'Palestinians' name forest after dead terrorist
The 'Palestinians' have named a forest after Khalil al-Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad,
Yasser Arafat's right-hand man.
The March 30 event at Martyr Khalil Al-Wazir
Forest was attended by dozens of officials, including Minister of
Agriculture Walid Assaf, District Governor of Hebron Kamel Hamid and
representatives of the PA Security Forces, as well as several mayors
from the Hebron district and relatives of Abu Jihad, Palestinian Media
Watch said in a bulletin Sunday.
Abu Jihad, also known as Khalid al-Wazir, was a
founding member of Fatah and a deputy to Yasser Arafat. He led the
PLO’s military wing, and was responsible for numerous terror attacks
that according to PA daily Al-Ayyam killed at least 125 Israelis. His
facilitation of the 1978 Coastal Road massacre — the hijacking of a bus
that resulted in 37 Israeli deaths, including 12 children — made him one
of the most wanted Palestinian terrorists in the world.
Abu Jihad’s son, Jihad Al-Wazir, told the
crowd, “All of you are martyr Abu Jihad’s children, and he is freedom in
the memories and hearts of every one of you.”
According to Palestinian Media Watch, PA
President Mahmoud Abbas also recently decorated Abu Jihad postumously
with “the highest order of the Star of Honor.”
Abu Jihad was allegedly assassinated by Israeli agents who included former Defense Minister Ehud Barak,
dressed in drag.
When they got ashore, Mossad cars waited for them. Evidently the Mossad had had agents planted in Lebanon for some time before.
They
got in the cars and received a report that three Lebanese policemen
were unexpectedly patrolling the area in front of the apartments that
they were supposed to attack. Ehud Barak made a quick decision to
continue with the operation despite the obstacle. A call to headquarters
could have easily led to the cancellation of the whole operation.
When
they approached their target they got out of the cars and began walking
like lovers, as they had planned. No one suspected them for anything
else. As they passed the policemen, the policemen didn't even react to
them. They got to the apartments and didn't see any guards there. Muki
Betser's group went in, climbing the stairs at a half-run. They got to
the door of one of the PLO men and set the explosive fuses. They waited
for a signal from outside that the other two units had also set their
explosives and were ready to act. They got the go-ahead. They lit the
fuses and waited. When they would explode Ehud Barak would "report back
to the mother ship that the operation began, setting in motion the rest
of the IDF forces in Beirut that night."
Just before the fuse
went off shooting broke out in the street below. The three units about
ready to enter the rooms had no time to deal with that.
Muki
Betser describes his part in the raid: "Finally, the explosion blew open
the door in a blast of smoke. I burst in with Tzvika, instinctively
taking the left-hand turn into the main corridor of the apartment,
running down the hall I knew so well from my drills.
Four strides
and I reached my target's office. Half a dozen empty chairs faced the
desk. Behind it, filing cabinets reminded me that military intelligence
wanted any piece of paper we found. To my right, said the architectural
plans I memorized, was the master bedroom door. I swung in that
direction, just as the door flew open.
The face I knew from three
weeks of carrying his picture in my shirt pocket looked at me as I
raised my gun. He slammed the door. Bursts from my Uzi and Tzvika's
stitched the bedroom door. I rushed forward and kicked through the
remains of the door." The PLO man, who was responsible for the Munich
massacre of the Israeli athletes, was no more.
They ran quickly
down the stairs to deal with the shooting they had heard just before
they entered the rooms. The shooting outside was still going on.
The noise grew louder as they leaped, landing to landing, towards the bottom of the stairs and outside the building.
Muki
Betser recalls: "Out the front door, I ducked into the shadow of a
tree, scanning the intersection just as a burning Lebanese police Land
Rover rolled through the intersection. Straight ahead, Amiram Levine in a
blonde wig looked like a crazed dancer in the middle of the
intersection, his tiny powerful body swinging his Uzi back and forth
from target to target.
To my right, Ehud (Barak) stood in the
middle of the intersection, doing the same. I added my own fire at the
Land Rover, giving Amiram cover for him to run toward me. The Land Rover
crashed to a halt against a building. But a second vehicle, a jeep full
of reinforcements came screeching into the box of fire we created at
the intersection." They took out this jeep as well.
They could
hear explosions in the distance. It was, they assumed, Amnon Shahak's
paratrooper unit at George Habash's headquarters.
The Mossad cars
came screeching to a halt outside of the buildings and the fiery
intersection they were waiting at. The Sayeret Matkal units, missions
completed, jumped into the cars. Only two minutes had passed since they
hit their targets in the buildings. Ehud Barak checked with the other
Sayeret Matkal units. No one had been killed, but one commando had been
wounded. No news as of then was known of the paratroopers who had
attacked George Habash's six-storey building.
"Ehud cut off radio
contact and we rushed in a crazy race down the hills of Beirut. The
Mossad drivers knew the city and they knew the big American cars well
enough to make them slip and slide around the corners as we raced
through the city. No whooping and shouting broke out inside the getaway
car. Each man sat alone with his thoughts, alert for enemy forces taking
chase."
Outside of the neighborhood they had just wreaked havoc
in they slowed down. Soon, before they were to turn off the road leading
down to the beach, they saw a Lebanese Army troop carrier, scanning the
shore. The Sayeret Matkal commandos inside of the Mossad-rented cars
were tense as they waited for it to pass. The Lebanese didn't bother
with them.
The commandos jumped out of the cars when they got to
the beach. The operation had taken a little longer than expected - a
half-hour instead of the anticipated 20 minutes.
As they motored
out to sea, they found out what had happened. Three of the top PLO
leaders they had intended to assassinate were dead. And George Habash's
six-storey building was in rubble and ruins. In that raid, which Amnon
Shahak had led, two IDF soldiers were killed . Shahak won a medal of
valor as he saved the lives of wounded comrades under his command.
They didn't get Arafat, although they thought they might have gotten him there. But they had done what they set out to do.
Operation Spring of Youth is still known as one of the IDF's elite units' finest moments.
According to the contemporary newspaper headline, pictured above, the operation was over in five minutes.
Labels: Abu Jihad, Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Sunday, November 4.
Remembering Kalil al-Wazir
Last week Israel stopped officially denying that it had been behind the
killing of Khalil al-Wazir, otherwise known as Abu Jihad. More
precisely, the military censor allowed an Israeli newspaper to publish
an interview with the commander of the mission.
Meryl Yourish did an excellent job of critiquing a number of those news organizations reporting on this decision. Her bottom line?
It is utterly reprehensible that the focus is on the assassination of
a Palestinian leader, instead of on the reason why he was assassinated.
There was, for instance, the Coastal Road Massacre, in which 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were murdered and 71 wounded. Eleven Israelis were killed during the Savoy Hotel attack. Neither of these attacks found their way into the stories about Abu Jihad’s assassination.
Even when Abu Jihad was killed there was ambiguity about who he was. The
Washington Post featured an editorial, The Killing of Khalil Wazir on
April 19, 1988. (This editorial is available through the ProQuest
database at many American libraries.)
As the No. 2 man in Yasser Arafat's PLO and the head of its main
military arm, he qualified as a terrorist, someone using violence
indiscriminately , against civilians and for political effect. He
believed armed struggle in this form was essential for Palestinians
claiming nationhood. There can be no loose romanticizing about the man.
Yet the editorial continued:
Khalil Wazir was also something besides a terrorist. He had a second
role. He had established himself as a respected leader of his people and
as one who personified their dream of national redemption in a land of
their own. This is the difficult but undeniable fact about the PLO. It
uses terrorism and, at the same time, evidently seeing no contradiction,
presumes to speak for a people's dignity.... The sponsorship of and
engagement in unspeakable acts of terror can only undermine the cause in
which these acts are undertaken, while the cause itself and the
eloquence with which some practitioners of terror defend it prompt
people who should know better to fits of sentimental rationalization of
what is going on.
If the editorial had stopped there, it would have been fine, but later on it continued:
Obviously the easiest way for Israel to deal with the ambiguities of
Palestinian nationalism is to finesse the question of the Palestinians'
true political identity and simply go out and get the terrorists ...
Palestinians are outraged at the thought that not only does Israel
refuse to acknowledge their leaders, it kills them when it can.
Even today, nineteen years after the Oslo Accords the Palestinian
national identity is still intertwined with a belief that violence
against Israel is justified. Moderates who speak out for coexistence may
no longer have to fear for their lives, but have no real constituency.
If the Washington Post obfuscated the connection of violence to
Palestinian nationalism, Jeane Kirkpatrick who weighed in with an op-ed
in the Washington Post on April 25, 1988, Confusion at State Over The
Killing of Abu Jihad, did not:
The PLO's war against Israel is as public as it is unconventional.
There are no reasonable grounds for anyone in the Security Council or
the State Department to doubt the reality of this ongoing war. It is
proclaimed. It is lived by "Palestinian commandos."
Presumably Israel, like all other states, has the right to defend
itself against this unconventional war - even though a majority in the
U.N. has long since decided that force used against the Zionist state is
"self defense" and force used by the Zionist state is "terrorism."
Labels: Abu Jihad, Middle East Media Sampler, Palestinian terrorism, Soccer Dad
