Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Lieberman is dying to say it


By Marwan Bishara
Al-Jazeera

"....But Lieberman, the eccentric former nightclub bouncer, is dying to take responsibility for the assassination of Israel's "enemy combatant" to borrow from the Pentagon's dictionary.

Or, to paraphrase one of Hollywood's epics, A Few Good Men, " ... he's pissed off that he has to hide behind all this ... he wants to say that he made a command decision and that should be the end of it"......

An immigrant from Moldova who made his way to become Netanyahu's bureau chief in the mid-1990s, Lieberman made a name for himself in Israeli politics by calling in 1998 for the bombing of the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egyptian support for the then Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

Lieberman reportedly called in 2002 for the transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their homeland, claiming that there is "nothing undemocratic about transfer".

The following year, the head of the Yisrael Betainu Party called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners to be shipped to the Dead Sea and drowned there.......

Alas, none of Israel's spineless allies would provide Lieberman with the opportunity to cough it up or tell them to go to hell; none would come out in the open or in private to question the minister or put the heat on Israel to come clean......

Instead, the British foreign minister pleaded with Lieberman in the most timid of ways. He asked kindly and politely for Israeli "cooperation" with an investigation into the use of forged British passports.

Miliband even tried appeasing arguably the most extremist leader in Israel - who supports the continued illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestinian and Syrian territories - by suggesting that Israel's cooperation is important because it has the most to gain from applying the rule of law in the Middle East!.....

As for proof of Mossad's activity, generally Israel's policy of ambiguity covers those acts it carries out, not the ones it would not. In other words, Israel uses denial when it does not want to give the impression it carried out an attack, but when it uses ambiguity, as Lieberman did immediately after the attack, it usually means it did...."

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