Posted on 08/21/2002 11:31:59 AM PDT by ancientart
Terrorism in the Middle East did not start with Islam. Political factions used terrorist tactics for centuries before the birth of Muhammad, and, in many ways, their actions foreshadowed the terrorist atrocities we see today. In particular, modern terrorists resemble the Sicarii, a particularly vicious group that plagued Jerusalem and Judea almost 2,000 years ago.
The Sicarii (knifemen) thought of themselves as patriots, freedom fighters who would liberate Judea from the hated Romans. Jewish freedom was so important to them that they would do literally anything they thought might gain them that freedom, killing anyone that might stand in their way. Roman officials, of course, were among their favorite targets. But the Sicarii worked even harder to eliminate Jewish "traitors" - Jews who collaborated with the Romans or who were not quite zealous enough in their resistance to Roman rule.
The favorite trick of the Sicarii was to mingle with the great crowds that assembled in Jerusalem. Suddenly: a hidden dagger, a sudden thrust, and another unsuspecting victim collapsed in a pool of blood. And then - the really diabolical trick of the Sicarii - the assassins themselves would scream in horror at the hideous spectacle. Their feigned shock made them indistinguishable from the frightened spectators, and the Sicarii assassins usually managed to escape without detection.
Today's Palestinian terrorists are in some ways heirs of the Sicarii. But we also see Sicarii-like tactics in the way our senators are handling the current wave of corporate scandals.
Every day, Capitol Hill resounds with thunderous denunciations of corporate greed and the inadequate regulation of American business. Ironically, the senators yelling the loudest are among those who stabbed the victims in the first place.
Sen. John McCain, for instance, has been screaming for the resignation of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt, blaming Pitt for overly lax regulation efforts. According to McCain, Pitt has been "slow and tepid" in trying to end accounting abuses.
But Pitt didn't become SEC chairman until August 3, 2001 - far too late to do anything about the accounting problems of Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, Enron, etc.
And while the scandals were developing in the 1990s, where was Sen. McCain? Why he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, a committee that has more authority (and more leeway) than the SEC when it comes to investigating corporate wrongdoing. If anyone was "slow and tepid," it was McCain himself. No wonder he howls so loudly!
And then there's Sen. Tom Daschle, who complains about the Bush administration's "cozy, permissive" ties to corporate America and its lack of openness about those ties. Rather odd criticisms coming from a man whose wife lobbies for some of the biggest corporations in America and who consistently refuses to make public the amounts their household receives in return for her lobbying efforts.
But all this pales when one looks at Sen. Jon Corzine, the man who during the 2000 election spent $60,000,000 of his own money to essentially buy himself the Senate seat from New Jersey. As the corporate scandals began to break, Corzine led the Democrats in trying to blame the scandals on Bush and the Republicans, and his shouts of indignation were among the loudest on Capitol Hill.
But this is utter hypocrisy. From 1994-1999, Corzine was the CEO of a Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs. Under Corzine's watch, Goldman Sachs manipulated IPO's artificially upward, creating a stock market bubble that, when it burst, cost investors millions. On top of that, Goldman Sachs was a major contributor to the Enron debacle.
For a man like Corzine to use the corporate scandal issue to smear his political opponents requires an incredible of amount of chutzpah, and an audacity that maybe even the Sicarii couldn't match.
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