By Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard University.
July 26, 2006.
Sometimes an apology can be quite revealing.
Consider the one recently issued by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of
Hezbollah. He apologized to the families of two Israeli children who were killed
by a Hezbollah rocket that hit the Christian holy city of Nazareth. He called
them shahids, martyrs, even though they did not choose to die at the hands of
Hezbollah terrorists.
The apology was issued not because they were children or innocent
bystanders, but because they were Israeli Arabs and not Jews. Hezbollah’s
rockets are aimed at Jews, and earn cheers whenever they kill a Jewish baby
or grandmother. No apologies there.
The so-called Arab-Israeli conflict represents the first instance since the
Holocaust that Jews, as Jews, are being specifically targeted by an
international organization that seeks recognition as a legitimate power.
Hezbollah has threatened to attack Jewish targets outside of Israel as
well. And they have proved their willingness to do so, as evidenced by their
attack on a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, in which they
collaborated with Argentine neo-Nazis to murder many Jews, including children.
The collaboration between neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists to murder Jews
should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the
collaboration between the Palestinian leadership and Hitler during World War II.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was recognized as
the official leader of the Palestinians during this period, was a virulent
anti-Semite whose hatred of Jews was both religious and racial. He became a
close ally and adviser to Adolf Hitler, and an active supporter of the “final
solution,” the mass murder of European Jewry.
In 1940, he asked the Axis powers to settle the Jewish problem in
Palestine in accordance with the “racial interests of the Arabs and along lines
similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany.” He urged Hitler
to extend the final solution to the Jewish refugees who had reached Palestine,
and he advised Hitler, in 1943, when it was well known what was happening in
Poland’s death camps, to send the Jews to “Poland, in order thereby to protect
oneself from their menace.”
Husseini rejected the two-state solution, arguing that Palestine was part of
Syria. He objected to any Jewish state, even one the “size of a postage
stamp,” on Islamic holy land. He wanted all of the Middle East to become
judenrein (free of Jews). Husseini’s heir was Yasser Arafat, a cousin who also
targeted Jews, through his surrogate terrorist groups.
When a young student at the Hebrew University was gunned down while
jogging through a mixed neighborhood of Jews and Arabs in north Jerusalem in
2004, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a wholly owned subsidiary of Arafat’s
Fatah movement, joyously claimed credit for killing yet another innocent Jew.
When it was later learned that the jogger was a Jerusalem Arab and not a Jew,
Al Aqsa quickly apologized to the family, calling it an accident.
This is anti-Semitism, pure and simple. And despite efforts by supporters of
Palestinian terrorism to justify the murder of innocent civilians as national
liberation or by any other euphemism, these selective apologies prove Islamic
terrorists’ targeting of Jews is little different in intent from other forms of
exterminatory anti-Jewish murders.
And yet Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations, Louise Arbour,
the high commissioner of human rights at the U.N., and many within the
European Union are condemning Israel for its reasonable military actions to
prevent these racist murders. They insist that there is a moral equivalence
between the anti-Semitic targeting of Jews by Hezbollah and the defensive
actions directed by Israel at military targets.
Hezbollah’s goal is not the “liberation” of Palestine. Its members are not
Palestinian. They are Islamic extremists who want to “liberate” all Islamic land,
which includes all of Israel proper, including Tel Aviv, from the “crusaders,” a
term that includes Jews and Christians (even though Jews were among the
victims of the Crusades).
The fight against Hezbollah is a fight against anti-Jewish, anti- Christian,
and humanistic values.
If Hezbollah terrorism is not stopped in southern Lebanon, it will be
coming to a theater, church, or synagogue near you.
