This article appeared in New York Post : LET'S TALK WAR CRIMES June 25, 2001 -- IF the Belgians are serious about trying war criminals, they will dismiss the phony charges against Ariel Sharon and indict Yasser Arafat for the murder of Guy Eid, their man in Sudan, who was executed on Arafat's order by PLO hit men in 1973. Eid went down together with two American diplomats, Cleo Noel and George Moore, in the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum. They were killed by Black September, Arafat's gunmen, after President Nixon refused to release Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. Tapes exist to prove that Arafat ordered these executions, but for "reasons of state," every American administration from Nixon on down has refused to comment. Sharon says it's so, and on this page in January I ran an interview with James Welsh, a U.S. Navy officer who was there at the time, and confirmed it. [There have also been numerous articles about this on WorldNetDaily.com, which I have posted from time to time. C.S.] Well now, if the Belgium court that today "ponders" whether to charge Sharon with war crimes - for "indirectly" causing the deaths of a few hundred Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila during the Israeli-Lebanon War in 1982 - would put Arafat in the dock, it could demand that our government release those tapes. Fuhgeddaboutit. The Belgians, like the European Union and the United Nations, would endorse the kosher laws before they'd put any blame on Arafat. Sharon, on the other hand, is open season. The BBC the other night ran a show that made him out to be an ogre, the man who destroyed the Palestinian camps in Sabra and Shatila. Not directly, but because as the Defense Minister of Israel, Sharon "allowed" the Phalange (the Christian Arabs) to kill off hundreds of their Palestinian Moslem enemies. The BBC's anchor, so to speak, for this slander was the Kahane Commission in Israel, which formally charged Sharon with "indirect responsibility" for the massacre. I was there at the time, and on my word as an old reporter, this decision was the result of a media lynching. The Israeli leftists controlled the press [still do. C.S.], and they wanted Arik's head. The Kahane Commission, under this pressure, had to give - it exonerated Sharon from direct guilt, but said he should have known that the Christians might have gone overboard when allowed into the camps. [I'm not sure they needed the press to do that. I don't remember much about the other two commission members, but Aharon Barak, the only living member, is definitely a leftist. C.S.] Arik was run out of office, and later so was Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who quit by saying, "I can't take it any longer." The big picture raised by the Palestinians who filed the charges against Sharon in Belgium is the legitimacy of war-crime tribunals. Nuremberg was the one and only, and few people argued against it. Those who had questions were hardly heard, but in retrospect I can see their point: If the Allies isolate a few Nazis as evil, it gives a pass to the German people. It turned out that way, but things change over a century. Now the question is: What if this idea of ‘indirect responsibility" takes hold? Imagine a Belgium court holding Sharon guilty of murder because he didn't stop the Lebanese Christians from killing Moslems in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatilla. What then would protect Norman Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell from indictment? In the Gulf War, the two U.S. generals stood by while Saddam Hussein killed tens of thousands of his people - Kurds and Shiites. We had Saddam at our will, his army was finished and Schwarzkopf opined that he could have wiped him out in a day. The worst that could be said about Sharon was that he looked the other way while his friends killed his enemies. America looked the other way while our enemies killed our friends. In both cases, the idea of ‘war crimes' is meshugga. Decisions are made and mistakes are made and the only people who think an international court will do justice belong in an international Creedmore. |
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