Where are the Terrorists?

Dr Abdullah Robin recounts his experiences of a recent eye-opening visit to Palestine in which he witnessed Israeli and American terrorism first hand.


Journalists spoke of an eerie silence that settled on Manhattan’s empty streets after the attack on America’s economic capital along with her military heart. I thought it would be timely to share some of my experiences during my visit to al-Khalil in Palestine, two weeks ago.

The intense stillness on the road from Al-Quds to al-Khalil would, at any other time on any other road in any other place, have felt peaceful. Gone were the lumbering lorries, the speeding taxis and the heavy-laden donkeys, all carrying passengers and produce to and fro. The peace on this road was the peace of a dead economy strangled between Arafat’s sticky fingers and Sharon’s tightening ring of steel around all the Muslim towns and villages of the West Bank.

As I approached al-Khalil I found a city under siege. Mounds of rubble heaped up daily by Israeli bulldozers blocked every road and dirt track that could have borne a car out of the city. Inside this ghetto for Muslims, those cars that escaped the firebombing of the Jewish settlers or being turned into Swiss cheese by machine guns piercing bullet holes in their bodywork were free to come and go. This is the city where, during Ramadhan in 1994, Jewish fanatics machine-gunned dozens of worshippers to death at Fajr prayers in Masjid al-Ibrahimi. The mosque is closed now just as Masjid al-Aqsa is closed to most of the inhabitants of al-Khalil.

The stillness of the day was soon interrupted. The deep thundering of thousands of rounds of ammunition, which pounded the city from Israeli tanks and sniper posts on every hill, lulled me to sleep that night. The human cost was a daily horror, unimagined, until the events of September 11th, by most Americans. There was Shakir Hasounah, shot dead for throwing stones, dragged along the ground by five soldiers as a group of savage hyenas would drag their prey. By publicly urinating upon the corpse, the soldiers displayed a kind of behaviour hitherto unknown in the animal kingdom.

There was a young girl visiting her grandmother and grandfather. She went up bravely onto the roof of their house in order to rescue her younger brother who was playing when shooting started. Her anxious mother later found her daughter’s body on the roof with a bullet in her brain. The girl’s grandmother died the next day from a heart attack.

There was a newly married bride, who after crossing an Israeli checkpoint with her family woke up in hospital to find her husband and two other members of her family, including a three month old baby, dead with bullets in the back of their heads.

All this is before making mention of the US made Apache helicopter gunships and F16s firing US made air-to-ground rockets into peoples houses. Relatives are left grimly scraping the remains of their loved ones off the scorched walls of their now broken houses, in order to at least half-fill a black plastic bag with something to bury the next day. When the chosen tool for destruction is a bulldozer, families have a few minutes notice before their homes are demolished.

Helicopter gunships were firing missiles onto defenceless civilians in the West Bank while Arafat and his employees were holding a three minutes silence for the American victims of the air attack. Arafat was even committed to sending his own blood as a donation to the American people, while the Muslims of Palestine lie dead from cold-blooded murder. If the word terrorism has any meaning then the Muslims in Palestine understand it because they have been victims of it for more than fifty years. It is ironic that they, along with all Muslims, are labelled as terrorists by the nation that seeks to subject the whole world to its torment. Surely the US is responsible for facilitating the barbarism of Israel upon the Muslims of Palestine through their military and financial support to the illegitimate terrorist state of Israel.

Israeli terror: Past and Present

The collapse of the World Trade Centre has given America more ammunition by which to target Islaam and the Muslims.

Colin Powell described the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon an “attack against civilization”. George W. Bush said; “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the Federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake! The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said; “The fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness.”

Israel’s murderous attacks upon Muslims are not called terrorism? America’s hegemony of the whole world is not called terrorism? America has used the lives of its own people as a tool for gaining sympathy towards its own foreign policy ambitions just as Israel has used sympathy for the Holocaust as a lever to assert its right to oppress others. Such is the arrogance and hypocrisy of the US, which stands side by side with Israel in condemning terrorism. This hypocrisy is even clearer when we look at the background of Israel’s leading politicians as they join the fight against the “forces of darkness”.

1. Sharon is currently facing the prospect of trial in absentia before a Belgian court for crimes against humanity. These crimes are the massacre of hundreds of old men, women and children in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

2. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion (1948-1953 and 1955-1963) headed the Zionist terror organisation called Haganah.

3. Menachem Begin (Prime Minister 1977-1983) led the Irgun, which blew up the King David Hotel in al-Quds in July 1946 killing 91 people many of whom were British.

4. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, led the terror group called the Stern Gang.

Together they terrorised the British while Palestine was under British rule earning notability for hanging two British sergeants and booby trapping their bodies with hand grenades. They, like Osama bin Laden today, were featured on posters with the words “WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE”. The massacre of 250 Muslims in the village of Deir Yassin and the wave of killings and expulsions upon which the state of Israel was founded are traits of this evil state and its greatest leaders and founders.

Perhaps if Americans were the targets of Israeli terrorism the US would take a different stand? It seems not. On 7th June 1967 the US Liberty was in international waters off the coast of Gaza when it was attacked at 14:00 hours by two Israeli Mirage aircraft. The attack lasted five minutes and was followed minutes later by another. Three Super-Mysteries dropped napalm and fired dozens of rockets before two more Mirages attacked. Throughout the attack the ship tried to contact the Sixth fleet’s headquarters, but the Israeli planes knew their frequencies and were blocking contact. By that stage 9 American sailors were killed and 60 were wounded. The ship managed to launch three lifeboats, which were immediately attacked by Israeli motor torpedo boats, destroying two and capturing the third. The attackers also launched torpedoes and fired cannon shells into the stricken ship! In all, 34 Americans were killed and 171 wounded from two hours of sustained attacks. The Liberty limped into Malta, where 821 rocket and missile holes along with over 1,000 holes from armour piercing bullets were counted.

As for the so-called United Nations, Israel defied 49 UN resolutions in the first 27 years of its existence and continues to do so. So, who are the real terrorists? The terror tactics of Israel are deemed to be non-terrorist to the United States. It is to be expected since the US are terrorists of a like nature.

Dr Abdullah Robin