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Subject:
Dershowitz's Case against Arafat
swhitebull
2/4/2004 9:00:01 PM
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Siggi the Troll blathered, baited and switched, since he couldnt defend Arafat- he-da-man- the Ghul:
It seems to me that there are not enough evidence to get Yasser Arafat convicted for this murder in American court. Maybe in a military court like it is pland to put the hostages in Cuba in. A court that vill not need as much proofs as a civillian court and vill newer come down on a conclusion that vill make USA look bad. The fact whether those men did what they vill be charget for or not will not have any impact on this courts conclusion. If we are talking about charging terrorist leaders for killing Anerican citizens then why not take some newer case. Why not take the murder of Rachel Corrie that was committet the 16. of march last year. An Israely soldier murded her with cokd blod in the front of his superiers. Tere are not likly that an icident like that takes plase vithout an order from the above. So why not arrest Ariel Sharon and charge him for ordering that murder. He is the top leader of the worst terrorist organisation in the middle east, the Israely army..
Here in Dershie's own words, the case against Arafat:
The Case Against Yasser Arafat
Any fair court would convict him of murder, Harvard law professor writes
by Alan M. Dershowitz - May 6, 2002
There are two distinct questions that will certainly be raised when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. President George W. Bush meet this week. The first is factual: Is Yasser Arafat a mass murdering terrorist with the blood of thousands of civilians on his hands? The second question is one of policy: Should Israel negotiate with Arafat who, regardless of whether he is a terrorist, is also the elected leader of the Palestinian people?
Sharon believes that the answer to the first question is yes and that it necessarily follows from this answer that the answer to the second question must be no. Bush wants the answer to the second question to be yes, and so he insists -- as U.S. national security advisor Condoleezza Rice has put it -- "I don't think we get anywhere by calling Yasser Arafat a terrorist." Indeed, if the U.S. were to call Arafat a terrorist, under the terms of the Bush doctrine, its hands would be tied. It could not deal with him because the Bush doctrine requires that the U.S. treat all terrorists as enemies to be defeated.
There is, of course, a third alternative: To recognize the factual reality that Arafat is a brutal terrorist who has relied on the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians from the very beginning of his career and who continues to do so today, while at the same time recognizing that it may be necessary to negotiate even with mass murderers in order to achieve peace.
The evidence that Arafat is a mass murderer is overwhelming and is beyond reasonable dispute. As a criminal law professor and a practicing criminal defence lawyer for nearly 40 years, I can attest, with absolute certainty, that there is enough evidence against Arafat to assure his conviction of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in any fair legal system anywhere in the world.
The evidence includes his own words, both oral and written, the eyewitness testimony of close associates and an overwhelming amount of documentary and circumstantial evidence.
Were Arafat a mafia don or a drug kingpin he would be spending the rest of this life in prison. On the facts currently available, the case against Arafat is far more compelling than the case against Osama bin Laden, both in terms of the quality and quantity of the evidence, and in terms of the number of deaths for which their organizations are responsible.
Here, in a nutshell, is the prosecution's case against Yasser Arafat:
Arafat's involvement with terrorism began even before Israel occupied a single inch of Palestinian territory. He began as an Egyptian terrorist, complicit in the arming of Fedayeen, who crossed the border from Egyptian-occupied Gaza into Israel to attack civilian targets. In 1968, a year after Israel's victory in the six-day war, Arafat became the father of international terrorism by directing a campaign of airplane hijackings which targeted not only El-Al but the airlines of virtually every European nation. These airplane hijackings were designed to bring attention to the Palestinian cause. Hundreds of commercial travellers were killed. In 1972, the Palestinian leadership decided to escalate its terrorism by attacking the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. Although the attack was masterminded by Mohammed Oudeh, a one-time associate of Arafat, Oudeh publicly stated that "Arafat was briefed on the scheme." Several months after the murder of the 11 Israelis in Munich, Arafat personally planned the kidnapping of two American and one Belgian diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan. Unbeknownst to Arafat, the United States intercepted a direct communication between Arafat and his operatives in the Khartoum office of al-Fatah. There exists a tape of that intercept, and of Arafat giving the direct order to murder the diplomats, one of whom was the highest ranking African-American in the American diplomatic corps. The Arafat-ordered murders were so brutal that the races of the victims could not be determined by direct observation. Two months after these murders, Arafat excitedly bragged about his involvement in them to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu at a dinner attended by Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who subsequently defected to the United States and debriefed U.S. officials about the Arafat confession. There is no statute of limitations on murder and on the basis of the Khartoum case alone, Arafat could now be convicted of first-degree murder, based on his own recorded words.
Shortly after the Khartoum killings, the Palestinian leadership once again ratcheted up its violence, this time targeting Jewish houses of prayer around the world. It targeted synagogues in Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Rome and Istanbul, killing dozens of Jews who had no connection with Israel. These killings were reminiscent of the Klu Klux Klan bombings of churches a few years earlier. In 1982, I wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times calling for an international investigation of these synagogue attacks in order to determine the role of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and its leader Yasser Arafat. No such investigation was ever conducted.
Terrorism continued as the tactic of choice by the Palestinian Authority until the early 1990s, when Arafat appeared to have renounced terrorism in favour of negotiations. This apparent renunciation earned Arafat a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. At the end of the Clinton administration, it looked like peace between Israel and the Palestinians was in hand. Israel's dovish Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a state, control over the Arab section of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount and more than 90% of the disputed territories. Instead of either accepting this offer or continuing to negotiate for a better deal, Arafat returned to his tried and true method of targeting innocent civilians.
As one observer recently put it: "The difference between Anwar Sadat and Yasser Arafat is that Sadat used war as a tactic and peace as a strategy, whereas Arafat has always used peace as a tactic and terrorism as a strategy."
Recently, Israel released documents which, if authentic, conclusively prove that Arafat has remained complicit in the premeditated murder of civilians, including children. These documents, captured during the recent Israeli military incursion into the Palestinian Authority, contain the sort of evidence traditionally used to convict organized crime capos and drug conspirators. The documents contain Arafat's signature on payment vouchers to terrorists and for the purchase of material that could only be used in acts of terrorism. They also include authorization and payment to a commander who was known to have participated in suicide bombings of Jews attending a bat mitzvah in Hadera. Arafat personally wrote in his own hand an authorization to pay him and other terrorists: "Allocate $600 to each of them."
These documents have been compiled by Israeli authorities into a briefing book which will be presented to President Bush. If and when they are authenticated, the world will see a paper trail conclusively proving that Arafat is a murderer.
There are some who argue that Israelis, too, have killed civilians. But there is a world of difference, both legally and morally, between the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians and the incidental killing of civilians who are being used as shields and camouflage to hide terrorists.
All of this does not answer the important question of whether Israel should negotiate with Arafat. Reasonable people can differ as to the proper policy with regard to dealing with terrorists. But no reasonable person can now believe that Arafat is anything but a terrorist.
To argue that Israel must negotiate with a terrorist because he is the elected leader of the Palestinian people is a knife that cuts both ways: It also supports the conclusion that the Palestinian people, at least those who voted for Arafat knowing that he is a terrorist, are morally complicit in his terrorism.
swhitebull - again, anything unclear here?
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