Zionist Provocation under False Flag
By George Pumphrey
http://www.israelshamir.net/shamirImages/Shamir/FalseFlag.htm
A successful false flag terrorist attack that discredited the cause of the terrorists is the case of the Palestinian hijacking of the Italian cruse ship, "Achille Lauro" in 1985. This operation was ordered by the Israeli secret service and organized by their Palestinian agents inside Palestinian terrorist organizations. The details of the preparations are related by an insider to the upper echelons of the Israeli secret services, Ari Ben-Menashe, former special intelligence advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir -in his book, "Profits of War."
"Radi [a Jordanian military officer who was unaware that he, since some time had already been smuggling arms for the Israeli secret service] went back to his drinking and womanizing and the money he made selling arms for Pearson all drained away. At that very vulnerable point, in 1978, Pearson stepped in again and offered Radi a £200,000 loan. This time, Pearson made it quite clear to him that the money was coming from an Israeli source. The desperate Radi accepted the loan and was recruited to work for an antiterrorist group in Israel run by Rafi Eitan. The group's methods were rather unconventional, one could say heinous, but it had operated successfully for years. An example is the case of the "Palestinian" attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was in fact, an Israeli "black" propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were. The operation worked like this: Eitan passed instructions to Radi that it was time for the Palestinians to make an attack and do something cruel, though no specifics were laid out. Radi passed orders on to Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders, was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas then gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man [Leon Klinghoffer] in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda."
Interesting in this account is that in order to "show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were" Israelis activated their agents among Palestinian terrorists to tell them to be particularly brutal to Jews, as Jews. What Ben-Menashe does not mention in this anecdote is the second objective sought by Israel: convince Jews of the merits of Zionism and Israel as their sole "protector" on the planet.
Ben-Menashe mentions the "success" that Eitan's methods were having. A major aspect lending to this success is Israel's credibility. One would not suspect that particularly the Israeli government would be so cold-blooded toward Jews. Have them murdered to be able to point at their adversaries and cry "anti-Semitism". They feign indignation at the fate of Jews, who refuse to come live in Israel, where they are "protected."
The international crisis created by the hijacking was designed to capture headlines of the world's press for about a week. The hijackers finally agreed to surrender to Egyptian authorities. (Abu Abbas, who himself was not among the hijackers, helped negotiate their surrender.) The German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, recently furnished additional information of what happened:
"The Egyptians wanted to send Abbas and the hijackers to the PLO headquarters in Tunis. The plane was intercepted in flight by US fighters and forced to land in Sicily, where the hijackers were put on trial.
The prosecution indicted the actual hijackers but Abu Abbas was called merely as a "witness" and permitted to flee the country. The US had made a demand for Abbas' extradition for murder of a US citizen. An Italian court convicted Abbas in absentia to five life terms. The US withdrew its extradition demand. And Abbas remained free.
In 1998 Abu Abbas was given official permission of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanjahu to visit the Gaza Strip. Israeli authorities justified the official permission with the fact that Abbas had in 1996 already been allowed to visit the Gaza Strip to participate in Palestinian parliamentary elections. He had also voted at that time for the resolution legally eliminating the clause from the PLO Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. Israeli Supreme Court also protected Abbas by refusing the law suit calling for Abbas' expulsion from Israel and being turned over to the US brought by the Klinghoffer family."
The leader who had planned and organized the hijacking was sitting in safety and on the enemy payroll. Those who carried out the action believed they were "helping the cause". They had no idea that the murder of an innocent, invalid reduced their "cause" in the public's eye from a struggle against occupation and ethnic cleansing to one against Jews per se, from a struggle for justice for the Palestinians to an unjust "anti-Jewish" struggle. It would take the Palestinian struggle a long time to overcome this setback.
The background of the Achille Lauro hijacking and the international immunity enjoyed by Abu Abbas provides useful insight into the workings of false flag terrorism. A close look at many of the "suicide bombings" taking place in Israel, would also raise doubts about many official versions of the attacks.
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The Journal of History - Fall 2007 Copyright © 2007 by News Source, Inc.