It is remarkable that three events happened on the same day: November 29, 2010: publishing WikiLeaks documents mostly about “concern” regarding the Iranian nuclear program, assassinating Majid Shahriari and the appointment of Tamir Pardo as head of Mossad, the agency most renowned worldwide for its involvement in assassinations. Some Western papers even boasted that the assassination was the “latest gift presented by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan”.
No Israeli source had any qualms acknowledging that the Mossad had death squads operating against those considered by the Israeli government as Palestinian, Arab and even Western enemies. It had actually admitted that it killed Iranian nuclear scientist Ardashir Hosseinpour in 2007. He was poisoned by gas. A European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said “Israel has shown no hesitation in assassinating weapons scientists of hostile regimes in the past. They did it with Iraq and they will do it with Iran when they can”. (See “Israel launches covert war against Iran” (The Daily Telegraph, Feb., 16, 2009). Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor, the US private intelligence company with strong government security connections, said “the strategy was to take out key people” (Ibid.). Israeli analyst Yossi Melman adds that “Israel is part of a detailed and elaborate international effort to slow down the Iranian program" (Ibid.).
Sources concur that Mossad carries out its operations in cooperation and coordination with Western intelligence agencies which share Mossad’s objectives, as in the case of assassinating the Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. A report drafted by the human rights division at the US State Department (March 3, 2009) revealed that Mossad, in coordination with US forces in Iraq managed to assassinate 350 Iraqi nuclear scientists, 300 university professors, in addition to hundreds of army officers, pilots and experts in designing and launching missiles. The American report said that the main task of the Mossad death squad, operating in Iraq since the American invasion of 2003, was to eliminate distinguished Iraqi nuclear scientists and former civilian and military engineers after Washington failed to persuade them to cooperate and work in the United States. Israel, however, saw that the mere existence of these scientists constituted a threat to Israeli long-term national security.
According to most published reports, Mossad is working in cooperation with American and Western intelligence; therefore, it is naïve for the Arabs to ask, or expect, any Western country to condemn Israel’s deliberate acts of killing whether against Palestinian leaders like Ahmad Yasin and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, or Iranians, or anyone the Israeli government thinks that he threatens its national security. The question is: what is the difference between Mossad’s acts: murder, poisoning, explosions and assassinations, and the acts of the terrorist groups the West continues to complain about because they seek to eliminate those they think pose a threat to them? Isn’t killing the same in both cases? And where is the international law and legality the West keeps talking about as a mark of civilization which separates them from terrorism?
After the WikiLeaks scandal, it has become clear that Western countries justify what they want with disregard to human rights, peoples’ interests or the law. The way they treat other peoples is not without Western racism and superiority. Otherwise, why wouldn’t Arab countries possess nuclear knowledge, since they have signed the non-proliferation treaty, while Israel and the United States have not signed it and use these weapons whenever they want?
So, we should read the United States’ withdrawal on Dec. 7, 2010 of its demand that Israel freeze settlement building as an acknowledgement on its part that it could not be “an impartial mediator” for peace between Arabs and the Israelis. This claim has been belied by American funding of the Israeli arsenal of mass destruction weapons, Israeli settlement and supporting the brutal Israeli blockade on civilians in Gaza and preventing them from remaining on their land or restoring their rights. It has become clear that the United States has handed over the running of its Middle East policy to Israel; it has given in to Israel’s desire for killing and settlement building. It has also been proven that the West is working in cooperation with Israel against Arabs and Muslims whenever Israel wants to kill more of them. What is new in this regard is perhaps that the old form of wars is over because it proved costly and unviable, particularly after the war on Iraq in 2003, on Lebanon in 2006, on Gaza in 2008-2009 and the ongoing war in Afghanistan which is becoming a quagmire with no end in sight.
So, killing, assassination, sabotage and espionage have, from now on, become the official policy used by Israel and its Western allies to destabilize Arab and Muslim countries. Does not this mean that resistance, in all its forms, of this bloody and evil alliance against Arabs – and which has proven its effectiveness against Israeli military arsenal - is the most valid method in today’s wars in order to achieve and maintain independence, to gain and defend freedom and achieve scientific progress?
Prof. Bouthaina Shaaban is Political and Media Advisor at the Syrian Presidency, and former Minister of Expatriates. She is also a writer and professor at Damascus University since 1985. She’s got Ph.D. in English Literature from Warwick University , London . She was the spokesperson for Syria . She was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She can be reached through nizar_kabibo@yahoo.com
Uprooted Palestinian
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