Germany Frees Terrorist: Vielen Danken, Angela!
Dr. Joseph Hitti - 12/26/2005
That the German government has decided to release the Hezbollah terrorist Mohammad Ali Hamadi, one of two hijackers of TWA flight 847 who beat, shot to death, and dumped the body of unarmed, off-duty U.S. Navy serviceman Robert Dean Stethem in the summer of 1985 in Beirut, comes as no surprise. We have grown accustomed to European governments kissing the hands of criminals and appeasing them to no end, supposedly to confront violence with love, barbarity with civility, but really to appease, to trade one criminal for a hostage, and thus always cower in the face of terrorism.
What is unacceptable is for the new German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to secretly take this action without in the least informing the US government, which has sought to extradite Hamadi to the US to stand trial for the murder of serviceman Stethem. The German government also trashed its own justice system by releasing Hamadi after he served only 17 years of a life sentence without possibility of parole. This smacks of the lowliest form of international diplomacy and is a deplorable retreat in the fight against terrorism.
We need only remember that Hezbollah was for the most of the past two decades an Iranian terrorist organization operating mainly from South Lebanon, but with tentacles in Africa where it raised money in the diamond trade, in Latin America where it carried out such terrorist acts as the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and elsewhere. Now we learn that the quid pro quo of releasing the German hostage in Baghdad at the same time as Hamadi was let go in Germany is evidence that Hezbollah also has tentacles in the insurgency movement in Iraq. Not to mention the 1980s spate of bombings in Beirut against the US Embassy (twice), the French Embassy, the US Marines barracks, the French paratroopers compound, and the notorious kidnappings, murders, and occasional barterings – thanks to the good offices of the Syrian occupation – of Western hostages who were held in sub-humane conditions for years and years. Yes, we also hear and read that Hezbollah is eager to turn that “page” of its history and wants to become a respected political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and ministers in the Lebanese government. But we thought that there are no statutes of limitations for crimes of this magnitude. Where is the conscience of the German people and the German government? Has the German nation sunk so low as to allow a murderer to go free only as in spite to George Bush’s policies? Is this where German diplomacy has ended? In fear of threats against Detlev Mehlis, the German investigator whose reports blamed Syria – whose only remaining ally in Lebanon today is Hezbollah – for the Hariri assassination?
We thought that, now that Lebanon is free of the Israeli and Syrian occupations, peace will return to this tormented country. Yet, of all Syria’s former allies in Lebanon – Jumblatt, Hariri himself, and all the other profiteers and high-flying pirates during the Syrian occupation – only Hezbollah and its sister organization Amal (who incidentally “negotiated” in 1985 the end of the TWA flight hijack) remain steadfast in their defense of Syria. In fact, the current Lebanese government is fractured today because the Hezbollah ministers refused last week to endorse the continuation of the UN investigations into the string of car bombings that have racked Lebanon and killed a number of prominent politicians and journalists. Hezbollah remains the only organization in Lebanon to reject progress towards a peaceful resolution of Lebanon’s border disputes between its two former occupiers, Israel and Syria. Those disputes center mainly on the Shebaa Farms, an outpost of a barren hill at the junction of the borders between the three countries. Belonging to Lebanon originally, the Shebaa Farms were annexed by Syria in the 1950s, back when Syria did not even recognize Lebanon’s right to exist as a sovereign and independent nation. Lebanon let it go, because it had no back to fight the Syrians over a barren hill. Then Israel conquered the Golan Heights, and with them the Shebaa Farms. Neither Syria nor Lebanon made any move to contest the status quo from 1956 to 1967 when the Farms turned from Syrian to Israeli hands, then again from 1967 to 2000 when Israel withdrew behind the 1949 Armistice Line – the official border between Lebanon and Israel. But suddenly, in 2000, having now lost the justification of its own occupation of Lebanon, Syria “remembered” that it pilfered the Shebaa Farms from Lebanon and decided to return them, thus implying that the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon was not complete.
So the endless limbo in which Lebanon finds itself today is still the making of a recalcitrant, disgruntled, foreign-paid Hezbollah who has no cards left to play: Terrorism has become too dangerous today; kidnapping foreign hostages isn’t cool either; even shelling northern Israeli villages does not pay any more. As a result, the importance, respectability and notoriety that Hezbollah garnered over decades of mayhem, lies, terror, of setting up a fiefdom within the Lebanese state and denying the Lebanese government access to the south of the country, of kidnapping ordinary Lebanese citizens and handing them to Syrian Intelligence where they continue to rot in jail to this day…all the exploits and feats on Hezbollah’s resume have become uncovered, and the emperor today has no clothes. There is nothing left for Lebanon to do to recover and begin the long road of rehabilitation and rebuilding but somehow get rid of the cancer and the nightmare that is Hezbollah. With its autonomous islands of training camps and military zones to which the Lebanese government has no access, Hezbollah continues to provide cover for Syrian operatives to proceed apace with their bombings of anti-Syrian politicians and journalists. Hezbollah has become the Trojan horse for the Syrian occupation of Lebanon to continue under a different guise.
Except that the “New European” German government of Angela Merkel has decided to give Hezbollah a fig leaf, to provide it with a lifeline for its waning respectability and a shot in the arm…Why? Out of fear. Out of the pragmatism of dealing and negotiating with terrorists that has shown time and again that it is a failed policy. Out of spite of George Bush. In protest over the American occupation of Iraq. All the reasons that once can conjure up at moments of anger such as this one cannot justify the abysmal moral delinquency of releasing the terrorist Hamadi and dispatching him straight to Beirut where Hezbollah will claim victory, where it will be vindicated yet again that terror pays and that Western nations are paper dolls. Remember that Arafat played the same cards and won. He bombed Western interests and burned Lebanon to the ground during the 1970s and 1980s, and was rewarded with Madrid and Oslo in the 1990s, and a Nobel Prize to boot! I imagine Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi discussing this latest example of German diplomacy with his henchmen as a vindication of their strategy. Some people never learn. Vielen Danken, Angela!
