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Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics Yohanan Ramati BULLETIN OF THE JERUSALEM INSTITUTE FOR WESTERN DEFENCE A Comparative Case Study of The Yugoslav and Middle East Crises Volume 9, Bulletin No. 4 December, 1996. Introduction Statesmen, politicians and journalists have lied deliberately throughout human history. Indeed, human history, usually written by unprincipled victors, contains so many falsehoods that the search for truth often becomes an impossible task. Even the currently accepted axioms are false. the lies of democratic statesmen are often as monumental as the lies of the most tyrannical dictators. In both cases, the motives are love of power and greed. The age of rapid air transportation, television and computers has created a world in which cheating all the people all the time is easier than at any time in history, while cheating most people most of the time is the normative political phenomenon. Superpowers have always been able to lie and cheat more effectively than other states. Competition between them occasionally - though by no means always - encouraged resort to truth. Temporarily, this competition has been eliminated by the emergence of the United States as the only Superpower. So truth has become what Washington wants it to be. When it does not correspond to the facts, the facts are buried beneath a barrage of television, radio and press propaganda kowtowing to Big Brother. In principle, there is little to distinguish today's US propaganda about the Yugoslav crisis or West European propaganda about the Middle East crisis (with which the US is often in tactic sympathy) from the propaganda of Goebbels, Stalin or , for that matter, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein. The lies are equally outrageous, the half-truths are equally misleading and the goals are fundamentally the same - more power and more money for those who dictate policy. but there is one redeeming feature about the sole superpower being a democracy: it is a little less dangerous to criticize it because large segments of its electorate - and even some politicians - really believe in abstract values like truth, justice and free speech. US policy-makers and power brokers protect themselves by a smoke screen of lies disseminated in the press and media. But the occasional critic is unlikely to go to prison or be assassinated. However, such critics are most unlikely to receive publicity in major television networks or major American newspapers - and very little in Western Europe. This is part of the system. Ignoring truth is one of the recognized modern methods of propagating lies. The Case Study This comparative case study is necessary not only because the parallels between the history of Serbia and the history of the Jews in the land of King David and King Solomon are too many to be ignored, but also since the attitude of the Western powers - and in particular the US - to both the Yugoslav and the Middle Eastern crisis is largely determined by the pro-Muslim bias of their policy-makers and power brokers. Western Europe has been a little more understanding in Yugoslavia because it is a little more scared of Muslim terrorism, mass Muslim immigration and the potential military threat from North Africa. this led to more objectivity in the press and, occasionally, in the electronic media, but very little else. Indeed, the need to make this case study comparative is highlighted by the fact that the anti-Serb posture of West European policy-makers is dictated more by their political and economic interests in the Middle East than by a desire to appease the Americans. France (tacitly supported by Germany and Britain) has been doing everything possible to undermine US Influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq by adopting pro-Muslim Middle East policies more extreme than those of the US State Department - not only as regards the Arab-Israel dispute. In other words, the political and economic ambitions of the West European states in the Middle Est are the direct cause of their cooperation with a pro-Muslim and anti-Serb US policy in Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the readiness of the US to mute its policy of combating Islamic extremism in the Middle East is partly due to its anti-Serb bias and its political goals in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. the net result is that the pro-Muslims are dictating Balkan and Middle Eastern policies in the US and Western Europe alike. The past, even the distant past, has a bearing on the present. The Arabs arrived in Palestine (the name given to the country by the Romans) in the 7th century A.D. from the southern part of the Arabian peninsula. Their clams to be the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Moabites and Philistines are a ridiculous attempt to rewrite history. Though rightly insisting they are Arabs and Muslims, they have started to stage Canaanite religious rites in full fancy dress, and to pay their devotions to Ba'al and Astarte! Whether or not the Albanians in Kosovo claim to have been there before the Serbs - in fancy dress or otherwise - the facts remain that the cradle of Serb nationalism is in Kosovo, while the cradle of Jewish nationalism is in Judea and Samaria - in Hebron, Jerusalem, Jericho and Shiloh. Kosovo was ethnically cleansed of most of its Serbs. Judea and Samaria were ethnically cleansed of most of their Jews. But this cannot wipe out history and the respective Serb and Jewish claims to these regions. More recent parallels are even more telling. Both Serbs and Jews fought the Nazis during the Second World War and both Serbs and Jews were the victims of persecution and murder by Hitler and his allies - the Croat "Ustashis" and the Bosnian Muslims. Moreover, the Arabs of the Middle East openly supported Hitler whenever an opportunity arose. Yet both Serbia and Israel were and are being pressed by the Western powers to make territorial concessions to their old-new enemies. This pressure, which Israel has experienced since its birth in 1948 and Yugoslavia since its dismemberment by American-German fair, has been exerted with the assistance of lying propaganda in the Western media, which utilize the ability technological progress has given them to brainwash ever-increasing masses of the world's population. Let me start with Yugoslavia. Throughout the cold War, the USSR had a clear interest in maintaining a united Yugoslavia, under communist control. There were many Serb communists and more Serb partisans who had helped the USSR during World War II. However, the Serbs' problem in dealing with the Kremlin was that the leader of these partisans who duly became the dictator of Yugoslavia was born of Croat and Slovene parents and, far from safeguarding the influence of the Serb majority, did his utmost to decrease it. He was also strongly anti-Israeli. As Tito was a confirmed communist. Moscow had no interest to risk removing him and chance an even less reliable successor. The result was that the traditional Russian support for the Serbs was partly eroded. It should be noted that communism promoted atheism - not Orthodox Christianity - so the common Christian-Orthodox heritage of the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Serbs was of only minor importance during this period. The very short time interval between the end of the Cold War and the successful German-American attempt to break up Yugoslavia was not coincidental, Russia was in the throes of a desperate economic crisis and suffered a serious political setback when the other Soviet republics became independent states. Its Foreign Minister, Andrey Kozyrev, favored a policy of cooperation with Germany and the US and could be relied upon not to make trouble for them in the UN. The German interest in creating friendly satellite states in Croatia, Slovenia and elsewhere in the Balkans was obvious. The only pertinent question was why the US supported it. The answer is simple: it wanted to dominate Europe. The Yugoslav civil war was set off by the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia as independent states by Germany (with tacit US approval) in defiance of international law and of the Helsinki accords guaranteeing the territorial integrity of existing European states, Yugoslavia included. Eleven European Community states voted against it, but Germany, knowing they would not dare to maintain their opposition for fear of endangering the Maastricht agreement, "went it alone" and imposed its view. Thereupon, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina under Muslim rule, the situation there was tailor-made for disaster. Only 44% of the population was Muslim, about 35% - Serb and perhaps 19% - Croat. In other words, there was a substantial Christian majority. Moreover, the Muslims lived mainly in urban areas, i.e. in less than a quarter of the country. The Serbs, on the other hand, were mainly a rural population and lived in 60% of the country. To try to impose a Muslim government led by an Islamic fundamentalist on such a "state" was to invite civil war. The Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina fulfilled none of the criteria required by international law for an independent state. It did not control the territory arbitrarily assigned to it and could not meet its international obligations. But it had the blessing of Washington. Nowadays, Washington's blessing is international law. Inevitably, the civil war broke out, all sides perpetrating the cruelties civil wars create, like Abraham Lincoln's generals. The European community intervened to stop the fighting. Pressure and persuasion from Lord Carrington and some others led to an agreement in Lisbon, initiated by Izetbegovic on behalf of the Muslims, Tudjman on behalf of the Croats and Milosevic on behalf of the Serbs. Peace seemed around the corner. but the Americans did not want this peace. For one thing, they had no interest in an agreement mediated by Europeans. This might have strengthened the European union which was not on Washington's agenda. They needed the Bosnian civil war to weaken Western Europe and demonstrate its dependence on the United States. They also needed it to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia, further safeguarding the US status as the only superpower. Besides, they had determined Bosnia-Herzegovina would be a state ruled by Muslims. So US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman was sent to Sarajevo to tell Izetbegovic not to sign the agreement he had just initialed because Washington would get him better terms. Izetbegovic complied and tree years of civil war costing hundreds of thousands of lives followed. Washington wanted this war and got it. While Western media bewailed the Muslim casualties, virtually ignoring Croat casualties and expressing satisfaction with Serb casualties, there was no talk of peace. Nor was peace on Washington's agenda while a US-trained and partly and partly US-equipped Croat army ethnically cleansed Krajina of its Serbs, bombarding Knin as fiercely as the Bosnian Serbs ever bombarded Sarajevo, but without the restraint of critical television coverage. Then NATO air-bombed the Bosnian Serbs, attributing to them an incident the Bosnian Muslims had deliberately provoked after the decision to hit the Serb forces had already been taken. "Peace" came only when the Americans could impose it on their terms in an American city, amidst comments that the Europeans were incapable of dealing with their affairs without US assistance. The role of the media in general, and the American media in particular, while these events were occurring was to justify US policy. In the US, where the general public still does not really like Hitler's World War II allies and dislikes foreign interventions on behalf of authoritarian states with no pro-American record, this required an organized campaign promoting hatred of Serbs by every technological means and propaganda trick available, whitewashing Croats and depicting the Bosnian Muslims as peace loving and US-loving democrats whose women and children were being killed by Serb war criminals. the technique of the Goebbelsian "Big Lie" was applied shamelessly, ruthlessly and effectively. The degree of objectivity in West European media was better and there was a fair number of anti-Croat and anti-Muslim articles in the West European press. However, the crucial television services were much less objective and their programmers rarely criticized US policies in a manner conveying strong disapproval. The Western media were neither initiators nor merely observers of events in Bosnia. the term most exactly describing their function is "collaborators". With some laudable exceptions (chiefly in Western Europe), they collaborated with the US Government explaining and justifying its policies. Consequently, after the signing of the Dayton agreement, when the American interest called for assuring a peaceful atmosphere before and during the Bosnian elections, vicious attacks on the Serbs became much rarer. The personal views of the journalists sent to cover Yugoslavia for the major television networks colored their presentations, as personal views always do. US journalists were usually selected for this task on the basis of their political views rather than their journalistic qualifications. And when one scratches this matter far enough, one will often find some kind of Government intervention or "guidance" at the higher decision-making levels of the broadcasting corporations concerned, especially - but not only - in the United States. In the West European press, such "guidance" was sometimes lacking, with the result that many anti-American, anti-Croat, anti-Muslim and even pro-Serb articles appeared in French, British, Italian and some other newspapers. European television networks were more circumspect in opposing American viewpoints. The media and the press did not determine policies. This was done by US politicians and by the owners or representatives of giant international conglomerates, many of which have major business interests in the Arab states. The media and press did what they were told to do, often gladly, but sometimes reluctantly. A fair proportion of the do-called "free press and media" is actually owned by giant conglomerates belonging to the globalist club. In some cases, Arab oil states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait own large holdings of media shares. The journalists know who bitters their bread. Being politically incorrect rarely yields advancement in their profession. This applies in Israel too, where most journalists work for owners supporting the Left-wing Labour and Maretz parties and share their predilection for appeasing the Arabs and the US, which tends to make them anti-Serb and sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims. The television is most affected by this sickness. There have been quite a few pro-Serb articles in the Israeli press. At this point, let me turn to the Middle East and Israel's ambivalent relations with the United States. To describe these relations as friendly is, at best, an exaggeration. The US did nothing to help Jews escape from Hitler's Europe during World War II and even turned back a ship with Jewish refugees which succeeded in reaching American shores. Its passengers died in Hitler's death camps. President Truman needed the Jewish vote to defeat the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, in the 1948 election. He was also personally influenced by the European Holocaust. This is why the US voted together with the USSR (which simply wanted the British to leave Palestine) to create a Jewish state during the UN vote in November 1947 and why it recognized the Jewish state in May 1948. But as soon as the Arabs attacked it pro-Arab pressures from the State Department mounted and Israel was saddled with an American arms embargo while it was fighting for its life. It was only saved by arms supplies from communist Czechoslovakia. The 1948 war ended with some territorial gains, including West Jerusalem and its approaches, which gave Israel a historical basis for its new independent existence. Ben Gurion promptly transferred the capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, despite the opposition of the powers to this move, Armistice agreements were signed with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. During these negotiations, the American mediator, Dr. Ralph Bunche, did not press Israel for significant territorial concessions. In 1954, Ben Gurion retired and was succeeded as Prime Minister by the weak Moshe Sharett, who began to be pressed by the Americans to give up the Southern Negev. When Ben Gurion heard this, he mobilized the party against Sharett, had him dismissed and regained power. In 1956, Britain and France decided to oppose by force Gamal Abdul Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal, built and owned by their nationals. They requested and received Ben Gurion's help. Israel overran the entire Sinai peninsula in a few days, only to find itself faced - like the British and the French - with a US-Soviet ultimatum to withdraw. France and Britain never regained their influence in the Middle East and the memory of being forced out of the region by their American allies still rankles. In return for retreating from Sinai and the Gaza strip, Israel received a US guarantee that a future Egyptian closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be met by American intervention. Israel tried to invoke this guarantee in May 1967, when Nasser again closed these straits. the State Department replied that it could not find the document... When Egypt, Syria and Jordan finally attacked Israel on 4 June 1967, the US (probably the CIA with State Department authority) sent a spy ship, the Liberty, which collected information about weaknesses in the Israeli battle lines and transferred it to the Egyptians. It should be stressed that at the time the Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdul Nasser, was an ally of the soviet Union with which the US was conducting a Cold War. Israel reacted by attacking the Liberty with military aircraft, killing more than 20 Americans. The US did not dare to react strongly because American public opinion would have denounced its actions. The incident reflects the deep-seated hostility to Israel in certain State Department and CIA circles. The 1967 war ended in six days The UN resolution adopted after its end, No. 242, would have been one of Israel's greatest diplomatic achievements, were it not for the fact that in international relations truth, even when embodied in an official written document properly signed and approved, counts for very much less than what the great powers want at any given moment. UN Resolution No. 242 does not require Israel to evacuate the territories it occupied during the 1967 war. This was specifically stressed by the British and American diplomats who framed it. It requires only a retreat from some of these territories, without specifying where or how far. According to the then Assistant Secretary of State, Eugene B. Rostow, the provisions of this resolution would have been satisfied by a retreat of a few kilometers on the Egyptian front alone. Needless to say, the Arabs immediately "interpreted" US resolution 242 as demanding the evacuation of every inch of territory occupied by Israel and, after some years, most of the powers outwardly accepted this interpretation, though admitting in private talks with Israelis that it is false. Nasser died in September 1970 after conducting a war of attrition against Israel on the Suez Canal front, which claimed many lives. His successor, Anwar Sadat, was an admirer of Hitler during World War II. He continued the war of attrition, but decided to switch Egypt's support from the USSR to the US. As a result, the Americans began to "mediate" between Israel and Egypt, deliberately misinforming Israel about breaches of cease-fire agreements, such as the movement of Egyptian missiles to the vicinity of the Suez Canals. In 1972, Sadat finally expelled all Russian experts and military advisers from Egypt. His relations with the US became very close, and it is difficult to believe that Washington did not know his plans for attacking Israel on the Day of Atonement, 5 October 1973. There was no American warning and Israeli intelligence wrongly advised the Government there was no likelihood of war. The Joint attack by Egypt and Syria surprised Israel and, had it started from the pre-1967 borders, the country would have been overrun. As it was, the Egyptians were able to advance some 15 kilometers beyond the Suez Canal, while the Syrians occupied most of the Golan Heights. The Us promised Israel arms and munitions, but these were deliberately delayed by a week during which Israeli casualties exceeded 1,000 dead. The idea was to soften Israel up for territorial concessions to Egypt, regardless of the results of the fighting, Gen. Ariel Sharon's breakthrough and outflanking of the Egyptian 3rd Army left Israel well West of the Suez Canal, while Gen. Avigdor Kahalani and others pushed the Syrians out of the Golan to a line only 20 kilometers from Damascus. After 18 days of fighting, it was clear to all that the Arabs had suffered a devastating defeat. The Egyptian 3rd Army could be destroyed at will and there was little to prevent an Israeli advance to Cairo. The US intervened to turn the Egyptian and Syrian defeats into major diplomatic victories. It issued an ultimatum to Israel demanding not only that the 3rd Army be allowed to retreat unmolested but also that Israel evacuate all territory West of the Canal, as well as a strip to the East of the Canal. This meant retreating to positions far worse than those from which the victorious war had started, and the effect on Israeli morale was devastating. Israel's hawkish Prime Minister, Golda Meir, resigned and, for the first time since independence, defeatism became fashionable. Itzhak Rabin, who became Prime Minister, became its chief exponent. His successor as head of the Labour Party and Prime Minister Shimon Peres, followed in his footsteps. It should be stressed that for the first 25 years of Israel's existence, defeatism was foreign to the leadership of the Israel Labour Party, which retained power throughout this period. The Prime Ministers - Ben Gurion, Eshkol and Golda Meir - were strong characters capable of withstanding Arab and foreign pressures at least as well as their Right-wing political opponents. The only exception was Moshe Sharett - and this was the reason for his very short tenure of power. But it seems that the American betrayal in October 1973 broke Rabin and Peres, just as it broke the spirit of most of their followers and many other Israeli Jews. In 1975, there was renewed American pressure on Israel to make major territorial concessions to Egypt and Rabin gave way. In return for the Abu Rudeis oil fields, which supplied most of Israel's fuel requirements, and the strategic Gidi and Mitia passes, Rabin received from President ford an official letter, dated 1 September 1975, stating, inter alia: "The US has not developed a final position on the borders (of Israel), Should it do so, it will give great weight to Israel's position that any peace agreement with Syria must be predicated on Israel remaining on the Golan Heights." Some time after the signature of the Oslo agreement with the PLO, President Clinton extracted from the same Rabin a secret promise to cede Syria the entire Golan Heights, including areas West of the international border which Syria had captured before 1967 and which would give it the right to part of the water of the Jordan river and nearly a quarter of the water of Lake Galilee. the Ford letter proved another empty promise. American politicians ignore it. Prime Minister Netanyahu told Clinton he could not be bound by promises given by Rabin to the US without authority from his own Government or the Knesset, which were informed about them only after Labor had lost the 1996 election. In 1977, the first Likud Government in history of Israel took office. Its head, Menahem Begin, decided to make peace with Egypt, calculating that this would divide the Arab world and leave him time to expand the Jewish population in Judea-Samaria. Other by-products of this policy were to be greater security for Israel through the removal of Egypt from the enemy camp and more aid from the United States, which had become Anwar Sadat's sponsor. Begin miscalculated. The division in the Arab world proved temporary. Hosni Mubarak, who succeeded Anwar Sadat after the latter's assassination, quickly repaired most of the damage. Egypt remained Israel's most dangerous enemy, with the added advantages of not being perceived as such and massive US aid - military as well as financial. Us aid to Israel was increased, but the cost was an image of economic dependence breeding further demoralization and a decline in Zionist motivations. Only the expansion of the Jewish population outside the narrow coastal strip - not only in Judea-Samaria but also in Jerusalem, Galilee and the Negev - was a lasting contribution to Israel's ability to survive. Characteristically, during the peace negotiations with Egypt, President Carter coordinated his positions with those of Anwar Sadat and succeeded in extracting from Begin the surrender of the entire Sinai peninsula, depriving Israel not only of self-sufficiency in oil but also of vital strategic depth. On Sadat's insistence, the peace treaty also included a section providing for Palestinian Arab autonomy. The question whether Israel, Jordan or Egypt would exercise sovereignty over this autonomy was left open for negotiations. The text appeared to exclude the possibility of a Palestinian Arab state. Later Egypt repudiated it. Israel's relations with the US improved somewhat with the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. However, Middle East policy was effectively in the hands of the pro-Arab Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger. The latter was probably responsible for one of the most shameful and Irresponsible decisions taken during this period. In 1982, Israel, angered by PLO terrorism from Lebanese bases, sent forces into Lebanon to expel the PLO and protect the Christian power structure there. Syria reacted by masterminding the assassination of the Christian President of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, causing Israeli troops to occupy Beirut in order to prevent a Muslim takeover there. The US, France and Italy sent forces to Lebanon, ostensibly to protect the PLO during its withdrawal from Beirut, killing 50 people. When this evoked no response from the international force, Syria, anxious to get rid of this force and to attain control of Lebanon on a permanent basis, sent Muslim terrorist on suicide missions against a US marine camp and a French base on 23 October 1996. 241 US marines and 58 French soldiers were killed. Instead of punishing the Syrians, Weinberger ordered the US forces to withdraw from Lebanon (the French and the Italians following suit), giving Syria and the entire Arab world to understand that the West would accept a Syrian occupation of Lebanon and the destruction of its Christian power structure. Syria has ruled Lebanon, with Washington's blessing, ever since, but it took another seven years to complete the destruction of the Maronite-Christian power structure - with the help of traitors in the Christian camp. The occupation of Lebanon given Syria an annual income of $1 billion to $2 billion from the proceeds of heroin and other drugs exported from there. In 1989, PAN-AM flight 103 was bombed and destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland. Both Israeli intelligence and the CIA knew that the outrage which killed 270 people, was perpetrated by Achmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command), which has its headquarters in Syria and operates under Syrian orders. But President Bush was reluctant to blame Syria, since he did not desire to upset his plans for Syria-Israel peace talks involving major concessions to Syria. A high CIA official told the German magazine Focus that the Lockerbie bomb was carried by the Syrian national airline from Damascus to Berlin and there given to Jibril's operators. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the US decided to blackmail Syria with Lockerbie in order to force it into its anti-Iraqi coalition. As someone had to be blamed for the outrage, Washington picked Libya, which had nothing whatever to do with it, and persuaded the UN to impose sanctions on it. Asked by Focus if the truth about Lockerbie will ever be officially admitted by the US, the high CIA official said: "It is doubtful whether my government can ever retreat from the Libyan version. Too much has happened since 1991. The UN embargo (on Libya) has caused enormous damage. And Syria is on the brink of peace with Israel. I do not deny that the price of this peace is Lockerbie." (my italics). Later, the US did everything in its power to discount and conceal evidence linking Syrian-sponsored Islamic terrorists with the blowing up of the Israel Embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992 and has been protecting the good name of the Syrian dictator (usually by blaming Iran for his actions) ever since. The parallels between the US attitude to Syria and its attitude towards the Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia are striking. In both cases, the behavior of the Muslim protege of Washington is irrelevant. He will be helped against his Christian or Jewish opponents regardless... The Rabin-Peres Government, which ruled Israel for four years starting in June 1992 with a majority of one in Parliament which included seven Arabs, based its policies on the following evaluation: Israel cannot afford another war with the Arabs because there will be too many casualties in Tel Aviv. Opposing United States policies is counterproductive and futile. The only hope for Israel's survival is surrender to all Arab demands backed by Washington while it is still possible to obtain US security guarantees in return. The by-product of ceding the Golan Heights, Judaea-Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip will be the political annihilation of Israeli parties opposing this and permanent Labor Party rule. The support of Jewish public opinion for the Government's policies is superfluous, as the US, the international community and, hopefully, the Arabs will back them. This is why the Government called its acts "irreversible". Peres ignored the probability that US undertakings given Israel within the framework of peace treaties would prove as unreliable as political undertakings given by the US in the past. The 1996 elections brought in a Likud Government supported by religious parties. Its policy rests on less defeatist assumptions, but it is well aware the support extended to Arab claims by the US and the West may encourage the Arabs to start a war they will expect to win at the diplomatic tables even if they lose it on the battlefields. Besides, Israel cannot expect any support from Western Europe against the US, because France, Britain and Germany are trying to supplant US influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran by being more pro-Arab than the Americans. Therefore, Prime Minister Netanyahu decided to continue the negotiations with the PLO and Syria, despite the blatant breaches of the Oslo agreements by the Palestinians, who, besides using arms given their police to keep order to kill Israeli soldiers, have not even formally amended their Covenant calling for Israel's destruction. However, it was decided to reject the more extreme Arab demands, try to amend some of the provisions of the Oslo agreement and insist on reciprocity in its implementation. The rejection of the initial US proposals at the recent Washington conference, which would have rewarded the PLO for starting the riots and killing Jews, showed that the Netanyahu Government is capable to standing up to Washington when this is absolutely necessary. The result was and American retreat and a presidential statement leaving Arafat and especially President Mubarak of Egypt (who may well have planned the riots together with Arafat) dissatisfied. However, Netanyahu showed less firmness afterwards and his attempts to curry favor with the Opposition by confining his major appointments to its supporters have weakened his position internally. He has also done nothing to counter the defeatism of the Israeli media and much of the press, which continue to support PLO demands. The role of the Israeli media in the Middle East crisis parallels the role of US and West European media in the Yugoslav crisis - they collaborate with American policy-makers, usually disregarding the national interest of their own country. False statistics have hacked some of the most damnable lies in this sorry tale of two crises. As regards Lebanon, statistics cited in the West have consistently exaggerated the numbers of Muslims and understated the number of Christians in order to justify the Syrian takeover of the country. Saudi indulgence is partly responsible for this. Yet despite massive Christian emigration after 1990, the registers drawn up for the recent Lebanese elections still showed the Maronite Christians as the largest ethnic-religious group and the Christians and Muslims almost equal in number. the Palestinians, most of whom came to Lebanon from Jordan after the PLO was expelled by King Hussein when he suppressed its rebellion in 1970, are not Lebanese citizens. Under Syrian rule, thinly disguised by Lebanese puppet politicians and rigged elections, Lebanon has become the major terrorist center of the Middle East, hosting over 10 terrorist organizations active in Turkey, Israel, Western Europe and elsewhere The number of Palestinian Arabs in Palestine has also been systematically exaggerated. One of the methods is not to count the dead. The UN body charged with Helping Arab refugees, whose staff is partly Arab, has been cooperating with the PLO in this matter. "Internationally supervised" elections were a deliberate and flagrant fraud in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and "Palestine". In each case, the purpose of the elections was to provide legitimacy for the party whose interests the US desired to advance - Arafat's Farah and the Islamic extremists of Mr. Izetbegovic respectively. Therefore, ballot-stuffing and fraudulent vote-counting were simply ignored and the required international blessing was conferred upon the "results". The PLO announced immediately after the first count that Arafat had received 88.1% of the votes and Farah - 75% of the seats on the Legislative Council. ON the same day, the Israeli paper Ma'ariv published a detailed list of elections results, excluding 9 seats where "counting had not yet been completed". The headline read: Blow to Arafat, 9 Members of Hamas Elected in Gaza Strip. This, though many Hamas members boycotted the election or voted for Yihya Ayyash - a terrorist previously killed by the Israeli secret service. Heydar Abdul Shafi, an opponent of Arafat and the Oslo accords was also elected. In Judea-Samaria, the Hamas boycott was more extensive, yet Hamas got 2 seats in Nablus. The Farah Hawks and other opponents of Oslo, got most of the seats, while some went to supporters of Jordan. The declaration of official election results was postponed for two days of frantic arm-twisting, ballot-box stuffing and "recounts" They produced the results the US, Arafat and Shimon Peres wanted. Of the 11 Hamas seats, only 4 remained. In Hebron, a known center of Islamic extremism, Fatah swept the board A woman supporting Arafat from the Balata camp in Nablus found herself elected and was granted a lengthy interview on Israel Television. In Ramallah, Fatah got an extra seat. The "final figures" gave Farah and its supporters 67 seats out of 88 - just over the 75% announced in advance. This wholesale fraud received the enthusiastic blessing of ex-President Carter, the European observers and the Peres government. The truth is that a fair election, yielding results approximating Palestinian public opinion was the last thing the West and Peres wanted. The Western goal was to justify the eventual cession of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip to the PLO. Peres' goal was to please the Americans. The story of the elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina is best told in the words of The Guardian correspondents in Sarajevo in a dispatch dated 24 September 1996 and headlined "West covering up mass fraud in Bosnian polls". The Guardian is a liberal British daily, which by no stretch of the imagination could be described as pro-Serb. the text has been slightly abridged: The international organization supervising the Bosnian elections is trying to cover up wholesale fraud involving an estimated 600,000 phantom votes. the preliminary results call into question the apparent victory of Alija Izetbegovic. His 41,000- vote margin of victory over the Bosnian Serb separatist; Momcilo Krajisnik , is dwarfed by the scale of voting discrepancies, which are greatest in predominantly Muslim areas. Independent election monitors demanded the elections be declared null and void after initial returns showed 7% more votes than estimated voters. Western observers say the figures suggest cheating during the count or ballot-stuffing on a vast scale. But if the results were nullified or if Mr. Krajisnik were declared the victor. Western strategy in Bosnia would go into a tailspin as : Bosnia's Muslims would refuse to accept Mr. Krajisnik, who helped orchestrate Serb ethnic cleansing, as head of state. Under the Dayton agreement, no new government institutions can be created until the whole election process - campaign, polling day count and results 0 is certified by the Chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Non-approval could postpone by months the draw down of US-text NATO troops, presenting President Clinton with a foreign policy fiasco weeks before the US presidential elections in November. While supervising the election, OSCE has been under constant US pressure to play down the evidence of fraud. The head of its Sarajevo mission is Robert Frowick, a US diplomat. Over the past month, the OSCE press department has been gradually packed with US officials, while their European counterparts have been sent home or demoted, in effect making the OSCE press office an extension of the American embassy. According to a Western observer, there was only one international supervising team in Bosnia for every eight polling stations and when the polls closed 70% of the polling stations were totally unsupervised. There are serious discrepancies throughout Bosnia, but the worst fraud appears to have been in mainly Muslim areas. One OSCE source said that in central Sarajevo 30,000 votes appear to have been cast on behalf of dead or missing Muslims. The number of voters was also suspiciously high around Bihac, the head of the International Crisis Group Office in Sarajevo, Sir Terence Clark, said yesterday; "We call on OSCE to explain the discrepancies and if they can only be explained by fraud then they should declare the elections null and void." OSCE argued there was no direct proof of fraud. Its elections director, Jeff Fischer, said the turnout seems high because the original estimate of the total electorate - 2.9 million - was too low. Over the weekend, OSCE revised the figure upwards to 3.2 million. But the revised figure defies demographic logic. It allows for new voters coming of age since the 1990 election, but radically revises downwards the death toll of the war. A UN analyst commented: "It is as if nobody at all had died throughout the entire war." Diplomats say the electorate estimate of 2.9 million was first put forward by OSCE in April 1996. Three studies by UN and Bosnian statisticians arrived at estimates ranging from 2,936,000 to 2,957,000. Two days after the elections, on September 16th, a document accepting these figures was signed by representatives of OSCE, the UN and IFOR. At least 580,000 refugees are known not to have voted. Based on polling day observations of international monitors, the document assumes an 80% turnout of Bosnians still in Bosnia but concedes this "is probably higher than the real turnout". If 80% of Bosnia's voters had voted, the maximum number of votes would have been 1.89 million - 600,000 less than the actual number of ballots cast, which was officially reported as 2.52 million. The European Institute for the Media, which monitored Bosnian television and radio broadcasts throughout the campaign said: "the fairness of the democratic process was seriously marred". The European Commission, which funded the monitoring, initially tried to soften its findings and then vainly urged the institute to delay the publication of its report. We can relax. If Washington wants Izetbegovic and Arafat to become elected presidents, this will happen, whatever the real results of the elections held. I do not envy President Milosevic. The make quite sure he signs on the dotted line, the Americans made the final termination of the sanctions on Yugoslavia dependent on his formal approval of the electoral fraud in Bosnia. Of course, there are differences between the ongoing betrayals of the Israeli Jews, the Lebanese Christians and the Serbs by the West. but viewed against the background of historical trends, these differences are minor. In each case, the basic reasons are the greed of "globalist" business interests involved and allied with Muslim rulers for their personal and institutional profit, and the control exercised by these interests over US and many West European politicians. the "One World" their propaganda is trying to sell us is a world in which they can decide which states exist and which are destroyed. Yet their Achilles heel are precisely the Muslims, whose ambitions they are cynically promoting. the proportion of secular Muslims is infinitely smaller than the proportion of secular Christians or secular Jews. Islam is an aggressive religion. Among its main tenets is its belief in the Muslim right to rule over unbelievers. It is totally opposed to the values of Christianity, Judaism and atheist or agnostic secularism. and it is spreading over the globe, including Europe and North America, like wildfire. Islam is also a patient and highly practical religion. If the unbeliever is too strong or too distant to be conquered, it allows the Muslim to leave him alone. Moreover, in contrast to the Christian-atheist-agnostic nations, the trend among the Muslims is towards more and more fundamentalist Islam. Today, we see this not only in Afghanistan. Pakistan and Iran, but also in Egypt and Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. The United States has taken the Muslim jinn out of the bottle but, almost certainly, will be unable to put him back into it. It cannot even cope with Louis Farrakhan and his "Nation of Islam" on its own territory. The recipe used to maintain US control is to select two or three Muslim states - in practice Iran, Iraq and Libya 0 as scapegoats to be beaten in order to demonstrate to the others the wisdom of accepting American dictates. Events in the Muslim world and on its fringes are proving this recipe inadequate. Iran, Iraq and Libya are no more Muslim and no more totalitarian than Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria or Pakistan, all of which have been Washington's special proteges, though they detest everything the West stands for except technology and bribes. And even bribes have their limit when the recipient starts believing he can stab the donor in the back with impunity. this is why the story of Washington's relations with Syria, briefly outlived above, is so important. It is crucial not to translate the criticisms of US and Western policy-makers and their big business sponsors into criticisms of Western democratic values. Globalism is a sham and a bane. But healthy nationalism and democracy still offer the best chance of resisting "globalism" and the tide of Islam in our imperfect world. Healthy nationalism is also the only motivation which can, to some extent, control the weaknesses created by human greed, weaknesses so often proved deadly by the course of human history. In the long run, the lying propaganda in the Western press and media can destroy the West itself. But the struggle of its critics must be for the soul of the West, not against the West. for the US and other Western countries of today, driven by the greed of the small cliques controlling their power structure, are proving once again the truth of the ancient Greek proverb; "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad."

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