October 20 raid on Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s compound as “a near disaster,” claiming twelve special forces were injured, three seriously. Gen. Tommy Franks said no one was wounded. Hersh claimed 16 AC-130 planes were used in the mission. The Air Force only has 21 and the large, heavily armed planes are not flown in groups. Journalist John Miller challenged Hersh: “Would 16 of them lead a relatively small special-forces operation in Afghanistan?” Undisturbed, Hersh said he might have “misheard.”

In his 1986 book The Target is Destroyed, on the Soviet downing of Korean civilian airliner KAL 007, Hersh gets the entire story wrong. His thesis is that the Soviets had made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RC-135, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft. U.S. officials “rushed to judgment” because “strong hostility to communism had led them to misread the intelligence.” The “real story,” said Hersh, was not the fate of the plane but the “politically corrupt” use of intelligence by the U.S. In 1991 Izvestiya took advantage of its new freedom to investigate the case and interviewed Lt. Col. Gennadi Osipovich, the Soviet fighter pilot who shot down KAL 007. Osipovich said that he had been ordered to state on television that the Boeing had been flying with its lights out, and that it ignored warning tracer shots and a radio message before he destroyed it, all of which was untrue. He also indignantly rejected the suggestion that he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135. To be sure, Hersh could not have obtained the true story in 1984. But if his anti-American ideological blinkers had not been firmly in place, he would have been less confident in his simplistic thesis that bad American anti-Communism led to the U.S. “lying” about the incident, misrepresenting an innocent, if tragic, Soviet mistake.

In an interview with The Progressive Hersh declared that “If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago.” And that is the real question: why has Hersh, who should long since have been banished to supermarket tabloids, instead attained what People magazine, in a fawning piece, called “a kind of mythic status as a journalist.” The answer clearly lies in Hersh’s long history of visceral anti-Americanism, which resonates with the journalistic elite. Hersh is a product of the “Movement” of the 1960s, which saw the American government as the focus of world evil. Hersh had his start with Dispatch News Service, a Movement outfit founded in 1969 as an “alternative” news agency to disseminate anti-Vietnam war stories to the mainstream press. A source called Hersh with a tip on what became known as the My Lai massacre. The army was in the process of court-martialing Lt. William Calley and investigating 36 others for their part in the shootings of civilians, and Hersh pursued the story, which Dispatch then distributed. Typically, Hersh insisted that My Lai was not an isolated instance: the true villain, he wrote, was “the Army as an institution.”

My Lai turned Hersh overnight into what A.M. Rosenthal, then New York Times managing editor, called “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.” The Times hired him and he remained there from 1972 to1979. He wrote a series of stories attacking the CIA for covert actions abroad and for spying on domestic groups (the material, which had been assembled by the CIA itself and turned over to the Congressional committee with oversight of the CIA, was leaked to Hersh by CIA head William Colby). In the anti-establishment atmosphere of the period, Hersh’s stories had a major impact, playing an important role in launching Congressional investigations by both houses of Congress into the CIA. The upshot of the “reforms” Congress enacted was to seriously compromise our intelligence capabilities, setting up a firewall between the FBI and CIA, the piper being paid on 9/11. It is significant that Rosenthal would say that a number of Hersh’s stories would not have been publishable under the standards he demanded of Times reporters a few years later.

In 1979, his last year at the Times, Hersh went to Vietnam, one of a few selected American journalists the Communists permitted entry. He wrote a series of six articles in which he exhibited none of the critical zeal with which he challenged U.S. government claims. Hersh reported that the boat people were those who had cooperated with the Americans during the war and could not acclimatize; the New Economic Zones were cultural and social success stories (they were actually concentration camps for political undesirables); the “reeducation camps,” what they purported to be and not the brutal places they in fact were.

Hersh is an ideological yellow journalist. With his tenacity, lack of scruples, narrow vision and white hats versus black hats view of the world, he might have been a successful police reporter – particularly in the earlier journalistic world of Chicago (Hersh’s home town) described by Ben Hecht, where letting the facts interfere with a sensational story was a mark against you. But Hersh is unable to handle complicated material, unable to understand or analyze policy issues. He never seems to have heard of standards of evidence. Unable or unwilling to sift out the wildest, most absurd allegations, he tosses them into the pot, as long as they contribute to his being able to say “the target is destroyed.”
The real issue is not Hersh but his standing among journalists. Hersh has won over a dozen major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, four George Polk awards, and this year’s National Magazine Award.. How could such dreadful stuff be so well rewarded? There is no worse indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism and the political bias of its elite than the flood of awards its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.

Caroline Glick Jerusalem Post -- Jul. 16, 2004

On June 30, the Council for the Protection of Journalists penned a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon protesting a missile attack the previous night on an office building in Gaza. According to the CPJ, whose honorary chairman is Walter Cronkite, the building housed the offices of several foreign press organizations, including the BBC and MBC.

According to the IDF and to the Government Press Office, the building in question also housed offices of Hizbullah's Al Manar television and operated as a Hamas communication center. Through it, Hamas maintained constant communications with terrorists, disseminated propaganda and claimed responsibility for attacks like the one the organization had carried out the previous day – the murder of 4 year old Afik Zahavi and 49 year old Mordechai Yosepov by Kassam rockets in Sderot. This fact was ignored by the CPJ.

In its penultimate paragraph, the letter stated, "CPJ reminds you that media offices are civilian facilities and are protected from attack under international humanitarian law unless they are used for military purposes. The IDF has not provided any compelling evidence that the office was used in this manner. The attack on the building was also disproportionate to any perceived threat and reckless in endangering civilians – in this case the many journalists who work there."

The letter by the CPJ followed a similar protest launched by the Foreign Press Association in Israel.

The fact that Hamas and Hizbullah cohabit a building used by media organizations and hide their operations behind journalistic cover is nothing new. It is standard fare for terrorists, both in the Palestinian population centers and in Iraq, to disguise themselves as journalists and to use journalistic cover to travel freely.

Before his arrest by the IDF, Hassam Yusuf, the Hamas commander in Judea and Samaria, sat in a Ramallah office bearing the sign, "Nur Press Office." When last fall the US began pressuring Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to close the terrorist headquarters in Damascus, Assad claimed that they were not headquarters, but press offices.

At the beginning of the month, Agence France Presse photographer Mohammed Abed took a picture of two Palestinian terrorists in ski caps assembling a bomb in Rafah refugee camp. The photograph was shot from a distance of less than a meter. How was he allowed to get so close? In Iraq there have been several instances of reporters arriving at the scene of terror attacks against coalition forces before the attacks take place. They have admitted that they were tipped off by the terrorists in order to enable them to take real time footage of dying Americans.

While Israel was roundly criticized for firing three missiles into the "press" headquarters of Hamas and Hizbullah, neither the CPJ nor the Foreign Press Association issued any condemnatory statement against the Palestinian Authority for the attack on New York Times bureau chief James Bennet in Gaza in May. When AFP photographer Jamal Arouri had both his arms broken by the Aksa Martyr Brigades earlier in the year to prevent him from working, neither organization launched a protest.

A Washington Post article about the US Army's fight against the Sadr army in southern Iraq this past spring includes a revealing line. In a fight in Najaf, US forces fought terrorists in a pitched battle that lasted six hours in order to prevent the enemy from taking hold of a burning Humvee. As one of the officers put it, "We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news. Even with all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them a victory."

All the above vignettes point to the fact that the ability to harness the media and to control the images of the war is one of the chief components of the terrorist war doctrine. The enemy hides behind press credentials in order to gain operational cover. It stage-manages terrorist theater by giving "scoops" of attacks to fellow travelers with cameras, tape recorders and notepads. It reenacts battlefield defeats as victories before the cameras. It uses its video footage of its own atrocities to both frighten its foes and encourage its sympathizers.

In the strategic use of the media to advance their war aims, the terrorists are assisted by Western press agencies. "Reporters" from Al Manar, Al Jazeera, Hamas and Al Qaida websites and other propaganda organs are viewed as "colleagues" rather than agents of jihad and participants in the war.

From all of this it is clear that one of the greatest challenges to democracies in fighting and winning the war is finding adequate answers to the question of how to conduct an informational warfare campaign that is integrally linked to the battlefield and diplomatic aspects of the war.

The US military rediscovered one of the most potent weapons against terrorist media warfare in the planning stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The decision to integrate or embed journalists with US forces was a monumental achievement. In so doing, the US reinstated a long tradition of battlefield reporting that had been nearly snuffed out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Having reporters with the troops enables the military to get out the story from the perspective of its own personnel in real time. When I was in Iraq with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division the necessity of the embed program was constantly in evidence. This was perhaps most starkly brought to my attention with the American seizure of Baghdad airport.

As I phoned into Israel Channel 2 news to report that I was at the airport, I was told by the television producer on the other end of the line that I must be mistaken because the Iraqi "Information" Minister had just said that there were no US forces at Baghdad Airport.

So embedding journalists with combat units is exceedingly important. But as the war moves on and mutates into increasingly ugly and sophisticated forms of made-for-TV barbarism it is clearly is not sufficient. Additional methods of fighting terrorist propaganda must also be found. One of these methods is to refuse to accord journalistic privileges automatically to anyone claiming to be a member of the press. The Iraqi Provisional Governing Authority recognized this when its members last year banned Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite stations from broadcasting in Iraq. News organizations should be judged by the impact of their reports and the content as well as by their legitimacy. If they are actively pursuing the cause of the enemy, they should be unmasked as the enemy. And this should be done without apology.

One of the advantages of the terrorists over the democracies they fight is that they have no compunction about lying. So it was in the case of the US air strike against a terrorist drop-off point on the Syrian-Iraqi border: before US officials in Baghdad had information about the raid, Arab "journalists" were reporting that US forces had bombed a wedding party.

In Israel's case, the first blood libel of the Palestinian terrorist war – the allegation that the IDF had killed 12 year-old Muhammed al-Dura in October 2000, was created as a result of the slowness of the IDF's ability to check the facts of the case. By the time the IDF had proved irrefutably that al-Dura had been killed by Palestinian forces, weeks had passed and the blood libel had circulated all over the Arab world.

To solve this problem, a policy must be adopted of never providing the terrorists with the moral high ground. On a strategic level, this requires never accepting blame for anything until all the facts have been unearthed. It is better to deny – indeed, it is possible to deny because, as a rule, the IDF does not target civilians – than to allow that the allegations may or may not be true. If, after the fact, it works out that civilians were killed, an explanation of the deaths can be given in a full context. The terrorists must never be granted a monopoly on telling the story.

On a tactical level, it means that democratic armies must integrate the informational warfare component into all their operational plans. This may involve becoming more flexible about exposing intelligence information. This may involve bringing army photographers with troops in every operation in order to take control of the visual image emanating from battle scenes.

While not according rights to terrorists and their media helpers, democratic armies must protect journalists who are actually doing their job. Reports have surfaced again and again of reporters from the US funded Al Hurra news network being physically attacked and harassed by terrorists and their supporters. This must not be allowed to continue. While reporting in war zones always involves risk, democratic forces must do everything they can to provide a modicum of safety for legitimate reporters.

The informational component of terrorist-warfare doctrine is one of the most unique aspects of the present war. The proliferation of news sources through the internet and satellite television combined with the post-nationalist, post-modernist preferences of large swathes of the Western media elites have made the necessity of integrating informational warfare components into every stage of battle planning, fighting and post-combat debriefings and overall strategic planning absolutely essential. Getting the story out is now of equal if not greater importance than defeating enemy forces in any particular engagement. Because without the story, the battlefield victory will eventually become a strategic defeat.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1089955401580&p=1006953079897

Copyright 1995-2004 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/

By Bat Ye’or

FrontPageMagazine.com | July 2, 2004

The following presentation by Bat Ye'or was delivered at a seminar in the French Senate in Paris three weeks ago - The Editors.

*
Allow me first to make a preliminary observation about the title of this session: the ‘return of the spirit of Munich’ – a title which I find somewhat optimistic. At Munich, in 1938, France and England, exhausted by the death toll of the Great War, abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Nazi beast, in the hope that by doing so they would avoid another conflict. The “spirit of Munich” thus refers to a policy of states and of peoples who refuse to confront a threat, and attempt to obtain peace and security through conciliation and appeasement, or even, for some, an active collaboration with the criminals.

For my own part, I would say that we have gone beyond the spirit of Munich, and the present situation should be seen not in the context of the Second World War, but in the present jihadist context.

In fact, for the past 30 years France and Europe are living in a situation of passive self-defense against terrorism. This began with Palestinian terrorism, then Islamic terrorism, not to speak of the local European terrorism, including the IRA in Great Britain, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy.

One need only look at our cities, airports, and streets, at the schools with their security guards, even the systems of public transportation, not to mention the embassies, and the synagogues – to see the whole astonishing array of police and security services. The fact that the authorities everywhere refuse to name the evil does not negate that evil. Yet we know perfectly well that we have been under threat for a long time; one has only to open one’s eyes and our authorities know it better than any of us, because it is they who have ordered these very security measures.

In his book, La Vie Quotidienne dans l’Europe Médiévale sous Domination Arabe (Daily Life in Medieval Europe under the Arab Domination), published in 1978, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, a French specialist on Andalusia (Islamic Spain) and the Maghreb, described under the subheading “Une grande Peur” (“A great Fear”) the conditions of life for the indigenous non-Muslim peoples in the Andalusian countryside. (1) Today, Europe itself is living with this Great Fear.

At Munich war had not yet been declared. Today the war is everywhere. And yet the European Union and the states which comprise it, have denied that war’s reality, right up to the terrorist attack in Madrid of March 11, 2004. If there is a danger as Europe proclaims urbi et orbi, that danger can only come from America and Israel. What should one understand? For can anyone seriously maintain that it is the American and Israeli forces that threaten us in Europe? No, what must be understood is that American and Israeli policies of resistance to jihadist terror provoke reprisals against a Europe that has long ago ceased to defend itself. So that peace can prevail throughout the world, those two countries, America and Israel, need only adopt the European strategy of constant surrender, based on the denial of aggression. How simple it all is…

This strategy is less worthy than even Munich’s connivance and cowardice. At Munich there was some sort of future contemplated, even if war, or peace, were to determine the future. There was a choice. In the present situation there is no choice, for we deny the reality of the jihad danger. The only danger comes, allegedly, from the United States and Israel. We conduct a propaganda campaign in the media against these two countries, before entering into a yet more aggressive phase; it’s so much easier, so much less dangerous…And we conduct this campaign with the weapons of cowardice: defamation, misinformation, the corruption of venal politicians.

In the time of Munich, one could envisage that there would be battles that might be won. There was at least the Maginot Line for defense. In Europe today, dominated by the spirit of dhimmitude – the condition of submission of Jews and Christians under Muslim domination – there is no conceivable battle. Submission, without a fight, has already taken place. A machinery that has made Europe the new continent of dhimmitude was put into motion more than 30 years ago at the instigation of France.

A wide-ranging policy was then first sketched out, a symbiosis of Europe with the Muslim Arab countries, that would endow Europe – and especially France, the project’s prime mover – with a weight and a prestige to rival that of the United States (2). This policy was undertaken quite discreetly, outside of official treaties, under the innocent-sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. An association of European parliamentarians from the European Economic Community (EEC) was created in 1974 in Paris: the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation. It was entrusted with managing all of the aspects of Euro-Arab relations – financial, political, economic, cultural, and those pertaining to immigration. This organization functioned under the auspices of the European heads of government and their foreign ministers, working in close association with their Arab counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission, and the Arab League.

This strategy, the goal of which was the creation of a pan-Mediterranean Euro-Arab entity, permitting the free circulation both of men and of goods, also determined the immigration policy with regard to Arabs in the European Community (EC). And, for the past 30 years, it also established the relevant cultural policies in the schools and universities of the EC. Since the first Cairo meeting of the Euro-Arab Dialogue in 1975, attended by the ministers and heads of state both from European and Arab countries and by representatives of the EC and the Arab League, agreements have been concluded concerning the diffusion and the promotion in Europe of Islam, of the Arabic language and culture, through the creation of Arab cultural centers in European cities. Other accords soon followed, all intended to ensure a cultural, economic, political Euro-Arab symbiosis. These far ranging efforts involved the universities and the media (both written and audio-visual), and even included the transfer of technologies, including nuclear technology. Finally a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy was promoted in international forums, especially at the United Nations.

The Arabs set the conditions for this association: 1) a European policy that would be independent from, and opposed to that of the United States; 2) the recognition by Europe of a “Palestinian people,” and the creation of a “Palestinian” state; 3) European support for the PLO; 4) the designation of Arafat as the sole and exclusive representative of that “Palestinian people”; 5) the de-legitimizing of the State of Israel, both historically and politically, its shrinking into non viable borders, and the Arabization of Jerusalem. From this sprang the hidden European war against Israel, through economic boycotts, and in some cases academic boycotts as well, through deliberate vilification, and the spreading of both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

During the past three decades a considerable number of non-official agreements between the countries of the CEE (subsequently the EU) on the one hand, and the countries of the Arab League on the other, determined the evolution of Europe in its current political and cultural aspects. I will cite here only four of them: 1) it was understood that those Europeans who would be dealing with Arab immigrants would undergo special sensitivity training, in order to better appreciate their customs, their moeurs; 2) the Arab immigrants would remain under the control and the laws of their countries of origin; 3) history textbooks in Europe would be rewritten by joint teams of European and Arab historians – naturally the Battles of Poitiers and Lepanto, or the Spanish Reconquista did not possess the same significance on both Mediterranean littorals; 4) the teaching of the Arabic language and of Arab and Islamic culture were to be taught, in the schools and universities of Europe, by Arab teachers experienced in teaching Europeans.

The Situation Today

On the political front, Europe has tied its destiny to the Arab countries, and thus become involved in the logic of jihad against Israel and the United States. How could Europe denounce the culture of jihadic venom which exudes from its allies, while for so many years it did everything to activate the jihad by hiding and justifying it by claiming that the real danger comes not from the jihadists, themselves, but from those who resist the Arab jihadist, the very allies that Europe serves at every international gathering, and in the European media.

On the cultural front, there has been a complete re-writing of history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to “The Contribution of the Islamic civilization to European culture.” It was reaffirmed by President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8, 1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, through the creation of a ‘Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations’ that was to control everything that was said, written and taught on the new continent of Eurabia, which encompass Europe and the Arab countries.

The dhimmitude of Europe began with the subversion of its culture and its values, with the destruction of its history and its replacement by an Islamic vision of that history, supported by the romantic myth of Andalusia. Eurabia adopted the Islamic conception of history, in which Islam is defined as a liberating force, a force for peace, and the jihad is regarded a ‘just war’. Those who resist the jihad, like the Israelis and the Americans, are the guilty ones, rather than those who wage it. It is this policy that has inculcated in us, the Europeans, the spirit of dhimmitude that blinds us, that instills in us a hatred for our own values, and the wish to destroy our own origins and our own history. “The greatest intellectual swindle would be to allow Europe to continue to believe that it derives from a Judeo-Christian tradition. That is a complete lie,” Tariq Ramadan has stated (3). And thus we despise George Bush because he still believes in that tradition. What simpletons those Americans…

The spirit of dhimmitude is not merely that of submission without fighting, not even a surrender. It is also the denial of one’s own humiliation through this process of integrating values that lead to our own destruction; it is the ideological mercenaries offering themselves up for service in the jihad; it is the traditional tribute paid by their own hand, and with humiliation, by the European dhimmis, in order to obtain a false security; it is the betrayal of one’s own people. The non-Muslim protected dhimmi under Islamic rule could obtain an ephemeral and delusive security through services rendered to the Muslim oppressor, and through servility and flattery. And that is precisely the situation in Europe today.

Dhimmitude is not only a set of abstract laws inscribed in the shari’a, it is also a complex set of behaviors developed over time by the dhimmis themselves, as a way both to adapt to, and to survive, oppression, humiliation, insecurity. This has produced a particular mentality as well as social and political behaviors essential to the survival of peoples who, in a certain sense, would always remain hostages to the Islamic system.

The dhimmis are inferior beings who undergo humiliations and aggressions in silence. Their aggressors, meanwhile, enjoy an impunity that only increases their hatred and their feeling of superiority, guaranteed by the protection of the law. The culture of dhimmitude which is expanding throughout Europe is that of hate, of crimes against non-Muslims that go unpunished, a culture which is imported from the Arab countries along with “Palestinianism,” the new European subculture that has been raised to the level of a European Union cult, and its exalted war banner against Israel.

At Munich, in 1938, France had not renounced its own culture, its own history becoming German; it has not proclaimed that the source of her own culture was the German civilization. The spirit of dhimmitude which today blinds Europe springs not from a situation imposed from without, but from a choice made freely, and systematically carried out, in its political dimensions, over the course of the last 30 years.

The well-known scholar of Islam, William Montgomery Watt, described the disappearance of the Christian world from the countries which had been Islamized, in his book The Majesty that was Islam (1974): “There was nothing dramatic about what happened; it was a gentle death, a phasing out.”(4) But Montgomery Watt was wrong; in fact, the long death-throes of Christianity under Islam were extremely painful and tragic, as can be seen even in the 20th century, with the genocide of the Armenians, and the Lebanese Christians’ resistance in the 1970s-1980s, and for the last decades the genocide in the Sudan, and finally the relentless Arab jihad against Israel, which is only one of the examples of the age-old struggle by people devoted to fighting for freedom against dhimmitude, for the dignity of man against the slavery of oppression and hate. But that observation by Montgomery Watt – about the “gentle death, the phasing out” applies perfectly to Europe today.

Notes:

1) Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, La Vie Quotidienne dans l’Europe Médiévale sous Domination Arabe, Hachette, Paris, 1978; this book examines the Arab conquest and colonization of Andalusia — see chapter 1, “Les Jours de Razzia et d’Invasion”. I am grateful to Dr Andrew Bostom, for having brought to my attention the works of Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, some of which will be included in his forthcoming compendium of essays and documents, The Legacy of Jihad, New York, Prometheus Books, 2005.

2) Pierre Lyautey (the nephew of Marshall Lyautey): “) « Le nouveau rôle de la France en Orient », Comptes rendu des séances de l’Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 4 mai 1962, p.176, voir aussi Jacques Frémeaux, Le monde arabe et la sécurité de la France depuis 1958, PUF, Paris 1995.

3) Tariq Ramadan, “Critique des (nouveaux) intellectuels communautaires”, Oumma.com, 3 October 2003.

4) William Montgomery Watt, The Majesty that Was Islam. The Islamic World, 66-1100. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1974, p. 257.

* Bat Ye’or has written articles and scholarly studies since 1971 on the situation of Jews and Christians under Islam. Her books in French have been translated into English (www.dhimmi.org / www.dhimmitude.org). This presentation – translated from the French – was given at a seminar organized by the B’nai B’rith (Europe) in the French Senate (Palais du Luxembourg, Paris), on the theme: “La démocratie à l’épreuve de la menace islamiste” (“Democracy faced with the Islamist menace”), in two sessions: “Les Islamistes et leur alliés” (“The Islamists and their allies”); “Vers un retour à l’esprit de Munich” (“Toward a return to the spirit of Munich”). Her next book covers this subject in depth: Eurabia. The Euro-Arab Axis (Cranbury, NJ., Associated University Presses, 2005). This recent presentation, “Beyond Munich – The Spirit of Eurabia,” along with many other pieces by Bat Ye’or and others, will appear in the essay collection, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (forthcoming from Prometheus Books), edited by Robert Spencer.

U.N. Lesson: Follow the Oil-for-Food Money

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

By Claudia Rosett

NEW YORK — This is the tale of a bribe linked to the U.N. Oil-for-Food program in Iraq.

The bribe itself, paid to Saddam Hussein's regime, first made the news in late 2002. What got no attention at the time, however, was just how odd a response it drew from the United Nations. There, it was treated as just another modest irregularity in Oil-for-Food — worthy of polite inquiry, but not the outrage and immediate expert investigation it deserved.

Certainly there was far less fury from the United Nations over this bribe than Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his aides have since expressed in rejecting criticisms that the world body ran a crooked Oil-for-Food program. But here's the charm at the center of it all (and one that various investigators now sorting through Oil-for-Food might want to keep in mind): U.N. procedure itself, even in a matter as serious as bribery, evidently entailed treating Saddam not like a totalitarian ruler under strict sanctions, but as just another esteemed head of state — albeit one with a particularly large U.N. welfare program underway.

Here's the story of the bribe itself — or rather, of its discovery.

As a rule, Saddam's partners-in-corruption were not eager to file official complaints, having nothing to gain from informing on themselves. Nor was the United Nations very inquisitive, despite rumors about corruption from the program's early days. When several Oil-for-Food contractors brought Iraqi kickback demands to the attention of the program's executive director, Benon V. Sevan, in 2000 — as the Secretariat finally disclosed to the Financial Times in 2004 — he effectively buried the issue at that time by telling informants to leave him alone and go file official complaints with their country missions.

But in the case of this particular bribe, matters had already gone too far for a brush-off.

The informant was a Russian businessman named Gazi Luguev, president of a Swiss-based trading company, Lakia S.A.R.L, which was authorized to buy Iraqi oil from Saddam under the program. Luguev was upset — not because Saddam's regime had asked him for a bribe — but because, by his own account, he had paid the bribe to no avail. He wanted his company's money back.

As detailed in a fax dated Oct. 2, 2002, which Luguev sent to Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO) and copied to the U.N. oil overseers in Sevan's New York office, Luguev had been asked by the Iraqi regime to pay a "deposit" of $60,000 into a secret bank account in the Jordan National Bank in order to procure an Oil-for-Food shipment of underpriced Iraqi oil. Any such payment was in gross violation of both U.N. sanctions against Iraq and Oil-for-Food rules, which spelled out that all Iraq's oil-related revenues would flow strictly into a U.N.-held escrow account. To read the Lakia fax, click here — Adobe Acrobat required to view pdf.

According to Luguev's fax, Lakia had paid the $60,000 to Baghdad in advance (which was by several accounts standard practice for such kickbacks on oil shipments, which were widely rumored to be commonplace). But this time, Iraq did not deliver any oil. So Luguev, in his fax to the Iraqi authorities and to Sevan's office, demanded Iraq refund to Lakia its deposit "or we will be obliged to take all necessary legal steps and apply to all concerned organizations to get our money back."

A copy of this fax, and the ensuing correspondence, was obtained by private investigators John Fawcett and Christine Negroni, at the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler. In reviewing these papers recently, they took a closer look at Sevan's response to Luguev's fax. What jumped out was that Sevan had fired off a letter that same day, Oct. 2 (as well he should have, this being formal documentary evidence of a kickback to Saddam's regime.) To read the Sevan letter, click here -- Adobe Acrobat required to view pdf.

But did he write immediately to inform the Security Council, which oversaw the program? Did he alert any independent auditing or investigative authority?

Evidently not. First, and foremost, Sevan wrote to Saddam's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, attaching Luguev's complaint. Sevan warned Aldouri: "I am duty bound to bring the matter to the attention of the Security Council Committee." Sevan then added a crucial sentence: "Prior to doing so, however, I should like to receive most urgently the views and comments of the Government of Iraq on the information provided by Lakia SARL."

He asked for a response within one week.

In other words, in the interest of what one can only suppose was routine information-gathering at the United Nations, Sevan's first move was, in effect, to give Baghdad a week's notice to bury the evidence and prepare a reply.

In a purely private business setting, this might be excused as nothing worse than an attempt to gather all the facts before taking the case to the boss (though in some quarters, one might hope that documented allegations of a $60,000 payoff would warrant the immediate attention of the top brass).

But Oil-for-Food was not a private business. It was an international program that existed — and was funded handsomely with 2.2 percent of Saddam's oil revenues — solely to supervise the commerce of a predatory totalitarian regime under strict U.N. sanctions. One would have thought that a fax detailing the illicit flow of money to Saddam's regime via a Jordanian bank account should have inspired loud and immediate alarms on all fronts, and an immediate heads-up to the Security Council — not just an exclusive letter to the Iraqi mission that begins with the salutation, "Excellencies," and requests "views and comments" about the Lakia charges.

Any official Oil-for-Food document with Sevan's signature gets extra scrutiny these days for two reasons. First, the United Nations has persistently kept most of the vital paperwork concerning the program secret. Second, because there have been allegations, now under investigation, that in 1998 Sevan himself received oil allocations from Saddam.

Sevan has denied he ever took anything from Saddam's regime. But even if he is officially cleared of all allegations, even if in the case of the Lakia bribe he was simply following established procedure, there remains the big question: Just what kind of crazy shop had the United Nations become that the excellencies of Baghdad — the accused bribe-takers in this dispute — were treated not as a government under sanctions, but as esteemed clients? So softly worded is Sevan's letter that it's hard to tell whether his chief concern was that Baghdad had been collecting bribes, or that Baghdad had failed to deliver on them.

In a reply to Sevan, dated oddly enough a day earlier than Sevan's letter (but registered by the Oil-for-Food office six days later, on Oct. 8 — just within the deadline set by Sevan) Saddam's Ambassador Aldouri said that the fax from Lakia contained information that was "incorrect." To read the Aldouri letter, click here -- Adobe Acrobat is required to view pdf.

However, according to a Newsweek story about the Lakia kickback spat, published in November 2002, Saddam's government then offered to refund Luguev's money. And while the Security Council's Sanctions Committee was eventually informed of the Lakia affair, a source close to the United Nations reports that such member states as China, Russia, France and Syria opposed any action — and none was taken.

Sevan did not reply to requests for his comments on this matter. Annan's office, asked to clarify if it was U.N. procedure to relay bribe allegations to Saddam before informing the Security Council, gave a pro forma response that the Secretariat is not commenting these days on anything that is "within the purview" of the Oil-for-Food investigation led by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.

Indeed, we have yet to hear any U.N. statement of condemnation, let alone contrition, for the Oil-for-Food fiasco. Over the course of the program, which ended last year, Saddam's regime by General Accounting Office estimates pocketed more than $4 billion in such "deposits" — skimmed from oil earnings meant to feed and doctor the people of Iraq.

What needs investigating here is not only whether the United Nations violated its own practices, but how it slid into procedures that so comfortably let this happen.

Claudia Rosett is Journalist-in-Residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, and writes a column, "The Real World," on issues of tyranny and human rights, especially as these relate to the war on terror, for The Wall Street Journal’s Opinionjournal.com and The Wall Street Journal Europe. Previously, Ms. Rosett has served as a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in New York, as bureau chief in The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow Bureau and as editorial-page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal. For her on-site coverage of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, Ms. Rosett won an Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence.

Solidarity With Terror
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 2, 2004

This June I attended a “training session” of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization of volunteers whose purpose is to obstruct Israeli defense forces attempting to protect the civilian population from terrorist acts. The ISM was set up by the Palestinians after Arafat broke off the Oslo peace talks and launched the second intifada. Its organizers were Ghassan Andoni, a physics professor from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, and Palestinian activists George Rishmawi and George Qassis. The idea was to bring in international volunteers, mostly radical students from the United States, Canada and Europe, as “nonviolent peace activists” who would interfere with the Israeli army’s anti-terrorist operations. If the volunteers were injured or arrested, the international repercussions would be detrimental to Israel, a propaganda win for the PLO. The operation costs the Palestine Authority very little since many of the radical volunteers pay their own transportation costs and live in the homes of Palestinians during their stays in the Middle East.

The ISM made international headlines when one of its activists, Rachel Corrie, a college radical from Olympia, Washington, was killed while attempting to block an Israeli bulldozer. The bulldozer was attempting to destroy tunnels from the Gaza strip through which the terrorists imported weapons and explosives. Corrie became a martyr to the cause, and inspiration to other radicals to follow.

Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf of the ISM

The most visible American figure in the International Solidarity Movement is Adam Shapiro, a Brooklyn Jew and college radical,who became a human shield for Yasser Arafat when the Israeli army surrounded Arafat’s Ramallah compound following the massacre of 30 Israelis – some of them Holocaust survivors -- at a Passover seder, shortly after the Intifada was launched. When I interviewed him last year, Shapiro told me point blank that he does not consider himself a Jew. He is married to Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American activist from Michigan whose father holds Israeli citizenship. They have become the spokespeople for the ISM in the United States. In articles on the ISM website where they discuss their goals of dismantling Israel by supporting Palestinian terrorists they use euphemisms such as “legitimate resistance” or support for “legitimate armed struggle” while claiming that they are nonviolent. The ISM uses as its motto “by any means necessary.”

Such means include the hiding of terrorists like Shadi Sukiya, who was arrested in an ISM office in the West Bank. An arms cache was also found in an ISM office. Two suicide bombers gained entry for their murderous agendas under the auspices of the ISM. These Pakistani Muslims from Great Britain entered Israel through Jordan as clients of the Alternative Tourism Group, an operation set up by Andoni to aid ISM volunteers coming to Israel. They then met with the ISM at their offices for an entire day in Gaza before proceeding on to Tel Aviv where they bombed a popular beach bar, Mike’s Place, killing three people.

In the last three years the ISM has developed an extensive presence in the United States, while operating under several organizational names to avoid unwanted scrutiny of its operations. One of these entities, Al Awda (the Return in Arabic), is also known as the Palestine Right to Return to Return Coalition (PRRC). It is led by Mazen Qumsiyeh, a Yale geneticist. There are Al Awda chapters all over the United States, particularly in the vicinities of U.S. college campuses. Other ISM groups under the name SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Taxpayer Assistance to Israel Now) operate in Los Angeles and New York. In New Jersey, the ISM supporters call themselves Palsolidarity. When the volunteers go to the Middle East to aid the PLO they go under the umbrella name of the International Solidarity Movement. When they hold events in the U.S. and Canada they call themselves the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

The party line, however, is always the same. The right of so-called Palestinian refugees to return to Israel is “unconditional” and Israel itself must become “Palestine.” The number of actual refugees from that part of the former Ottoman empire where Israel was established in 1948 was 600,000, most of whom are no longer alive. The number of refugees the Palestine Authority now recognizes is close to 5 million. The population of Israel is 6 million, including 1 million Israeli Arabs. The math is simple and the desired result: the liquidation of the Jewish state.

At the Palestine Solidarity Conference held at Ohio State last year, Adam Shapiro told me that the ISM has Palestinian “handlers,” or undercover supervisors at all demonstrations against Israel. These supervisors direct attacks against the separation fence that is being built to keep suicide bombers and armed terrorists from infiltrating into Israel and other targets. One of the handlers leading the current attacks on the security fence at the start of this summer’s campaign is a veteran of the Marxist terrorist group PLFP named Hisham Jam Joun. The ISM website, www.palsolidarity.org , openly proclaims that the organization is “Palestinian-led.”

I signed up for the ISM training session, after seeing their Internet announcement calling for volunteers for their new campaign, which they called “Freedom Summer 2004,” after the nonviolent campaign of the civil rights movement in the American south in the 1960’s. There were similar announcements on local websites run by the ISM all over the United States.

The phone number I dialed put me in touch with Paul LaRudee, a 68 year-old retired Berkeley professor who, along with his Lebanese wife, has been a leader of the ISM movement in the Bay Area. LaRudee assured me that they welcomed everybody, no matter how old or inexperienced. “Most of our volunteers are in their sixties,” he said. I was advised if I wanted to train with the ISM I needed to attend an orientation lecture at The New College of San Francisco which was being given by an Arab-American named Jess Ghannam, a psychoanalyst and professor at the University of California Medical School.

Ghannam’s lecture was a two hour diatribe, reviewing the history of the Middle East. It was so pathologically anti-Israel that it even reversed the famous slogan of the PLO, originating with Arafat’s uncle the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that the goal of Palestinian liberation was to “drive the Jews into the sea.” In Ghannam’s version it was the Jews who intended to drive the Arabs into the sea, though how this could be done with 200 million people he failed to explain.

Ghannam concluded his lecture by telling a story about an Israeli soldier who asked him for his ID card when he was at a checkpoint in the West Bank. The young soldier noticed that Ghannam was from the San Francisco Bay Area and, being friendly, mentioned he’d gone to Mt.Tamalpais High School near Ghannam’s home. “Imagine!” Ghannam said indignantly, “This soldier, a Jew born in the United States, had the nerve to ask me for my ID on my land!” Yet Ghannam had told us in the beginning of the lecture that he was also born in the United States.

The following Saturday morning, June 12th, I arrived for my actual training. The session was held at 2263 Mission Street in San Francisco, a ratty storefront theater in a rundown area of the city that had a folding grid gate barring the entrance from the public.

About ten of us showed up, counting both volunteers and trainers. Before we were allowed to enter the storefront, however, we had to go through a simulated interrogation by an “Israeli border guard” impersonated by a woman named Jamie, who was a social worker for the city of San Francisco.

Jamie took her role very seriously. We learned later that she was an ISM veteran, having been a volunteer in Israel two years earlier as a member of San Francisco’s Jews For A Free Palestine (JFFP) and would be going again this summer.

Jamie went through my belongings and, on finding my notes from the ISM orientation lecture, asked me why I an Arabic name like Jess Ghannam appeared in my notebook.. Playing the game, I replied that I thought Jess was a Christian name and that I had no idea that Ghannam was an Arab. She asked me what hotel I was staying at in Israel, to which I replied the Sheraton. She allowed me to pass inside, and then turned to the next signup.

After everyone passed through the interrogation ritual, the gate was secured with a big padlock so nobody could get in or out. We were told we were in there for the entire day with just a brief break for lunch, a potluck meal which we had all been asked to contribute to.

Now that we had entered “Israel,” Jamie continued with the instruction. She had us form a circle and then led a discussion of the “border checkpoint” we’d just been through. I was told I did the right thing to get past the guard by lying that I had not realized Ghannam was an Arabic name and making up the hotel, since I would be actually staying with Palestinians. In other words, the ISM training session began with the idea of breaking the law to enter a democratic country by deceiving its border guards. In fact, everything we were instructed to do in the course of our training while we were in Israel would involve some form of breaking Israeli law.

Jamie then handed out ISM training manuals, big thick white notebooks containing eight sections, a text designed for would be infiltrators and subversives. Inside were articles authored by radical groups like the War Resisters League, Act Up, Direct Action and a several “anti-global” organizations. There were also internal ISM documents. They contained valuable information on how to disrupt the Israeli law enforcement and defense officials as effectively as possible. Jamie admonished us, “You see what it might be like when you try to enter Israel. Don’t bring your manuals with you!”

We then introduced ourselves. The first in the circle to do so was Mahera, a Palestinian-American woman in her late twenties who we were told would also be training us.

Mahera told everyone she works for the San Francisco office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). I learned later that our orientation lecturer, Jess Ghannam, was on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco chapter of the same organization, which bills itself as a non-profit civil rights advocacy group for Muslims and Arab-Americans. Glancing through my manual I noticed it referred us to “the ADC reader.”

Many will be familiar with the ADC through its communications director, Hussein Ibish, who frequently appears on television talk shows, and promotes the ADC as a civil rights organization for Muslim-Americans in no way involved with aiding Middle East terrorism.

As Adam Shapiro had informed me earlier, the group was told that the ISM is a Palestinian-led movement and that we were under the leadership of the Palestinians who had professional handlers to oversee what we would be doing. Once we were in the West Bank there would be veteran ISM leaders to guide us, but that the Palestinian handlers had ultimate control.

The first woman in the circle identified herself as Barbara Miles, who said her maiden name was Zakasia and that she was Lebanese-American. Barbara described how she had visited Syria to support of the regime there. She asked if having “Syria” stamped on her passport would prevent her from getting into Israel. “Get a new passport,” Jamie advised. “It’s easy.”

Ian Trenallio

The next to introduce himself was Ian Trenallio who was from Lake Tahoe and wore a T-shirt that said “anti-hate, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist.” Ian told us he formerly had lived in San Pablo, a suburb of Berkeley. He had recently been to Tijuana, he said, to protest economic globalization and now he wanted to “help the Palestinians.” “Don’t say to the border guard you are there to help the Palestinians!” Jamie interjected. “The goal is to have the Israeli guards think you are a tourist. The Israeli economy is hurting because the war has killed tourism and we want to take advantage of that.”

By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 2, 2004

Next to contribute was Christina Cruz, an Argentine national who was a student in the U.S. She expressed concern that she would have to go into to debt to join “Freedom Summer.” She wanted to “help” people and further the cause of human rights. It was still hard for me to understand the equation – helping terrorists and human rights.

Because of my interest in pro-Palestinian bias of university faculties, I was especially interested in the next volunteer. Scott identified himself as Jewish and even claimed to have family in Israel. He said he was a supporter of Israel until he attended classes in Middle East Studies at Stanford University. “I used to support Israel until I took some classes with Joel Beinin who set me straight,” he volunteered. Beinin is a former president of the Middle East Studies Association and a self-proclaimed Marxist and supporter of the Palestinian struggle to liberate Israel by dismantling the Jewish state.

The next speaker was Jeff who said he’d been to Israel before but was now looking forward to go there to “stir things up.” He was a Bay Area radical involved in environmental issues. He was followed by Ken, a semi-retired consultant for the Food and Drug Administration who introduced himself as someone who was sick and tired of what the “Zionists” had been doing and wasn’t afraid to do something about it “even if the CIA is after me.”

Nui

Nui introduced herself by explaining she was part Lebanese and part Thai-Chinese. She was going to help the Palestinians and “find her roots.” No one asked her to explain this.

Meredith (right)

Next came Meredith, who said she was going to Palestine to assert herself as “a queer Jewish woman.” She quickly explained that she was really only half-Jewish, and that by helping the Palestinians she was asserting her identity. She was evidently oblivious to fate of gays living in the Moslem world.

Arlene, a 62 year-old Jewish woman from Oakland, was more vocal than the others. She told us that she had a lifetime of activism. “During the Vietnam War I went to visit and support the ‘comrades’ who told me to go back home and fight the war against America from here for them.” She told us that she was estranged from her parents and had used the excuse of their funeral to get into Israel the last time she was there. Despite her age she was ready to do things to attack the Israeli soldiers such as throwing tear gas canisters back at them during riots and putting sugar in the gas tanks of their security vehicles. She lamented a loose bladder due to her age but vowed it would not stop her from “helping” the Palestinians with all the other ISM volunteers. She also expressed grief for the Israeli execution of Sheik Yassin, the former head of Hamas who was responsible for the murders of over 350 people inside Israel including some American citizens. “We’re going to win,” she glowed. “Like Dr. Ghannam said at the lecture the other day, the demographics are on our side.”

Once the introductions were complete, Jamie shared with us the experiences and methods used by previous ISM volunteers to fool the Israeli border police. “Make a reservation in a hotel in Israel even if you don’t use it.” “Bring guidebooks for Israel that look dog eared.” “Give them the name of a hostel if you are young enough, these will fool the border guards.”

She continued, “If you use the name of someone in Israel as being the reason for your visit, they will call that person. Make certain you have a story thought out who that person is.” If that person were an Israeli leftist, the task was a lot easier. Mary Erwin, another trainer from Oakland, interjected at this point that our allies from the Israeli anarchist and communist movements were ready to lie to the border guards when called on the phone. They were available to verify false stories given to the border guards in order to get the ISM volunteers into Israel. She offered to provide us with the names and numbers of leftists in Israel who would say they knew us.

“If the border guards become suspicious, an Israeli contact will be set up to lie and say you are visiting them,” Mary summarized. She mentioned the leftist Israeli group B’tselem as providing such false witnesses. B’tselem is one of the most active leftist groups in Israel working to aid the PLO. Among its leaders is Anat Biletzski, the former head of Israel’s Communist Party.

Once we were inside Israel we were told we could make our way to the West Bank even though we were also informed that to go there is illegal. Jamie told us to email ourselves instructions so we would not need our manuals. We were assured the “ISM corps” was working on legal proposals to challenge the Israeli government at every turn if illegal entrants were discovered. “We are asking also if people are willing to resist if they are caught and told they will be deported.” Anything to be a nuisance and break the law was the goal.

We were also given alternative ways to get into Israel besides through Ben Gurion Airport. “You can take a taxi from Amman in Jordan to the Allenby Bridge (Jordan’s border entry). Even if you are turned back from that entry, you can go to the other border crossing because they usually don’t know you were turned away from another one first,” Jamie counseled. “Rehearse your story,” she continued. “They will interrogate you also when you leave. If they interrogate you, you can miss your plane. Don’t buy anything because it will give them things to look through.”

As for luggage, she told us if could pass as students we should just use a backpack. “A duffel bag on wheels does well at the airport. Remember that Israel needs tourists. Their economy is in shambles and they are anxious for tourism. And they are not organized.”

“Most of all, be patient. If they ask you questions such as ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know there’s a war?’ you should reply, ‘I thought it was better now.’ Or say, ‘I had my ticket for a long time and my Israeli friends said I should come.’ If you are Jewish, know your Hebrew name if they ask you what it is. Know your story. Wear your Star of David especially if you are Jewish.”

We were told once we were on the West Bank and under the Palestine Authority we were to attend another mandatory two-day training session where we would be assigned to “affinity groups.” She then began making a bulletin board of how we were to function by setting up rules. The first rule was “Confidentiality.” Volunteers would be assigned to unknown affinity groups where they would function as teams to disrupt the Israel soldiers in military zones.

We were then instructed to say to the media if we were interviewed: “We support the Palestinian right to resist the occupation provided by international law.” If the interview were more extensive, we were told to say: “We call for an immediate end to occupation and immediate compliance and implementation of all relevant UN resolutions.” Apparently to the ISM, international law is whatever they want it to be, since their agenda is to break laws to enter a democratic country in order to further violate its laws.

Brian Malovany

When one of the trainees asked if we as ISM volunteers favored a two-state solution to secure peace, Brian Malovany, another senior trainer from Oakland who had just joined us explained, “The idea of a two-state solution is pretty much dead.” This was an interesting dismissal of all the peace plans ever proposed by the United Nations, the United States, or the official negotiating parties of the Palestinians themselves. “There can only be one state called Palestine,” explained Molvany echoing the line of Hamas and other terrorist organizations. “And the Right of Return is non-negotiable. If people ask you about a two-state solution just tell them it’s a human rights issue. Whatever you do though, do not dictate to the Palestinians what they should not do.”

In other words, if the Palestinians shoot at Israeli soldiers don’t tell them it is wrong to do so. Apparently being non-violent peace activists only applies to the end of dismantling Israel and providing cover for the people who will commit the violent acts.

I asked Molvany, “But what if we see kids throwing stones at tanks or putting themselves in danger. Shouldn’t we tell them not to and urge them to stay away?”

Brian Malovany responded: “We can’t tell kids not to throw stones! It’s not our place to tell them what to do.” Obviously the same rule applied to suicide bombers as we were advised that we might be used as human shields inside houses slated for demolition by the Israeli army because they were used as bomb making factories.

During the lunch break I looked at my manual and found this ISM wisdom:

“Some pacifists are uncomfortable with property damage. For myself...I see it as a great tool.”

“[Some] settle for tactical nonviolence, but given the right historical circumstance, armed struggle would be justified...”

“When VIOLENCE is mentioned, say RESISTANCE or RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE.”

“When TERRORISM is mentioned, emphasize STATE TERRORISM.”

“Instead of OCCUPATION say MILITARY OCCUPATION to make people think the occupation is a MILITARY DICTATORSHIP.” The only military dictator in Israel and the West Bank is Yasser Arafat. The page this appeared on was supplied by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, yet another purportedly Muslim “civil rights group” like the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The most cynical section of the manual was the last chapter written by Paul LaRudee, the Northern California ISM leader who provided my first contact over the phone: “You may well hear Palestinians talking ‘about the Jews’ when they really mean ‘Israelis’ or ‘the Israeli army’ or the ‘Israeli government.’ It is useful to remember the context; talk about “the Jews” is not the indication of bigotry that it would be in the United States or Europe.”

LaRudee also provided this whopper for “queer activists” who want to go on the Freedom Summer 2004 tour: “Palestinian society is as diverse in attitudes about gender and sexuality as is U.S. society.” In fact, over 100 homosexuals who had lived under the Palestine Authority recently took refuge in Israel for fear of being killed.

Apparently the ISM doesn’t care what they say as long as they get anyone over there to make trouble and risk their lives for the cause. Now I understood the recruitment of Meredith. To these radicals the strategy is to tie any cause, any idea, any gender, environmental or social issue to the destruction of Israel.

After lunch, we were given the activities schedule for the “Freedom Summer” anti-Israel campaign (see the ISM website for details). It included marching onto an Israeli army base to free captured terrorists and trying to tear down the security fence. Violent attacks by the “nonviolent” ISM had already begun when we met. Every member of our group knew that what they were really being asked to do was illegal. They just didn’t care.

Or perhaps it’s that radicals don’t fear the Israeli police in the same way they don’t fear the police in the U.S. because they know in a democracy they will be treated fairly. That might explain why they weren’t training for sit-ins in Tiananmen Square or in Teheran where the authorities might kill them. As if conceding the point, the ISM manual stressed that the volunteers were not in any real danger from Israeli security forces and advised them to inconvenience and disobey them in every way possible. The manual also advised those who were arrested to contact the Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, an organization created by the American Communist Party with a half century of legal experience in supporting Communist and totalitarian causes.

After the break we were told how to deal with Israeli soldiers. If advised to leave an area designated a closed military zone where the IDF is fighting terrorists, we were told to demand their orders in writing. “The soldiers can only detain you. They have to call the border police to arrest you,” counseled Jamie.

A list of instructions was given on how to deal with possible arrests since we would be doing our best to break the law. If a Palestinian was arrested for something serious like throwing a Molotov cocktail, we were told to show “prison solidarity” with him. We were told that international demonstrators usually get released quickly by the police once they reach the police station. But if we refused to leave without our Palestinian companion, the police might release him also just to get rid of all of us.

“Carry only a photocopy of your passport if they ask to see yours. If they hold it, you have to remain like they tell you. But if it’s a photocopy you can escape while they are busy handling other demonstrators. If the soldiers tell you to back up ten feet, back up only five.” Anything and everything to interfere with the soldiers trying to do their jobs was our goal.

Jamie told us a story of how 100 “internationals” had surrounded six Israeli soldiers and besieged them at a roadblock set up to prevent suicide bombers from getting into Israel. The soldiers, all young boys and conscripts in the Israeli army, tried to control the mob until they ran out of non-lethal weapons and were forced to withdraw. The trainers all snickered at the story.

Not once all day, in any way, did members of our group – trainers or trainees – express a negative word about suicide bombings, or the shooting of women and children by Palestinian terrorists. But we were told repeatedly not to tell the Palestinians how to “resist.”

At the conclusion of our session, Jamie used her training as a social worker to prepare us to deal with long term trauma once we returned to the Bay Area. I thought it was an interesting lesson for people going to the Middle East to engage in “nonviolent” activities for peace. “Be ready for lots of violence,” she said.

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Lee Kaplan is a contributing editor to Frontpagemag.com.