From FT, March 2 2010, by Andrew Roberts:
Is state-sanctioned assassination justifiable, or does it somehow de-legitimise the state that undertakes it?
Two articles in this newspaper last week, by Henry Siegman and David Gardner, have been violently critical of Israel in the wake of the assassination of the Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on 19 January.
Mr Siegman wrote of how “Israel’s colonial ambitions” and “checkpoints, barbed wire and separation walls” were “turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state”, thereby creating a “looming global threat to the country’s legitimacy”. Two days later Mr Gardner wrote of how Israel’s “militarist extroversion” over the Dubai murder demonstrated an “Israeli preference for instantly satisfying executive solutions to complex political and geopolitical problems” which would “widen the international battle-space for tit-for-tat attacks” and “encourage the perception that [Israel] is a rogue state”.
Both commentators are completely wrong. All that the Dubai operation will do is remind the world that the security services of states at war – and Israel’s struggle with Hamas, Fatah and Hizbollah certainly constitutes that – occasionally employ targeted assassination as one of the weapons in their armoury, and that this in no way weakens their legitimacy.
As for the “separation walls” and checkpoints that one sees in Israel, the 99 per cent drop in the number of suicide bombings since their erection justifies the policy.
There is simply no parallel between apartheid South Africa – where the white minority wielded power over the black majority – and the occupied territories, taken by Israel only after it was invaded by its neighbours. To make such a link is not only inaccurate, but offensive. If Arab Israelis were deprived of civil and franchise rights, that would justify such hyperbole, but of course they have the same rights as every Jewish Israeli.
Far from having any colonial ambitions, Israel wants nothing more than to live peaceably within defensible borders. But equally it demands nothing less.
Furthermore, rather than some kind of knee-jerk “preference for instantly satisfying executive solutions”, the decision to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh – assuming it was sanctioned, planned and carried out by Mossad alone, which is anything but clear at this stage – would have been minutely examined from every political and operational angle. Yet sometimes complex political and geopolitical problems do require the cutting of the Gordian knot, and this was one such.
When Britain was at war, Winston Churchill sanctioned the assassination by its Special Operations Executive of the SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the capture (and killing if necessary) of General Heinrich Kreipe on Crete; ditto Erwin Rommel. Just as with some Mossad operations, such as the disaster in Amman in 1997 when agents were captured after failing to kill Khaled Meshal of Hamas, not all Churchill’s hits were successful. But the British state was not de-legitimised in any way as a result.
The intelligence agents of states – sometimes operating with direct authority, sometimes not – have carried out many assassinations and assassination attempts in peacetime without the legitimacy of those states being called into question, or their being described as “rogue”. In 1985 the French Deuxième Bureau sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior trawler, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, without anyone denouncing France as a rogue state. Similarly, in 2006, polonium 210 was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko without Putin’s Russia being described as “illegitimate”. That kind of language is only reserved for Israel, even though neither Pereira nor Litvinenko posed the danger to French and Russian citizens that was posed to Israelis by the activities of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
The reason that such double standards still apply – more than six decades after the foundation of the state of Israel – is not because of the nature of that doughty, brave, embattled, tiny, surrounded, yet proudly defiant country, but because of the nature of its foes.
Even though one has to be in one’s seventies to remember a time when Israel didn’t exist, nevertheless there are still those who call the country’s legitimacy into question, employing anything that happens to be in the news at the time – such as this latest assassination – to try to argue that Israel is not a real country, and therefore doesn’t really deserve to exist. Real rogue states such as North Korea might be loathed and criticised, but even they do not have their very legitimacy as a state called into question because of their actions.
Those who wish to understand Israel’s actions and put them in their proper historical context should read Michael Burleigh’s cultural history of terrorism, Blood and Rage. Burleigh quotes a senior Mossad agent saying after the Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes: “If there was intelligence information, the target was reachable and if there was an opportunity, we took it. As far as we were concerned we were creating a deterrence, forcing them to crawl into a defensive shell and not plan offensive attacks against us.”
Is that attitude so very different from the pre-emptive targeted assassination of Taliban leaders that Nato carries out by flying drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan today? Yet are Messrs Siegman and Gardner going to call into question America’s legitimacy? No, that insult is reserved for only one country: Israel.
Showing posts with label Dubai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dubai. Show all posts
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Computer scans of passports are commonplace in the United Arab Emirates
From: The Australian February 26, 2010, by Simon Canning:
IN the past two weeks [alone], hundreds of Australian passports have been scanned into computers in the United Arab Emirates ...computer scans of Australian passports are commonplace throughout the region, hotels there usually requesting guests hand over their passports for scanning.
Travellers in large groups ...are often asked by hotel clerks to surrender their passports overnight for scanning ...a practice that is frowned upon by the Australian government, but harried travellers often agree with the request when checking in.
...Two weeks ago, 500 Australians and New Zealanders travelling with the V8 Supercars round to Abu Dhabi and Bahrain were told by clerks at the Yas Marina Crowne Plaza Hotel to hand in passports to be scanned overnight...
IN the past two weeks [alone], hundreds of Australian passports have been scanned into computers in the United Arab Emirates ...computer scans of Australian passports are commonplace throughout the region, hotels there usually requesting guests hand over their passports for scanning.
Travellers in large groups ...are often asked by hotel clerks to surrender their passports overnight for scanning ...a practice that is frowned upon by the Australian government, but harried travellers often agree with the request when checking in.
...Two weeks ago, 500 Australians and New Zealanders travelling with the V8 Supercars round to Abu Dhabi and Bahrain were told by clerks at the Yas Marina Crowne Plaza Hotel to hand in passports to be scanned overnight...
Friday, February 26, 2010
Hamas mass murderer got what he deserved, all else is trivia
From vexnews.com, February 26, 2010, by Andrew Landeryou:
If Israel brought the Hamas mass murderer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to justice – and we’ll never whether they did or whether he fell foul of fellow terrorists – then we can only celebrate.
How they did it is a tenth-order issue.
Why they did it is to stop Hamas blowing buses full of school-children, crowded pizza parlours, airplanes and airports, kindergartens and beach resorts.
Kevin Rudd and his blow-dried Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are good men and they have a role to play on the national stage ...Protecting the integrity of our passports is a part of the job, we suppose.
...Being a victim of a one-off identity theft is obviously not nice. And we can entirely understand the confusion and unhappiness about the individuals in that position. We’re sure not even the knuckle-headed authorities in the Dubai one-man dictatorship will hold them responsible for the death of the Hamas arms-buyer.
But after everyone has had a Bex and a good lie down, then surely the paramount issue is the need for Israel to protect itself from those who wish to terrorise it into madness, blast Jerusalem with nukes and drive six million Jews into the sea.
The world continues to apply a double-standard to Israel.
Where’s the front-page outrage when missiles land in southern Israel? ...
Where’s the Prime Ministerial or DFAT frenzy over the nuclear arsenal being slowly and hopefully incompetently assembled by Iran’s perverted regime? ...
...Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is dead.
We don’t know why he was killed. But if Israel did it, then that’s fine by me. If it had been possible to do so, I don’t doubt the preference would have been to extract him from the one-man dictatorship of Dubai and bring him to Israel to see how many of his blood-thirsty ghoul comrades he’d give up.
If you really believe that the Holocaust ought happen never again, if you’re really Israel’s friend as I’ve seen Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith insist over the years then you might consider that true friends stick even when slight offence has been caused. True friends don’t act opportunistically to denigrate the other. True friends see the big picture.
Whining about identity theft, the integrity of passports and such things is not the act of a friend.
It shows a contemptible lack of understanding about the reality of life in the Middle East and situation Israel is put in by those who seek to destroy it.
...From the comfort of suburban Melbourne, I am in no position to second-guess how the brilliant Israel security forces and services do their work. But I thank God they do. And while debate will rage in Israel about whether operations against scum like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh are worth all the grief, real friends of Israel are just relieved that there’s one less genocidal maniac on the loose.
If Israel brought the Hamas mass murderer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to justice – and we’ll never whether they did or whether he fell foul of fellow terrorists – then we can only celebrate.
How they did it is a tenth-order issue.
Why they did it is to stop Hamas blowing buses full of school-children, crowded pizza parlours, airplanes and airports, kindergartens and beach resorts.
Kevin Rudd and his blow-dried Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are good men and they have a role to play on the national stage ...Protecting the integrity of our passports is a part of the job, we suppose.
...Being a victim of a one-off identity theft is obviously not nice. And we can entirely understand the confusion and unhappiness about the individuals in that position. We’re sure not even the knuckle-headed authorities in the Dubai one-man dictatorship will hold them responsible for the death of the Hamas arms-buyer.
But after everyone has had a Bex and a good lie down, then surely the paramount issue is the need for Israel to protect itself from those who wish to terrorise it into madness, blast Jerusalem with nukes and drive six million Jews into the sea.
The world continues to apply a double-standard to Israel.
Where’s the front-page outrage when missiles land in southern Israel? ...
Where’s the Prime Ministerial or DFAT frenzy over the nuclear arsenal being slowly and hopefully incompetently assembled by Iran’s perverted regime? ...
...Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is dead.
We don’t know why he was killed. But if Israel did it, then that’s fine by me. If it had been possible to do so, I don’t doubt the preference would have been to extract him from the one-man dictatorship of Dubai and bring him to Israel to see how many of his blood-thirsty ghoul comrades he’d give up.
If you really believe that the Holocaust ought happen never again, if you’re really Israel’s friend as I’ve seen Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith insist over the years then you might consider that true friends stick even when slight offence has been caused. True friends don’t act opportunistically to denigrate the other. True friends see the big picture.
Whining about identity theft, the integrity of passports and such things is not the act of a friend.
It shows a contemptible lack of understanding about the reality of life in the Middle East and situation Israel is put in by those who seek to destroy it.
...From the comfort of suburban Melbourne, I am in no position to second-guess how the brilliant Israel security forces and services do their work. But I thank God they do. And while debate will rage in Israel about whether operations against scum like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh are worth all the grief, real friends of Israel are just relieved that there’s one less genocidal maniac on the loose.
Duplicitous Dubai
From an article published February 25, 2010 by Zvi Bar'el:
It's no surprise Dubai was the site of a hit on Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by a troupe of disguised assassins. After all, Dubai itself is a two-faced entity, disguising itself again and again while providing cover for spies.
...Dubai has several masks. It helps Iran, but behind its back it provides the United States with an opportunity to gather intelligence about that country. The U.S. Consulate in Dubai also operates as a station for gathering information and enlisting agents. A few years ago the U.S. State Department wanted to close the consulate, but the CIA succeeded in convincing it to leave it open and even to boost the number of employees so that it could handle the hundreds and perhaps thousands of Iranians who come to request visas.
It's not only the U.S. intelligence services that love Dubai: The tremendous scope of commerce and the large number of companies and foreign agencies there are an excellent cover and an appropriate disguise for any city of spies.
Dubai has now replaced 20th-century Istanbul, Nicosia, Casablanca and Berlin as a hotbed of spying activity. Russians exchange information with Pakistanis, Afghans and Chechens trade tactics, members of Hezbollah convert illegal money and diamonds in bank transactions "for widows and orphans," and all while enjoying car races and performances by international artists.
...Dubai is a city-state that is not only its own disguise, but also that of neighboring and distant Arab countries. Male and female Saudis, who at home observe religious strictures very strictly, travel on weekends to Dubai in order to enjoy the nightclubs and the alcohol. Iranians of both sexes sail along its coasts without headscarves and without the supervision of the morality police, and political exiles find a refuge there from governments that are seeking revenge.
Dubai is a wonderful place. It has no substitute. Ask the Mossad, the CIA or the British Secret Intelligence Service.
It's no surprise Dubai was the site of a hit on Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by a troupe of disguised assassins. After all, Dubai itself is a two-faced entity, disguising itself again and again while providing cover for spies.
...Dubai has several masks. It helps Iran, but behind its back it provides the United States with an opportunity to gather intelligence about that country. The U.S. Consulate in Dubai also operates as a station for gathering information and enlisting agents. A few years ago the U.S. State Department wanted to close the consulate, but the CIA succeeded in convincing it to leave it open and even to boost the number of employees so that it could handle the hundreds and perhaps thousands of Iranians who come to request visas.
It's not only the U.S. intelligence services that love Dubai: The tremendous scope of commerce and the large number of companies and foreign agencies there are an excellent cover and an appropriate disguise for any city of spies.
Dubai has now replaced 20th-century Istanbul, Nicosia, Casablanca and Berlin as a hotbed of spying activity. Russians exchange information with Pakistanis, Afghans and Chechens trade tactics, members of Hezbollah convert illegal money and diamonds in bank transactions "for widows and orphans," and all while enjoying car races and performances by international artists.
...Dubai is a city-state that is not only its own disguise, but also that of neighboring and distant Arab countries. Male and female Saudis, who at home observe religious strictures very strictly, travel on weekends to Dubai in order to enjoy the nightclubs and the alcohol. Iranians of both sexes sail along its coasts without headscarves and without the supervision of the morality police, and political exiles find a refuge there from governments that are seeking revenge.
Dubai is a wonderful place. It has no substitute. Ask the Mossad, the CIA or the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Fraudulent passports and disguises are tools of trade for Hamas
From The Globe and Mail, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010, by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza — Reuters:
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas commander assassinated in Dubai, used the same tradecraft — fraudulent passports and disguises — as his killers during secret missions to procure arms for the group, a confidant said on Thursday.
...“He used to wear coloured contact lenses and dye his hair when travelling to European countries,” said the confidant, who is based in the Gaza Strip, an enclave run by Hamas Islamists. He told Reuters he spent two years in exile with Mr. al-Mabhouh.
“He used to supply money and arms to Hamas and other allied factions,” the confidant said.
“He had many passports of different nationalities — all Arab,” he added. “Recently he underwent surgery to reshape his nose. It became narrower.”
Mr. al-Mabhouh was killed last month in his hotel room in ...Dubai ....
Dubai authorities have named 26 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian and said they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports, and disguises...
...Dubai police have not commented officially on the passport Mr. al-Mahbouh used to enter the emirate. Mr. al-Mabhouh's brother said the Hamas commander arrived in Dubai on a Palestinian passport that listed his family name as Hassan.
“(Mabhouh) never led a normal life. He was suspicious, careful, and he never told anyone, not even his wife, of his future or immediate plans,” the confidant said, adding that Mr. al-Mabhouh used Arab passports to enter European countries because they aroused less suspicion....
...Both Hamas and Iran have acknowledged Tehran's financial support for [Hamas]....
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas commander assassinated in Dubai, used the same tradecraft — fraudulent passports and disguises — as his killers during secret missions to procure arms for the group, a confidant said on Thursday.
...“He used to wear coloured contact lenses and dye his hair when travelling to European countries,” said the confidant, who is based in the Gaza Strip, an enclave run by Hamas Islamists. He told Reuters he spent two years in exile with Mr. al-Mabhouh.
“He used to supply money and arms to Hamas and other allied factions,” the confidant said.
“He had many passports of different nationalities — all Arab,” he added. “Recently he underwent surgery to reshape his nose. It became narrower.”
Mr. al-Mabhouh was killed last month in his hotel room in ...Dubai ....
Dubai authorities have named 26 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian and said they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports, and disguises...
...Dubai police have not commented officially on the passport Mr. al-Mahbouh used to enter the emirate. Mr. al-Mabhouh's brother said the Hamas commander arrived in Dubai on a Palestinian passport that listed his family name as Hassan.
“(Mabhouh) never led a normal life. He was suspicious, careful, and he never told anyone, not even his wife, of his future or immediate plans,” the confidant said, adding that Mr. al-Mabhouh used Arab passports to enter European countries because they aroused less suspicion....
...Both Hamas and Iran have acknowledged Tehran's financial support for [Hamas]....
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
European hand-wringing over forged passports, but not over cold-blooded mass terrorism
From WSJ, Tuesday February 23, 2010, by Gerald M. Steinberg, who teaches political science at Bar Ilan University and heads NGO Monitor:
The headlines and video images allegedly showing Israeli spies in Dubai are titillating, but they mask the serious issues involved in the death of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Along with predictable European hand-wringing over forged passports, this case is the latest example of the failure of the international legal system and the United Nations to provide a remedy to mass terror.
Al-Mabhouh was a cold-blooded murderer—in an interview just last year on Al Jazeera he boasted about kidnapping and then killing two Israeli soldiers. He was also a major figure in arranging arms shipments from Iran to Gaza. Al-Mabhouh shared responsibility for the thousands of rocket attacks fired at civilians in Sderot and other Israeli towns, which resulted in last year's war in Gaza. In his travels, the Hamas terrorist was probably making arrangements for the next round of attacks.
But international law provides no means for stopping terrorists like Al-Mabhouh, or for his Hezbollah counterpart, Imad Moughniyeh, whose life ended with an explosion in Damascus in 2008. (In addition to numerous attacks against Israelis, Moughniyeh has been blamed for the 1983 Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American and French peacekeepers and the murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri.) Cases involving Muslim terrorists, supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of the United Nations. Al-Mabhouh violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians, but the U.N.'s Human Rights Council—which is dominated by such moral stalwarts as Libya, Algeria, and Iran—has no interest in Israeli complaints.
It is equally hard to imagine Interpol issuing arrest warrants in response to Israeli requests. And if warrants were issued, history shows that German, French, Belgian, and other European governments would not risk the consequences of acting on them. Little effort was ever made to apprehend the perpetrators of the Munich Olympic massacre, or of the deadly bombing attacks against synagogues in Istanbul and Athens. It's a widely known secret that European governments had ungentlemanly agreements with the PLO that allowed the Palestinians to operate from their territories, provided the terror attacks occurred elsewhere. Not until 2003 did the EU even put Hamas on its terror list. Hezbollah is currently free to operate in Europe.
The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope of justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel. In European courts, universal jurisdiction statutes, initially created to apprehend and try dictators and genocidal leaders, are now exploited as weapons in the service of the Palestinian cause. In this way, Israeli defense officials are branded as "war criminals."
Similarly, Richard Goldstone's predetermined "fact finding inquiry" into the Gaza war makes no mention of Al-Mabhouh or Iran, which supplied Hamas with over 10,000 rockets for attacks against Israelis. Mr. Goldstone and his team have remained silent about what would be the "legal" way to bring jihadi murderers to justice. In their efforts to demonize Israel, Palestinian terror actually doesn't really exist. The Goldstone team simply refused to accept conclusive Israeli video evidence of Hamas war crimes.
The same legal distortions are found among the organizations that claim to be the world's moral guardians, such as Human Rights Watch. HRW's systematic bias is reflected in a Middle East division that sees no problem in holding fund-raising dinners in Saudi Arabia—one of the world's worst human rights violators and a country officially still at war with Israel—to help finance their campaigns against the Jewish state.
In the absence of any legal remedies or Western solidarity, Israel's only option to protect its citizens from terror has always been to act independently and with force.
When in 1976 a group of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Israel-bound Air France plane to Uganda and separated the Jewish passengers, Israel decided to act. In a daring mission, it rescued all but three passengers while killing all terrorists and several Ugandan soldiers who had been protecting the terrorists. Back then, Israel's detractors also fretted about the "violation of Ugandan sovereignty" even though dictator Idi Amin was in cahoots with the terrorists. Entebbe, though, quickly became the gold standard for successful counter-terror operations. Only a year later, Israeli-trained German special forces freed in Mogadishu, Somalia a Lufthansa plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. Similarly, when after years of horrific suicide bombings Israel pioneered the targeted killings of Hamas terrorists—often with the help of unmanned drones—Israel's Western adversaries complained about "extrajudicial assassinations." Today, though, U.S. forces have copied Israel's technique with their own drone killings of jihadi terrorists in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
Unlike those Predator strikes, though, which hardly raise an eyebrow in the West these days, there was no "collateral damage" in the mysterious Dubai hit. No innocent civilians were hurt, no buildings were damaged. Justice was done, and al-Mabhouh's preparations for the next war ended quietly.
All this is lost on those diplomats, "legal experts," and pundits who blame Israel for Dubai, and angrily denounce the passport infractions. In the absence of viable alternatives, and a refusal to share any of the risks, they are in no position to condemn actions aimed at preventing more terror.
The headlines and video images allegedly showing Israeli spies in Dubai are titillating, but they mask the serious issues involved in the death of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Along with predictable European hand-wringing over forged passports, this case is the latest example of the failure of the international legal system and the United Nations to provide a remedy to mass terror.
Al-Mabhouh was a cold-blooded murderer—in an interview just last year on Al Jazeera he boasted about kidnapping and then killing two Israeli soldiers. He was also a major figure in arranging arms shipments from Iran to Gaza. Al-Mabhouh shared responsibility for the thousands of rocket attacks fired at civilians in Sderot and other Israeli towns, which resulted in last year's war in Gaza. In his travels, the Hamas terrorist was probably making arrangements for the next round of attacks.
But international law provides no means for stopping terrorists like Al-Mabhouh, or for his Hezbollah counterpart, Imad Moughniyeh, whose life ended with an explosion in Damascus in 2008. (In addition to numerous attacks against Israelis, Moughniyeh has been blamed for the 1983 Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American and French peacekeepers and the murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri.) Cases involving Muslim terrorists, supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of the United Nations. Al-Mabhouh violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians, but the U.N.'s Human Rights Council—which is dominated by such moral stalwarts as Libya, Algeria, and Iran—has no interest in Israeli complaints.
It is equally hard to imagine Interpol issuing arrest warrants in response to Israeli requests. And if warrants were issued, history shows that German, French, Belgian, and other European governments would not risk the consequences of acting on them. Little effort was ever made to apprehend the perpetrators of the Munich Olympic massacre, or of the deadly bombing attacks against synagogues in Istanbul and Athens. It's a widely known secret that European governments had ungentlemanly agreements with the PLO that allowed the Palestinians to operate from their territories, provided the terror attacks occurred elsewhere. Not until 2003 did the EU even put Hamas on its terror list. Hezbollah is currently free to operate in Europe.
The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope of justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel. In European courts, universal jurisdiction statutes, initially created to apprehend and try dictators and genocidal leaders, are now exploited as weapons in the service of the Palestinian cause. In this way, Israeli defense officials are branded as "war criminals."
Similarly, Richard Goldstone's predetermined "fact finding inquiry" into the Gaza war makes no mention of Al-Mabhouh or Iran, which supplied Hamas with over 10,000 rockets for attacks against Israelis. Mr. Goldstone and his team have remained silent about what would be the "legal" way to bring jihadi murderers to justice. In their efforts to demonize Israel, Palestinian terror actually doesn't really exist. The Goldstone team simply refused to accept conclusive Israeli video evidence of Hamas war crimes.
The same legal distortions are found among the organizations that claim to be the world's moral guardians, such as Human Rights Watch. HRW's systematic bias is reflected in a Middle East division that sees no problem in holding fund-raising dinners in Saudi Arabia—one of the world's worst human rights violators and a country officially still at war with Israel—to help finance their campaigns against the Jewish state.
In the absence of any legal remedies or Western solidarity, Israel's only option to protect its citizens from terror has always been to act independently and with force.
When in 1976 a group of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Israel-bound Air France plane to Uganda and separated the Jewish passengers, Israel decided to act. In a daring mission, it rescued all but three passengers while killing all terrorists and several Ugandan soldiers who had been protecting the terrorists. Back then, Israel's detractors also fretted about the "violation of Ugandan sovereignty" even though dictator Idi Amin was in cahoots with the terrorists. Entebbe, though, quickly became the gold standard for successful counter-terror operations. Only a year later, Israeli-trained German special forces freed in Mogadishu, Somalia a Lufthansa plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. Similarly, when after years of horrific suicide bombings Israel pioneered the targeted killings of Hamas terrorists—often with the help of unmanned drones—Israel's Western adversaries complained about "extrajudicial assassinations." Today, though, U.S. forces have copied Israel's technique with their own drone killings of jihadi terrorists in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
Unlike those Predator strikes, though, which hardly raise an eyebrow in the West these days, there was no "collateral damage" in the mysterious Dubai hit. No innocent civilians were hurt, no buildings were damaged. Justice was done, and al-Mabhouh's preparations for the next war ended quietly.
All this is lost on those diplomats, "legal experts," and pundits who blame Israel for Dubai, and angrily denounce the passport infractions. In the absence of viable alternatives, and a refusal to share any of the risks, they are in no position to condemn actions aimed at preventing more terror.
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