22 Pirates and Emperors, 136; Cockburn, Out of Control, 26.
23 Woodward, Veil (Simon & Schuster, 1987, 396f.).
24 See chapter 5. Recall that aggression is a far more serious crime than international terrorism.
25 For details, see my "Libya in U.S. Demonology," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1986, expanded in Pirates and Emperors, chapter 3; William Schaap, CAIB, Summer 1988. Dave Griffiths, Business Week, Sept. 19, 1988. Though no credible information about the terror attack at the disco has been forthcoming, suspicions have been voiced in Germany that the bombing at this Third World bar, killing a Turkish woman and a Black GI (later a second Black American soldier died), may have been drug-related or even perhaps a Klan operation.
26 The first exposure of a "disinformation" campaign was in Newsweek, Aug. 3, 1981.
27 Turner, testimony before House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, April 16, 1985, cited by Peter Kornbluh in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.
28 Fred Barnes, TNR, May 30, 1988; editorial, TNR, April 2, 1984. For a longer excerpt see Turning the Tide, 167-68; and notes, on the efforts by editor Hendrik Hertzberg to evade the facts. Hertzberg, TNR, Feb. 6, 1989. Recall also the laudatory comments on Reagan's dedication to human rights during the propaganda exercises at the Summits, already discussed.
29 Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Brookings Institution, 1987, 17).
30 Ibid., 16f., 78f., 89f., 98; International Security, Winter 1987-88, 12. For more on these terrorist operations, see the references of chapter 5, note 25; also U.S. Army Captain Bradley Earl Ayers, The War that Never Was (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976); Warren Hinckle and William Turner, The Fish is Red (Harper & Row, 1981); William Blum, The CIA (Zed, 1986); Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution (Cambridge, 1987).
31 Jerusalem Post, Aug. 16, 1981; see Fateful Triangle, chapter 5, sections 1, 3.4, for further quotes, background, and description.
32 Glass, text of talk at Middle East Studies Association Conference, Los Angeles, Nov. 4, 1988, published in Index on Censorship (London), January 1989.
33 Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, 70. The October 1973 war brought home the lesson that Egypt could not be disregarded. The U.S. then turned to the obvious strategy: remove it from the conflict. See my 1977 article reprinted as chapter 11, Towards a New Cold War. Camp David consummated this strategy.
34 See Towards a New Cold War and Fateful Triangle on the events, and Pirates and Emperors on how they have entered into memory. For a brief review from an expert Israeli perspective, see Schiff and Ya'ari, Israel's Lebanon War. It is difficult to know just what their original manuscript might have contained, since much was excised by the Israeli censor; 20 percent according to Ehud Ya'ari, 50 percent according to a "respected correspondent" cited by Middle East historian Augustus Richard Norton of the West Point Military Academy (Kol Ha'ir, Feb. 10, 1984; Middle East Journal, Summer 1985).
35 Editorial, Washington Post, April 22, 1982; see Fateful Triangle for further background; and Yaniv, op. cit., for justification of these operations. See also appendix I, section 2, above.
36 Harkabi, Israel's Fateful Hour, 100-1. See appendix I, section 2.
37 NYT, Sept. 7, 1987.
38 Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism. Citations that follow are from pp. 8, 91-92, 218, 215, 139, 166, 232, 141, 106, 21-22, 291-92, 204, 262, 245, 296-97, 310, 300.
39 Laqueur and Charles Krauthammer, New Republic, March 31, 1982.
40 On the facts, and the numbers game, see appendix I, section 2.
41 Ehud Ya'ari, Egypt and the Fedayeen (Hebrew) (Givat Haviva, 1975, 27f.), a study based on captured Egyptian and Jordanian documents. At the same time, Salah Mustapha, Egyptian military attache in Jordan, was severely injured by a letter-bomb sent from East Jerusalem, presumably from the same source; ibid.
42 Israeli military historian Uri Milshtein, Hadashot, Dec. 31, 1987, referring to Eliav's 1983 book Hamevukash.
43 See, among others, Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (California, 1972, 197, and particularly chapter 3).
44 See Alfred W. McCoy et al., The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper & Row, 1972). For some recent discussion, see Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (Norton, 1987). Stone, "Is the Cold War really over?," Sunday Telegraph (London), Nov. 27, 1988.
45 On these matters, also virtually ignored in the U.S. media, see Herman and Brodhead, Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, 81f.
46 For critical discussion of the Weathermen at the time, see Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Ramparts, 1970).
Title 3: Addendum to p. 120.
48 On U.S.-Iranian relations, see James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion (Yale, 1988).
49 Ibid., 55-56.
50 The maneuverings are of some interest; see Towards a New Cold War, 313f.
51 Dorman and Farhang, The U.S. Press and Iran. Quotes below are from this book, unless otherwise indicated.
52 Editorial, NYT, Aug. 6, 1954; for a longer quote and more context, see Towards a New Cold War, 99, and the discussion there and in chapter 11.
53 U.S. Press and Iran, 33ff., 123, 164, 91f., 120, 54, 148, 157. For an insider's account of how the Times looked the other way on the CIA role in the coup, and on "sanitizing" copy on Vietnam in which he was personally involved as a senior rewrite editor, see John Hess, Grand Street, Winter 1989. Hess's interesting comments reveal illusions of their own, however. Thus he writes that while Times correspondents David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan originally criticized the conduct of the U.S. war in Vietnam on tactical grounds, they "gradually<193>came to see the war as evil in itself, and they helped to persuade many fellow Americans that it was." In reality, they were far behind not only the peace movement (which did the work that they failed to do) but even the majority of their fellow Americans in this regard, and at least their published criticism remained well within the dove-hawk consensus that adopted unquestioningly the basic doctrines of the propaganda system.
54 Bill, op. cit., 283-84.
55 Saeedpour, "Kurdish Times and the New York Times," Kurdish Times (Brooklyn), published by Cultural Survival, Summer 1988. Other journals are also sampled.
Title 4: Addendum to p. 122.
57 There has been a most remarkable campaign in the United States to justify this stance by denying that the Palestinians are more than recent immigrants, occasioned by a book by Joan Peters that received almost unanimous applause in a euphoric reception among American intellectuals. For discussion of this most illuminating episode of recent intellectual history, which actually merits much closer study, see essays by Norman Finkelstein and Edward Said in Said and Hitchens, Blaming the Victims. Finkelstein's important study exposing the fraud, which was well known early on in the propaganda campaign, was unpublishable in the United States. It was only after the book appeared in England, and was utterly demolished by reviewers (in part, relying on Finkelstein's unpublishable analysis), that its American enthusiasts, or at least the less audacious among them, broke ranks and dropped the matter, some claiming falsely that they had not known before about the fraud that was being perpetrated with their assistance. his is a revealing story that has yet to be properly told.
58 Like any historical comparison, this one is inexact in sme ways. To mention only the most obvious discrepancy, and the one least likely to be recognized, support for the PLO among the Palestinians, by all available evidence, is far beyond support among Jews for the Zionist organizations in the mid-1940s.
59 For further details and the background factors, see Fateful Triangle; Pirates and Emperors; and my articles "The Palestinian Uprising," Z Magazine, May 1988, and "The U.S. and the Middle East" (see chapter 3, note 23). The latter also reviews some important documentation from the Israeli diplomatic record. See the same sources for references, where not cited below.
60 Mary Curtius, Boston Globe Magazine, Aug. 14, 1988. The example is more interesting than most, because Curtius is an independent and knowledgeable Middle East correspondent. For a sample of many other cases, see Fateful Triangle, chapter 3, 2.4.2. Major journals have even rejected letters to the editor correcting false statements on this matter.
61 Friedman, NYT, Aug. 7, 1988.
62 For details, see Pirates and Emperors, chapter 2, note 58 and text, and sources cited.
63 Friedman, "The Power of the Fanatics," NYT Magazine, Oct. 7, 1988.
64 Editorial, NYT, June 13, 1988.
65 See references of note 59.
66 NYT, March 17, 21; June 2, 1985.
67 Peace Now had never clearly separated itself from Labor Party rejectionism. On its unclear and vacillating positions, considerably misunderstood in the United States, see below.
68 Friedman, NYT, Dec. 10, 1986; March 27, 1987.
69 Yitzhak Ben-Horin, Ma'ariv, Dec. 4; Ma'ariv, Dec. 5; Eyal Ehrlich, Ha'aretz, Dec. 19, 1986.
70 AP, April 1, 1988. In the New York Times, these events were reported accurately by John Kifner, a fine journalist for many years, and by other media, in the early months of the uprising.
71 "The Man who Foresaw the Uprising," Yediot Ahronot, April 7; Hotam, April 15.
72 Friedman, NYT News in Review, Jan. 29, 1989.
73 Hadashot, Jan. 7, 1988; Ha'aretz, Dec. 31, 1987.
74 Interview, Nouvel Observateur, Jan. 7, 1988.
75 AP, Jan. 15; Toronto Globe and Mail, Jan. 15, 1987; also published in several local newspapers in the United States.
76 NYRB, June 25, 1987. U.N. English translation, quoted in The Other Israel, Newsletter of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, Nov.-Dec. 1987.
77 To be precise, the PLO support for the nonrejectionist political settlement vetoed by the United States at the United Nations in January 1976 was reported (NYT, Jan. 27, 1988), but then disappeared from history.
78 NYT, March 12, 1988.
79 "Israeli Supreme Court lets two extremist parties run," Christian Science Monitor, June 29, 1984.
80 Ha'aretz, April 12; Jerusalem Post, April 13; Shamir, Ha'aretz, April 7; Herut, Dorit Gefen, Al-Hamishmar, Feb. 29, 1988; Milo, then chairman of the Likud bloc in the Knesset, Maariv, Jan. 3, 1984; Globe and Mail, April 26; Rabin, Tony Banks, Jane's Defence Weekly, May 7; Eban, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 3, 1988.
81 See my articles in Z Magazine, May, July 1988. I found no other mention.
82 Sciolino, NYT, April 6, 8, 1988.
83 In These Times, June 22, distributed several days earlier; New York Times, June 22, 1988. In subsequent weeks, there were continued indications of controversy within the PLO over the Abu Sharif initiative.
84 As of 1988, Peace Now -- unlike the PLO -- had never proposed a nonrejectionist peace settlement. Individuals associated with the group have done so, while others (notably Abba Eban) maintained an association with it while clearly advocating Labor Party rejectionism (see, e.g., his "The Central Question," Tikkun 1.2, 1986). As of April 1988, leading activists in Israel were unable to provide me with a single textual example of support for a two-state settlement, and I can find none. Funding literature of November 1988 cites Peace Now's willingness to "talk to Palestinians" who advocate a nonrejectionist political settlement, so that other Palestinians can be "encouraged to renounce violence and fend off rejectionists." But there is not a word to indicate that Peace Now joins their Palestinian interlocutors (specifically, Faisal Husseini) in adopting a nonrejectionist position. See below for further confirmation of this conclusion.
85 In the intellectual climate in the United States, often semi-hysterical on these matters, it is perhaps worth adding that the review of the factual record does not entail that the PLO is an admirable organization. In fact, it has proven over the years to be incompetent, corrupt, foolish, and often murderous, particularly in the early 1970s. These are matters that I have often discussed for the past twenty years. They have no relevance in the present connection, just as the long record of Zionist violence was not relevant to evaluating the right of Jews to be represented by the Zionists in 1947, or their right to national self-determination in Palestine.
86 Jewish Post and Opinion, Nov. 16, 1988.
87 See chapter 4. Editorial, NYT, Nov. 16, 1988.
88 Editorial, Dec. 8, 1988; Steve Lohr, "Arafat says P.L.O. Accepted Israel, NYT, same day; official statement, same day.
89 Editorials, LAT, Nov. 16, WP, Nov. 15, 1988.
90 Will, BG, Nov. 20; Kipper, Lewis, NYT, Dec. 1, 1988; Weinstein, BG, Dec. 4, 1988.
91 CSM, Dec. 8, 1988.
92 Peter Steinfels, Dec. 8, 1988.
93 Aryeh Dayan, Kol Ha'ir, Nov. 25; Peace Now advertisement, Nov. 23; poll, Yediot Ahronot, Dec. 23, 1988.
94 An exception is a column by William Raspberry, pointing out that Israel's commitment to terror continues unabated and that "the real sticking point for Israel is not PLO 'ambiguity' but insistence that the Palestinians no less than Israelis have a right to a homeland" (WP, Dec. 14, 1988). With regard to terror, the same can be said about the United States. It is difficult to overlook the fact that this near-unique recognition of reality was written by one of the few Black columnists in the United States.
95 Editorial, NYT, Dec. 21, 1988; Friedman, "Reality Time in Mideast," NYT, Dec. 19, 1988. On Friedman's version of "reality," see below.
96 On the actual record of apologetics for Israel and venomous attack on anyone who departed from the party line, quickly effaced from history when the conditions of respectability changed, see Peace in the Middle East?, chapter 5; Fateful Triangle, 146f., 263f., 378f. Some of the transitions are startling.
97 State Department conditions, NYT, Dec. 14; Marie Colvin, NYT Magazine, Dec. 18; Chancellor, NBC evening news, Dec. 13, 1988, reported to me by Marilyn Young. For a succinct legal analysis of the U.S. obligations to the U.N., see Alfred P. Rubin, CSM, Dec. 15, 1988.
98 Richard Strauss, BG, Dec. 14; Charlotte Saikowski, CSM, Dec. 15, 1988.
99 On the early stages of the Israel-Jordan alliance, see Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan (Columbia, 1988). Van Creveld, Jerusalem Post,, Feb. 1, 1989.
100 Editorial, WP Weekly, Dec. 19, 1988, lauding Shultz for having "hung tough on the principled conditions of 1975" and for denying Arafat a visa, a "useful signal." The editors state that "the 1975 conditions were drafted at a time when Israel had a government prepared to exchange territory for peace if there were a negotiating partner." The facts, however, are that Israel's Labor government explicitly refused to deal with any Palestinians on any political issue, and the U.S. and Israel rejected the land-for-peace offer at the U.N. Security Council. See Fateful Triangle, and for more detail on the Israeli government attitude at the time, Towards a New Cold War, 267f. Israel's reaction to the U.N. session was a gratuitous bombing of Lebanon, with over fifty killed. The U.S. reaction was to veto the resolution. The media reaction has been to deny the facts, as in this editorial.
101 H.D.S. Greenway, BG, Dec. 15; see also Randolph Ryan, BG, Dec. 16, 1988, the only example I found where the elementary facts about the State Department conditions are recognized.
102 Alan Cowell, NYT, Dec. 19; Robert Pear, NYT, Dec. 15; editorial, WP Weekly, Dec. 19; "Palestinian Semantics: Arafat's Changing Words," NYT, Dec. 15; editorial, NYT, Dec. 16; editorial, BG, Dec. 16; Pipes, "How the U.S. Should Handle Arafat," Dec. 20; Friedman, "Reality Time," NYT, Dec. 19, 1988. On the facts concerning the 1971 negotiations, which Friedman has always suppressed or denied, see Fateful Triangle, chapter 3.
103 Bush News Conference, NYT, Jan. 28; Brinkley, Jan. 29, 1989.
104 "Palestinian Semantics," NYT, Dec. 15; Alan Cowell, NYT, Dec. 19, 1988.
105 Safire claims that "Mr. Arafat, by accepting the hated word renounce, promised to cut out what his organization had been doing in the past," by which he apparently means that Arafat promised to cut out what he, Safire, considers to be terrorism. That, however, plainly does not follow; it only follows that Arafat promised to cut out what he, Arafat, considers terrorism. The issue turns again on the right of struggle for self-determination against colonialist and racist regimes and foreign occupation, accepted by the entire world apart from the United States and Israel. Safire's contorted argument misses this point and thus collapses.
106 Safire, NYT Magazine, Jan. 1; Berman, "What is a Jew?," Village Voice, Jan. 3, 1989. On Howe's actual role over many years, see the references of note 96.
107 BG, Dec. 19; NYT; Peres, Op-Ed, NYT, Dec. 21; John Kifner, NYT, Dec. 20, 1988. On casualties, see Daoud Kuttab, Middle East International, Jan. 20, 1989, citing figures of thirty-one killed (including children) from mid-December to mid-January, the highest monthly total since the preceding March, and 1,000 injured. The horrifying details are regularly reported in the Hebrew press. See, for example, Yizhar Be'er, Kol Ha'ir, Dec. 30, 1988, reporting the results of an intensive investigation of the "day of slaughter" in Nablus on December 16, two days after Arafat allegedly said the magic words. For some details, see my article in Z Magazine, March 1989.
108 Hadashot, Feb. 14; Rabin, Nahum Barnea, Yediot Ahronot, Feb. 24; JP, Jan. 6, 1989. Emphasis in JP. It is not impossible that U.S. and Israeli intelligence actually believe that the Intifada was initiated by the PLO and is directed by it. There is ample evidence from the documentary record of the incapacity of intelligence, the national political police, or the political leadership to comprehend the reality of popular movements and popular struggles. The idea is simply too threatening, and cannot be faced or comprehended. It is also necessary to bear in mind the ideological fanaticism that often colors intelligence reports and the higher-level interpretation of them, also amply documented.
109 See references cited earlier; NYT, Nov. 6, 1982.
110 Wilkie, BG, Dec. 1, 1985.
111 NYT Magazine, Oct. 30, 1988.
112 Klein, "Our Man in Managua," Esquire, Nov. 1986; Howe, NYT Book Review, May 16, 1982; Peretz, New Republic, Aug. 29, 1983, May 7, 1984, among many examples; Brooks Jackson, Wall Street Journal, March 23, 1984; Matt Moffett, WSJ, Aug. 30, 1984; Safire, NYT, Sept. 5, 1988; Ruth Wisse, Professor of Yiddish Literature at McGill University, Commentary, May 1988.
113 Eban, Congress Bi-Weekly, March 30, 1973.
114 Nathan and Ruth Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America (Arbor House, 1982); see Fateful Triangle, 14f., for more extensive quotes and discussion.
115 Colin Campbell, NYT, Jan. 30, 1985. See Fateful Triangle (11f.) and Pirates and Emperors (29f., 46n) for some references to the condemnations by Israeli doves of the hysteria, fanaticism, Stalinist-style methods and sheer cynicism that they see -- correctly, in my view -- as profoundly harmful to the interests of their country.
116 Seven were discharged from the Bush campaign after the revelations, four of them retaining their leadership positions in the Heritage Groups Council, the ethnic outreach arm of the Republican National Committee. See Russell C. Bellant, "Will Bush Purge Nazi Collaborators in the G.O.P.?," Op-Ed, NYT, Nov. 19, 1988.
117 Judis, In These Times, Sept. 28; New Republic, Oct. 3, 1988. See David Corn, Nation, Oct. 24, 1988, for more on the "haven" for "anti-Semites and fascist sympathizers" in the Republican party. Also Holly Sklar, Z Magazine, Nov. 1988; Charles Allen, Village Voice, Nov. 1, 1988. On the downplaying of the story by the New York Times, see FAIR, Extra!, Sept./Oct. 1988.
118 Ed Vulliamy, WP Weekly, Oct. 24-30. See also Christopher Kenneally, BG, Oct. 16; David Korn and Jefferson Morley, Nation, Nov. 7, 1988.
119 Spector, Op-Ed, NYT, March 17, 1988, noting that not a single question was raised to Prime Minister Shamir about this matter in his press conference in Washington and TV interviews; LAT-BG, NYT, Oct. 31, 1984; BG, NYT, Feb. 25, 1987.
120 Abraham, AAUG Mideast Monitor, April 1987.
121 See Fateful Triangle, chapter 7, section 4.2.