By LINDA HEARD, ARABNEWS
People who believe Israel has the right to send its bombs and emissaries anywhere on the planet to carry out extrajudicial assassinations have a warped moral compass. However it’s dressed, murder is murder. It’s bad enough when an individual premeditates to take the life of another but it’s far worse when murder at will is the policy of a state.
Israel not only gets away with perpetrating assassinations or “targeted killings” as Israelis prefer to call them, they appear to be a source of national pride or amusement. Israeli filmmakers are in the process of producing a comedy based on the Mossad’s alleged hit on Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mahbouh in a Dubai hotel room by undercover operatives traveling on cloned Western passports.
They think it’s funny but what’s really funny (not funny “Ha Ha” but funny peculiar) is the laid-back fashion Western governments react to Israel’s transgressions especially when one recalls their fury following the bombing of Rafik Hariri’s convoy in Beirut for which Damascus was initially blamed. Their double standard is glaring. There was no outrage over the assassination of four Iranian nuclear scientists, believed to have been killed by Israeli -made car bombs, but when Israeli diplomats were recently targeted in India, Georgia and Thailand, the incidents dominated international discussion and news.
Since the 1950s, Israel has been eliminating its adversaries with airstrikes, missiles, car bombs, parcel bombs, snipers and poisons. PFLP commander Wadie Haddad died from ingesting poisoned chocolates, courtesy of the Mossad. The political leader of Hamas Khaled Mashaal almost died from poisoning and survived only because President Bill Clinton pressurized Israel to supply the antidote following the arrest of Mossad agents traveling on Canadian passports.
Now it appears that Tel Aviv has sunk to even greater depths.