Damascus: Car bombing is 'Israeli state terrorism'

Sep. 26, 2004 12:01 | Updated Sep. 26, 2004 20:45
Damascus: Car bombing is 'Israeli state terrorism'

By ARIEH O'SULLIVAN

Nine hours after a car bomb exploded in the Syrian capital on Sunday killing top Hamas terrorist Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil, the Syrian government called the assassination "an Israeli act of state terrorism in the heart of Damascus", a statement by the Syrian government said.

The Syrian Interior Ministry said in a terse statement carried by the official news agency, SANA, that Khalil had not engaged in any activity inside Syrian territory, and that authorities were investigating the explosion. Ahmad Haj Ali, an adviser to the Syrian information minister, described the assassination as a "terrorist and cowardly action."

"This is not the first warning" Israel has tried to convey to Syria, Haj Ali said. "What happened indicates that Israel's aggression has no limits." The Israeli assassination, he said, "was meant to deliver a message to the entire world that says: 'We are capable of striking anywhere in accordance with the Israeli agenda."'

While not confirming or denying Israeli involvement in Khalil's death, Israeli officials said he was involved in the transfer of arms from Syria and Lebanon to Hamas hands in the Palestinian territories.

Khalil's white Mitsubishi Jeep exploded 10 meters from his home in al-Zahraa district at 10:45 a.m. (0745 GMT) almost immediately after he started it. Witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had been speaking on his mobile phone as he got in the car. Khalil, who is survived by two sons and a daughter, may have been an easier target than other Hamas leaders because he lived outside the well-guarded Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. He had been living on the ground floor of the 10-story building in al-Zahraa with his family for about a year. The area is modest and heavily populated, with towering apartments with shops on their ground floors and old, single-story stone houses.

The Izz el-Deen al-Kassam Brigades, Hamas' armed wing, vowed to avenge Al-Sheikh Khalil by attacking Israeli targets overseas, the group said in a statement issued in the Gaza Strip.

"We have allowed hundreds of thousands of Zionists to travel and move in capitals around the world in order not to be the party that shifts the struggle overseas. But the Zionist enemy has done so and should bear the consequences of its actions," said the statement, a copy of which was faxed to the pan-Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, which broadcast the message.

"We announce an escalation in the fight between us and the Zionist enemy," Hamas spokesman Sami Zuhari said speaking on Al-Jazeera.

But another Hamas spokesperson, Osama Hamdan, denied the al-Jazeera report, saying Hamas would not change its strategy of striking at Israeli targets only within Israel and the Palestinian territories. "Our policy was and remains to conduct our struggle inside the Zionist entity," Hamdan said, speaking from Beirut.

Experts believe the retraction came about because Hamas does not want to be seen as another al-Qaida.

The Associated Press Jerusalem bureau reported that anonymous Israeli security officials acknowledged the Jewish state was involved in the assassination, a claim not backed up by sources in the Ministry of Defense, the Prime Minister's Office and the Israel Defense Forces.

Israel Radio reported that Israeli officials learned of Khalil's death through the media.

Israel has never taken responsibility for assassinations and other activities on foreign soil. Israel has a long history of tracking down terrorists abroad and settling accounts with them. In a persistent campaign in the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli agents killed 11 members of the PLO's "Black September" group responsible for murdering members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in 1972. Eleven athletes were killed in the hostage drama.

In 1988, Mossad agents killed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's right-hand man and PLO military chief Khalil Al Wazir in his bed in Tunis. In 1995, assassins on a motorcycle gunned down Islamic Jihad chief Fathi Shekaki outside a Malta hotel in a mission widely attributed to Israel.Sunday's action inside Syria was the first by Israel since October last year when Israel sent its warplanes to bomb a base of the Islamic Jihad. That air attack, the first in two decades, was retaliation for a Jihad suicide bombing at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa where 19 people were killed.

Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra expressed satisfaction at Khalil's killing, but stressed that he did not know if Israel was behind the assassination. "I cant confirm, and I can't deny, but I am not unhappy that he was killed," Ezra said.

Former Mossad head Danny Yatom told Army Radio that if Israel was behind the assassination, "then it was a justified act."

"Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil had innocent blood on his hands. He was behind many terrorist acts inside Israel. I don't know if he was killed by the long arm of some country's intelligence agency or from a work accident, but he got what was coming to him," Yatom.

The explosion took place in the al-Zahraa district at 10:45 a.m. a media center in Damascus told AP. According to reports, Khalil got into the car, received a call on his cell phone, started the engine, and that is when the car exploded.

Radio Damascus said he was not involved in Hamas activities inside Syria, but Khalil's brother, Salame, was quoted on Arab TV as saying Khalil was the tutor of other Hamas bomb makers. The Radio also said three bystanders were wounded in the blast.

A top aide to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said that the assassination in Damascus "is the beginning of a very dangerous period that will have negative consequences on everyone," Israel Radio reported.

A member of the Hamas political bureau, Mohammed Nazzal, told the AP in Cairo that a bomb had been planted in Khalil's car, which exploded as Khalil tried to start the ignition.

Police at the scene of al-Zahraa district explosion were seen retrieving pieces of the body of Khalil.

Khalil, 42, used to work for Hamas in the Gaza Strip and was deported by Israel to Lebanon from the Gaza Strip. He was one of the people who trained legendary Palestinian bomb maker Yehiya Ayyash, who was killed in 1996.

Israel has warned that it would target Hamas leaders anywhere. Vice Premier Ehud Olmert said the battle against Palestinian terror will reach "every place, every corner."

Olmert made the comments in a speech at a memorial service for soldiers killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and was not reacting to the car bombing.

Israel reinforced its warning to hunt Hamas leaders everywhere after the double suicide bombing on two Beersheba buses on August 31 that killed 16 people. Hamas claimed responsibility for that attack.

Israeli security sources have said that Hamas in Damascus was increasingly involved in guiding, funding and directing Palestinian terrorist groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Following the warnings, the senior Hamas leaders in Damascus, at the urging of the Syrian government, departed Syria.

"You're preaching to the choir"

A choir knows a hymn by heart and sounds it gloriously in unison. This board is not a choir on this subject.

"but preaching so self-righteously and loudly"

Guilty as charged. You shout by using caps. I shout by strident statements. The nuke mecca crowd shouts with mushroom cloud pics. Moveon.org shouts with Hitler references. We are in better company, differing only slightly from one another and more sharply from the rest of them.

"what motivates terrorists to do what they do has always baffled me, and still does."

I can answer that question, but first I apparently have to get a misconception out of your head. Guess we aren't all on the same hymn yet, are we?

"You say the answer is "justice.""

So siree bob. I said no such thing. We are motivated by justice, and use it, and enact it. Terrorists do not exercise justice and are supremely unconcerned with it. They are after power, not justice - seeking its source, seeking its display, seeking the illusion of it when they can't have the substance.

They think that cruelty is the secret of power, that all powerlessness is caused by morality and self-restraint, that to create power and amass it for oneself all that is necessary is ruthlessness, cruelty, consciously willed evil.

They think that the United States is more powerful than they are because it is more willing to ruthlessly bomb people, to aggressively murder, to lay waste entire cities. They think Jews are powerful because they are cunning and wicked and stick together with lockstep prejudice and humiliate their enemies and listen to no one. They think the rich are rich because they are willing to cheat and steal. They think the poor are the virtuous and the powerless are the righteous.

It is so much easier, you see, to admit that one is weak than to admit that one is morally bad. They diagnose the cause of their weakness as precisely their goodness, their simplicity, their moral easy goingness. Then they seek power by getting rid of these things. By attacking any inward self restraint, by stealing themselves to ignore their humane feelings. Soon they set themselves the task of deliberately doing the most disgusting thing they can imagine.

They superstitiously expect their power must soar as a result. They are thinking to themselves, "to hell with justice, I want revenge, I want power, morality be damned, cut off their heads". They imagine that trashing morality will make them stronger. When they find themselves surrounded by ashes as a result, all cooperation destroyed, all finer feeling evaporating, blind hate everywhere, everything they have ever touched falling to ashes - it never occurs to them that the cause is their cynical maxim that injustice is the high road to power.

At root, their belief that injustice must lead to power is a cosmic or religious faith. And I don't mean Islam. I mean pessimism. They believe that death is stronger than life, that life is a brief interlude between infinite bookends of nothingness, that humaneness and politeness and delicacy of feeling are all lies and things for women, that reality at its core is black pit of desperation. They don't mind dying because they are already dead.

They feel themselves humiliated by their very nature, by their mortality, by their fleeting pointlessness. And they give this humiliation a name. Its name is the west, modernity. Which are to blame for stripping away their illusions and their beliefs, the comfort of sheltering in the hands of a just God.

And they would rather die trying to shatter that humiliation, to defy it even if it is true, than to live in the blink between those bookends of nothingness, pretending this world matters. They say they are dying for Islam. What they mean is, they are at war with the mortality proclaimed by modern secularism as the truth about man. Not because they think it untrue, but because they suspect, fear, that it is true.

So they show no sign of belief in a just judge weighing men's hearts. On the contrary, they think the fate of their civilizations is a purely political matter in their own hands, that can only be advanced by a kind of magical power conjured by systematic cruelty. The root of that thought is scarcely different from the knee jerk reaction you often see even around here - if only we stop being so civilized and such patsies and really get evil and boil our enemies in oil, then we are sure to win. Pray ardently enough to the devil and worldly power must follow. (Think about it - when they call the US and Israel the great and the little satan, and also envy our power and seek it themselves, what are they doing?)

"Is not justice in the eyes of the beholder??"

No it is not. Justice is absolute. It does not cut along the grain of identity groups but across them. It judges men not by their identity but by their conduct and the maxims of that conduct. It distinguishes innocent from guilty and combatant from civilian, not westerner from Muslim. Justice never excuses unlimited violence, it is always directed at reform of the adversary, it always leaves a way out back into grace, if conduct changes. "He killed, he dies" is justice, because it says "those who do not kill may not be killed", and nowhere in that is there anything about identity. It is formal, formal enough for the golden rule.

"I see the blood and gore"

Well that would be half the problem right there. See moral and immoral actions and actors, not blood. Some blood is just, better shed than left alone. Some is sacred, sacrilege to touch. What draws the line between them? Identity? No, justice.

"after innocent Israelis are killed on a bus and I wonder how any ARAB could think this is in any way justified."

First they don't think it is justified, they think it is expedient and useful and revenge and the way to power, they aren't looking to be just, justice is for patsies. Also, Israelis are all criminals, the little satan, cheaters and ruthless. You can tell, just look how successful they are. Only devil worshippers could be so successful in this world, since evil is the road to power. If they were simple and unoffending pacifist sheep, they would just be slaughtered. They have power therefore they are evil, so they deserve whatever they get.

"how do we ever, EVER change their minds?"

They need to learn that the high road to power lies through justice and not through evil, that evil courses always result in ashes and impotence, that their cynicism is at bottom superstition, heresy, error and despair. Until they learn this they must be smacked down every time they attempt to stand on evil. Every time they seek profit in cruelty, they must see it fail.

Lately we have been rewarding them far too much for their troublemaking - Israel withdrew from Lebanon because of ambushes, Philippines withdrew troops from Iraq because of a hostage, Spain withdrew troops from Iraq because of a bombing, Kerry says he will withdraw troops from Iraq because it isn't Nantucket yet. We do them no favors this way. They can only learn that injustice is a road to ruin by encountering ruin promptly when they try to take that road. In the nature of things, they will encounter it, but we can make it prompt or distant. Justice makes it prompt.

"I just can't believe that "ordinary" Palestinian mothers are that much different than "ordinary" American mothers."

You underestimate the effects of war frenzy and racial and religious hatred, as well as the depth a cosmic outlook penetrates the soul and all of life. The sport of mankind through untold ages has been slaughter of their neighbors. Ordinary people in superstitious times past have sacrificed their own children on bizarre altars to monsters existing only in their imagination, expecting thereby to be magically rewarded. A modern suicide bomber's family is not much different. We gave our first born to "god", perhaps we will get power and respect out of it, and at least the government will send us a check.

They do not know what else to do when their policy of redoubled hatred fails, expect to try even harder by testing new canyons of ruthless cruelty. They think becoming more evil and fighting harder are synonymous. They think all power in the world is purely a result of victory, not of justice or cooperation. If they aren't winning yet, becoming more evil is the only remedy that even occurs to them. Give us H-bombs to smuggle into foreign cities, then maybe the devil will give us our due.

I am of course speaking of the terrorists. There are any number of Iraqis who had a bellyful of cruelty under Saddam, know that it leads nowhere, and want justice instead. There are others who enjoyed being torturers endowed with the authority to murder whoever they chose. And there are others who think the only thing wrong with Saddam's cruelty is they were receiving it instead of dishing it out. Which of these is most numerous? Certainly the first, who would rather try justice for a change. But the others are quite active (and evil, even mad).

How do we deal with it? We offer justice as a free offer. If you behave you will be treated based on your actions, not your identity. If on the other hand you want to try your luck at seeking power through evil, you will get plenty of evil out of it, but no power. Because we will stand here and at whatever risk to ourselves, knock out of your hands anything you manage to grab by descending into ruthless evil.

It is an education. A moral education. In the uselessness of cruelty. In the profitability of justice. Those with ears to hear, let them hear. Those without, get justice, of the "he killed, he dies" variety if that is their choice. You can't save a man from seduction by evil. That is his affair, you can't control it, in the end he decides. You can only give him the choice, and make him face the consequences.

Now, does the whole choir understand this? Does the whole choir understand, that this moral and philosophical difference is why we have choirs and they have suicide bombers? Why we practice cooperation in the production of beauty once a week, while they preach death to the infidel?

It is not enough to wave "our civilization" around like an identifying flag. We have to actually understand why we are civilized, and live that being civilized. And that means trying to teach them civilization, not imitating their worship of evil as an entirely imaginary source of worldly power.

Is that preachy enough for you? Understand yet why I am go off about this?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.