Even Terrorists Know the truth

Tuesday April 09, 2002 18:01

by Keith Davies - Fair Reporting

Some commentary from investigative journalism on charges of Israeli attrocities

The Arab media is filled with false stories of brutal Israeli army behavior against Arabs and PLO leader Yasser Arafat has called for international protection from the Israeli “genocide.” Again and again, and it barely matters which party is in power, Israeli leaders are shown in the Arab media as being thirsty for blood, particularly that of Arab children. The following quotes are representative of the type of reporting that can regularly be found in the Arab and pro-Arab media:

* “…playmates killed by a booby-trapped bomb planted on the path to their school by the child-killing Israeli army…”

* “…the Israeli army sprayed machine gun fire at a crowd of Arab children.”

* “Israeli occupation troops are carrying out random acts of killings of Palestinian citizens ...”

* Unfortunately, it is not only the Arabic media that repeats such libels against the Jewish State. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz included the following ‘analysis’ by Gideon Levy: Israel “places explosive charges where children are likely to pass and then claims that only the other side practices terrorism?”

* Then there is the recent, well-publicized, though not unusual, case of a Saudi newspaper publishing a truly medieval blood libel against the Jews. The article accused Jews of using the blood of non-Jewish youth for traditional holiday foods.

The accusations certainly are insidiously horrendous. Yet, sometimes, the truth about the actual character of the Jewish army comes from the mouth of the worst of Israel’s enemies. It is just such enemies that much of the Israeli media, for some inexplicable reason, seeks out for interviews. While in most cases such interviews serve as a forum for the terrorist leader du jour to make further outlandish accusations against the Jews, sometimes, inadvertently to be sure, the cause of truth is served, even if only for a moment.

Such was the case when Nachum Barnea, a columnist for the major daily Yediot Aharonot, went to Ramallah to interview H’seyn a-Sheikh, the regional commander of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization. A-Sheikh, along with Marwan Bargouti, is responsible for the recent series of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, but, nonetheless, Barnea wanted to hear if the man had anything interesting to say. As it turns out, he did.

During the interview, a-Sheikh said that he was not there when Israeli troops recently came to his Ramallah home in search of him. However, a-Sheikh’s children were there, no doubt terrified after being fed a steady diet of horror stories about the evil Jews by the PA media and school system. A-Sheikh was with Fatah gunmen at the time, he told Barnea, but he immediately called his family. He even told the Israeli journalist what he said to them in that phone call.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Fatah leader told his children, “the soldiers won’t do a thing to you.”

That must have thoroughly confused the poor tykes, primed as they were by Arafat’s television and radio for “martyrdom” at the hands of “the child-killing Israeli army.”

In one sentence, in his own words, H’seyn a-Sheikh admitted what all Arab propagandists know to be true: the Israeli army maintains moral standards far higher than their Arab enemies. PLO leaders, such as a-Sheikh, have intentionally targeted schools, children playing outside, teenagers at birthday parties and babies in their strollers. Then, when the news of such attacks reached the Arab cities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the streets became filled with people celebrating the massacres. Yet, in the case of Jewish soldiers, a terrorist leader can confidently tell his children, “Don’t be afraid, the soldiers won’t do a thing to you.”

The a-Sheikh interview brings to mind the assassination of PLO leader Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) in 1988. Al-Wazir was Yasser Arafat´s closest aide, the second-in-command of Fatah at the time and one of the men behind the massacre of eleven Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. He was with his wife in their Tunis home, when unidentified gunmen entered and shot him dead. Israel never officially took credit for the assassination of Abu Jihad and there were enough inter-Arab rivalries to suspect that other terrorist factions may have carried out the deed. Yet, the PLO always insisted that it had to be the Israelis. We can only guess what made them so absolutely sure.

By the way, Intissar al-Wazir, widow of the slain Abu Jihad, was left unharmed by the assassins and is now a minister in the Palestinian Authority