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Our World: The convenient war against the Jews
In the end, the global jihad, and the West's fickle response to radical Islam's assault on its civilization, is about hating Jews. This truth, never wholly hidden from view, was exposed in all its ugliness in recent months with startling disclosures by former Italian president and Senator-for-life Francesco Cossiga.
In a letter to Italy's Corriere della Serra in August, Cossiga acknowledged that during the early 1970s, then Italian prime minister Aldo Moro signed an agreement with Yassir Arafat's PLO and affiliated organizations that enabled the Palestinians to field terrorists, operate bases and store weapons in Italy in exchange for immunity from attack for Italy and Italian interests worldwide. Cossiga also acknowledged that even when the Palestinians murdered Italians, the government still protected them. Indeed, he admitted for the first time that the largest terror attack ever to take place on Italian soil - the bombing of the Bologna train station in July 1980 which killed 85 people - was the work of PLO-affiliated terrorists from George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the time of the bombing, Cossiga was Italy's prime minister. Right after it occurred, he blamed the atrocity on neo-fascists. In his words at the time, "Unlike leftist terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state through its representatives, black terrorism prefers the massacre because it promotes panic and impulsive reactions."
In August, he claimed that it was the work of the PFLP and asserted that the bomb exploded inadvertently. That is, the Palestinians hadn't meant to kill non-Jews - so Italian authorities protected them.
On Friday, Cossiga expanded on his disclosures to Corriere della Serra in an interview with Yediot Aharonot's Rome correspondent Menachem Ganz. Cossiga admitted that it wasn't just Israeli targets that Italy permitted the Palestinians to attack with impunity, but Jewish targets as well. Indeed, in at least one and probably two incidents, the Italians colluded with the Palestinians in their attacks against Jews. On October 9, 1982, six terrorists opened fire on worshippers leaving Rome's Great Synagogue. Dozens of Jews were wounded and two-year-old Stefano Tache was murdered. Hours before the attack the Italian police detail charged with securing the synagogue was withdrawn.
Then too, in December 1985, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the El Al ticket counter at the Rome airport. Ten people were killed. Another seven people were murdered in a simultaneous attack against the El Al ticket counter at the Vienna airport. According to Cossiga, Italian intelligence agencies received prior warning of the attack but didn't bother to share the information with Israel.
Cossiga explained to Yediot, "No Italian targets were hit. They attacked the Israeli airline at the airport. The murdered were all Israelis, Jews, and Americans."
Then there was the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off the Egyptian coast in October 1985. Palestinian terrorists led by Abu Abbas commandeered the ship. They shot wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer and threw him overboard while he was still alive. The Egyptians freed the hijackers and sent them off on a flight to Libya. American jets forced a plane to land at a NATO base in Sicily. The Italians refused to permit the Americans to take the hijackers into custody and freed Abbas. The Italians cast the standoff as a victory against American bullies. But it really amounted to a surrender to Palestinian murderers. As Cossiga explained, "Since the Arabs were capable of harming Italy more than the Americans, Italy surrendered to them."
COSSIGA ALLEGES that his country's agreement with the Palestinians has recently been expanded to include Hizbullah. After the Second Lebanon War, Italy agreed to command the UNIFIL force charged with preventing Hizbullah from reasserting control over southern Lebanon and blocking its re-armament efforts. Yet Cossiga asserts, "I can state with absolute certainty that… Italy has a deal with Hizbullah according to which UNIFIL forces turn a blind eye to Hizbullah's rearmament so long as no attacks are carried out against soldiers in the force."
Ganz notes ruefully that although Cossiga's statements provoked the Italian Jewish community to demand that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi investigate the government's collusion with Palestinian terrorists, no such investigation is likely to be forthcoming. Ganz explains that Berlusconi himself is not immune to the anti-Semitism that caused his predecessors to abstain from protecting Italy's Jewish citizens. When he addresses Italian Jews, Berlusconi often calls the Israeli government "your government," and so exposes his adherence to the view that Jews are not true citizens of any country other than Israel.
The anti-Semitic belief that all Jews are Zionists and therefore all Jews are fair game in the war against Israel - itself simply another round of the age-old war against the Jews - allows anti-Semites to obfuscate the fact that their anti-Israel rhetoric is simply warmed over Jew-hatred. People like Iranian leaders Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and Palestinian terrorists from the PLO and their progeny in Hamas and Hizbullah nearly always limit their threats to "Zionists," and so pretend that they aren't actually anti-Semites.
Their razor-thin deception is eagerly embraced by their fellow travelers in the West - from university professors like Juan Cole, Steven Walt and John Mearshimer, to policymakers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Western decision-makers and European heads of state, and an alarming number of American politicians.
This deception is par for the course of anti-Semitism. Throughout history anti-Semites have used Jew-hatred as a way to rally their troops. By attacking Jews as the collective enemy, tyrants have given their people a convenient, weak culprit to attack to deflect criticism away from their own failures or to hide real enemies from pacifistic publics uninterested in fighting. Anti-Semitism appeals to people's basest instinct. But people don't like to acknowledge how much they hate Jews, and Jews have always preferred to deny that they are hated.
Continued
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