Saturday 2 February 2013

French writer: Israel knew of plans to kill Sadat and did nothing

"In their [Israelis] eyes, Yasser Arafat embodied Palestine, and Palestine is an obscene word in their eyes." Gérard de Villiers

The New York Times interviewed Gérard de Villiers, the French author of the best-selling S.A.S. espionage series. Unsurprisingly he had to claim that Israel knew that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was going to be murdered and did nothing about it. A truly appalling and unsubstantiated accusation:

"In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”"

De Villiers, wrote an conspirational Israel-bashing piece in Atlantico, a conservative French news site, about Arafat's "poisoning". This is a translation of what he wrote:

"The discovery by a Swiss scientific laboratory of polonium-210 traces on clothes that belonged to Yasser Arafat only strengthens the rumours that have been circulating among the intelligence community since his death to the effect that the Israeli Secret Services assassinated the old Palestinian leader. Obviously, there is no evidence and there may never be any. However, several factors argue in favor of this thesis. Foremost the blind hatred, which can verge on the irrational, rooted at the heart of the Israeli leadership. Somewhat comparable to the hatred the United States feels towards Iran since the hostage taking at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Israelis have never considered the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as a possible partner, but as a ennemy. They did everything to kill it off. Including contributing significantly to the birth of Hamas, with a view to weaken the PLO. From their point of view, they have succeeded by splitting the two Palestinian movements, but in the process they created a new and much more determined ennemy. When they besieged Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters, they clealy tried to kill him, by shooting directly at him. In their eyes, Yasser Arafat embodied Palestine, and Palestine is an obscene word in their eyes. He had to disappear. Despite all his faults, the old leader was still an icon. The physical elimination of political opponents is a constant and official dogma of Israeli policy. Israel is the only country that officially maintains a brigade of assassins, the kinodim. A special Mossad unit with professional assassins. There are around sixty of them including a dozen women. They are the official executioners of the State of Israel. When they kill they do not break the law. They carry out a sentence issued by the "war cabinet" and the Prime Minister. Such a sentence must relate to a person who is a danger to Israel. They have killed mostly PLO and Hamas executives. And they made a few mistakes. In Norway, Lillehammer, they killed an innocent waiter by mistaking him for a terrorist, Abu Nidal. [...]"

Back to Arafat's "poisoning":

"There is nothing surprising about their use of poison. I met in Amman, Jordan, Khaled Mashal, when he was only the Hamas spokesman and two Mossad kidonim had tried to poison him by shooting a deadly gas at him with a gun. Another example: the Mossad has for a long time used a "home" product, a toothpaste laced with Thallium. It is a highly toxic slow-killing substance. The "target" is poisoned every morning while brushing his teeth .... As to Arafat, it has been stressed that he did not show symptoms caused by polonium-210 similar to those of Litvinenko when he was poisoned in London by the Russian Secret Services. They disregard the fact that Litvinenko had received a strong dose fit to kill a herd of elephants ... The Israelis are far more subtle. A much lower dose is sufficient to kill. One last point: there is no doubt that Mossad would have access to polonium-210 designed to trigger nukes which Israel has."

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