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Jewish World Review Oct. 7, 2008 / 8 Tishrei 5769 The ironies of the West's collusion with the Arabs and Iran By Caroline B. Glick
At the time of the bombing, Cossiga was Italy's prime minister. Right after
it occurred, he blamed the atrocity on neo-fascists. In his words at the
time, "Unlike leftist terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state
through its representatives, black terrorism prefers the massacre because it
promotes panic and impulsive reactions."
In August, he claimed that it was the work of the PFLP and asserted that the
bomb exploded inadvertently. That is, the Palestinians hadn't meant to kill
non-Jews - so Italian authorities protected them.
On Friday, Cossiga expanded on his disclosures to Corriere della Serra in
an interview with Yediot Aharonot's Rome correspondent Menachem Ganz.
Cossiga admitted that it wasn't just Israeli targets that Italy permitted
the Palestinians to attack with impunity, but Jewish targets as well.
Indeed, in at least one and probably two incidents, the Italians colluded
with the Palestinians in their attacks against Jews. On October 9, 1982, six
terrorists opened fire on worshippers leaving Rome's Great Synagogue. Dozens
of Jews were wounded and two-year-old Stefano Tache was murdered. Hours
before the attack the Italian police detail charged with securing the
synagogue was withdrawn.
Then too, in December 1985, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the El Al
ticket counter at the Rome airport. Ten people were killed. Another seven
people were murdered in a simultaneous attack against the El Al ticket
counter at the Vienna airport. According to Cossiga, Italian intelligence
agencies received prior warning of the attack but didn't bother to share the
information with Israel.
Cossiga explained to Yediot, "No Italian targets were hit. They attacked
the Israeli airline at the airport. The murdered were all Israelis, Jews,
and Americans."
Then there was the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off
the Egyptian coast in October 1985. Palestinian terrorists led by Abu Abbas
commandeered the ship. They shot wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger
Leon Klinghoffer and threw him overboard while he was still alive. The
Egyptians freed the hijackers and sent them off on a flight to Libya.
American jets forced a plane to land at a NATO base in Sicily. The Italians
refused to permit the Americans to take the hijackers into custody and freed
Abbas. The Italians cast the standoff as a victory against American bullies.
But it really amounted to a surrender to Palestinian murderers. As Cossiga
explained, "Since the Arabs were capable of harming Italy more than the
Americans, Italy surrendered to them."
COSSIGA ALLEGES that his country's agreement with the Palestinians has
recently been expanded to include Hizbullah. After the Second Lebanon War,
Italy agreed to command the UNIFIL force charged with preventing Hizbullah
from reasserting control over southern Lebanon and blocking its re-armament
efforts. Yet Cossiga asserts, "I can state with absolute certainty that…
Italy has a deal with Hizbullah according to which UNIFIL forces turn a
blind eye to Hizbullah's rearmament so long as no attacks are carried out
against soldiers in the force."
Ganz notes ruefully that although Cossiga's statements provoked the Italian
Jewish community to demand that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi investigate
the government's collusion with Palestinian terrorists, no such
investigation is likely to be forthcoming. Ganz explains that Berlusconi
himself is not immune to the anti-Semitism that caused his predecessors to
abstain from protecting Italy's Jewish citizens. When he addresses Italian
Jews, Berlusconi often calls the Israeli government "your government," and
so exposes his adherence to the view that Jews are not true citizens of any
country other than Israel.
The anti-Semitic belief that all Jews are Zionists and therefore all Jews
are fair game in the war against Israel - itself simply another round of the
age-old war against the Jews - allows anti-Semites to obfuscate the fact
that their anti-Israel rhetoric is simply warmed over Jew-hatred. People
like Iranian leaders Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and Palestinian
terrorists from the PLO and their progeny in Hamas and Hizbullah nearly
always limit their threats to "Zionists," and so pretend that they aren't
actually anti-Semites.
Their razor-thin deception is eagerly embraced by their fellow travelers in
the West - from university professors like Juan Cole, Steven Walt and John
Mearshimer, to policymakers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to
Western decision-makers and European heads of state, and an alarming number
of American politicians.
This deception is par for the course of anti-Semitism. Throughout history
anti-Semites have used Jew-hatred as a way to rally their troops. By
attacking Jews as the collective enemy, tyrants have given their people a
convenient, weak culprit to attack to deflect criticism away from their own
failures or to hide real enemies from pacifistic publics uninterested in
fighting. Anti-Semitism appeals to people's basest instinct. But people
don't like to acknowledge how much they hate Jews, and Jews have always
preferred to deny that they are hated.
So anti-Semitic leaders have disguised their appeal to base instinct by
pretending that they are actually appealing to sublime aspirations. In the
case of the Nazis for instance, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels appealed to
Germanic pride and love for the Fatherland. Today, the Left appeals to
people's aspirations for peace and justice. It is only by permitting and
indeed enabling Jews to die and the Jewish state to be destroyed that
"peace" can be secured and the Palestinians can receive "justice."
THIS STRATEGY appeals to European - and to greater and lesser degrees
American - policymakers for two reasons. First, as French Foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner made clear in an interview with Ha'aretz on Friday, while
the West understands that Islamic jihadists seek the destruction of Europe
and the US, they believe - in part because their own anti-Semitism leads
them to exaggerate Jewish power - that they will get away with coddling the
Arabs and Iran because Israel will protect them.
Referring to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Kouchner said that no one is
particularly worried about Iran's nuclear threat because everyone believes
that Israel will attack Iran for them. In his words, "I honestly don't
believe that [a nuclear arsenal] will give any immunity to Iran. First, you
[Israel] will hit them before [they acquire nuclear weapons]… Because Israel
has always said that it will not wait for the bomb to be ready. I think that
they [the Iranians] know. Everybody knows."
What is ironic about this view is that it exposes the inversion of
anti-Semitic rhetoric. Five years ago, former Malaysian prime minister
Mahathir Mohamed told an approving audience of Islamic heads of state, "The
Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
But the West's belief that Israel will protect it from Iran shows that the
opposite is true. The West is absolutely certain that Israel is its proxy,
and that Jews will fight and die protecting it from the forces of global
terror and jihad.
THE SECOND reason the Western champions of "peace" have opted to sell Israel
and the Jews out to the jihadists is because as anti-Semites, Western
"anti-Zionists" fear Jewish power and therefore want us to be weak. So it is
that for the past 40 years, European governments and the US State Department
have bankrolled anti-Zionist groups in Israel like Peace Now, B'tselem and
Four Mothers. So it is that they have blamed Israel for Palestinian
terrorism. And even when Israel succumbs to all their demands for
territorial withdrawals, they always manage to demand still more.
In the same interview with Ha'aretz for instance, Kouchner on the one hand
praised Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for
their willingness to surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the
Palestinians, but argued that this is still not enough. Israel must also
accept the free immigration of the hostile descendants of the Arabs who left
Israel in 1948. That is, Israel must also agree to its own destruction in
order to pave the way for "peace." In his words, "The main problem is the
refugees and Jerusalem, but more the refugees. Olmert and Livni do not have
the perception of this."
Kouchner for one is certain that Livni will come around to recognizing the
need to allow hostile foreign-born Arabs to move here. "I think she will
change. This is always the case for people that are in charge for politics
and for life," he claimed.
Kouchner soothed the reporters' fears of national destruction by claiming
that he's probably not talking about more than 100,000 hostile Arabs
immigrants. But that's today.
If Livni does form a government and comes around to this view, leave it to
the West to explain that placing "arbitrary" limits on Arab immigration is a
human rights abuse, and that Israel's Zionist racism is compelling the Arabs
and Iran to kill Jews and Westerners around the world.
AND THIS brings us to perhaps the greatest irony of the West's collusion
with the Arabs and Iran in their war against the Jews. The logical outcome
of the twin delusions of anti-Semitism - that Jews are all powerful and that
the Jews must be cut down to size - is the destruction of Israel. And if
that happens, the West will find itself in jaws of the Islamic jihadists
they have been feeding the Jews to for four decades.
The West's subversion of the Israeli elite has fomented a situation where
many Israeli leaders have embraced their anti-Semitic views of Israel.
Leaders like Livni and Olmert, and the media and academia in Israel, have
largely accepted the notion that Israel is to blame for the global jihad.
Today these leaders uphold Jewish weakness as an ideal. The longer these
Western-supported elites remain in power, the larger the chance that Israel
won't attack Iran and that Israel will allow itself to be destroyed in the
interest of pursuing "peace" with Palestinian terrorists.
And if Israel is destroyed, the West won't be able to depend on us Jews to
fight and die for them anymore. They will be all alone.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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