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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Statesman Arafat can't shed
his guerrilla skin
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
April 18, 2002
Since I examined Ariel Sharon's background in a Saturday column, readers say I should do the same with Yasser Arafat.
Fair enough.
Arafat, 73, was a terrorist for at least two decades before he assumed the mantle of statesman. He directed the Palestine Liberation Organization which, between 1968 and 1988, waged a worldwide campaign of terrorism in the misguided hope of destroying international support for Israel and creating sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
Even supporters of that cause -- self-determination for a people displaced by the state of Israel -- conceded that Arafat was fighting a just war by unjust means.
For 20 years, his fedayeen hijacked airliners and in one case a ship, bombed Jewish and non-Jewish targets alike and staged other atrocities such as the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. One recorded telephone conversation proved that Arafat himself gave the "kill" order on two U.S. diplomats seized during an embassy siege in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.
By Israel's count, the PLO was responsible for more than 8,000 terrorist attacks. And 30 Israelis who lost relatives in some of those attacks have lodged murder and genocide charges against Arafat in the same Belgian court where war crimes charges were lodged by Palestinians against Sharon.
Thrown out of Jordan in 1970 and expelled from Lebanon by an Israeli invasion in 1982, Arafat continued to direct terrorist attacks on the Jewish state from Tunisia until 1988. Then, seeing the looming demise of communism and loss of Soviet support, he suddenly switched tack and began advocating peace with Israel.
In a December 1988 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Arafat declared "null and void" the article in the PLO charter that called for the "elimination of Zionism in Palestine" -- although it was never formally removed.
A skeptical Israel waited five years to respond to this overture. It was not until 1993 that the Israeli parliament removed its legal prohibition on contact with the PLO, which led to the Oslo accord and Nobel prizes for those who signed it -- Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
As the democratically elected leader of an autonomous Palestinian Authority widely seen as the precursor to statehood, Arafat found it hard to shed his guerrilla skin.
He ran a corrupt and authoritarian regime that jailed political opponents, failed to provide adequate levels of government service and advanced the fortunes of PLO hacks, widely derided as the "Tunis Mafia," at the expense of more able Palestinian technocrats who had flocked to offer their services to the new administration.
In those early years, the peace process survived continued Israeli settlement building, suicide bombings by Islamic terrorists, a massacre of Palestinians by a Jewish-American settler and Rabin's assassination by an ultra-Orthodox Jew. But Arafat's popularity plummeted, especially when he arrested hundreds of Hamas members to become, in Palestinian eyes, "Israel's policeman."
Many of those militants were released when the peace process began faltering under hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And when it collapsed entirely at the failed Camp David summit, Arafat gave free rein to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and his own Fatah faction.
Still, it remains debatable whether Arafat started the intifada, as Israel claims, or whether he was simply swept up in a popular uprising sparked by Sharon's controversial visit to a Muslim holy site in Jerusalem. Whichever is true, Arafat did not help matters by talking out of both sides of his mouth -- condemning suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians from one side and exhorting Palestinians to jihad and martyrdom from the other.
Sharon, who loathes Arafat, first tried to make him "irrelevant" and now wants to destroy the Palestinian Authority as a "terrorist infrastructure." But this has not stopped terrorism and has made Arafat wildly popular again; his approval rating among Palestinians has shot up from a pre-intifada 30 percent to 80 percent.
The Bush administration is correct in saying that Arafat could do more to stop the violence. But it is ridiculous to expect him to do so while his own security forces are being shot, disarmed or jailed in Israel's current offensive.
And if resistance to occupation is terrorism, then all 3.2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza are part of a "terrorist infrastructure."
Obsessed Sharon applies brutal philosophy
to advance Zionism
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
April 13, 2002
Nicknamed "The Bulldozer," Israel's prime minister is a soldier-politician whose career has been dogged by persistent accusations of war crimes.
What kind of man is Secretary of State Colin Powell trying to persuade to make peace with the Palestinians?
At 74, Ariel Sharon may be the last Israeli leader who fought for the Haganah, politely described as part of the "underground" that helped create the Jewish state in 1948.
Often overlooked is that the Haganah and its offshoots, Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, were once considered terrorist organizations that bombed Arab bus stops, attacked Arab villages and killed quite a few Britons in fighting to end the British Mandate of Palestine.
It should also be noted that two other former prime ministers of Israel, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were leaders of the Irgun and the Stern Gang respectively. Among the atrocities these groups were responsible for was bombing the King David Hotel and massacring 250 Arab villagers in Deir Yassin.
So it can safely be said that some of Israel's earliest patriots were no different from the Palestinians they call terrorists today.
The Haganah, which Sharon joined at 14, formed the nucleus of Israel's new army when the Jewish state came into being. The Israeli Defense Force, as it is called, is now the world's fourth-strongest military machine.
Besides an awesome array of American-supplied weapons, it has the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal outside the five declared nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain -- estimated at up to 2,000 warheads. These include nuclear artillery shells and nuclear-tipped medium-range ballistic missiles (the Jericho 1 and 2).
The man who now controls those nukes has devoted his entire life to Israel's security, and ruthlessly so.
Sharon earned a bloody reputation in the 1950s when he led retaliatory attacks against Jordanian villages accused of harboring Palestinians who mounted cross-border raids on Israel. After the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sharon pursued a hunt for guerrillas that destroyed hundreds of Palestinian homes.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Sharon was held indirectly responsible for a massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel's Christian Phalange allies. Eyewitness accounts by journalists and relief workers in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, including a Dutch doctor and a Jewish American nurse, said Israeli army bulldozers helped dig mass graves for more than 800 dead.
That cost Sharon his job as Israel's defense minister and is the basis of war crimes charges filed by 29 survivors in a Belgian court.
[Quatations from Davar interview omitted due to incorrect attribution. Explanation.]
Twenty years later, Sharon is still applying that brutal philosophy to a captive West Bank. And he is so obsessed with destroying Israel's enemies he won't listen to friends, including the president of the United States.
April 18, 2002
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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