COMMENT POSTED TO REVIEW OF A BOOK BY RONEN BERGMAN IN THE
INDEPENDENT
Poisoned toothpaste
and exploding phones: New book chronicles Israel’s ‘2,700’ assassination
operations
Intelligence
correspondent Ronen Bergman persuades Mossad agents, Shin Bet and military
personnel to disclose their stories on state-sponsored killings
Israel has demonstrated little to the world over its brief
history beyond the fact that it is capable of succeeding as a criminal state.
It has flourished on lawlessness and criminal activity of every description.
Assassinations, kidnappings, torture, illegal imprisonment, theft,
terrorism, starting wars with every neighbor it has, using banned weapons,
making nuclear weapons, making chemical weapons, proliferation of nuclear
weapons (with apartheid South Africa), blackmailing other states, and more.
The record is simply appalling, and the world cannot go on
saying everything is okay because of what some other criminals did in a
different country on a different continent three-quarters of a century ago.
That cannot be an excuse for decades of new terror and lawlessness.
All people everywhere are capable of sinking into corruption
and criminal behavior if they are subject to no standards, no oversight, no
checks and balances, and no penalties for wrongdoing. And add to that, allowed
to function under the general acceptance of a terrible principle that anything
can be excused owing to events of another place and era and people.
When I think of the way our establishment regards Israel, blind
to all the terrible things done in its name, I am reminded of J Edgar Hoover
whose FBI in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, simply refused to acknowledge that
organized crime existed in the United States.
He spent all of his considerable resources chasing
non-existent communists.
But organized crime did exist, and in a big way. And it grew
and flourished precisely because of the way Hoover ignored it.
Turns out that old J. Edgar (who was a closeted gay and a
cross-dresser) had been badly compromised by the Mob.
The Mob apparently had compromising photos of him.
J. Edgar and his companion, Clyde, also used to like
vacationing at some Mob-run resorts, where they received all kinds of special
treatment, including tips on how to successfully bet at the Mob-run race track.
Here was the country’s chief law-enforcement officer accepting betting tips
from the Mafia.
Now, does that remind us of anything?
