War Crimes and Misdemeanors

 

 

The best news in 2001 was that Slobodan Milosovic is finally locked up in a cell in the Hague. Another war criminal, Osama Bin Laden, is facing a similar fate or worst. Now for the bad new. Ariel Sharon is still waltzing around the world stage making plans for his next war crime.

What exactly will it take to bring Sharon to justice? The evidence of his crimes at Qibya and Sabra and Shatila are well documented and a compelling body of evidence has already been filed in a Belgian court. But Sharon has protection from some very powerful American power players in such lofty institutions like The New York Times and The Washington Post. He also has the full backing and support of Rupert Murdoch at FOX and from Levine at CNN and Time/Warner. At ABC, he can depend on Isner. No one loves Israeli war criminals quite like Ted Koppel. Except for Sulzberger’s Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer of the Post.

Since Sharon’s election, the Yiddish supremacists in the American mass media machine have launched a campaign to sanitize his record of serial war crimes. Amazingly enough they have had an unblemished record of success. The same publishers who prided themselves on bringing down tricky Dick accomplished this unbelievable feat. Nixon’s crime was that he lied to the American people about his cover-up of the Watergate break-in. He must be turning in his grave for being hounded out of office for a misdemeanor. And then there is Waldheim, who had to step down as President of Austria because he lied about his service in the German Army. Yet Sharon’s criminal war record somehow escapes the memory of every journalist at the New York Times and The Washington Post. The CNN boys have apparently lost their footage of the carnage at Sabra and Shatila and the indiscriminate bombing of Beirut in 1982. Information on Sharon’s crime at Qibya, where he dynamited a whole village without sparing a single inhabitant, can be easily found in State Department and United Nations archives.

The events of the last year have clearly demonstrated that we now have an American government that is dominated by two forces, The White House and the fourth estate. The Supreme Court has been reduced to reviewing last appeals for those facing capital punishment. As for Congress, it has become a virtual slave of special interest groups. No Senator would dare challenge the Israeli lobby’s blueprint for American policy in the Middle East. Senators like Robert Dole and William Fulbright have been replaced by a class of American politicians that cast every vote depending on the amount of coin deposited in their campaign chests. The end result is that the mass media ‘journalists’ and pundits have more influence on public policy than either Congress or the Supreme Court.

Since the terrorist attacks of 911, the Israeli lobby has hardly been mentioned in either the New York Times or The Washington Post. These two ‘national’ newspapers are virtual pillars of the Israeli Lobby. Yet, somehow they have failed to report to their readers on their very ethnic agendas and how they deliberately tailor news and commentary to accommodate Israeli policies. All the major networks, especially CNN and FOX, scrupulously adhere to this pattern of avoiding the delicate subject of Sharon’s past.

Now why would a group of ‘American’ journalists nail an American president for a misdemeanor and let Sharon totally evade the subject of his war crimes? Why would an American President be reduced to dancing to any tune played on Sharon’s fiddle even after the 911 atrocities? Has George Bush developed an unhealthy paranoia about the power of the Yiddish supremacists?

One would think that there is no better time for an American president to openly discuss whether an ethnic group with vast media assets should be allowed to monopolize the foreign policy debate. Every American of the adult persuasion knows that the Gulf War was a war for oil and Israel. It was the Israeli lobby, which determined every little detail about our Middle Eastern entanglements and even our Balkan policies. The decision to embrace Ariel Sharon was their decision. The decision to place an American Garrison in Saudi Arabia was their way of demonstrating Israel’s influence to the Arabs. It is the Israeli lobby that constantly hounded the administration to tighten the embargo in Iraq which resulted in half-a-million civilian deaths. It is the Israeli Lobby, which now is agitating to have America attack a half a dozen Arab countries on Israel’s hit list.

During the Clinton administration this Lobby moved its operatives into the State Department to the point where virtually every single ‘American’ policy maker assigned to the region was a Yiddish supremacist. Richard Holbrooke was the ambassador to the United Nations. Lawrence Eagleburger was actively involved in allowing Milosovic to hang on to power. Dennis Ross was the ‘American’ mediator who can now be found working in the Lobby. The ‘American’ ambassador to Israel was none other than Martin Indyk, an Australian immigrant who used to head up AIPAC. Indyk is now at the Brookyns Institute doing his chores for Sharon. Daniel Kurzer, the Ambassador to Egypt was an Orthodox Jew. The State Department spokesman, Rubin, is now doing Israeli public relations work at CNN. And, of course, Albright was there to coordinate the ‘All Yiddish’ team. Every single one of these Israeli partisans has warmly embraced Ariel Sharon, without the slightest reservation.

In fact, every single major American Jewish Organization issued statements endorsing the election of Ariel Sharon and they have backed his yearlong campaign to pulverize the Palestinians.

George Bush has an opportunity to really change American fortunes in the Middle East and to give the people of the region a chance to live in peace and prosperity. All he has to do is publicly and openly call for an investigation of the policies that led to 911. At the same time, he must demand that Sharon be investigated and indicted for his war crimes. Sooner or later, the Yiddish supremacists are going to have to deal with this cat when it gets out of the bag. It is a legacy that they can never hope to justify to American media consumers.

No one is suggesting that we silence the Yiddish supremacists. Let the New York Times publish all the canards it sees fit to print. If they start publishing the truth, it will just focus too much attention on their past habits of deception. All that is required is an open debate, with an open agenda, to see how we got ourselves into this miserable mess. Let Palestinian voices be heard, let African-American voices be heard and we must encourage the open participation of the church community. We should feel free to examine the operations of the Israeli Lobby, who finances it, how much money it raises, which Senators are wholly owned and which ones are just on lease to the lobby. Most important, we must encourage Yiddish supremacists to consider adapting more American

Values. We must be blunt in challenging them on their ethnic chauvinism and the need to diversify the ranks of the pundits so that non-Yiddish Americans can also voice their opinions and have career opportunities in the mass media. Finally, we must insist that they abandon their tactics of black listing American journalists and intellectuals who dare to challenge the wisdom of an Israeli government ruled by a criminal thug like Ariel Sharon.

Just another modest agenda for 2002.

Mr. Ahmed Amr is Editor of NileMedia.com in Seattle and a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN).