Archived Jewish Ledger Editorials from 2004

Sari Nusseibeh’s guile and Boston’s gullibility

Dec 24, 2004 – On Dec. 10, the Boston chapters of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Boston Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) sponsored Sari Nusseibeh, the Chancellor of Jerusalem’s Al Quds University and member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s inner circle, at a luncheon attended by more than 120 people. The reason for the luncheon as explained by Nancy Kaufman of the JCRC as quoted in Boston’s Jewish Advocate, was to provide “the community with the opportunity to hear from him about his expectations in a post-Arafat era and to challenge him about some of the accusations that have been made against him over the years.”
There is much to say about what Jewish communal organizations should and should not be involved in as there is to say about who Sari Nusseibeh is, but we’ll confine ourselves to one key remark he made during his presentation, which was a focal point of the argument made against his being invited to appear before this audience.
He was asked to explain his remark and he did. But he is on record as having addressed the same topic elsewhere, where he gave a different answer.
For what was said at the meeting we depend on a Jewish Advocate article distributed through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) dated Dec. 20. For the translation of a presentation he made on Al-Jazeera, the Arab broadcaster, we use published reports from MEMRI. MEMRI’s work is used by almost all western media outlets. Their site is readily available and their bonafides easily checked. They are extremely dependable and are meticulous in their translations (www.memri.org). [The Jewish Ledger subscribes to JTA and has contributed to MEMRI, which is a 501(c)(3).]
The incident and statements in question came out of an interview with Sari Nusseibeh on Al-Jazeera television. He appeared on a program with the mother of a suicide bomber who had murdered five teenage Israelis while they studied at a yeshiva.
The mother, Umm Nidal, had just expressed her pride in her son’s act. All accounts agree up to this point and what the mother said is not at issue. Those who objected to Nusseibeh’s appearance said that Nusseibeh then praised the mother. When asked about this at the Boston meeting he replied as follows:
“I wanted to push away from viewer’s minds the emotion of the mother. At that point I said, ëI grieve with mothers, but that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to see whether suicide killings should be supported.’ I wanted to draw the audience into a frame where I could show why I’m right and suicide attacks are wrong.”
MEMRI goes to the tape of the Al-Jazeera broadcast and translates the same conversation as follows:
Referring to Umm Nidal’s pride in and justification of her son’s martyrdom, Professor Nusseibah glorified her, saying: “When I hear the words of Umm Nidal, I recall the [Koranic] verse stating that ëParadise lies under the feet of mothers.’ [1] All respect is due to this mother, it is due to every Palestinian mother and every female Palestinian who is a Jihad fighter on this land. I do not wish to mix political statements and political commentary with the respect every Palestinian feels for every Jihad fighter and for anyone who truly thinks that there is no life under the occupation, except in freedom and dignity.” [2]
In the event one feels that this quote is taken out of context, MEMRI publishes more of that interview on their site and also references other Nusseibeh statements where he addresses the same subject. If what he said previously was what he really felt, it is clear to any reader that he was not forthright in his Boston presentation. Anyone who bothered to do the research on this man beforehand would have found that this was not an isolated incident and that Mr. Nusseibeh plays with the facts loosely on a regular basis.
A correspondent of ours in Israel, David Bedein, sent an associate to hear Nusseibeh at a conference in Herzilya the week after his Dec. 10 presentation in Boston.
The following exchange took place: At the meeting Nusseibeh called on Palestinians to forgo their “right of return” and to eschew “the path of violence.” Bedein’s reporter then asked him after the meeting if what he said to this audience in English was something he would repeat to a Palestinian audience in Arabic. Specifically, would he say the same thing on the Voice of Palestine, the official media outlet of the Palestinian Authority.
His answer: “Yes, I’ve been speakingÖits very well known, my position is very well knownÖYes myÖ myÖ my positionÖmy position among the Palestinians and the Arab world at large is very well known: it is very clear. I write it. My plan is clear. I say what I sayÖ.” And then Nusseibeh broke off the interview and walked away.
It’s a question he should have been asked in Boston too. Before he was invited there.
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Footnote 1: This is not a Koranic verse, but a Hadith (tradition ascribed to Muhammad), about mothers being the highest beings, such that even Paradise is beneath their feet.
Footnote 2: Al-Jazeera television (Qatar), June 29, 2002.

December 21, 1988: Pan Am 103

Dec 24, 2004 – It’s been 16 years since Pan Am Flight 103 crashed into the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing more than 270, including those who died on the ground. In that time the world has become increasingly aware of the role of nation states in sponsoring terror, but is still searching for the way to deal with them in a context like this.
Pan Am 103 wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a chain of events that continues today. Middle Eastern groups, many affiliated with the recently departed Yassir Arafat, had perfected the art of hijacking airliners in the 1980s and 9/11 was merely a more sophisticated variation of that theme. We regarded Pan Am 103 as a shocking event at the time, but many of the players around then are still with us today and have been involved in the terrorist incidents around the world. They’ve succeeded in making their mark on our society and impacting our everyday lives.
Just last week, Mahmoud Abbas, the soon to be coronated head of the nascent “Palestinian” state, visited Damascus not only to gain approval from Syria’s dictator Bashir Assad, but also to pay his respects to Ahmad Jubril, the very same Jubril who was deeply involved in the Pan Am 103 murders. Jubril is considered by some as the architect of the plan and at the very least, the contractor for the bomb that destroyed the plane. In fact, in 1991, Steven Emerson, in an article in the Washington Post, described Jubril’s high-tech bomb-making operation as having targeted a number of planes in this operation and not just Pan Am 103, but an alert German intelligence unit managed to track down the other bombs before they were used. Multiple airliner incidents were on the agenda of terrorists then just as they were in September of 2001.
Aggressive investigation of the destruction of Pan Am 103 pieced together a chain of events that tagged Iran as the paymaster for the killings and Syria as the facilitator for those who planned it. Even so, in a trial finally over with a settlement this year, two low-level Libyans absorbed all of the blame (one was acquitted) for this act of terrorism while Syria and Iran were ignored. Politics trumped justice and the diplomacy of peacemaking drove the process.
In 1991, Secretary of State Jim Baker needed access to Syria’s Hafez Assad so he could try and pry open his hands to accept Israel’s Golan Heights as a peace offering. It didn’t work, except to take Syria out of the Pan Am 103 picture. If the wheels of justice moved slowly during the Bush administration of the early 90s, they stopped completely during the Clinton years. Clinton too was more interested in a possible Rabin-Assad handshake than justice for the murder of 189 Americans.
At the end of the long and painful court case, Libya did a mea culpa of sorts with a monetary settlement clearing the way for Libya to be returned to the family of nations while Syria and Iran no longer needed absolution, never having left it. The events before, after and during Pan Am 103 teach us that when justice is delayed and then denied, a flourish of terrorism can result.

The full story is in the book, ëThe Fall of Pan Am 103,” by Steven Emerson and Brian Duffy, available at www.amazon.com

Is it the same war?

Dec 17, 2004 – In Iraq, seven American soldiers were killed last weekend. The violence seems to be increasing as the election comes closer.
In Gaza, five Israeli soldiers are killed as Israel grapples with the difficult issues surrounding an imminent military and civilian withdrawal from that area.
If getting the Americans out of Iraq and the Israelis out of Gaza were the objectives of the violence against them, then these killings just don’t make sense. What eludes us though is that the killers have other things in mind.
Our soldiers in Iraq were murdered not just because they were working to make elections happen there. That they are trying to turn the country over to the Iraqis and go home doesn’t make much difference at all. They were killed because they are Americans, and the war is against America and the West, and in that sense Iraq is only part of it.
The Israelis killed in Gaza were murdered for a similar reason. They weren’t killed to get them out of Gaza; that’s already going to happen. They weren’t killed because this is about a state for the Palestinians either. They were killed because they were Israelis, and in the eyes of the terrorists and provocateurs who did the killing, they and the state they come from shouldn’t exist.

The UN: Adding injury to insult. Time to leave.

We presented evidence that Saddam accumulated more than $21 billion through abuses of the Oil-for-Food program and U.N. sanctions. We continue to amass evidence that he used the overt support of prominent members of the U.N., such as France and Russia, along with numerous foreign officials, companies and possibly even senior U.N. officials, to exploit the program to his advantage. We have obtained evidence that indicates that Saddam doled out lucrative oil allotments to foreign officials, sympathetic journalists and even one senior U.N. official, in order to undermine international support for sanctions. In addition, we are gathering evidence that Saddam gave hundreds of thousands — maybe even millions — of Oil-for-Food dollars to terrorists and terrorist organizations. All of this occurred under the supposedly vigilant eye of the U.N.
.— Report of Sen. Norman Coleman of Minnesota, Chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

Dec 10, 2004 – The news coming out of the United Nations about arguably the largest financial scandal the world has seen is not going to get better. There’ll be fixes proposed and people removed and all sorts of reforms put in place, but none of it will change the nature of the organization or deter it from repeating its dismal record of failure and corruption. The United Nations is a dysfunctional organization that supports policies that are antithetical to the views of those who fund it. It is antisemitic in the extreme, corrupt in every sense and beyond reform. If the UN were disbanded today, the world would hardly miss it. The lofty principles that gave it life are no longer relevant in the current organization.
Even where it does attempt to do good, it misses the mark. Things like UNICEF cards, health care and feeding programs as well as agricultural improvement projects can and are done just as easily through other venues. Running funds through a UN bureaucracy is not a very good idea nowadays.
The UN refugee aid organization, UNWRA, for example, shows how even with the best motives, the UN can fail: besides not succeeding, it has done great harm. Charged with the care and feeding of Arab refugees in and around Israel, UNWRA prolongs their untenable situation. Long after other displaced populations around the world have been integrated into host countries, UNWRA has for generations perpetuated the refugees’ status by encouraging false hopes and a sense of grievance that only compounds the difficulties of those it serves. Like so many other things the UN touches, a charitable impulse has morphed into an instrument of policy with ongoing negative outcomes for the region and the world.
The UN has an antisemitic focus in most of what it does. Five million Israelis in a world of three billion souls are always on the UN agenda. According to the indefatigable Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute, 30 percent of the resolutions from the UN’s Human Rights agency are denunciations of Israel and the Jewish homeland. A writer of fiction couldn’t come up with a more perverse outcome for an institution that was the last best hope of man and founded in part as an answer to the Holocaust. The resolution of the 70’s that Zionism equals racism was reversed after great effort by the United States, but its spirit lives on today.
A consistent record of failure and the giant Oil-for Food scandal, which has been unearthed by Claudia Rosett of the New York Sun, has opened up this body to a scrutiny that until now was lacking. Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, in his latest book, “Tower of Babble,” studies the UN record in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia and from first hand knowledge explains why the UN couldn’t function well in each place. Gold feels it is scandalous that those who hold the power to judge others are themselves the world’s most egregious violators of their own citizens’ “human, civil and political rights.”
David Frum and Richard Perle, in an LA Times article that preceded the current wave of financial revelations, have a different problem with the United Nations.
“The UN has become an obstacle to our national security because it purports to set legal limits on the United States’ ability to defend itself.” While the UN proscribes force in a number of circumstances, it has no definition for terrorism thereby limiting the response to this kind of aggression. Anything short of an invasion of territory precludes force as an answer.
In Commentary Magazine, Joseph Muravchik reminds us that 30 years ago, then US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan described the body as a “squalid circus” and wondered aloud how long “we could bear to remain a part of it.” No doubt Moynihan today, with all that has transpired since, would be marveling at our continued patience and tenure.
The honor roll for holding the UN accountable is growing and includes a number of courageous and tireless seekers of truth: Claudia Rosett has done the important work in uncovering the Food-for-Oil fraud; Anne Bayefsky delves into the workings of the UN and exposes its meanness of character; Dore Gold adds his first hand experience and unique insights. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) seems destined to pick up the mantle of Daniel Moynihan when it comes to looking objectively at this organization.
No body dominated by countries that don’t abide by the rule of law and deny basic freedoms to their own people should have any sovereignty over ours. A new association of democratic nations would agree on a more positive purpose and be able to effect it because of their shared values.

“A world left to the UN as supreme arbiter would not be the world of law….it would be the opposite: a world of lawlessness. Nor would a United States that had been induced to yield to the superior majesty of the UN be replaced by an equivalent force for good and certainly not by the UN itself…” Joseph Muravchik in Commentary Magazine.

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