America's Double Standard on Terrorism

For the U.S. government, there is terrorism and then there is terrorism. It is rarely questioned why the United States should be allowed to hold the position of world arbiter of terrorism since America's definition of it is conspicuously influenced by political bias and opportunism.

It comes down to this, America's government and much of the media judges political violence as terrorism if it is aligned against declared American interests and goals but conveniently excuses such violence when the group is deemed pro-American. The best case of this is Israel and the Palestinians. Admittedly, many Palestinian groups have committed acts of terrorism and should be recognized accordingly. But Israel is a far worse and serial offender. Zionist militias later incorporated into the Israel Defense Forces, Israel's occupation military, were the pioneers of terrorism in the Middle East. Car bombs, bus bombs, market bombs, hotel bombs, cafe bombs, indiscriminate rocket fire on a civilian area, all these acts and more, that are not presented as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Palestinian cause were used, nay (to belabor) pioneered, by Zionists in their quest to build a Jewish state. But beyond being the mothers of Mideast terrorism, Israel has maintained an unceasing policy of terrorism against Palestinians and Arabs. Put aside the question of Israeli killing of civilians during Israel's unrelenting wars against the occupied Palestinians and the Lebanese for which Zionist apologists are ever ready to cite a host of pretexts to dismiss Arab civilian deaths by either invoking the horrific term "collateral damage" or blaming the victim with lies that Palestinian militias "use human shields", put aside all that, but Israel has engaged in violence so premeditated and focused that it can only be described as dictionary terrorism. By this I refer to the letter bombs and car bombs sent not to Palestinian resistance fighters, but to Palestinian civilian artists, writers, intellectuals, researchers and activists. Ghassan Kanafani, to cite by one, was a Palestinian writer who never held a gun in his arms and was killed by Israel alongside his 14-year niece in a car bomb in Beirut. His death, like others, was meant to demoralize Palestinians as erasing those voices which gave cause to their struggle. This was and remains part of the Zionist war against the Palestinians. It is unassailable that a car or letter bomb against a civilian to achieve an atrocious political goal is an act of terrorism. And, yet, never has the U.S. government or the establishment American media ever referred to any Israel act as terrorism.

I will accept that some acts by Palestinians are terrorism and some legitimate resistance against occupation. And even accept that some acts of Israel, as a state, are self-defense but many, if not most, are terrorism. And yet one side is routinely accused of being a bunch of irredeemable terrorists as they try to resist what is being done to them by merciless military power, and the other is presented as a beacon of peace whose actions are always beyond reproach and morally sound. And if civilians die it is they victims fault, no less!

If America cannot offer even a semblance of balance and fairness on this issue, it is hopeless and it should be seen as invalid in its hypocritical self-righteous preaching about its opposition to terrorism.

Then there's Iran, briefly, as the United States condemns Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism many prominent former government officials are busy promoting a radical Iranian group, designed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, solely because of the mutual hatred for the Islamic Republic. That's how it works.

But closer to home there is an even clearer illustration: Cuba. Anti-Castro Cuban terrorists have long been treated with lenience for obvious reasons:

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ONE of the Cuban government’s most legitimate criticisms of the United States involves its handling of Luis Posada Carriles. A Havana-born Venezuelan citizen, Mr Posada helped organise the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He later worked for the CIA to undermine Fidel Castro and assist Nicaragua’s right-wing Contra guerrillas. In 1976 two of his employees blew up a Cuban aircraft, killing 73 people, including the country’s national fencing team. Over 20 years later he was implicated in bombings of Havana hotels.

Mr Posada has largely evaded punishment for these crimes. Mr Posada sneaked into the United States and asked for asylum. When Venezuela sought his extradition, he withdrew his asylum request and was arrested. However, a judge refused to deport him on the grounds that he might be tortured in Venezuela—a claim many Cubans might find ironic, given the presence of Guantánamo Bay on their island.

Since then, Mr Posada has been in legal limbo.

Cuba and Venezuela have accused the United States of protecting Mr Posada by failing either to try him for terrorism or to extradite him. Yet prosecutors had to prove his role in the hotel bombings to show that he had lied. The evidence seemed strong. The government subpoenaed Ann Louise Bardach, who interviewed Mr Posada in 1998 for the New York Times. In a conversation she taped, he said he was the “boss” of the plot and that an Italian tourist who was killed was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. (He later recanted this confession.) Asked if he was sorry, he said he “slept like a baby”. Prosecutors also unearthed a fax detailing payment for the attacks signed by “Solo”, one of his aliases.

However, the defence cast doubt on the government’s case by painting its witnesses as biased or unreliable. Moreover, the judge did not allow the fax as evidence. The jury debated for just three hours before acquitting Mr Posada on April 8th.

Even though Cuba and Venezuela had objected to the perjury charges at first, they were outraged by the verdict. Ricardo Alarcón, head of Cuba’s parliament, called the trial a “stupid and shameful farce” because of limits on the evidence presented to the jury. Venezuela’s foreign ministry said it was “an emblematic case of the United States’ double standard in the international fight against terrorism.”

So now ask yourself again: Should the opportunistic U.S. government be the arbiter of world terrorism with this record?