Terror Pays, Capitulation Doesn’t.

Ted Belman

The seventies were witness to the Munich Massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, the Yom Kippur War, the oil embargo, the PLO terrorist attacks on international airlines and airports, and finally the appearance of gun-toting Yasser Arafat before the General Assembly of the United Nations. Bat Yeor studied this decade and set out her thesis of what was going on in Europe vis a vis the Arabs in her ground-breaking book Eurasia. Prof Paul Eidelberg summarized what it meant for Israel.

1) European policy would be independent from, and opposed to that of the United States;
2) recognition by Europe of a “Palestinian people,” and the creation of a “Palestinian” state;
3) European support for the PLO;
4) the designation of Arafat as the sole and exclusive representative of that so-called Palestinian people;
5) the de-legitimizing of the State of Israel, both historically and politically, its shrinking into non-viable borders, and the Arabization of Jerusalem.


Essentially Europe sold out its independence to the Arabs to avoid terror and a cessation of oil supplies. It agreed to the Islamification of Europe and to adopting the Arab narrative regarding the Palestinian cause.

Recently, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga revealed that the government of Italy agreed to allow Arab terrorist groups freedom of movement in the country in exchange for immunity from attacks in Italy.
Cossiga wrote that the government of the late Prime Minister Aldo Moro reached a

“secret non-belligerence pact between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance organizations, including terrorist groups,” in the 1970s.

“The terms of the agreement were that the Palestinian organizations could even maintain armed bases of operation in the country, and they had freedom of entry and exit without being subject to normal police controls, because they were ‘handled’ by the secret services,”

Germany also capitulated to Arab demands at this time by releasing the Arab terrorists from jail that were captured in the aftermath of Munich Massacre. It only took a month.

Prof. Barry Rubin recently weighed in with Morality and Enlightenment or Fear and Greed?

European countries and much of the elites there and in the United States claim that they sympathize with the Palestinians-or at least are far more critical of Israel-due to a sympathy with the underdog and a higher knowledge about how peace can be made and extremism defused. In fact they are motivated far more by fear (of being attacked themselves) and greed (for trade to the Arabic-speaking world and Iran).

Often, implicitly or explicitly, it is suggested that, ironically, the experience of Jewish persecution had brought about this contemporary hypersensitivity to the suffering of the helpless underdog. In fact, though, the motive is the same now as it was then: hypersensitivity to the power and wealth of the persecutors.

In this regard, during the worst of the suicide bombings on the streets of Israel, I wrote that anytime the European countries wanted to stop the terror in Israel, they could do so by withdrawing diplomatic and financial support from Arafat. This they never did.

The USA was similarly affected by this mentality. Amir Oren reports CIA papers show Arafat ordered murder of U.S. diplomats in Sudan. These papers were recently released.

Henry Kissinger instructed the CIA to continue diplomatic contacts with Yassir Arafat’s PLO representatives before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, even after Arafat ordered the kidnapping and murder of the American ambassador and his deputy in Khartoum, Sudan.

The newly-released material contains, among other things, information on the Egyptian effort in the spring of 1973 to plead with the U.S., through Iranian channels, to reach a peace arrangement with Israel “on the basis of the Rogers plan,” a withdrawal from the occupied territories captured in 1967 and placing them under international supervision.

In a telegram Helms sent Kissinger - then Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor - on July 5, 1973, Helms reported that King Hussein of Jordan told him that Jordanian intelligence had learned of a Syrian attack to recapture the Golan Heights originally planned for June, that had been delayed but could take place at any time soon. One of the Jordanian intelligence sources was the commander of a Syrian armored brigade, and the Jordanians had obtained a copy of the battle plans, which had been coordinated with Egypt and Iraq.

The most sensational revelation in the documents was the contents of the diplomatic negotiations held between Robert Ames of the CIA and the head of the Fatah’s security apparatus, Ali Hassan Salameh, who was also the commander of the Fatah’s Black September organization.

Since the contacts between the CIA and the Fatah were revealed, their purpose has been described as obtaining intelligence information to warn of terrorist attacks against Americans; but the Helms’ documents reveal that Arafat sent Salameh to the talks without hiding his responsibility for killing American diplomats in Khartoum in March 1973. Ames also agreed to Salameh’s requests and asked Washington about various diplomatic issues, such as the Nixon administration’s intentions relating to Palestinian interests.

Salameh told Ames that the PLO was working to topple King Hussein and establish a Palestinian state in Jordan. The response from Washington was: If the Palestinians want to negotiate a settlement, the U.S. would be happy to hear their proposals, but the toppling of existing governments through the use of force did not seem to be the most promising way.

Arafat, for his part, was unmoved: He threatened, via Ames, that he would burn Beirut if the Lebanese government acted against the PLO.

You will recall in my article The Conspiracy to Shrink Israel, I reported that, on December 17, 1975, Henry Kissinger met with Sadun Hammadi, Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs. A transcript of this meeting has been published which discloses Kissingers attempts to assuage the concerns of Hammadi.

“Kissinger: I think, when we look at history, that when Israel was created in 1948, I don’t think anyone understood it. It originated in American domestic politics. It was far away and little understood. So it was not an American design to get a bastion of imperialism in the area. It was much less complicated: And I would say that until 1973 the Jewish community had enormous influence. It is only in the last two years, as a result of the policy we are pursuing, that it has changed,

We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world

We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel but we can reduce its size to historical proportions.

You mentioned new weapons. But they will not be delivered in the foreseeable future. All we agreed to is to study it, and we agreed to no deliveries out of current stocks. So many of these things won’t be produced until 1980, and we have not agreed to deliver them then. .

If the issue is the existence of Israe1, we can’t cooperate. But if the issue is more normal borders, we can cooperate.

Aide: Your Excellency, do you think a settlement would come through the Palestinians in the area? ‘How do you read it? Is it in your power to create such a thing?

Kissinger: Not in 1976. I have to be perfectly frank with you. I think the Palestinian identity has to be recognized in some form. But we need the thoughtful cooperation of the Arabs. It will take a year or a year and to do it, and will be a tremendous fight. An evolution is already taking place.

Aide: You think it will be part of a solution?

Kissinger: It has to be. No solution is possible without it. But the domestic situation is becoming favorable. More and more questions are being asked in Congress favorable to the Palestinians.

Capitulation to terror didn’t save the US from 911, Britain from the subway bombing, Ames from being the victim of a terror attack and so on.

Today the West continues to capitulate by trying to be politically correct rather than correct. Surrendering its values like free speech and the rule of law to Islam is just plain surrendering.

The war on terror was a phony war from the get go. It was concocted in order to avoid the real war, namely, the war on Islam.

It little profits a country to avoid terror if it loses its soul in the process.

Islam represents a bigger danger to the West than the USSR ever did. The West never surrendered to Communism but everyday and in every way it is surrendering to Islam. Think of the West as a frog on a pot of water which is being heated to boiling. The frog doesn’t realize that its goose is being cooked and remains in the water to the end. Just as certainly, the West is allowing its goose to be cooked.