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July 10, 2002
The
controversy over
the fourth of July gunman at LAX, Hashem Mohamed Hadayet, known as "Ali,"
is typical of any issue involving Israel. Since it advances Israel's interests
to maintain that Hadayet was part of a larger terrorist operation, a footsoldier
in a worldwide Islamofascist
network, then it must be true. Which is why Israeli government officials
jumped the gun, as
I pointed out in a July 4 piece, and characterized it as an act of organized
terrorism before Hadayet had even been identified.
James
Taranto admits there is no evidence of any organized terrorist plot, but avers
that hate crimes are "arguably a form of terrorism." Well, then, perhaps
we ought to take this Los Angeles Times headline – "Deluge
of Hate Crimes After 9/11 Pours Through System" – a bit more seriously.
According to Times staff writer Richard Serrano,
"… Officials
have opened three times as many investigations into hate crimes with Arab victims
since Sept. 11 as in the same period the previous year. They include 350 federal
cases and 70 by state and local authorities."
The Egyptians,
meanwhile, having interrogated Hadayet's family, are telling us that the murders
stemmed from a "personal grudge," as Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed
Maher put it. An Agence
France Presse dispatch reports:
"Egyptian security services
told Hadayet's father Friday that the shooting incident 'was due to financial
problems with El Al,' his cousin, Emad al-Omda, told AFP Saturday. Omda said the
Israeli airline had been late in paying for two limousines it had rented from
Hadayet's service."
I don't know whether I believe that, anymore
than I believe Israeli officials who confidently
pin Hadayet's act on Al Qaeda. But it's interesting how this has developed
into an increasingly acrimonious conflict between US law enforcement officials
and the Israeli government, summed up in a [UK] Times headline: "Airport
killer's motive provokes US-Israeli split."
Seen through the
prism of extreme Israelophilia, Hadayet's rampage was a mini-9/11 – yet more proof
that Israel's fight is our fight. As suicide bombers rip through Israel's cities,
so the same wave of murderous fanaticism is blooming in the US, soon to move out
from the airports and into the streets of the American metropolis.
Or
so the story goes. Matters of fact become matters of ideology; and when the former
is sparse, the latter takes over – never more readily than in wartime. Thus we
have Rod
Dreher writing in National Review:
"Authorities are
hesitant to label the LAX attack 'terrorism.' Let's see: the murderer was an Egyptian-born
Muslim who turned up at the counter of the Israeli national airline, heavily armed,
and starts shooting. Excuse me, but why is this not terrorism? I wonder if the
eight children left behind by one of the Islamofascist shooter's victims have
any trouble discerning whether or not this is terrorism. By this standard, all
the anti-Semitic violence of late in France, which has been carried out by Arab
Muslims, is not terrorism either, but random criminal acts. Come to think of it,
isn't that what the French authorities have been saying?"
Based
on zero evidence, a man who may have been driven by a personal grudge is
cast by Dreher as an agent of the International Islamofascist Conspiracy. Excuse
me, but it's entirely possible Hadayet's motive was non-ideological. The
explanation coming from the Egyptians – that Hadayet's rage was rooted in his
failing finances – at least has some basis in known fact. We know his limousine
business was failing: what El Al had to do with this, if anything, remains
to be seen. As a Los Angeles Times profile
of Hadayet relates:
"By last summer, however, Hadayet's luck
appeared to have turned sour. He notified the state that he had stopped operating
one car, then the other. State records show his required insurance coverage was
canceled. In November, after a series of warnings, the Public Utilities Commission
revoked his limousine permit."
The FBI isn't
absolutely ruling out the possibility that this was indeed an organized terrorist
attack, the fulfillment of law enforcement's earlier
warning that Jewish targets on American soil were being targeted. There is
as yet no evidence that his mad act was part of a concerted effort, apart from
Hadayet's nationality and religion – but that is quite enough for Dreher.
The triumph of ideology over reality has come to the point where everyone
has a "line" on matters such as who's behind the anthrax murders. The
War Party can't be bothered with mere facts. That only a few laboratories within
the United States are even capable of producing such high-grade stuff as came
out of those envelopes, and that the
pool of specialists with knowledge of the procedures involved is very small,
and limited to the US doesn't phase them in the least. The
Wall Street Journal regularly runs editorials naming Iraq as the source
of the anthrax attacks, a theory as firmly rooted in reality as Dreher's dubious
methods of crime detection. As in the July 4 incident, the Sherlock Holmes Brigade
of the War Party finds itself up against law enforcement professionals whose focus
on the facts has led them to the opposite conclusion.
The FBI believes
the
origins of the anthrax are domestic, and has acted accordingly, if more than
a little slowly. They have searched the premises of Dr. Steven
J. Hatfill, and he seems to be the
suspect of choice as far as the liberals over at The American Prospect
are concerned. The narrative here is that an evil and no doubt quite mad scientist,
in an effort to scare the government into funding bioterror research and prevention,
unleashed a biological horror on a few ostensibly to save the many. It also doesn't
hurt that Hatfill reportedly served in the Rhodesian military and bragged of having
been a double agent in apartheid era South Africa.
Laura Rozen's piece
nowhere contains a single iota of solid evidence: sure, Hatfill has the knowledge,
but his motive is barely sketched out beyond some vague megalomania mixed with
right-wing malevolence. Rozen points out that Hatfill had appeared in several
news stories as warning of the dangers of bioterrorism as if this underscores
his possible guilt. But if Hatfill is the culprit, why would he want to draw so
much attention to himself, even going so far as to publicly speculate on how a
bioterror attack might take place?
As my regular readers know, I
have my own candidate for the role of Dr.
Anthrax. A theory, I might add, based on facts, and not ideological wish-fulfillment
fantasies. I also believe that it was not just the work of a lone mad scientist
, but of a group based at the Ft. Detrick biowar research facility – a clique
known as the "camel club" because of their outspoken hatred for Arab-Americans
working at the same facility.
A few days before the anthrax letters became
known, the authorities received an anonymous letter accusing Dr.
Ayaad Assaad, a native of Egypt and a former scientist at Ft. Detrick, of
planning bio-terrorism, and naming his two sons as accomplices. The letter gave
specific details of Assaad's life and career, and claimed to be from a former
Ft. Detrick colleague. On October 3, Assaad was questioned and completely cleared.
The next day, the anthrax scare began. Is it really rocket science that whomever
tried to frame Assaad also sent the anthrax letters? Remember, those letters contained
crude messages suggesting that this was coming from fanatical Muslims. Interviewed
by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dr.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological arms-control expert with the Federation
of American Scientists, who has developed a
profile of Dr. Anthrax, weighs
in on the meaning of the poison pen letter:
"'The superficial
purpose was to cast suspicion on Assaad,' drawing attention away from a 'whole
group of people' at the Fort Detrick lab. 'I think it could well be whoever sent
the [hoax] letter,' Rosenberg said."
The key clue to the anthrax
mystery is in Assaad's decade-long battle against a clique of colleagues who harassed
him mercilessly, and at one point sent him obscene poems mocking his ethnicity
in the most vulgar terms imaginable. The Ft. Detrick laboratory was apparently
a maelstrom
of ethnic conflict, pitting "the camel
club" against scientists of Middle Eastern origin. Was Hatfill, who left
his job at Ft. Detrick in 1999, a member of the "camel club"? Others
in the clique departed
in 1997.
It is, in any case, extremely odd that none of this essential
background material is so much as mentioned in all the speculation surrounding
the anthrax mystery. The Wall Street Journal ignores it, content to conjure
a nonexistent Iraqi connection – as does The American Prospect, content
to conjure its own preferred bogeyman, a mad scientist with white supremacist
tendencies. The same is true in the case of the LAX gunman – only this time the
paucity of facts gives the fantasists a much wider berth. The always reliable
Debka [sarcasm off] has already pinned Hadayet
as a longtime
cadre of an Egyptian terrorist faction, while Ariel Sharon and his ministers
are less specific but no less certain of his role as the instrument of a conspiracy.
The problem, in the case of Hadayet, is not only the paucity of facts, but wildly
differing versions. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that
Hadayet
was on an FBI watchlist, while FBI agent Richard Garcia told a news conference
on July 6 that "he
was not on any FBI or FAA watch list." Taranto, citing an Associated
Press report carried
on Fox News, goes into a whole spiel about how Hadayet was supposedly offended
by his neighbor’s display of the American flag, and pontificates about
the Egyptian’s "apparent hate for America": but the Orange
County Register tells a different,
more ambiguous story:
"Conflicting views on Hadayet were bumping into each other all over the neighborhood. For example, some said Hadayet was mad about a large American flag that his upstairs neighbor had draped over the landing above Hadayet's front door -- but others said he wasn't. And some said the Egyptian-born Hadayet was angry at America in general, that he felt discriminated against, and that he had covered up the ‘Read the Koran’ sticker on his front door because he was afraid of being attacked - but others said he was a normal but quiet family man who liked to hang out at the apartment complex Jacuzzi."
At this stage
of the game, when what little is known is ambiguous or contradictory, for Israel's
partisans to try to capitalize on the July 4 shootings as part of a vast conspiracy
is not only absurd but unseemly.
The great tragedy of this horrific attack, aside from the heartbreaking loss
of the dead and the injured, is that we have imported the intractable conflicts
wracking the
Middle East to our own shores. Because we have intervened where we have no business
meddling – befriending and subsidizing the one, while alienating and persecuting
the another – America has been turned into a battleground for the ancient blood
feuds of implacable enemies. It's
the price of Empire – but are the American people willing to pay it? The
answer, I suspect – and hope – is no.
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