The history of the PLO and the International Legitimization of Terrorism

For the achievement of such complicity by Western nations, accepted values of culture and civilisation had to be thrown overboard. The international institutions within the United Nations that were established to promote, to disseminate, and to perpetuate those values had to be subverted and prostituted, and even the formal regulations and norms protecting them in the Charter of the United Nations had to be abused and undermined. The Arab states, however, encountered little resistance.

Thus, in November 1974, a year after the Yom Kippur War, the world was treated to the spectacle of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Arab terrorists, a revolver showing at his hip, addressing amid noisy acclaim the Assembly of the United Nations. Fourteen months later, a representative of his organisation was seated as a participant-lacking only the right to vote -- in a meeting of the Security Council.

On the Arab side, these developments were neither sudden nor the fruit of spasmodic opportunism. They were well and long thought out. They were the result of a clear change in tactics by the Arab states after the oil and petrodollar weapon had proved its potency., Before the war, the pattern of their propaganda, their pressures, and their strategy had been governed by the logic of geography: first the "erasure of the consequences of the 1967 War"-that is, Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines-and then the concentrated physical attack on the attenuated Israel by a sea of Arabs, all wearing "Palestinian" uniforms and fighting for the "restoration of their legitimate rights": that is, the elimination of Israel.

When the American pressure began to bear fruits, when Israel had physically given up part of the gains of 1967, and the further consummation of the Arabs' objective seemed to them no longer in doubt, they changed the order of priorities. It became possible at once -- without waiting for the gradual process of Israeli withdrawal-to establish the diplomatic basis for the most radical part of their dream: the creation, in the public consciousness, of the "Palestine State" on the rains of Israel. To this end, considerable diplomatic activity was required-for co-ordination among the Arab states themselves, for co-ordination with the Soviet bloc and with the submissive African states--to test the reactions of the Western states, the degree of passivity with which they would swallow the project.

The terrorist organisations had certainly come----or been brought-a long way since their crushing defeat in Jordan. The Arab states had then acted, swiftly to ensure the speedy rehabilitation of their proteges. Some latitude, to be sure, had to be given them in executing at least some symbolic revenge on Jordan. But the promise and the arrangements for their continued existence, for quartering them (mainly in Lebanon), for financing their arms, their training and their propaganda, were necessarily accompanied by the condition that they concentrate their main effort against the Israeli enemy.

Symbolic revenge found expression in the appearance of a new organisation that called itself Black September, in memory of the events in Jordan in 1970. The first operation claimed by the organisation was appropriately a blow against Jordan. On November 28, 1971, King Hussein's Prime Minister, Wasfi el Tal, was shot down in a Cairo street. The four assailants did not resist arrest. They were not put on trial but were subsequently simply released by Egyptian authorities.

In fact, Black September was not a new organisation at all. The nature of its operations, the new dimension of brutality which -became its hallmark, made it convenient for Fatah and its leader to avoid identification with it.

Most of its activities in the next two years were carried out at a distance from Israel. They consisted mainly of efforts to attack civilian airplanes-on the ground at Rome or Athens airports-or by means of stratagems. For example, a gift chivalrously given to an unsuspecting girlfriend flying on an El Al plane to Israel, contained a time-bomb. Most dramatic of their exploits were the attacks on unsuspecting groups of people, related or unrelated to Israel, in airplanes or elsewhere, and holding them as hostages against the satisfaction of various demands. Usually these included the release of prisoners, jailed in Israel or other counties as well as money and safe conduct to one of the Arab states. Arab terrorism now became also part of an international phenomenon. Liason and mutual co-operation was widely reported with terrorist groups in Italy, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Thus, the one major act of terror carried out on Israel itself was the 1972 attack by three Japanese terrorists at Lod Airport. Landing from a plane on March 25, they took up positions in the airport's arrival hall and machine-gunned their fellow passengers. They killed twenty-seven people, including twenty pilgrims from Puerto Rico who had come to celebrate Easter in the Holy Land. Eighty others were wounded.¹

Black September's own tour de force that year was performed in Munich, Germany. There, in September, they murdered eleven Israeli athletes who had come to participate in the 1972 Olympic Games. They had first trapped them, unguarded and unarmed as they were, in their sleeping quarters.

As though to flaunt its special tactics of warfare, Black September carried out an act of equal Wantonness six months later. This time, for reasons unexplained, the chosen field of battle was inside Arab territory: the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, capital of Sudan, where the ambassador was giving a party. The attackers had no difficulty getting in, nor in subduing five unarmed diplomats and taking them captive into another part of the building. They soon released the two Arabs among them: the host, and a Jordanian. Many hours of negotiations then followed with Sudanese authorities. To this end, the terrorists reported and received orders by radio communication with Beirut. Then the three remaining captives-a Belgian and two Americans-were shot dead in the chairs to which they had been tied. The killers were arrested.

There were perhaps some valid inter-Arab reasons for the operation, but the Sudanese authorities, in their anger, now publicly dispelled whatever doubt may have existed about the authenticity of Black September. They announced and published documents proving that Black September was indeed none other than Fatah, and that the organiser of the killing in Khartoum was in fact the local official representative of Fatah. Sudan's Vice President later announced that the order to kill had come by code on the radio from Fatah headquarters in Beirut. Later, unofficial reports added that the order had been given personally by Yasser Arafat. Arafat now admitted that "there are some Fatah members in Black September." A member of Fatah, captured in Jordan, revealed that the operative leader of Black September was Arafat's deputy, Salah Halef, known as Abu Ayad.

The massacre at Munich had evoked expressions horror throughout the Western world. The terrorists knew no bounds after the gruesome event in Khartoum The American government demanded that Sudan deal with the murderers with due severity, and newspapers throughout the world called for countermeasures against this new barbarity. The New York Times expressed the view that it was "inconceivable" that Black September should be allowed to exist. Then sentiments failed, or pretended to fail, to understand the realities.

But by the time the Yom Kippur War broke out nobody could continue to feign ignorance of the fact that Black September was Fatah, just as Fatah and its sister organisations were a completely integrated arm of the Arab states. There, each new operation was greeted with public approval and enthusiasm. The only Arab government that officially announced its active role in the world-wide operation of Black September was.² In fact, all the requirements of the terrorists were placed at their disposal by one or another of the Arab states as required, and the embassies of the Arab states, in carefree disregard of all international agreements and procedures, became bases for terrorist activities.³

Arab perpetrators of terrorist acts found sanctuary, when they needed it, in the Arab states (except Jordan). In some cases, they were given public receptions as heroes; in others, they were quickly removed from the public eye and returned to their base. Sudan had reacted to the murder of the diplomats and had responded to the horror-stricken reactions in the United States by emphatic, unequivocal, and repeated undertakings to punish the murderers. But in fact, after a while, the Sudanese government packed the murderers off to Egypt where Sadat freed them without fuss.

The Yom Kippur War presented Yasser Arafat and his organisation with a great opportunity. Suddenly the Israeli Army was engaged heavily on two fronts and was plunged into dire difficulties. Large numbers of Israeli Reserve soldiers were being moved to the fronts, and civilian life in Israel was suddenly in a state of upheaval. Here was a favourable, even ideal, set of circumstances for major action-to set up a third front: to divert Israeli forces to the "Fatah front" on the Lebanese border, to attack Israeli Army installations and forces behind the lines in Judea and Samaria and indeed on the roads and in the cities of Israel. This is what might have been expected by those throughout the world who, on radio and television and in the newspapers, absorbed the daily ration of information on the size and prowess of the Palestinians. Nothing of the sort happened, however. Neither Fatah nor any of its sister organisations played any noticeable part in Yom Kippur War.

It was only after the war, in the gloom and atmosphere of defeat that had been induced in Israel by the revelation of the unwarranted shortcomings and blunders at its opening, by its heavy toll of casualties, and by the crushing cruelty of American pressure at its conclusion, that the Arab terrorist organisations mounted a new series of operations. Now they no longer used the camouflage of Black September, but explicitly that of their collective identity -- "Palestine Liberation Organisation"---or of one of its constituent bodies. Now, indeed, they operated, mostly from their bases in Lebanon, against and inside Israel itself.

The onslaught began in the spring of 1974. During that year, in addition to a number of smaller operations -- such as the flinging (by two non-Arab allies from abroad) of hand grenades from the balcony of a Tel Aviv theatre into the crowd below-they launched a dozen major attacks. Some were nipped in the bud; a number succeeded. Several places in northern Israel were thus added to the annals of Arab achievement, gaining a sombre fame throughout the world: Nahariyah, Beit She'an, Shamir. The pattern of these attacks was exemplified by the events at Kiryat Shmoneh and Ma'alot.

Kiryat Sh'moneh is a village in the mountains of Galilee close to the Lebanese border. It was there that the PLO opened its offensive. Shortly before dawn on April 11, 1974, three of its members, two Syrians a one Iraqi, went into an empty schoolhouse on the outskirts and, as dawn broke, fired into the street. Upon the arrival of Israeli soldiers who returned their fire, they found a way out of the building, crossed a street, and went into an apartment building. They entered an apartment and, using Kalashnikov automatic rifles, shot Mrs. Esther Cohen, age forty, her seventeen-year-old son David, and her daughter, Shula, age fourteen. They then went quickly to other apartments in the building. Some they entered, firing at the occupants, most of whom were eating breakfast; into others they simply threw hand grenades. In the noise and confusion of the next ten minutes, they made their way into the adjacent building to continue their attack. By the time the Israeli soldier’s caught up with them and shot them, they had killed six more Israelis between the ages of two-and-a-half and eleven as well as eight civilian adults. Sixteen men, women, and children were wounded but survived, and Israeli soldiers were killed.

Even more spectacular was the operation a month Later at Ma'alot, a village somewhat farther from the Lebanese border. Here the attackers arrived earlier in the day, at 3:00 A.M., when everybody was asleep. They knocked at the door of one apartment and one of called out in Hebrew: "Police! There are terrorists around!" When the door was opened, the terrorists entered and shot Yosef Cohen, his wife Fortuna, and their four-year-old son Eli. They also shot the daughter, five-year-old Beah, but she survived. From the Cohen apartment, the terrorists went across the road again to a school. But this school was not empty. Housed in it were more than one hundred high-school pupils on a hiking tour from Safed, resting for the night. The attackers woke the sleeping children and, wielding their Kalashnikovs, herded them, together with their teachers, into the hallway. Some of the children and one of the teachers succeeded in slipping and escaped by jumping out of a window. The rest were held for fourteen hours. When Israeli soldiers rushed the building, the Arabs fired into the crowd of children, hitting eighty-four of them. Twenty were either killed instantly or later died of their injuries.

These operations were hailed with enthusiasm by the communications media in all the Arab states. They were described later that year by Farouk El Kadoumi, leader of the Fatah delegation to the Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Arab States at Rabat, as "great operations of military heroism."

The cries of horror that resounded throughout the West did not inhibit the great diplomatic offensive maintained by the Arab states throughout that year. Its first stage was brought to a successful conclusion by the end of 1974. Arafat himself was active in the offensive, moving from one Arab capital to another, and twice visiting Moscow in April and July.⁴ He had also had an earlier meeting in March with the Soviet Foreign Minister in Cairo, after which Mr. Gromyko sounded the keynote of the diplomatic offensive: He announced that the Soviet Union regarded the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.

It was on October 14, 1974, that the concentrated effect of Arab power was dramatically demonstrated. On that day, 105 member states of the United Nations voted to invite Yasser Arafat to address the Assembly on the Palestine problem. The moral significance of the vote was minor. Over the years, the automatic majority of the totalitarian, the anti-democratic, and the captive blocs had long turned the United Nations into a forum, pathetic yet potentially dangerous, whose deliberations bore little or no relation any longer to its high purpose. Now it was not only condoning murder and barbarity and legitimising the threat of politicide and genocide, it was destroying its own formal legitimacy as an organisation of recognised states with recognised minimal criteria. Among the 105 states, France and Italy also raised supporting hands, and of the other Western states, only three (apart from Israel)-Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and the United States-were bold enough to vote in opposition. The rest abstained.⁵

Now, too, the French government hastened to seek a further advantage over its fellow Western Europeans in subservience to the power-wielding Arabs. Foreign Minister Jean Sauvagnargues, paying an official visit to the Middle East, made his way first to Beirut and there (October 21) became the first Western Foreign Minister to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat. He greeted him effusively as "Mr. President" and, at a press conference, publicly pronounced his considered judgement of Arafat as "a moderate leader" possessed of "the stature of a statesman" who was "following a constructive path." He did not elaborate. These events took place eighteen months after the slaughter of Western diplomats in Khartoum and five months after the massacre of children at Ma’alot

The stage was now set for the Arab states to legitimise formally their intention to replace Israel with a "democratic, secular State." On October 29, 1974, the heads of the Arab states met in conference in Rabat, Morocco, and passed resolutions

(a) Reaffirming "the right of the Palestinian people to return to its Homeland";

(b) Reaffirming "the right of the Palestinian people to set up an independent national authority, under the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, in every part of Palestine liberated. The Arab States are obligated to support this authority, from the moment of its establishment, in all spheres and at all levels";

(c) Expressing "support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in exercising its national and international responsibility within the framework of Arab undertakings."

The decisions at Rabat were unanimous. Hussein of Jordan who was deprived by the Rabat resolutions of any backing for his own claim to western Palestine, had long resigned himself to the reality that the terrorist movement was the more effective instrument for eliminating Israel. He could only hope that his acquiescence Might evoke from the PLO a similar forbearance about leaving Transjordan in his hands, which, after all, they (correctly) regarded as eastern Palestine, and where in fact most of the Palestinian Arabs lived. He had long since been readmitted into the Arab fold. Egypt and Syria had re-established relations with him on the eve of the October war, and he had then released the remaining tefforists-756 in number-from his jails.

The resolutions were passed unanimously. President Sadat of Egypt, widely advertised by Western apologists as a "moderate," did not pretend to try to introduce even a semantic modification of their plain language Moreover, whoever wished to could find many pronouncements by him or by other Egyptian authorities on their identity of purpose with the "Palestinians." What Sadat intended for the Jews of Israel he had in plain in his widely publicised oath a year before Yom Kippur War. He had sworn in the Cairo mosque to restore the Jews to the condition described in Koran: "to be persecuted, oppressed and wretched." It was Egypt's leading weekly journal, Al-Musswar, that had spelt out in political terms precisely what was intended when the "legitimate rights" had been restored.

"The English word peace," wrote the editor of journal on December 7, 1973, "can be translated Arabic as both sulh and salaam, whereas in Arabic there is a difference between the two."

Israel, he explained, could indeed expect salaam in exchange for a surrender to present Arab territorial demands (that is, to withdraw to the Armistice lines of 1949).

A fortnight after the Rabat Conference, clothed now with the unambiguous authority of the whole Arab world, Yasser Arafat delivered his address to the United Nations Assembly. His appearance was timed to coincide with the presidency for that month of an Arab, President Boumedienne of Algeria, who duly accorded to Arafat at the podium the treatment previously accorded only to heads of state. Nobody objected, nobody commented. Arafat did not disappoint his sponsors. Mounting a Soviet-style attack on imperialism and colonialism of which Zionism was the handmaiden, and repeating a fine selection of the calumnies, gathered together by Arab calumniators of Zionism and the Jewish people, he called for world support for the elimination of the State of Israel and its replacement by a democratic, secular State of Palestine. He did, however, make a concession to Western susceptibilities. Not all the Jews who had arrived after 1948 would be deported. The Jews living in Israel could stay there, provided they agreed to accept whatever fate awaited them in the "democratic, secular State."

The favouring wind that blew up for Arab ambitions after the October war had by now reached gale force. The campaign continued to accustom the world to the Nazistic idea that it would not be bad for the world if the Jewish state disappeared. Meantime, however, circumstances had made it possible for the Arabs to eliminate two other obstacles disturbing the homogeneity of Arab Moslem domination throughout the area between the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.

One of these was the Kurds in Iraq, a Moslem but non-Arabic nation; the other the Christians of Lebanon. The Kurds, who had no state of their own, had been fighting for a generation in their contiguous territory in northern Iraq, not indeed for independence, but for autonomy within the Iraqi Arab state. Except for the occasions when they made promises (which were never kept) to grant such autonomy, successive Iraqi governments had tried without success to crush the Kurds by force.

Fierce and bloody resistance to Iraqi power was supported by Iranian arms, with United States backing. Iran’s support was a function of her ongoing dispute with Iraq about the sovereignty over the waterway dividing them. With the growingly profitable common oil interest and, presumably, prodded by the Arab League, the Iraqis, meeting the Iranians at an OPEC meeting in Morocco in March 1975, made concessions in return for an Iranian abandonment of the Kurds. The Kurds were accorded one gesture. Those who wished to escape the mercies of the Arabs would, within a brief time limit, be allowed to cross the border into Iran and would be given sanctuary as refugees.

Inside the Kurdish region, the Iraqi government speedily applied plans for a final solution of the "problem." It would be done by degrees.

Nearly 80 percent of the agricultural produce of the region was "bought" by the Iraqi government at a very low price, thus reducing the means of livelihood for the population. Moreover, nearly all doctors and medical personnel were transferred from the Kurdish region.

A plan to settle large numbers of Egyptians in the Kurdish region, and the building of three new towns for the purpose, was publicly described in an advertisement in AI-Ahram of Cairo.

Should nothing happen to disturb the process, the Kurdish entity was well launched for extinction.

The assault in Lebanon began a month later. It was not a walkover. Here was the only Arab state in which the Moslems had to share power and even to accept a minor share in it. Indeed, the original raison d'être and the whole modem history of Lebanon was primarily of a Christian enclave, of a haven for Christians in an unfriendly Moslem environment. In recent years in particular, with the increasing discomforts and unease suffered by Christians in some of the Arab states, Christian immigrants from those countries were being absorbed by Lebanon.⁶ By the agreed Lebanese Constitution of 1943, the President and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army were always Christians,  while a Moslem was Prime Minister. A Moslem was also Speaker in the Parliament, but the Christians held a majority of its seats.

The intolerance of Moslems to a status of less than domination had twice in the recent past led to violent efforts to put an end to this Christian predominance. On the last occasion, in 1958, order had been restored only after the United States had intervened by sending in Marines.

The Christians, well organised, forewarned by the new spirit of exhilaration and militancy that gripped the Arab Moslem world after the Yom Kippur War and by the ominous direction and thrust of American diplomacy, prepared for trouble. But they were faced by a coalition of forces. Their own Moslem neighbours, armed with weapons from Syria, were reinforced by the Arab terrorist organisations now filling without inhibition the role of executors of the pan-Arab will.

Incredibly, the fighting went on for months, mainly in Beirut, the capital. Large sections of the once flourishing westernised city, banking and business metropolis of all the Arab states, were reduced to rubble, and day after day tens, and later hundreds, of people, mostly civilians, were killed. After a year of civil war, at least twenty thousand people had perished.

By then the political objective of the Moslem onslaught had been accomplished. Whatever the precise future organisation of the country turned out to be, Christian predominance had been brought to an end. The army had been broken up into its religious components, and had in fact disintegrated as a viable force. The Christian President, whose resignation was demanded by the Moslem insurgents, was finally replaced by a cowed majority vote in a besieged Parliament; his successor was a Christian nominated by the Syrians.

The continued shelling and shooting reflected the sense of desperation of the Christians, who could not reconcile themselves to defeat. But more incisive was the fact that the Moslems, having achieved the essential political victory, quarrelled over the spoils.

The Syrian government now found the moment ripe to achieve her own special objective: to take the affairs of Lebanon under her control as a first step toward the creation of the long-dreamed-of Greater Syria. Yet the Lebanese Moslems had believed that the struggle and indeed the sacrifice had been for their benefit. The terrorist organisations, who had-played their full part in reducing the Christians, regarded it as their natural right to play a dominant role in deciding the fate of Lebanon.

The grotesquerie of the events was now made complete. The Christian nations, who with more or less embarrassment had throughout the months kept silent and turned their faces from the slaughter that Syria had generated and sustained, now welcomed her, and the troops she sent into Lebanon, as a "peacemaker."

The precise roles and relationship of the Syrians, the Lebanese Moslems, and the Palestinian terrorist organisations would soon crystallise. The reduction of the penultimate vestige of non-Moslem sovereignty in the Arab world would now also bring about, along the southern Lebanese border, a fourth front manned by a variety of Arabs, all in "Palestinian" uniforms, for the final reduction of Israel-the last obstacle to the "unity of the Arab world."

Pending the realisation of their ideal of Israel's physical elimination, the Arab states pursued with undiminished vigour the preparatory gnawing and nibbling at Israel’s status as a member of the community of nations. Their tactics were strikingly similar to those of the Nazis: to disseminate an image of Israel-and of the Jewish people-as black, as negative, and as hateful as could be conjured up by their own fertile imaginations and by the anti-Semitic outpourings of the ages, so that when the time and the opportunity came to destroy Israel physically, the normal reactions, even of civilised people, would be blunted and minimal. At the same time, they accustomed the world to spectacles symbolising the supplanting of Israel by the "Palestinians."

They had as yet no hope of achieving Israel's expulsion from the United Nations or even of the application of sanctions against her-both decisions subject to veto by the Security Council-but in the meantime they secured majority decisions denouncing Israel and indeed the concept of Jewish nationalism in a number of international bodies unconcerned with politics. They succeeded even in having Israel expelled from the regional section of UNESCO to which she belonged (and to whose work she contributed far beyond her logical share). The protests and resignations of intellectuals, artists, and scientists throughout the world were to no avail. Thus, also, Israel was excluded from Asian sporting bodies. And, thus, the United Nations Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

This last obscenity was indeed too much for the Western nations to stomach. Not only did they not hide their disgust, but thirty-four of them voted against the solution.

Yet this isolated act of protest revealed all the more sharply the supine resignation of the Western nations toward nearly all the other Arab-Soviet orchestrated efforts to turn Israel into a pariah state, and which had already made a grotesque caricature of the United Nations organisation. Mr. Abba Eban, the former Foreign Minister of Israel, once remarked-before the Yom Kippur War-that if the Arabs were to introduce a resolution at the UN declaring the earth to be flat, they would get forty supporting votes. In the now enlarged United Nations, and in today's circumstances, they would probably muster 110. And the Western nations would abstain. This is the essence of their record on the Arabs' hate campaign against Israel. Afraid to offend the Arabs, yet unable to support them in conscience, or where no plausible excuse was available, they would seek discreet refuge in abstention, however absurd, irrelevant, or outrageous the Arab resolution might be.⁷

On the other hand, the Western nations equally supinely showed no resistance to the seating of the PLO on various international bodies engaged in practical day-to-day activities, treating that organisation as though it were a national authority relating to the territory of Palestine.⁸

It is weird and depressing to see the rapists of Czechoslovakia and those who savaged Yemen, the destroyers of the Kurds and those who murdered South Sudanese, the vicious racists from Uganda and the begetters of the bloodbath in Lebanon, conferring in the corridors of the United Nations in amity and parliamentary decorum with the spokesmen for Western civilisation, wrestling over a formula for their diverse, selfish (or imagined) interest that would somehow break the resistance and the spirit of Israel, while all aver that their only objects are peace and justice. As long as this collaboration continues, there can neither peace nor justice in Palestine, but at best cease-fire with recurring Arab efforts at attrition.

1. Two the attackers were killed or committed suicide. The third, Kozo Okomoto, was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. The three were members of a Japanese organisation called the United Red Army.

2. On June 11, 1972.

3. A comprehensive survey of Black September was published by Christopher Dobson in a series of articles in the London Daily Telegraph in July 1973.

4. Arafat had paid six earlier publicised visits to Moscow in preceding two years.

5. The abstainers were: Australia, Barbados, Belgium, Britain, Burma, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Laos, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and West Germany. Absent from the vote were: Bahamas, Chile, Granada, Honduras, Lesotho, Nepal, Romania, South Africa, and Swaziland.

6. See Bernard Lewis, "The Return of Islam," Commentary, January 1976.

7. When Mr. Baroudi, the delegate for Saudi Arabia, announced that the Holocaust was a Zionist invention, the Western delegates remained silent and unruffled, except for a belated few words of correction by the British delegate. When Baroudi added that the story of Anne Frank had never happened, even the Dutch delegate remained silent. When Baroudi quoted "an important Swedish newspaper," no Swede rose even to explain that he was referring an obscure neo-Nazi scandal sheet.

8. Much of the time of these bodies is of course now spent debating fantastic charges against Israel.

This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst 
Brooklyn, New York 
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Source: "Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine" by Samuel Katz, 
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A fully documented, dramatic history of the turbulent events which shaped the crisis of the Middle East. "Battleground" is one of the best written and most informative histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict. ... I advise everyone to read it. - Congressman Jack Kemp Reading "Battleground" is an eye-opener. It is well written, informative, fast-paced and debunks some carefully cultivated myths concerning Israel and the Middle East. - Former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick