The following are excerpts from remarks by B. Netanyahu,
former prime minister of Israel, before a group of U.S.
senators in Washington D.C. discussing the current events in
the Middle East. At the breaks, material was left out. Mr.
Netanyahu was on a publicity tour of the U.S. on behalf of
Israel.
Thank you. I want to thank Senators Kyl and Lieberman for
hosting this gathering, and for my many friends, the
distinguished senators who are here, and Senator Helms, who
have all been stalwart supporters of the State of Israel and
the excellent relationship between our two countries.
It is for the sake of our common values that I have come here
today. I have come here to voice what I believe is an
urgently needed reminder that the war on terror can be won
with clarity and courage or lost with confusion and
vacillation.
Seven months ago, on a clear day, in this capitol of freedom,
I was given the opportunity to address you, the guardians of
liberty. And I will never forget that day -- a day when words
that will echo for ages pierced the conscious of the free
world. These were words that lifted the spirits of an
American nation that had been savagely attacked by evil,
words that looked that evil straight in the eye and boldly
declared that it would be utterly destroyed. And most
important, words that charted a bold course for victory.
Now, these words were not mine. They were the words of the
president of the United States. In an historic speech to the
world that September, and with determined action in the
crucial months that followed, President Bush and his
administration outlined a vision that had the moral and
strategic clarity necessary to win the war on terror.
The moral clarity emanated from an ironclad definition of
terror and from an impregnable moral truth. Terrorism was
understood to be the deliberate targeting of civilians in
order to achieve political ends, and it was always
unjustifiable. With a few powerful words, President Bush said
all that was needed to be said. Terrorism, he said, is never,
ever justified.
And the strategic clarity emanated from the recognition that
international terrorism depends on the support of sovereign
states, and that fighting it depends -- demands that these
regimes be either deterred or dismantled. In one clear
sentence, President Bush expressed this principle. He said,
"No distinction will be made between the terrorists and the
regimes that harbor them."
This moral and strategic clarity was applied with devastating
force to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that supported al
Qaeda terrorism. No moral equivalence was drawn between the
thousands of Afghan civilians who are the unintentional and
unfortunate casualties of America's just war, and the
thousands of American civilians deliberately murdered on
September 11th. No strategic confusion led America to pursue
al Qaeda terrorism while leaving the Taliban regime in
place.
Soon after the war began, the American victory over the
forces of terror in Afghanistan brought to light the third
principle in this war on terror -- namely, the imperative for
victory, the understanding that the best way to defeat terror
is to defeat it. Now, I know this sounds to you tautologous
and it must have seemed at first to be a trite observation.
It wasn't fully understood.
But contrary to popular belief, the motivating force behind
terror is neither desperation nor destitution. It is, in
fact, hope -- the hope of terrorists, systematically
brainwashed by the ideologues who manipulate them, that their
savagery will break the will of their enemies and help them
achieve their objective.
Now, if you defeat this hope, you defeat terrorism. Convince
terrorists, convince their sponsors and their potential new
recruits that terrorism will be thoroughly uprooted and
severely punished, and you will stop terrorism in its
tracks.
By adhering to these three principles -- moral clarity,
strategic clarity, and the imperative for victory -- the
forces of freedom, led by America, are well on their way to
victory against terror from Afghanistan. But that is only the
first step in dismantling the global terror network. The
other terrorist regimes must now be dealt with rapidly in
similar fashion.
And yet today, just seven months into the war, it is far from
certain that this will be done. Faced with the quintessential
terrorist regime of our time, a regime that both harbors and
perpetrates terror on an unimaginable scale, the free world
is muddling its principles, losing its nerve, and thereby
endangering the successful prosecution of this war.
The question many in my country are now asking is this: Will
America apply its principles consistently and win this war,
or will it selectively abandon these principles and thereby
ultimately risk losing the war? My countrymen ask this
question because they believe that terrorism is an
indivisible evil that must be fought indivisibly. They
believe that if moral clarity is obfuscated, that if you
allow one part of the terror network to survive, much less be
rewarded for its crimes, then the forces of terror will
regroup and rise again.
Until last week, I was absolutely certain that the United
States would adhere to its principles and lead the free world
to a decisive victory. Today, I too have my concerns. I am
concerned that when it comes to terror directed against
Israel, the moral and strategic clarity that is so crucial
for victory is being lost. I am concerned that the imperative
of defeating terror everywhere is being ignored when the main
engine of Palestinian terror is allowed to remain intact. I'm
concerned that the State of Israel, that has for decades
bravely manned the front lines against terror, is being
pressed to back down just when it is on the verge of
uprooting Palestinian terror.
These concerns first surfaced with the appearance of a
reprehensible moral symmetry that equates Israel, a democracy
that is defending itself against terror, with a Palestinian
dictatorship that is perpetrating it. The deliberate
targeting of Israeli civilians has been shamefully equated
with the unintentional loss of Palestinian life that is the
tragic but unavoidable consequence of legitimate warfare.
Worse, since Palestinian terrorists both deliberately target
civilians, and deliberately hide behind civilians, Israel is
cast as the guilty party because more Palestinians have been
killed by Arafat's terrorist war than Israelis have been
killed.
No one, of course, would dare suggest that the United States
was the guilty party in World War II because German
casualties, which, by the way, included millions of
civilians, were 20 times higher than American casualties. So
too, only a twisted and corrupt logic would paint America and
Britain as the aggressors in the current war because Afghan
casualties are reported by some -- I don't have conclusive
figures -- to have well exceeded the death toll of September
11th.
The responsibility for civilian deaths in the U.S. on
September 11th and in America's subsequent military actions
lies squarely with the Taliban's chief, Mullah Omar, and with
Osama bin Laden. And similarly, the responsibility for
civilian deaths in Israel, and in Israel's subsequent
military action in Palestinian- controlled areas, lies
squarely with Yasser Arafat, who has actually the dubious
distinction of being the world's only terrorist chieftain who
both harbors and perpetrates terrorism.
Now, my concern was sparked not only by this specious
allocation of blame for civilian casualties, it deepened
when, incredibly, Israel was asked to stop fighting terror
and return to a negotiating table with a regime that is
committed to the destruction of the Jewish state and openly
embraces terror. Yasser Arafat brazenly pursues an ideology
of "poliscide" -- I think I coined this phrase --
"poliscide," which is the destruction of a state, and he
meticulously pursues it by promoting a cult of suicide, and
with total control of the media, the schools, the ghoulish
kindergarten camps for children that glorify suicide
martyrdom -- for G-d's sake, this is a man who signs the
checks for the explosives for the suicide bombs. Arafat's
dictatorship has indoctrinated a generation of Palestinians
in a culture of death, producing waves of human bombs that
massacre Jews in busses, discos, supermarkets, pizza shops,
cafes -- everywhere and anywhere.
Israel has not experienced a terrorist attack on the scale
that you have witnessed on that horrific day in September.
That unprecedented act of barbarism will never be forgotten.
It too will live in infamy. In my judgment, it will surpass
in infamy the other great attack on America. But in the last
18 months, Israel's six million citizens have buried over 400
victims of terror -- a per capita total equal to half-a-dozen
September 11ths. This daily -- indeed, hourly carnage, is
also unprecedented, even in terrorism's long and bloody
history. Yet, at the very moment when support for Israel's
war against terror should be stronger than ever, my nation is
being asked to stop fighting. And though we are assured by
friends that we have the right to defend ourselves, we are
effectively asked to suspend -- not to exercise that
right.
But our friends should have no illusions. With or without
international support, the government of Israel must fight,
not only to defend its people and to restore a dangerously
eroded deterrence to secure the Jewish state, but also to
ensure that the free world wins the war against terror in
this pivotal arena in the heart of the Middle East.
* * *
But to assure that this evil does not re-emerge a decade or
two from now, we must not merely uproot terror but also plant
the seeds of freedom. If we win against Arafat, as I know we
will -- if you win against Saddam and Iraq -- what will
prevent a new Saddam or a new Arafat from coming back 10
years or 20 years from now?
It is important to understand that only under tyranny can a
diseased, totalitarian mindset be widely cultivated. And this
totalitarian mindset, which is essential for terrorists to
suspend the normal rules that govern human beings' conscious
behavior -- the behavior that prevents them from committing
grisly acts, from blowing up babies, or a bus full of
innocent people -- you have to brainwash people
systematically under a tyrannical system in order to get them
to make these acts, these suicide acts.
Well, it is impossible to produce such a mindset in a climate
of democracy and freedom, because the open debate and
plurality of ideas that buttresses all genuine democracies
and the respect for human rights and the sanctity of life
that are the shared values of all free societies, these are,
at the end of the day, the permanent antidote to the poison
that the sponsors of terror seek to inject into the minds of
their recruits.
And that is why it is also imperative that once the terror
regimes in the Middle East are swept away, the free world,
led by America, must begin to build democracy in their place.
This will not happen overnight, and these will not become
western democracies overnight or ever.
But we simply can no longer afford to allow this region to
remain cloistered by a fanatic militancy. We must let the
winds of freedom and independence finally penetrate the one
region in the world that clings to unreformed tyranny.
* * *
I have come before you today to ask you to courageously
continue to carry this torch with courage, with honor, by
standing by an outpost of freedom that is resisting an
unprecedented terrorist assault. I ask you to stand by
Israel's side in its fight against Arafat's tyranny of
terror, and thereby help defeat an evil that threatens all of
us, that threatens all of mankind. And, knowing you, I'm sure
that you will respond.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
