Terrorism, Theirs & Ours by Late. Eqbal Ahmad (1933/34 - 1999)

WASHINGTON — After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August. A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier. What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden on Sunday and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts. American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him. REFERENCE: Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden By MARK MAZZETTI and HELENE COOPER Published: May 2, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/02reconstruct-capture-osama-bin-laden.html 

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described as “TERRORIST.” Then new things happened. By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as “freedom fighters.” At least two Israeli Prime Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the books and posters with their pictures, saying “Terrorists, Reward This Much.” The highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist. Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, William Safire of the New York Times, as the “Chief of Terrorism.” That’s Yasir Arafat. Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netan­yahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and Arafat is looking literally like a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he used to appear with this very menacing look around him, with a gun appearing menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you remember the next one. REFERENCE: TERRORISM: THEIRS AND OURS By Eqbal Ahmad (A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998) Courtesy: University of Colorado http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm 

Eqbal Ahmad -Terrorism, Theirs & Ours- Pt 1.

Courtesy: dyollnagrom's Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/dyollnagrom More in: In part one, Eqbal Ahmad examines the terms "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" as they are used in American politics. In part two, David Barsamian interviews Ahmad upon his return from Afghanistan where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours Eqbal Ahmad (Author), David Barsamian (Author) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583224904/bitsonline-20

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These bearded men I was writing about in those days in The New Yorker, actually did. They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans looking like they came from another century. President Reagan received them in the White House. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed towards them, I’m sure some of you will recall that moment, and said, “These are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers”. These were the Afghan Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil Empire. They were the moral equivalent of our founding fathers! REFERENCE: TERRORISM: THEIRS AND OURS By Eqbal Ahmad (A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998) Courtesy: University of Colorado http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm 

Eqbal Ahmad -Terrorism, Theirs & Ours- Pt 2.

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More in: In part one, Eqbal Ahmad examines the terms "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" as they are used in American politics. In part two, David Barsamian interviews Ahmad upon his return from Afghanistan where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours Eqbal Ahmad (Author), David Barsamian (Author) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583224904/bitsonline-20

In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from the American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin Laden and his men in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to embarrass you with the reminder that Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired to hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got angry over the fact that he has been demoted from ‘Moral Equivalent’ of your ‘Founding Fathers’. So he is taking out his anger in different ways. I’ll come back to that subject more seriously in a moment.

You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you that the matter of terrorism is rather complicated. Terrorists change. The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of the constantly changing world of images in which we have to keep our heads straight to know what is terrorism and what is not. But more importantly, to know what causes it, and how to stop it.

The next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be consistent, you’re not going to define. I have examined at least twenty official documents on terrorism. Not one defines the word. All of them explain it, express it emotively, polemically, to arouse our emotions rather than exercise our intelligence. I give you only one example, which is representative. October 25, 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of State of the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park Avenue Synagogue. It’s a long speech on terrorism. In the State Department Bulletin of seven single-spaced pages, there is not a single definition of terrorism. What we get is the following:

Definition number one: “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call terrorism.”

Definition number two is even more brilliant: “Terrorism is a form of political violence.” Aren’t you surprised? It is a form of political violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of the U.S.

Number three: “Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization.”

Number four: “Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values.”

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More in: In part one, Eqbal Ahmad examines the terms "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" as they are used in American politics. In part two, David Barsamian interviews Ahmad upon his return from Afghanistan where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours Eqbal Ahmad (Author), David Barsamian (Author) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583224904/bitsonline-20

Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your emotions? This is typical. They don’t define terrorism because definitions involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of consistency. That’s the second characteristic of the official literature on terrorism.

The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not prevent officials from being globalistic. We may not define terrorism, but it is a menace to the moral values of Western civilization. It is a menace also to mankind. It’s a menace to good order. Therefore, you must stamp it out worldwide. Our reach has to be global. You need a global reach to kill it. Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be global. Same speech of George Shultz: “There is no question about our ability to use force where and when it is needed to counter terrorism.” There is no geographical limit. On a single day the missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are 2,300 miles apart, and they were hit by missiles belonging to a country roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.

A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are also omniscient. We know where they are; therefore we know where to hit. We have the means to know. We have the instruments of knowledge. We are omniscient. Shultz: “We know the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters, and as we look around, we have no trouble telling one from the other.”

Only Osama Bin Laden doesn’t know that he was an ally one day and an enemy another. That’s very confusing for Osama Bin Laden. I’ll come back to his story towards the end. It’s a real story.

Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don’t look at causes of anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What cause? They ask us to be looking, to be sympathetic to these people.

Another example. The New York Times, December 18, 1985, reported that the foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you remember the days when there was a Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of State of the U.S. to consider the causes of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State, George Shultz, and I am quoting from the New York Times, “went a bit red in the face. He pounded the table and told the visiting foreign minister, there is no connection with any cause. Period.” Why look for causes? Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are officially disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials do approve. Hence, President Reagan, “I am a contra.” He actually said that. We know the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by any definition, but terrorists. The media, to move away from the officials, heed the dominant view of terrorism. The dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more importantly to me, the terror of friendly governments. To that question I will return because it excused among others the terror of Pinochet (who killed one of my closest friends) and Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia ul-Haq, who killed many of my friends in Pakistan. All I want to tell you is that according to my ignorant calculations, the ratio of people killed by the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pino­chet, Argentinian, Brazilian, Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That’s the ratio. REFERENCE: TERRORISM: THEIRS AND OURS By Eqbal Ahmad (A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998) Courtesy: University of Colorado http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm 

Eqbal Ahmad -Terrorism, Theirs & Ours- Pt 4.

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More in: In part one, Eqbal Ahmad examines the terms "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" as they are used in American politics. In part two, David Barsamian interviews Ahmad upon his return from Afghanistan where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours Eqbal Ahmad (Author), David Barsamian (Author) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583224904/bitsonline-20

History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not to weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically to dominant groups. In our time, the time that began with this day, Columbus Day.

The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary unrecorded holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian Indians were all wiped out. Their voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now they are beginning to be heard, but not fully. They are heard, yes, but only when the dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a semblance of costing, of exacting a price. When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is besieged. That’s when you know that they were Indians fighting, Arabs fighting and dying.

My last point of this section – U.S. policy in the Cold War period has sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds of tyrants have been America’s friends. You know that. There was a reason for that. I or you are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.

Now the second side. You’ve suffered enough. So suffer more.

There ain’t much good on the other side either. You shouldn’t imagine that I have come to praise the other side. But keep the balance in mind. Keep the imbalance in mind and first ask ourselves, What is terrorism?

Our first job should be to define the damn thing, name it, give it a description of some kind, other than “moral equivalent of founding fathers” or “a moral outrage to Western civilization”. I will stay with you with Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “Terror is an intense, overpowering fear.” He uses terrorizing, terrorism, “the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.” This simple definition has one great virtue, that of fairness. It’s fair. It focuses on the use of coercive violence, violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is correct because it treats terror for what it is, whether the government or private people commit it.

Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We’re not talking about whether the cause is just or unjust. We’re talking about consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality, constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference.

I have identified in my work five types of terrorism.

First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism inspired by religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can call it if you wish. State, church. Crime. Mafia. All kinds of crimes commit terror. There is pathology. You’re pathological. You’re sick. You want the attention of the whole world. You’ve got to kill a president. You will. You terrorize. You hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private group; be they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade. Political terror of the private group. Oppositional terror.

Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these five can converge on each other. You start with protest terror. You go crazy. You become pathological. You continue. They converge. State terror can take the form of private terror. For example, we’re all familiar with the death squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government has employed private people to kill its opponents. It’s not quite official. It’s privatized. Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and becomes pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In Afghanistan, in Central America, the CIA employed in its covert operations drug pushers. Drugs and guns often go together. Smuggling of all things often go together.

Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property [Political Terror of those who want to be heard]. The highest cost is state terror. The second highest cost is religious terror, although in the twentieth century religious terror has, relatively speaking, declined. If you are looking historically, massive costs. The next highest cost is crime. Next highest, pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian Jenkins, for a ten-year period up to 1988, showed 50% of terror was committed without any political cause at all. No politics. Simply crime and pathology.

So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin Laden, whoever you want to take. Why do they do it? What makes the terrorist tick?

I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be heard. Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group, the political, private terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there are exceptions, there is an effort to be heard, to get your grievances heard by people. They’re not hearing it. A minority acts. The majority applauds.

The Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in the world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told that they became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away - an Arab radio, which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they invented a new form of terror, literally their invention: the airplane hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up by its ears. They dragged us out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still haven’t done them justice, but at least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, saying in 1970, ‘There are no Palestinians.’ They do not exist. They damn well exist now. We are cheating them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat now. We can’t just push them out. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.

Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are angry. You are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to wreak retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known to become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That’s what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror.

Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large Jews were not known to commit terror except during and after the Holocaust. Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst terrorist groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered people. They become very violent. The ghettos are violent internally. They become violent externally when there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can say, ‘Yes, this one did it to me’. Then they can strike back.

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological groups or individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are examples set by governments. When governments engage in terror, they set very large examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other sets of examples.

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism. Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of you who are familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the disputes, the quarrels, the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight between anarchists and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have always argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be sociologically and psychologically selective. Don’t hijack a plane. Don’t hold hostages. Don’t kill children, for God’s sake. Have you recalled also that the great revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the Cuban, never engaged in hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in terrorism, but it was highly selective, highly sociological, still deplorable, but there was an organized, highly limited, selective character to it. So absence of revolutionary ideology that begins more or less in the post-World War II period has been central to this phenomenon.

My final question is - These conditions have existed for a long time. But why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much of it and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can communicate it through radio and television. They will all come swarming if you have taken an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They will all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can shoot a mile away. They can’t reach you. And you have the modern means of communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of coercion and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new kind of politics becomes possible.

To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been responding with traditional methods. The traditional method of shooting it out, whether it’s missiles or some other means. The Israelis are very proud of it. The Americans are very proud of it. The French became very proud of it. Now the Pakistanis are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say, ‘Our commandos are the best.’ Frankly, it won’t work. A central problem of our time, political minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing new realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America?

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you’re going to practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don’t use it. Don’t condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn’t work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity warfare. These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred there. The structure of covert operations, I’ve made a film about it, which has been very popular in Europe, called Dealing with the Demon. I have shown that wherever covert operations have been, there has been the central drug problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade. Because the structure of covert operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central America, is very hospitable to drug trade. Avoid it. Give it up. It doesn’t help.

Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at causes and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works.

Take the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don’t know what you’re attacking. They say they know, but they don’t know. They were trying to kill Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old daughter. The poor baby hadn’t done anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein. They killed Laila Bin Attar, a prominent artist, an innocent woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden and his men. Not one but twenty-five other people died. They tried to destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now they are admitting that they destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the production of medicine in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory. You don’t know. You think you know.

Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were totally damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the American government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan is trying, stupidly, to build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology embargo on my country. One of the missiles was intact. What do you think a Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was a gift from Allah. We wanted U.S. technology. Now we have got the technology, and our scientists are examining this missile very carefully. It fell into the wrong hands. So don’t do that. Look for political solutions. Do not look for military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve.

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law. There was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn’t they go to it first to get their warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a warrant, then go after him. Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the International Court of Justice, this unilateralism makes us look very stupid and them relatively smaller.

Q&A

The question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into the story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and didn’t do so, could I go into some detail? The point about Bin Laden would be roughly the same as the point between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City. The New Yorker did a long story on him. It’s the same as that of Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents. Let me see if I can be very short on this. Jihad, which has been translated a thousand times as “holy war,” is not quite just that. Jihad is an Arabic word that means, “to struggle.” It could be struggle by violence or struggle by non-violent means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the big jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves the struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I mention it is that in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism.

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to him and said, ‘Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?’ By here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, ‘You must meet Osama.’ I went to see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment. In 1990 the U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place of Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet. Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the kaba (the sacred site of Islam in Mecca), foreign troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have stayed on. Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I was saying earlier about covert operations? A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn’t matter. Their code of ethics is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty and revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You break your word, I go on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has betrayed you. They’re going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more. These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This is why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price attached to those that the American people cannot calculate and Kissinger type of people do not know, don’t have the history to know. REFERENCE: TERRORISM: THEIRS AND OURS By Eqbal Ahmad (A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998) Courtesy: University of Colorado http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm 

Eqbal Ahmad -Terrorism, Theirs & Ours- Pt 5.

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More in: In part one, Eqbal Ahmad examines the terms "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" as they are used in American politics. In part two, David Barsamian interviews Ahmad upon his return from Afghanistan where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours Eqbal Ahmad (Author), David Barsamian (Author) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583224904/bitsonline-20

Eqbal Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in Bihar, India in 1933 or 1934. A few years later, his father was murdered over a land dispute, while the young Eqbal lay beside him. During the partition of India in 1947, he and his elder brothers migrated to Pakistan. Ahmad graduated from Foreman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1951 with a degree in economics. After serving briefly as an army officer, he enrolled at Occidental College in California as a Rotary Fellow in American History in 1957. From 1958 to 1960, he studied political science and middle eastern history at Princeton, later earning his Ph.D.

From 1960 to 1963, Ahmad lived in North Africa, working primarily in Algeria, where he joined the National Liberation Front and worked with Frantz Fanon. He was a member of the Algerian delegation to peace talks at Evian. When he returned to the United States, Ahmad taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964 - 1965) and Cornell University in the school of Labour Relations (1965 - 1968). During these years, he became known as "one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia". In 1969, he married the teacher and writer Julie Diamond. From 1968 to 1972, he was a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago. In 1971, Ahmad was indicted with the anti-war Catholic priests, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, along with four other Catholic pacifists, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. After fifty-nine hours of deliberations, the jury declared a mistrial. From 1972 to 1982, Ahmad was Senior Fellow at the Institution for Policy Studies. From 1973 to 1975, he served as the first director of its overseas affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 1982, Ahmad joined the faculty at Hampshire College, in Amherst Massachusetts, where he taught world politics and political science.

In the early 1990's he was granted a parcel of land in Pakistan by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's government to build an independent, alternative university, named Khaldunia. The land was later seized by Bhutto's husband, Asif Zardari, reportedly to build a golf course and club. A prolific writer and journalist, Eqbal was widely consulted by revolutionaries, journalists, activist leaders and policymakers around the world. He was an editor of the journal Race and Class, contributing editor of Middle East Report and L'Economiste du Tiers Monde, co-founder of Pakistan Forum, and an editorial board member of Arab Studies Quarterly. Ahmad was "that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority, a companion in arms to such diverse figures as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fred Jameson, Alexander Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan." Upon his retirement from Hampshire in 1997, he settled permanently in Pakistan, where he continued to write a weekly column, for Dawn, Pakistan's oldest English language newspaper. Eqbal died in Islamabad on May 11, 1999, of heart failure following surgery for colon cancer, diagnosed just one week before. Reference: Biography: http://www.bitsonline.net/eqbal/biography.asp 

Nobel Prize, CJ Iftikhar Chaudhary & Menachem Begin

Iftikhar nominated for Nobel Prize By our correspondent Tuesday, October 07, 2008 Karachi

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=139631&Cat=4&dt=10/12/2008

"Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry has been nominated for the Nobel Prize", said SCBA President, Aitzaz Ahsan, which, he added, was a great honour not only for him but for the entire country.

====================================================

Lets not make Nobel Prize a Criteria to Honour Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary because the NOBEL PRIZE MAFIA had also awarded Nobel Prize to a known Butcher i.e. Notorious Zionist Terrorist i.e. Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel in 1978. I wonder if anybody in Pakistan even know about the Massacre at Deir Yassin - Palestine in 1948 [read the quote of Einstein published in The New York Times below agaisnt this massacre]? The massacre [OF UNARMED NON-COMBATANTS PALESTINIANS OLD MEN, CHILDREN AND WOMEN] was planned and conducted by Menachem Begin.

Lets have a quick look at the Criteria The Norwegian Nobel Committee had set to award Nobel Prize of Peace to a Butcher of Innocent Men, Women and Children:

"QUOTE"

The Irgun: Palestine 1931-48

[1931] Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) was founded in Jerusalem; led by Avraham Tehomi, it advocated armed Jewish insurrection against British rule and war against Palestinian Arabs.

[1943] Menachem Begin became leader of the Israeli terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), which was engaged in a campaign against the British in Palestine.

[1946] King David Hotel bombing (July 22): Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorists, commanded by Menachem Begin, bombed the British office wing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel, killing 91 people, 17 of them Jews. Among other Irgun terrorist actions was the bombing of the British Embassy in Rome.

Later Menachem Begin won Nobel Peace Prize.

It was 48 years ago, on Jan. 4, 1948, when Jewish terrorists drove a truck loaded with explosives into the center of the all-Arab city of Jaffa and detonated it, killing 26 and wounding around 100 Palestinian men, women and children.1 The attack was the work of the Irgun Zvai Leumi—the "National Military Organization," also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel—the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine. The Irgun was headed by Revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin and had been killing and maiming Arabs, Britons and even Jews for the previous 10 years in its efforts to establish a Jewish state. This terror campaign meant that at the core of Revisionist Zionism there existed a philosophical embrace of violence. It was this legacy of violence that contributed to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995.

The Irgun was not the only Jewish terrorist group but it was the most active in causing indiscriminate terror in pre-Israel Palestine. Up to the time of the Jaffa attack, its most spectacular feat had been the July 22, 1946 blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with the killing of 91 people—41 Arabs, 28 Britons and 17 Jews. The other major Jewish terrorist group operating in Palestine in the 1940s was the Lohamei Herut Israel , "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel," Lehi in the Hebrew acronym, also known as the Stern Gang after its fanatical founder Avraham Stern. Two of its more spectacular outrages included the assassination of British Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne in Cairo on Nov. 6, 1944, and the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden in Jerusalem on Sept. 17, 1948. Both groups collaborated in the massacre at Deir Yassin, in which some 254 Palestinian men, women and children were slain on April 9, 1948. Palestinian survivors were driven like ancient slaves through the streets of Jerusalem by the celebrating terrorists.

Yitzhak Shamir was one of the three leaders of Lehi who made the decision to assassinate Moyne and Bernadotte. Both he and Begin later became prime ministers and ruled Israel for a total of 13 years between 1977 and 1992. They were both leaders of Revisionist Zionism, that messianic group of ultranationalists founded by Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky in the 1920s. He prophesied that it would take an "iron wall of Jewish bayonets" to gain a homeland among the Arabs in Palestine.5 His followers took his slogan literally. Begin and the Revisionists were heartily hated by the mainline Zionists led by David Ben-Gurion. He routinely referred to Begin as a Nazi and compared him to Hitler. In a famous letter to The New York Times in 1948, Albert Einstein called the Irgun "a terrorist, rightwing, chauvinist organization" that stood for "ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority."6 He opposed Begin's visit to the United States in 1949 because Begin and his movement amounted to "a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a 'leader state' is the goal," adding:

Mohammed Tareq Al-Khadra, who has been a direct witness to much of the brutal hatred exhibited by the Zionist supremacists, describes this in the book "Zionist Massacres ... Committed Against the Palestinian Arab People in the 20th Century." He writes,

"Terrorism is considered the main pillar on which the Zionist movement rested for occupying Palestine. Since the 1930s, the Zionist invaders considered that Palestine should be emptied of its indigenous population, the Palestinian Arabs, so that they can establish their artificial entity on the land of Palestine without instances of future obstacles. ... The series of massacres in Palestine did not cease with the creation of the Zionist entity. It, rather, increased in violence and brutality. During that time, the Zionist occupiers perpetrated many grisly massacres against our people, rendering homeless hundreds of thousands of them."

This book then documents literally hundreds of such massacres committed by the Zionist hatemongers. "Al-Quds Massacre--29 December 1947. The Irgun terrorist gang threw a barrel full of explosives near Bal Al-Amood in Jerusalem, killing 14 Arabs and injuring 27.... Al Quds Massacre--30 December 1947. The Irgun terrorist gang hurled a bomb from a fast moving car, killing 11 Arabs.... Balad El-Sheikh Massacre--31 December 1947 to 1 January 1948. On New Year's Eve, a joint force composed of the First Battalion of the Palmach and of the Carmeli Brigade led by Chaim Avinoam attacked the village, killing 60 Arabs.... Jaffa Massacre--4 January 1948. Stern Zionist gang threw a bomb at a crowded square in Jaffa, killing 15 and injuring 98.... The Massacre of the 'Old Government House' in Jaffa. On 4 January 1948, the Irgun Zionist gang placed a car filled with explosives adjacent to the Old Government House. The blast destroyed the building and everyone in its vicinity. Thirty Arab! s were murdered, others injured...."

The list goes on. Later, it becomes like a diary of who died in unchecked Zionist atrocities. One day after another, it lists many of those who have been murdered, hundreds upon hundreds of such incidents. Take the date 15 November 2000, for instance:

Terrorism and the origins of Israel—Part 1 By Jean Shaoul 21 June 2003 The Stern Group

The Lehi

As the war drew to a close, Stern’s followers, including Shamir on his release from jail, regrouped as the Lehi with similar aims, including Stern’s “Eighteen Principles of National Renewal” that proclaimed a Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates. They adopted the methods of the IRA in its struggles against the British. Shamir even used Michael as his nom de guerre, after Michael Collins. The now embarrassing Nazi-fascist affiliation was dropped in favour of Britain’s latest enemy, the Soviet Union, although some advocated an alliance with the Arab national liberation movements that opposed the stooge regimes imposed by British imperialism.

Lehi denounced the Labour Zionists and the mainstream Revisionist movement for relying upon negotiations with the British. As far as Lehi was concerned, the British were the Gestapo and the Labour Zionists were akin to Vichy Europe, and Lehi were the resistance. Asked if it was possible to achieve national liberation through terrorism, Lehi’s response was, “The answer is no! If the question is, are terrorist activities useful for the progress of revolution and liberation, the answer is yes.”

Lehi’s most notorious action was the assassination of Lord Moyne, the British military commander in Egypt in 1944.

According to Shindler, a fellow in Israeli Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and author of The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, Lehi copied the methods of the IRA. Between September 1942 and July 1946, when Shamir was arrested and exiled to Eritrea, there were seven assassination attempts on the life of the British High Commissioner in Palestine and several more were planned, including Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary and members of British intelligence forces. It was Shamir who planned the assassination of Lord Moyne. Lehi also carried out 14 assassination attempts against Jews who worked or were believed to work for British intelligence. It was not averse to killing its own members if the need arose.

While Lehi was by far the smallest of the Zionist terrorist groups, the Stern/Lehi group carried out 71 percent of all political assassinations between 1940 and 1948. Nearly half of these were against fellow Jews.

The Irgun

In contrast to the Stern/Lehi group, the Irgun only took up the armed struggle against the British when the defeat of Germany became imminent. At the end of 1942, Menachem Begin returned to Palestine after his release from a Soviet labour camp in Poland. He took over as the military commander of the Irgun and led the armed struggle—the Revolt—to get rid of the British.

But the Irgun’s activities had nothing in common with a revolutionary struggle to overthrow imperialism in the region. They were also targeted against the Arabs. One of its pamphlets read, “We must fight the Arabs in order to subjugate them and weaken their demands. We must take them off the arena as a political factor. This struggle against the Arabs will encourage the diaspora and consolidate it. It will draw the attention of the nations of the world, which will be compelled to honour the people which struggles with its arms. And an ally will be found which will support the peoples’ army in its struggle.”

Begin, unlike the Stern group and Lehi, always rejected the label “terrorism”, claiming that the Irgun was an army fighting a war against another army. Using the same methods as these two terrorist groups, the Irgun’s most well known act against the British was the blowing up of the King David Hotel, the British military headquarters in Jerusalem in July 1946.

Lehi’s assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944—a close friend of Churchill with whom Weizman and Ben Gurion, the Labour Zionist leaders, had good relations—led them to crack down on both Lehi and the Irgun. “Every organised group must spew them out... refuge and shelter must be stringently denied these wild men... It is our hearts—not the heart of Britain—that the terrorist iron has entered. Our hands then, no others, must pluck it out.” [Cited by Colin Shindler in The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream.]

Deir Yassin Meir Pail's Eyewitness Account Meir Pail and Ami Isseroff

Based on an interview conducted October 1, 1998 by Ami Isseroff at the Yad Tabenkin Institute of the United Kibbutz Movement Seminar in Ramat Efal Israel.

I was born in Jerusalem. My family moved to Holon in 1936 when I was ten years old. I joined the Palmach in 1943 after graduating from high school. In the Palmach, I participated in numerous operations including the bombing of the B’not Ya’akov Bridge (on the ‘night of the bridges’) and in illegal immigration. I was an instructor in various non-commissioned officer training courses of the Palmach. Then I was sent to be instructor in the Haganah officers’ course from December 1946 to April 1947. After that I was deputy commander of a course for reconnaissance officers of the Hagana. I was Haim Bar Lev’s deputy in the big course for Mem-Kafim (squad leaders). In the summer of 1947 I was sent to Jerusalem in the capacity of company commander, to be head of the special operations unit in Jerusalem, consisting of about twenty first class fellows from the Haganah and Palmach and had a rank equivalent to captain. I was under the direct command of Joshua Globerman, representing the Haganah Supreme command. He ran several such units in different parts of the country. This unit was separate from the Jerusalem intelligence service of the Haganah (Shai) headed by Yitzhak Levi ("Levitza") but we cooperated with them. I did not know any of the people in the Jerusalem Shai and it was best that way. I was not under the command of the, Haganah district commanders in Jerusalem (Israel Amir and later David Shaltiel) either. We operated against the British, the Arabs and the dissidents. Our operations against the dissidents consisted of finding out about their planned operations and preventing them. We did not stop them by force, but rather by kidnapping and arresting the commanders designated to carry out the plan for a few days, and releasing them after the date of the planned operation. On November 29, 1947 Globerman called and said that in view of the changed situation, operations against the dissidents were to cease. From then on, we acted against the British and Arabs only. I performed only one minor operation against the dissidents after that. They wanted to take over the campus of the Palestine Works Department. It was just as the British were going to leave. David Shaltiel didn’t know what to do, so I said I would take care of it. We surrounded the place and called out to them with megaphones, and they left. There was no violence. After Globerman was killed, David Cohen was appointed as liaison officer to the Special Operations unit.

Some days before the attack on Deir Yassin it was decided to disband my unit and I was awaiting reassignment. In his book Milstein (Uri Milstein, The War of Independence, Vol. IV) wrote that I was supposed to be in charge of the military police, but that wasn’t true. However, I know that Shaltiel might have entertained the idea. He was a very strange sort of fellow; a German Jew of Sephardi origin, he had been in the French Foreign Legion and had been well educated. Few people in the Palmach got along with him, but I did. We had many chats. One time he said that we should have a state like Plato’s Republic, in which guardsmen played an important part. He said that a fellow like me, a good Palmachnik, would be suitable to be commander of the military police they were setting up in Jerusalem. I said, in Yiddish, "Go on, forget it."

Deir Yassin was a quiet village, that had a pact with us that had been approved by Yitzhak Navon, then Head of the Arab section of the Haganah Jerusalem Intelligence Service and later President of Israel. The people of Deir Yassin had kept to the pact. The Mukhtar’s son had even been killed fighting off an attempt to bring in foreign Arab troops. The Haganah had planned, when the British left, to take over Deir Yassin peacefully as we did in Abu Ghosh, and to build an airstrip between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul. The place was of no strategic value. There was one field track that led into it from Givat Shaul and that was a dead end. I never heard about any shooting at our side coming from Deir Yassin or from foreign Arab soldiers in Deir Yassin in 1948, and there was none that I know of on the night before the attack. I know that Raanan, commander of the Irgun, later said it had strategic value and controlled roads and logistic axes and so on, but that is all nonsense. Deir Yassin did not maintain any observation or fire control over the main road to Jerusalem, or any other route to Motza or Qastel. They didn’t shoot at anything, certainly not at the road, because it was impossible to shoot at the road from Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin is high above sea level, but it, and Givat Shaul, are separated from the main road to Jerusalem by a big ridge where the Givat Shaul cemetery is located now, and you cannot see anything of strategic value from Deir Yassin. Everyone knows where the cemetery is, so it is ridiculous to claim they could fire on the road from Deir Yassin.

I learned about the planned attack on Deir Yassin about April 6, from Moshe Idelstein, an acquaintance who had formerly been in the Palmach and was now in the Lehi. He had been kicked out of the Palmach in disgrace, a very rare occurrence, but that is another story. Idelstein came bragging that they had been given the go-ahead to attack Deir Yassin. We sat down and had a cup of coffee. When he left, I went to Shaltiel’s office in the Jewish Agency building. I was much younger than he was, and I was just a company commander. I said "Is it true that you gave the dissidents permission to attack Deir Yassin?"

He said, "Yes."

I said "How can you do this? We have a pact with this village, and they have kept it faithfully. No shooting, no foreign soldiers, no aggression of any kind."

He said he had tried to talk the dissidents out of it. He had offered them alternatives. He suggested that they raid Ein Kerem, but they refused, saying it was too difficult. He said he told them that if they want to help us, he would give them a base in Lower Motza, and they could attack Qolonia and kick out the inhabitants and even destroy the village, which had been shooting at Motza and the convoys, but they said it was too difficult.

"I will even give you more weapons if you want," he said to the dissidents.

"No, it is too difficult. Only Deir Yassin."

Shaltiel continued, "What am I to do? If they start out from Beit Hakerem and Givat Shaul without my permission, should I give an order to our guys to shoot them in the back? I have no choice. They are giving me a fait accompli. If I concentrate my men and try to detain them by force in the city, it will mean civil war, and I have no time for that. We are in the midst of a war against the Arab enemy. So I told them, "You know what, OK. But you aren’t just going to attack and leave. Since we are, with this attack of yours, violating a pact that we made with them, you must stay in the village and hold it. Because if you leave, the Arab gangs will enter, and then we will have trouble."

Looking back, I think that he was right. I was young and zealous then and thought differently, but there really wasn’t anything the Haganah could do. I did not know that Levitza (Yitzhak Levi, head of the Jerusalem branch of Haganah intelligence) had gone to him also. Perhaps they could have been stopped, but nobody imagined that there would be a massacre there!

Shaltiel did not consult any superiors. He was commander in this sector and had supreme authority for matters such as this. For example, the pact with Deir Yassin was also concluded with local approval only. I had no doubt that he had the right to make this decision on his own. When he finished explaining all this to me, I asked him when they were doing the raid. He said "Friday morning, before dawn."

I told Shaltiel I wanted to go in with the raid.

Shaaltiel said, in German, "What business is it of yours?"

I said, "Sooner or later the Hebrew state will come into being, and then the Hagana organization will become the Hebrew army, and these ‘dreckes’ (shits) from Etzel and Lehi, will have to decide what to do. Either they join the Hebrew army, or they continue in their secession. In either case, we have to know ‘what is their real military performance,’ do they know how to fight? etc. This is an excellent opportunity. All of Lehi and Etzel, 120 people they say, are going to attack one village. I will join them, I will find out what their plan is in the Shai (Hagana intelligence) and join accordingly, and we shall see how they fight. If they are good fighters, they can join the Hebrew army as a unit; if they prove to be mediocre fighters, they can join as individuals. If they will not join us, we will need to know if it will be easy to disband them or not. It is important to know."

Sha’altiel said, "You know what, I’m not your commander. Go ahead. Just coordinate it with the Intelligence Service (Shai)."

I went to the Shai. They gave me the plan of attack. They knew, because there were Shai people planted in the Etzel and Lehi. They had a good plan. Nobody even dreamed there would be a massacre there. Only long after, it turned out that Lehi had initiated the idea of the raid. They wanted to do it on Sheikh Jerakh, but Etzel diverted them to Deir Yassin. In the course of the planning discussions, the Lehi people suggested a massacre, but the Etzel people objected.

I took one of my special operations unit people with me. First I sent him to bring a camera from the Shai, with the most sensitive film he could find. So he requisitioned a Leica camera from the Jerusalem Shai, and two rolls of high-speed film. Since they knew him, and knew he was in my group, they gave it to him. I wasn’t in the Shai, but I had good connections with them. We came to Kiriath Moshe by car; I remember it was a Skoda. We started out when it was still dark. The Lehi people went along the field path into Deir Yassin, following the tender {covered pickup truck} with the loudspeaker, and we went along a bit behind them. We were all dressed in khaki civilian clothes. I think I was wearing a ‘Kova Tembel’ hat. When the truck got near the village it got stuck in a rut, and the loudspeaker was never used. Anyhow, when there is shooting all around, nobody is going to hear a loudspeaker. There were no vehicles other than that truck and no searchlights. I know that the Arab refugees insisted that there were tanks, but there were no tanks and no armored cars.

Dawn was breaking as we got to the village. I didn’t hear or see any signal given, and I didn’t know the password. It seemed to me that they just ran in and attacked. We hid in some houses. The Irgun and Lehi had some Lee Enfield British rifles, Bren guns, Tommy guns and Sten guns, though some of the Stens didn’t work. They may have had knives too, but I didn’t see any. The villagers had no automatic weapons. We found a hiding place in a small empty house. The Irgun and Lehi people fought in no sort of order. They didn’t know how to cover each other and so on. The fighting went pretty well on the Lehi side, but the Irgun got stuck. They came from the south. They were supposed to set up a Bren gun at a high position where there is now a swimming pool, but for some reason they didn’t. {On the map, this is marked as blocking unit - A.I.} Anyhow they got stuck. The Arabs had no automatic weapons, just rifles, but for some reason the Irgun failed to advance, which shows what kind of soldiers they were. The western part of the village was not conquered, and we were stuck in the eastern part. It got later and later in the day. I remember it was a beautiful Spring day. I suppose it was around ten o’clock in the morning judging from the Sun, when I heard some light mortar shells fly across the village and hit the house of the Mukhtar in the western part of Deir Yassin. They seemed to be two inch mortar shells. Soon after that I saw Yaki Weg, a young Palmach company commander, driving up the steep northern slope to the western village with about 15-17 guys. He occupied that part of the village in about 15 minutes. After I joined him, he told me that he had been sent with some people from Camp Schneller to deploy his men on the main ridge, where the cemetery is today, commanding the main road to Jerusalem, because there was supposed to be a convoy that day. He said that Moshe Idelstein came to him and said they were attacking Deir Yassin two kilometers south of that ridge, and had run into trouble. He said he had to help Jews in trouble, so he had set up the mortar and assaulted the village with a group of his company.

Not one of Yaki’s men was even scratched. That shows how strong the resistance was in the village. I ran to him and, as I outranked him, I said "Yaki look here, you have your own mission to accomplish, I think you deserve a big thank you, as you helped conquer the village. Now get out of here." He took the guys, they went to their truck. I asked one thing of him: "Report to Sha'altiel somehow by telephone about what you have done." And I know that is what he did, though I don’t know where he found a telephone. I happened to know from somewhere that Shaltiel’s people knew he was going to go in to the village, and had told him to limit himself to evacuating wounded. So it could be that he had reported earlier and I didn’t know, but he didn’t evacuate any wounded. Yaki was killed later in his company’s assault on the Latrun police station. Moshe Wachmann was there too; he’s still alive.

Until then there had been just fighting as far as I know. I did not see any houses demolished with explosives. To this very day I am haunted by the mistake I made. I shouldn’t have let Yaki and his men leave, but I didn’t imagine there was going to be a massacre there. If those Palmach guys had stayed, the dissidents wouldn’t have dared to commit a massacre. If we saw that, we would have cocked our guns and told them to stop.

A few minutes after Yaki left, it must have been around 11:00 o’clock, I wasn’t paying attention to the time. Anyhow, after the Palmach guys left, I started hearing shooting in the village. The fighting was over, yet there was the sound of firing of all kinds from different houses. Sporadic firing, not like you would hear when they clear a house. I took my chap with me and went to see what was happening. We went into houses. They were typical Arab houses. Most of the houses there are one-story, though there are a few two story houses like the Mukhtar’s house and a few others. In the corners we saw dead bodies. Almost all the dead were old people, children or women, with a few men here and there. They stood them up in the corners and shot them. In another corner there were some more bodies, in the next house more bodies and so on. They also shot people running from houses, and prisoners. Mostly women and children. Most of the Arab males had run away. It is an odd thing, but when there is danger such as this, the agile ones run away first.

The looting started later. There weren’t any rapes, or any use of knives, daggers pitchforks or other such weapons, and I didn’t see any forcible looting of people or bodies. I did see people walking around with spoils, chickens and household goods and things like that, but that was later.

I couldn’t tell if it was Lehi people or Etzel people doing the killing. They went about with glazed eyes as though entranced with killing. We went from house to house, and took pictures. In all the confusion nobody noticed us or challenged us.

I saw this horror, and I was shocked and angry, because I had never seen such a thing, murdering people after a place had been conquered. Afterwards in the War of Independence it happened in a few other places, but it was the first time in my life I had ever seen such a thing. So I started going around investigating. I didn’t say anything. I did not know their commanders, and I didn’t want to expose myself, because people were going around there, as I wrote in my report, with their eyes rolled about in their sockets. Today I would write that their eyes were glazed over, full of lust for murder. It seemed to be going on everywhere. Eventually it turned out that in the Lehi sector there were more murders, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know what to do.

Around noon, I saw that they had gotten together around twenty or twenty five males near the entrance to the village on the field track. A truck came in, and they put them on a truck, and drove off to the city. Meanwhile the massacre continued About three quarters of an hour or an hour later the truck came back. The prisoners were led to a place in the quarries between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul. We could see this from the village, and I suppose some survivors might have seen it too. We saw them going to the quarry, so my companion and I perched on a vantage point above the quarry and took some pictures down into it. There was a natural wall there, formed by digging out the quarry, along one side. There were a group of dissidents there, Irgun or Lehi, and they stood the prisoners against that wall and shot the lot of them. I didn’t recognize who did the shooting. All the while the massacres were going on in the houses in the village as well.

Meanwhile a crowd of people from Givat Shaul, with peyot {earlocks} , most of them religious, came into the village and started yelling ‘gazlanim’ ‘rozchim’ - (thieves, murderers) "we had an agreement with this village. It was quiet. Why are you murdering them?" They were Chareidi (ultra-orthodox) Jews. This is one of the nicest things I can say about Hareidi Jews. These people from Givat Shaul gradually approached and entered the village, and the Lehi and Irgun people had no choice, they had to stop. It was about 2:00 or 3:00 PM. Then the Lehi and Irgun gathered about 250 people, most of them women, children and elderly people in a school house. Later the building became a "Beit Habad" - "Habad House.’ They were debating what to do with them. There was a great deal of yelling. The dissidents were yelling ‘Let’s blow up the schoolhouse with everyone in it’ and the Givat Shaul people were yelling "thieves and murderers - don’t do it" and so on. Finally they put the prisoners from the schoolhouse on four trucks and drove them to the Arab quarter of Jerusalem near the Damascus gate. I left after the fourth truck went out.

It was Friday afternoon. It must have been about 4:00 -5:00 P.M because the religious people had begun leaving to prepare for the Sabbath. It was still light. I didn’t see any other Haganah people. I knew Gihon. I know he was supposed to be there, but I didn’t see him. We walked back to Kiriat Moshe. When I got back to my Skoda, my men from the special operations unit were waiting for me. They were worried, even though both of us were armed with Tommy guns. They went to Kiryat Moshe, looked for my Skoda, which they recognized and waited for me.

We drove to the city. I told may companion, "I am going to write up the report tonight, you go to the Shai and develop negatives only, don’t make any prints, and bring them to me tomorrow because I don’t want the pictures being shown around Jerusalem."

He said "I finished one roll, and am in the middle of the second one." So we made up to meet near Shaltiel’s office in the Jewish agency around 8:00 A.M. on Shabath, April 10, 1948.

I went home and spent the night writing up the report. At that time I was rooming with a family in Meonot Ovdim Bet in Rehavia. I wrote all night, in one copy. I began the report with a passage from Bialik’s ‘Beir Hahareiga’ - ‘In the City of Carnage.’ I didn’t remember it word by word, but the family I was staying with had the works of Bialik in four volumes, so I took the volume with the poetry, and I copied ten or twelve lines about what one sees in the City of Carnage, and then I wrote the report. I wrote about the massacre, and described their poor military performance. I wrote that it was not murder in cold blood, but murder in ‘hot blood.’ It was not preplanned according to my knowledge. They didn’t go into the village to commit the massacre, as the Nazis did in Lidice.

There was just the one copy of the report. In the morning I got the films from the fellow who had accompanied me, and I went to Shaltiel and asked him to send the report and films to Yisrael Galilee, who was chief of the Supreme Haganah Headquarters in Tel-Aviv.

I was in Jerusalem until April 13. By Saturday it was all quiet. There was no fighting on Saturday. On Saturday afternoon I found out from the Shai that the dissidents had told David Shaltiel that they were leaving Deir Yassin on Sunday.

I went to David Shaltiel’s office protesting, "Are you going to let them leave? Let me go in with my guys and some troops of yours. I will deploy in the area of Givat Shaul. Nobody of the Etzel and Lehi people will leave alive, unless they decide to remain."

So he said "Meirkeh, don’t get excited," and he was right, not I. He got together groups of Gadna youth troops, they were issued Czech rifles, and they went into the village replacing the dissidents. Prof. Yehoshuah Arieli was their commander, and I know two people who were among the Gadna there, Yair Tzaban, later a member of the Knesset and Minister of Absorption, and Eliezer Shmueli, later General Manager of the Education Ministry. Both can testify to what happened. Levitza {Yitzhak Levi, head of the Shai} and I found a rock overlooking the village and watched from a ridge as the dissidents came out of the village. They looked very unimpressive. They were wearing those odd tin helmets that they had gotten from somewhere, though I don’t remember them wearing them going in.

It is hard to estimate how many Arabs were killed. I don’t think I gave a number in my report. Yehoshuah Arieli’s report runs like this: "We saw three groups of bodies, in one there were 70, the second had 20, the third had 20. But when we entered the village the whole village smelled of burned bodies, many bodies were thrown into cisterns." Not wells, there were no wells I know of in Deir Yassin. I know that the Bir Zeit study estimated about 120 dead by interviewing refugee survivors, and Aref El-Aref wrote that there were 116 I think, but I think there may have been many more. Etzel and Lehi had a press conference on Saturday evening and claimed that there were 254 dead. Now they say that they exaggerated on purpose, but I don’t know when they started prevaricating, in April 1948, or later, when they realized the damage done by their deed.

I know that the next day, or the day after, on Sunday the Red Cross sent De Reynier and the Histadrut doctors came, but I never met those people and I wasn’t there. De Reynier reported about 200 dead. I assume that the true count is in between 200 and 250. Most of the bodies were women and children. There were no Palestinian irregular ‘gangs’ there or people of the ‘Tsva Hatzala’ (Salvation Army of the Arab League). The inhabitants of Deir Yassin had kept their word up to the last minute.

Two weeks later, on my way from Jerusalem to the Negev, I was requested to report verbally to Galili in Tel-Aviv and I gave him a report of the events in Deir Yassin in person. I was transferred to the Negev and sent down there by plane. I was appointed deputy battalion commander of the Palmach 7th battalion and later the operations officer of the Negev brigade. I kept quiet about the Deir-Yassin incident until about 1970. Of the people who knew I was there, Weg had been killed in the attack on Latrun, and David Shaltiel had passed away.

After the war I stayed in the army, mostly in command, combat, training and education duties. I was commander of the central officer’s training school. I was commander of the 51st Golani battalion in the Sinai Campaign and in the 1967 war I was deputy commander of General Tal’s armored group. I was head of the Battle and Strategy department of the IDF and wrote the IDF combat handbook. I finished my army service as a full Colonel in 1971. In the army, and the Palmach too, everyone knew my political opinions; I was known as "The Red Zionist." I never let my opinions influence my duty, but I was always a leftist. But my opinions were not popular and maybe that is why I was not promoted beyond Colonel. That was why Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres considered me persona non grata. I decided on a political career because it seemed to me that we had to declare openly that the territories conquered in 1967 should be kept as a ‘dowry’ for peace. We must keep them even for a thousand years if necessary, by army occupation only, until our neighbors would make peace, but we mustn’t settle them. Anyone wanting to sign a peace treaty with us would know that they were getting the territories conquered in 1967 in return, so that the Palestinians could establish a state in the West Bank and Gaza strip. This was not a popular view. Yigal Alon, Galili, Peres and others didn’t agree. In 1974 I became a member of the Knesset.

Sometime about 1970, before I was an MK. Begin was a Minister Without Portfolio in Golda’s government. One day there was an article in Ma’ariv. It reported that Begin had returned from abroad, and a reporter had asked him at Lod Airport, how he had dealt with the problem of Deir Yassin while abroad.

Begin said, "What? There is no problem. Why are you raising this question? The Foreign Office has issued a nice pamphlet. It explains it in English and in Hebrew. It was a hard fight from house to house."

It was all "blah-blah." I got sore, but I still held my peace. A day or two later, I got a telephone from Shaul Avigur, who had been one of the highest authorities in the Haganah. He told me that he had read what Begin said, and called Prime Minister Golda Meir immediately and asked if they had published a pamphlet on Deir Yassin. She said she didn’t know anything about it. Avigur investigated. It turned out that Begin, as a minister, had gone to the Foreign Office and said they had to write a pamphlet about Deir Yassin. The person he talked to was some minor official, who said, "I don’t know anything about Deir Yassin, you write it." So Begin wrote it, based on the Etzel archives, and they had it printed up in the name of the Foreign Office. Abba Eban had it stopped, but Herut printed up their own copies. On the outside they had printed "Order of Jabotinsky " ("Misdar Jabotinsky" in Hebrew), but inside, when you opened it up, it read "State of Israel, Foreign Office." Shaul sent me a copy of the pamphlet, it was terrible. These guys know how to produce propaganda, it is the only thing they know how to do well.

Later, I got a telephone from the Foreign Office. Collins and Lapierre had written a book called ‘Oh Jerusalem.’ It was pro-Israel, but the chapter on Deir Yassin was very critical. They wanted me to write a rebuttal. They sent me the chapter I had someone translate it for me from the French. I called them and said, "I am sorry to say that most of it is correct, except for two items. It is not true that David Shaltiel gave them arms. Secondly, there were no rapes, or cold-blooded murders with knives or scythes or pitchforks. It was a massacre in ‘warm blood.’"

In 1972, while teaching in Tel-Aviv University, I was giving a course in military history and I related what happened in Deir Yassin as part of it. One of my students who worked as a reporter for Yedioth Achronoth decided that this story should be published, and he went ahead and did it. I told him he should also get testimony from Lehi Commander Yehoshua Zettler and from Irgun Commander Raanan. He did not dare write everything I said, so I wrote another article for Yedioth two weeks later to complete the picture. This provoked several more articles. One of them was by a fellow we called ‘Eliahu the Czech,’ who was operations officer of the Etzioni brigade, who wrote that he got to Deir Yassin on April 10, and filed a report. He wrote an article saying everything I said was correct, and he added details.

During the election campaign for the ninth Knesset, I came to kibbutz Hulda to give a political talk. When I finished, the head of the culture committee of Hulda said they had invited Raanan, ex-commander of the Irgun in Jerusalem, to give a talk on Deir Yassin in a few weeks, and was asked if I would give my evidence in advance. So we got a blackboard, and sketched it out, and I told them what happened. A couple of months later I got a call from Yisrael Galili in Kibbutz Na’an. He said that the person who organized the talks in Hulda had written and said, "We had Meir Pail here, and we had Raanan, and they gave two completely different versions. Raanan said Pail was never there and it was all a lie. Who is right?" I was very embarrassed, because Galili was a very important personality in April 1948. He was the most important figure in the Israeli military hierarchy except Ben-Gurion and had a million things on his mind. How could he remember the report of some semi-junior officer named Meir Pail (in those days Pilevsky)? But Galili said he was answering them, and that he wanted to read me the letter before sending it. He wrote that everything I said was true. That he had gotten the report and the pictures, and that all other sources had verified and supported the report. Moreover, he said that I had been in his office and told the whole story again. I have a copy of this letter from Hulda. They didn’t send it to me, but I asked them about it, and they said they had gotten the letter and put it on the bulletin board, so I asked for a copy and they sent it.

Deir Yassin was an immoral example of a massacre that we must admit to ourselves and atone for and not cover up. The massacre has done, and is still doing, tremendous damage to the Israeli and Zionist cause. Even to this day there are memorial ceremonies for Deir Yassin each year in the Arab world. I was invited once to England, but I never went. I want the whole thing to be forgotten, though the lessons should be learned.

Militarily it was worthless. The Irgun claimed falsely that after Deir Yassin it became easier to conquer villages because the Arabs left out of fear rather than fighting. Begin said that the "turning point of the War of Independence came at Deir Yassin." I took a ruler and counted all the Arab villages and neighborhoods in a 10 km radius around Deir Yassin. I wanted to determine how those that we had attacked after Deir Yassin had reacted. Some were conquered fairly easily in battle, but none ran away. These were Beit Ixsa, Colonia, and Ein Kerem for example. In other places, such as Beit Mazmil, which is now Kiryath Yovel, Malcha, Zuva and Katamon there was very tenacious fighting. In Nebi Samuel and Beit Tzurik we failed completely. What it means, is that Deir Yassin did not make a big impression, as the Revisionists would have us believe. Begin made this claim because he wanted to show that the Etzel and Lehi had some strategic value in the War of Independence, whereas in fact they had no positive military or political value at all. The only effect of Deir Yassin was negative, because it helped attach a stigma to Jewish behavior. The only way to clear ourselves of this stigma is by permanently pointing the finger of blame at the Deir Yassin massacre.

"UNQUOTE"