BY
DOUG LORIMER
CANBERRA The head of the Palestinian Authority delegation to Australia, Ali Kazak, issued a statement on April 6 criticising Australian and other Western media for their uncritical reporting and interviewing of Australian, US and British officials and commentators regarding the objectives of the war against Iraq.
Officials used to say that their objectives were to force Iraq to comply with international law and UN resolution 1441, and to get rid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Now they say their objectives are to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.
Kazak said the only people who need freedom from 55 years of tyranny and bloody occupation in the Middle East are the Palestinian people. He noted that Israel has the largest stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the Middle East. Kazak referred to a recent US report The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons, which estimated Israel's nuclear arsenal has grown from 13 nuclear bombs in 1967 to a present total of around 400.
Israel used chemical weapons such as napalm and phosphorous bombs in its 1967 and 1982 wars, used biological weapons against Palestinian farmers as early as the 1940s and 1950s and attempted to assassinate a Hamas leader in Jordan with a biological weapon in 1997, Kazak observed. Israel threatened to use nuclear warheads against the Arab countries in the 1973 war.
Underlining the real danger in the Middle East is Israel's Prime Minister General Sharon's history of massacres and war crimes as well as the fact that Israel's religious fanatics and extremists, who assassinated their own prime minister [Yitzhak] Rabin, are found everywhere, including in the nuclear weapons industry and its control rooms. Weapons of mass destruction are already in the hands of very dangerous people.
Kazak pointed out that Israel had defied 87 Security Council resolutions relevant to the Palestine question since 1948, 37 of which specifically relate to the 1967-occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel's occupation and daily war crimes against the Palestinian people are carried out with America's latest weapons, with American finance and American political protection. Where is the morality of the United States, Australia and Britain?, he asked.
Kazak said people around the world, particularly in Arab and Muslim countries, are boiling with rage and anger at this hypocrisy and double standard between US support for Israel's defiance of UN resolutions and the US claim that its invasion of Iraq is aimed at enforcing UN resolutions.
The only way for this boiling anger of the Arab and Moslem people to be calmed down is for the United States, British and Australian forces to also force Israel to comply with international law and UN resolutions, withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967 and get rid of Israel's weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise destabilisation, terrorism and wars will be the landmarks of the 21st century.
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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