Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 4:39 PM

Subject: Fw: " What about Israeli Terrorism?"

----- Original Message -----

Cc: Edward Greenspon ; href="/cgi-common/webmail.cgi?cmd=url&xdata=~2-de4326fc8581e34e3e1b9122eb8389abf44d9ef0db00&url=ail" title=mgee@globeandmail.ca href="javascript:press_email('mgee@globeandmail.ca')">Marcus Gee

Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 12:31 PM

Subject: " What about Israeli Terrorism?"

Canada Palestine Association,

Halifax, NS, B3J 2X1

Your editorial : {" Yasser Arafat's ultimate failure" Nov.12} is a catalogue of misrepresentations and falsehoods. You speak of the "tragic unforgivable failure [of Arafat] for which he himself bears the primary blame." There is not a word about the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their homeland, in 1948 and 1967. There is not a word about the Israeli illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that has been allowed to stand for 37 years, in defiance of international law and repeated Security Council resolutions, together with the atrocities committed during this occupation, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, constituting war crimes.

You state : " If terrorism today is a worldwide phenomenon, we have Mr. Arafat to thank." The 'credit' for the the introduction of terrorism in the Middle East and on the international scene must clearly go to the Zionist movement and Israel.

The late Professor Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor, and then Chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil rights, wrote:" There is nothing new in the fact that Israel is a terrorist state, which, almost from its inception, has used its intelligence service [the Mossad] to assassinate people on foreign soil with any violence or terror it considers necessary for its ends."

The record of Israel and the terrorist gangs {the Stern, Irgun Zwei Leumi and Haganah} that brought it about is massive and would take volumes to relate, but I will refer only to a few examples:

The Irgun Zwei Leumi, led by Menachem Begin, was responsible for the bombing of King David hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing over 90 men,women and children. In 1944, Yitzhak Shamir was responsible for the assassination the British minister, Lord Moyne, in Cairo in 1944. A horrible crime was committed in the assassination of the Swedish nobleman, Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Mediator, on Sept. 17,1948, in Jerusalem on the orders of Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister of Israel. Count Bernadotte's sin was his recommendation, as the UN Mediator, that the Palestinian refugees, who were driven out from their homes by Israel, should be allowed to return to their homes. This was the substance of the UN resolution # 194, of Dec. 11,1948, which remains unfulfilled to this day.

The first act of air piracy in the history of civil aviation was carried out by Israel in 1954, when a civilian Syrian airliner was forced down in Tel Aviv and its passengers and crew held hostage, despite international condemnation.

The first act of shooting down a civilian airliner was deliberately carried out by Israel when a Libyan airliner was shot down by Israeli jet fighters over Sinai in February 1973, on the orders of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, killing 107 of its passengers and its entire French crew.

Israeli terror was not restricted to Palestinians, Arabs and Europeans but included its own closest supporter and ally, the United States. In 1954, Israeli secret agents bombed the U.S. diplomatic centres in Cairo and Alexandria (known as the Lavon Affair), in an attempt to put the blame on the Egyptians. Israel later honoured the perpetrator, Marcello Ninio.

In June 1967, Israeli forces attacked the U.S.spy ship USS Liberty, and strafed rescue boats, killing 34 and injuring 170 U.S. servicemen, in an attempt to conceal its own secret communications, and again tried to blame it on the Egyptians. To this day, incredible as it may seem, the U.S. Congress refuses to hold an inquiry into this crime, as requested by the surviving crew. Needless to say, no sanctions were imposed or calls to extradite the perpetrators were made.

Zionist terror did not spare Jews. In 1940, Menachem Begin's Irgun Zwei Leumi terrorist gang bombed the ship Patria in Haifa harbor, killing 240 Jewish refugees, so as to put the blame on the British for political gain.

In 1950-1951, Israeli agents were dispatched to Iraq where they tossed hand grenades into the crowded Massauda Shem-Tov synagogue, killing innocent Jewish worshippers, in order to blame it on the Iraqis and encourage reluctant Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel.

This a mere sample of the acts of terrorism that Israel conducted and continue to carry out against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and on the international scene.

Yours sincere;y,

Ismail Zayid, MD. President, Canada Palestine Association.