April 1990, Page 4

Letters To (and From) The Editors

The Israeli Connections

I've just read your interesting article on Mike Harari's involvement in the Panama arms and drugs network. At last we are getting some good reporting on the subject to open American eyes to Israel's surrogate role in their back yard. It is a role which I think is not going to diminish, because Israel will not want to give up such a lucrative market. There will always be other Mike Hararis available to do the job. Recently I was in Honduras and saw in a local newspaper a report, quoting from the Washington Times, that an Israeli C-130 had landed in Panama some six hours before the invasion. All evidence of Israel's links to Noriega were packed up and put on that plane. In other words, they cleared out the files. The Washington Times said they were quoting intelligence sources, but that those sources did not know whether Harari was on board that C- 130 when it left Panama.

I came to be interested in the Panama arms network when I was working on the Khashoggi/Marcos story with a colleague who used to work for a Lebanese newspaper. In the course of our investigations we came across the indictment of a Khashoggi associate, Sam Evans. Evans and several others were charged with trying to sell $2.2 billion in weapons to Iran. The name Richard Brenneke surfaced and then reappeared in Senator Kerry's report in which US officials did their best to discredit Brenneke's testimony on the Harari arms network, for which he apparently worked.

I found your magazine very informative.

Jacqueline Williams, New York, NY

Evidence of a major Israeli role in selling arms and services to drug traffickers, and in the money laundering that completes the triangle, abounds. Like illegally dumped toxic wastes, it oozes to the surface faster than the spin artists can cover it up. A good place to start is with the PBS "Frontline" film "The Covert Connection," produced by Andrew Cockburn and described in this issue's "Media" column. Subscribers wishing to borrow the VHS-video cassette may do so by contacting AET Book Club manager Sally Nyhan and paying postage costs.

Mike Harari and The God Fearing Norwegians

I'm writing to protest some of the language you employed in your recent article on Mike Harari. I will not defend Mr. Harari. The murder of the Moroccan waiter was a hateful act. However, I am not sure that it was any more hateful than the murder of innocents executed by the armies of the other side.

More importantly, your reference to "God-fearing Norway" was ill-considered. Why resort to that type of characterization? Your implications that Israel is not a "God-fearing" place, or that we Americans whose relationship to Israel is one of support are not a "God-fearing" people, are clear.

You were misguided, at best. Norway was an official state collaborator with the Nazi war machine only a bit more than 50 years ago: where do you think the term Quisling came from? Is that something you want to hold up to the present world as an example of a "God-fearing" people?

How would you feel if the Israelis expressed the same level of sanctimony concerning the atrocities committed by PLO forces? How do you suppose the rhetoric of "God-fearing" would play if they used it to evaluate a hijacking, the murder of a wheelchair bound innocent, or the slaughter of schoolchildren? Huh?

No one's interest is served by any petty smear of the sort that you embedded in the end of that article. Let's leave that particular form of rhetoric behind in the search for common ground.

Kenneth R. Donow, Washington, D.C.

To a believer, atrocities committed in the name of God are especially reprehensible, just as to an American, atrocities committed with American-supplied weapons should be especially reprehensible. It's called accountability. It was the basis for the writer's choice of admittedly emotional words. He feels that Americans who do not actively oppose atrocities for which they are even indirectly responsible have no right to call themselves "God-fearing," and desecrate everything America has stood for in the past and, the writer believes, will stand for again.

Let's follow your advice, however, and leave God out of the editor's response to the remainder of your letter. Murder of innocents is hateful, whether by military aircraft, revenge-seeking death squads, or stealthy bomb throwers. In an imperfect world, however, armed struggle against armed oppressors is still the recourse of choice for many people denied freedom of expression and peaceful, democratic means to affect change. Armed struggle that makes no attempt to distinguish between civilians and combatants, however, serves no cause but the one it opposes. Those ruminations, which apply equally to Lieutenant Calley's My Lai massacre, unconscionable actions by such PLO fringe group leaders as George Habash and Mohammad Abul Abbas, the hell on earth created by the Ayatollah Khomeini's merciless disciples in Iran and Lebanon, and the massacres for which Israel's General Ariel Sharon is responsible, are at the root of most editorial decisions in this magazine.

To set the record straight on Norway, Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling was a pre-war Norwegian fascist leader installed as "minister president" by Nazi German authorities after their military occupation of Norway early in World War II. After Norway was liberated by allied forces, Quisling was convicted of treason by the Norwegian government and executed on Oct. 24, 1945. We're old enough to recall that on that day there was no hand-wringing about "Norwegians killing Norwegians" of the kind now directed at Palestinian killing of Palestinians who have revealed the identities of intifada activists to the Israeli military occupiers of their country.

Since you, too, believe in the search for common ground, perhaps we can find it immediately by mutually supporting talks between enemies—the Israeli government and the PLO. Talking to one's enemy is still the best way to secure peace.

Give Credit Where It's Due

My column in last Sunday's San Antonio Express-News was edited for reasons of space and mistakenly describes your editor as writing for Washington Jewish Week, rather than quoting from it.

Should his wife, children and staff be planning to leave him for becoming a columnist for that publication, here is the correction from a subsequent edition.

As a retired Marine (without pension) I am pretty close to being a Quaker. I want peace for Israel within its old boundaries and statehood for the Palestinians. Now with all that "democracy" in Eastern Europe, unfortunate new anti-Jewish feelings may emerge. The time to cut a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians is running out.

Anyway, you are my heroes and readers of the Express-News have been informed that you definitely have not found work at the Washington Jewish Week.

Maury Maverick, Jr., San Antonio, TX

In fact, it's a well-edited and informative newspaper and we'd be delighted to participate in a "Two Views " exchange with it, or another moderate Jewish weekly not afraid to print serious views on both sides of US-Middle East relations, as we do.

The Assyrian Minority

I sincerely hope that you will consider affirmative action on behalf of the plight of Assyrian Christians in the Middle East.

Francis E. Hoyen, Jr., Worcester, MA

We get such requests frequently, often in the form of negative charges aimed at a particular Middle East government and, we suspect, paid for by another. We would be interested in an objective article touching on the historical roots of' the modern-day Assyrians in present-day Turkey, how they came to be disbursed to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Australia and the United States, and their numbers and status in each of those (and other) countries today. If the views presented vary widely, we'll present them in ''Two (or four) Views" format. Any takers?

The Congressional Record

Please use your influence to introduce into the Congressional Record a disclosure of Palestinian genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government and Shamir, using our US taxpayer money totaling four billion dollars annually.

I am a subscriber to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and wish you all success in 1990. God bless you.

Stanley M. Garska, Riverside, CA

Remember that even, one of us who lives outside Washington, DC has one representative and two senators in Congress, and should have some "influence " with them. Anymember of Congress has the power to introduce such statements into the Congressional Record. For any who listen to their constituents instead of the special interest PACs, it's still worth a try.

Kudos for Everyone

My husband and I have read Dr. Shahak's reports with interest. We find they have greatly improved with better translation and nicer presentation. And the cost is certainly reasonable, thanks to the volunteer work.

I would like to comment, while I am on the subject of publications, that the Washington Report keeps improving in a most remarkable way. Everyone who contributes to it, writers, photographers, and staff, deserves high praise for superior performance. We who have lived and worked for years in the Middle East are grateful to you for bringing to the US public the facts about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the role of our government in it. Public awareness over here may be the decisive factor that will bring peace over there—and hopefully before too long.

Margaret Ison, Gordonsville, VA

Thanks for the kind words. The list of paid subscribers for Dr. Shahak's translations From the Hebrew Press is approaching 300 and is growing exponentially. It has been made possible by volunteer Editor George Paduda of McLean, VA, and additional volunteers listed in each edition.

Jabotinsky's Zionism

In his essay "Zionism Is Not Racism If You Understand It," Dr. Ariel Bar-Sela made the following challenge:

"I defy any reader to examine the annals of Zionism and find even one serious Zionist group that can honestly be called 'racist.’"

Please allow me to take up Dr. Bar-Sela's challenge given in the Feb. 1990 issue of the Washington Report.

The present political tendency which has been ruling Israel since 1977 is the Revisionist wing of Zionism whose intellectual mentor and ideological guru is the late Vladimir Jabotinsky. It might surprise some people to learn that the racial views of Jabotinsky and Adolf Hitler were remarkably similar. What follows is a sampling of Jabotinsky's views on race as quoted by Lenni Brenner in The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir: "The source of national feeling ... lies in a man's blood ... in his racio-physical type, and in that alone ... A man's spiritual outlooks are primarily determined by his physical structure ... For that reason we do not believe in spiritual assimilation. " (p. 29)

Now the following Jabotinsky quotation sounds as though it could have been written by Adolf Hitler himself:

"It is inconceivable, from the physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood ... can become adapted to the spiritual outlooks of a German or a Frenchman ... He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish ... The spiritual assimilation of peoples whose blood is different is impossible. . . In order to become truly assimilated he must change his body. He must become one of them in blood." (Ibid.).

Brenner's source is "A Letter on Autonomy" written by Jabotinsky in 1904 which can be found in Israel Among the Nations, edited by Z. Zohar and published by the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem in 1966.

Having examined the "annals" of a Zionist group which certainly can be called I serious" and which happens to be in charge of Israel today, I believe that I have discovered one Zionist group that indeed can honestly be called 'racist.’"

Robert E. Nordlander, Menasha, WI

The Lost Villages

I would like to know how I can obtain the booklet mentioned in your response to Gar Smith (editor of Earth Island Journal), whose letter was published in the March 1990 issue of the Washington Report. The booklet contains, by your description, a list of more than 400 destroyed Palestinian towns and villages.

Thanks very much for your assistance.

Lisa Suhair Majaj, Worcester, MA

Copies, of the booklet were donated to AET by Mr. Hatem al Khalidi, a Palestinian geologist of Saudi Arabia. We will send you a copy at no charge but would appreciate a donation to cover the postage. AET does not endorse the political or religious thrust of the booklet, but respects the research that went into documenting the destroyed settlements.

Soviet Arms Tales

Please send three copies of Stealth PACs to me at the above address.

Does anyone on your staff have information about the Israeli army finding a huge Soviet arms cache (over $2 billion worth) in a caveat Sidon, Lebanon, in June 1982? An article I have says the Soviet Union intended to launch an invasion of Israel on August 1982.

Dolores Lawless, Post Falls, ID

The story is nonsense. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon, they found arms caches belonging to the various Palestinian and Lebanese militias which had been fighting an on-again, off-again civil war since 1975. They invited the press to see and photograph the caches, and exaggerated their size. Since then, Israel has been selling the captured arms all over the world. Not even General Ariel Sharon, who planned and carried out the misguided invasion, has had the chutzpah to claim, however, that the arms were for rather than from the Soviets.