The Real Criminals
By Uri Dan

    (The writer is an author of The Mossad: Secrets of the Israel Secret Service and other books on the Middle East.)

    The BBC has for years engaged in incitement against Israel in its programming, long before it concocted this week's new blood libel against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon regarding the 1982 slaughter of Palestinian refugees by Christian Falangists.

    If we look only at the last eight months, numerous BBC television and radio broadcasts have presented the Palestinians as an underdog oppressed by the Israelis - even though Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat started this terrorist war at a time when Ehud Barak and his foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, were ready to concede virtually everything to the Palestinians, including the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

    The BBC's Arabic broadcasts do not spare even Shimon Peres, just as the British network presented Ehud Barak, and Israel, as the aggressors although Arafat was the one who started the war on Israeli citizens, as in the suicide bombings at the Netanya shopping mall and the Tel Aviv disco.

    It is therefore no surprise that the BBC has fallen upon Sharon with the deliberate intention of accusing him of war crimes. It seems that such haters of Israel are afraid that Ariel Sharon, who defeated the Arabs in all of Israel's wars, will defeat them once again in this most crucial campaign for the fate of the Jewish State, for which he bears responsibility - just as Winston Churchill was chosen by the British to lead them in the crucial campaign against Nazi Germany.

    What did the BBC actually claim on Panorama? That according to the new world rules of 2001, Sharon is guilty of war crimes, no less.

    The show's producers are professing to be more thorough than the Kahan commission of inquiry appointed by the Israeli government in 1983 to investigate the affair, in which Christian Arabs murdered Moslem Arabs.

    Right now, it's not important what I think of the conclusions reached by that commission, since I was media advisor to then-defense minister Sharon during that war.

    The commission decided that when Israel sent the Falangists to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, it did not intend for them to murder Palestinians. It had no foreknowledge. Therefore, the commission did not blame Sharon and the military chain of command, but only attached to them "indirect responsibility" for not taking into account (in the commission's opinion) that such slaughter was likely to occur. In other words, there was no intention, only a mishap.

    Consequently, the commission attached no blame of any kind - certainly not of a criminal nature - to the Israeli leadership, or to anyone in the IDF.

    THE BBC has pretensions of accomplishing what the Kahan Commission did not, and did not even attempt. Does the BBC question the integrity of the current Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, a Kahan Commission member, who found nothing criminal in Sharon's actions - certainly not war crimes? Is the BBC accusing Barak of collusion in covering up a war crime not committed by Sharon? It would of course also be important to hear what Barak has to say about the BBC's blood libel - particularly since Justice Yitzhak Kahan and Maj.-Gen. Yonah Efrat, the other two members of the commission, have since passed away.

    The pitiful explanation behind the Panorama lie, supported both by the Arab enemies and the lunatic fringe of the Israeli Left, is that "the rules of game have changed." What happened 19 years ago is history. They now hypocritically claim that the events involved in the Sabra and Shatila massacre must be judged by new international criteria for war crimes.

    So why stop with Lebanon in 1982? According to the principles of the BBC's field court-martial, we can go back half a century, or more. In 1943, Winston Churchill and Air Marshal Harris ordered the RAF Bomber Command to bomb Hamburg, knowing that innocent men, women, and children would be killed. This was in Operation Gomorrah, aimed deliberately at destroying the economy and morale of Nazi Germany. Towards the end of the war, British pilots were ordered to do the same to Dresden. Hundreds of thousands of civilians - the numbers are still unknown - lost their lives in the bombing.

    According to the BBC's absurd 2001 code, Churchill and Harris do not deserve a place in the Hall of Fame of British and world history. Instead, they should be in the dock of the Nuremberg War Crimes Court. According to the BBC's distorted view, it is not Nazi Field Marshal Goering who should have been tried at Nuremberg, but RAF Air Marshal Harris. Can the BBC, which at that time praised the RAF and its brave bomber pilots, now supply us with pictures of the appalling slaughter by Churchill and Harris of hundreds of thousands of German civilians in Hamburg and Dresden?

    Compared to the crimes of Churchill and Harris (according to the BBC's new principles), Sharon is as innocent as a new-born babe. The real criminals are those at the BBC, and at Panorama, who distort and rewrite Sharon's history thus carrying out the real Operation Gomorrah.

(c) Jerusalem Post

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