In this issue:

LaRouche's 'Message to Arab Leaders" Published Amid Discussions Around Cancelled Summit

U.S. 'Reform' Sabotages Arab League Summit

Fallujah Exposes the Straussian Liars

Sharon Copies Policy of Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt

Sharon Could Be on His Way to Jail

From Volume 3, Issue Number 14 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Apr. 6, 2004
Mideast News Digest

LaRouche's 'Message to Arab Leaders" Published Amid Discussions Around Cancelled Summit

Al-Arab International, edited in London, but published in Tunisia, host of the cancelled Arab Summit, published Lyndon LaRouche's statement "How Must We Deal with the New Turn in this Worsening Crisis?" on March 31. The statement (see Editorial, EIW #13) was written by LaRouche in response to questions from Al-Arab. The answers were planned to appear on the eve or the day of the summit, but was withheld when the hosting country, Tunisia, abruptly decided to cancel the Arab Leaders' Summit.

The publishing of LaRouche's statement now comes at a more important point of the crisis. While Arab leaders are divided on how to continue to survive with the Bush Administration, "the poisonous Gila Monster," LaRouche's message is that nations of the world "should unite to crush the this Nazi-like serpent in its nest." The title of the statement in Al-Arab's "International Affairs" page is: "Lyndon LaRouche: The source of the danger to civilization is the reluctance of nations to unite." It has a secondary headline quoting LaRouche: "To begin discussing such facts openly would in itself be an important step forward." The statement is accompanied by a photo of LaRouche identified as Democratic Presidential candidate. The Arabic translation of this statement is available on LaRouche's Arabic website (www.nysol.se/arabic).

U.S. 'Reform' Sabotages Arab League Summit

The Arab League, representing the 22 governments of the Arab world, was hit by a bombshell on the eve of its March 29-30 summit in Tunis. Not a terrorist attack, but an event with potentially comparable consequences occurred. For the first time in the organization's 57-year history, the summit was called off—or rather, postponed—during final preparations. Arab League General Secretary Amr Mussa warned that the postponement would have "dangerous consequences for joint Arab action." He added, "The situation is serious and immediate action must be taken." See the article by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach in this week's InDepth for the full story.

Fallujah Exposes the Straussian Liars

"Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreign contractors including at least one American through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River," Associated Press reported on March 31. "Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby.... It is reminiscent of the 1993 scene in Somalia, when a mob dragged the corpse of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu."

In an intelligence evaluations discussion about this, incident with EIR staff, Lyndon LaRouche commented that "This is a case where sheer incompetence, typified by Cheney and Rumsfeld, kills. Their tendency for lying has not assisted them."

Fallujah is exactly the kind of result that Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command, warned against—at least twice—when commenting on the insane neo-con plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein, drafted by Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and his neo-con co-conspirators: Paul Wolfowitz, Wayne Downing, and Richard Perle. Zinni warned against this in a U.S. Senate hearing in January 1999, and in his Farewell remarks to the U.S. Naval Institute in March 2000.

In contrast, the great Chickenhawk, Richard Perle, on two occasions, in October 2002 and March 2003, said on U.S. national TV that there will be "dancing in the streets" by the Iraqi people, and that when Saddam Hussein is toppled, "Then I think it's over for the terrorists."

See this week's InDepth, "Ahmed Chalabi's Bay of Goats," for more on this story.

Sharon Copies Policy of Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt

A senior member of the German Jewish community wrote in Neue Zuercher Zeitung March 27 that, in assassinating Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Ariel Sharon is following the "friend-foe" doctrine of Carl Schmitt. Micha Brumlik, a senior member of the German Jewish community and head of the Leo Braun Institute, wrote in the Swiss daily on March 27 that Ariel Sharon's "justification" for the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin bespeaks an ideology that "derives directly" from (Nazi ideologue) Carl Schmitt. Schmitt wrote, in 1933, that the friend-foe situation can escalate to the point that self-preservation necessitates the liquidation of the other side.

Brumlik noted that Schmitt meant his statement to be not only a "statement of fact," but as something he said, "juridically legitimized." This is totalitarian thinking, Brumlik added, and it is a total rejection of the "Greek-Judeo-Christian tradition" which was established by Plato, who wrote that a state can only be considered legitimate if it is based on the rule of law. What Sharon's government is doing, is practicing the logic of Carl Schmitt (the self-proclaimed "Nazi Crown Jurist") who wrote that everything escalates into a special state of emergency, Ausnahmezustand," in which all existing rules are overturned, and raw power as such prevails.

We know what the friend-foe dialectic escalates into, Brumlik warned: the Nazi concentration camps. This also stands against every idea on which the State of Israel was founded in 1948.

Sharon Could Be on His Way to Jail

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could be going to jail, as an outcome of one of the longest-running political organized-crime investigations in the history of the "free world."

On March 28, Israel's Chief Prosecutor Edna Arbel delivered to Attorney General Menahem Mazuz, a draft indictment of Sharon for taking huge bribes from David Appel, a real-estate developer and Likud Party money-bags who was indicted after an investigation of several years for bribing Sharon, his Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, also of the Likud, and Sharon's son Gilad. The money was said to have been channelled through Gilad Sharon. Attorney General Mazuz has announced that he will decide in about a month whether to indict Sharon—which would make him the first Prime Minister in the history of Israel to be indicted.

In a related development, the Israeli Supreme Court on March 29 ruled that Gilad Sharon must turn over documents relating to the bribery case, which he has so far refused to do.

The referral by the Chief Prosecutors has renewed the calls for Sharon to resign now, including a call by Sharon's own Minister of Infrastructure, Yosef Paritzsky, a member of the Shinui Party. Knesset (Parliament) member Yossi Sarid, a leader of the Meretz Party, demanded, "How can you run the country when a heavy cloud of bribery allegations hovers over your head? We all know that when we have a personal problem, it eats away and distracts our mind."

- The 'Greek Island' Deal -

This is no penny-ante case: It involves, according to the January indictment of Appel, a transfer of "$3 million and additional monthly payments through inflated compensation; a payment of $100,000, and another NIS 2,582,634 [$600,000] to the Sycamore Ranch estate...." The money all passed through Gilad, Sharon's financial handler, in return for several favors from 1998 to 2001: for example, getting Sharon, then Foreign Minister, to influence the Greek government to sell a Greek island to Appel, where he could set up a gambling casino. Another deal involved rezoning agricultural land which Appel had purchased near the city of Lod. The "Greek island" deal never materialized, but the documents from Gilad are expected to confirm that the money kept going to Sharon.

The documents that Gilad must now turn over could be the final nail in the coffin for the Sharon "family." Public opinion is not likely to favor Sharon, especially after the Israeli people learned, through newspaper accounts, that police wiretaps have caught the Prime Minister himself telling Appel, "The island is ours," contradicting Sharon's claims that he knew nothing of the Greek island deal.

One Israeli commentator also noted with disgust that, in talking to Appel, Sharon used the same phrasing he used in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when he announced, "The Temple Mount is ours." Both messages are vintage Sharon, who long ago should have been indicted for war crimes, rather than mere bribe-taking.

- Scratching Each Other's Backs -

Since the January indictment of Appel, Sharon has been confident that Washington would save him. He shrugged off the indictment and escalated military operations, including air strikes into Lebanon and Syria, and frequent assassinations of Palestinian militants, culminating in the March 22 assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader and founder of the Hamas organization that Sharon himself had built up as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The chaos that will follow the Yassin killing has yet to unfold.

Now, Sharon is scheduled to arrive in Washington on April 14, with his hands still bloody from personally supervising that assassination. But Sharon will find Washington changed, and there are reports that the meeting may be cancelled.

Dick Cheney, Sharon's protector, is himself being investigated—nine separate inquiries, so far—involving fraudulent statements about the threat posed by Iraq and Saddam Hussein; intimidation of critics of the Iraq war; and financial fraud around the Iraq war-related, no-bid "sweetheart" contracts awarded to Halliburton, the company which Cheney headed for six lucrative years, during which he was paid well over $40 million, and which is still paying him hundreds of thousand of dollars a year.

- A Changed Washington -

Inside Israel, Sharon's trump card has been his proven close relationship to Washington. But the White House, facing an election, wants something from Sharon—a foreign policy "success" in the Middle East, which is in shambles because of the insurgency following an Iraq war that was supposed to be a "cakewalk."

Middle East sources report that Sharon's visit is occurring as part of a deal the desperate White House hammered out, whereby Sharon promised he would clear Israelis out of the Gaza Strip, and also close down six or seven remote Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But the Israeli extreme right wing has threatened to bring down his government if Sharon gives Bush this deal.

It is clear that in Sharon, the U.S. is dealing with a gangster, whom Labor Party Knesset member Ofer Pines-Paz compares to "the Sopranos on television." The Appel case is one of several multimillion-dollar frauds for which Sharon is still under investigation, including illegal American contributions to his 1999 Likud leadership campaign, and a $1.5-million loan from South African businessman Cyril Kern.

Already, forces in Washington's neo-con war camp are feeling out options to replace Sharon. The two leading jackals—Finance Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz—are already circling, waiting for Sharon's political corpse to stop twitching. But the continuing investigations into David Appel, a member of the Likud Central Committee, show that his money taints the entire Likud. If he goes under, many others besides Sharon may fall.

—from the New Federalist April 2, 2001.

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