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From Unity, 27 February 2010

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Keep your eye on your passport

by Wise Owl

The actions of the Israeli state, and especially its secret service wing, Mossad, know no bounds, and the latest revelations concerning the assassination of the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouki in January of this year are just another example.
     The use of false passports of British, Irish, German and French origin, all friendly countries, shows that they operate in a climate of total confidence that these countries, whilst expressing outrage at such usage, will do nothing about it.
     The Guardian reported that if Israeli involvement were proved, the British government would “at the very least demand a public apology and guarantees that passports would not be stolen again.”
     That should frighten them.
     But, as the same newspaper pointed out, Mossad agents “routinely” use forged western passports, and each time they are caught doing it Israel gives assurances that they will not do it again, as they did in 1987, when Britain had a bit of a set-to with them.
     Ten years later they gave the same assurances to Canada after Mossad agents entered Jordan on doctored Canadian passports in what was described as a “bungled” attempt to kill another Hamas leader. In another instance, two suspected Israeli agents were jailed in New Zealand for obtaining that country’s passports illegally.
     Quite rightly, the Guardian described Israeli assurances as “evidently worthless.”
     The Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn was quoted in the Morning Star on the 19th of February, comparing the government’s timid attitude to the Israeli ambassador with that of the treatment of the Iranian ambassador recently, “who was summoned to account for his country’s actions and publicly hauled over the coals.”
     In an interview on BBC Radio 2 with the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, Jeremy Vine also pointed out the instance where the Foreign Office “invited” the Israeli ambassador, whereas the Irish government “summoned” his counterpart in the Republic. On the surface this might not seem a big issue, but in diplomatic terms it shows the differing attitudes of the two governments.
     Miliband was at pains to express that Israel and Britain were “strategic allies.”
     Seumas Milne, writing in the Guardian on the 18th of February, confirmed that the passport identities of six people with dual British and Israeli nationality, all of them living in Israel, were used, which proved that Mossad has no scruples about who it puts in danger.
     All the passports contained the original names but with obviously different photographs.
     Running “parallel” with what he describes as the “languid official response” of the British government was the attitude of most of the media, which have treated the whole story “more as a ripping spy yarn” than as an event that has put six British citizens’ lives at risk because of their perceived connection to a Mossad death squad.
     All have made comments that they are “shocked,” “angry” and “scared” at how their passport details have been used.
     Milne singles out the Daily Mail, which described the killing as an “audacious hit” straight out of a “Frederick Forsyth page-turner,” and the Times, which “revelled” in an attack that resembled “a well-plotted murder mystery.”
     At least the Israelis can be pleased that their activities are being supported by the Daily Mail, which seems to have come a long way from the days when it gave credence to National Socialism and gave support to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists with a banner headline exclaiming, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”—strange bedfellows indeed.
     The Israeli government, in the person of its racist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, has said there is no reason to blame Israel for the murder, but it is also reported that he has not “explicitly” denied it either.
     Such is the alarm in some Israeli circles that one MP is going to summon a parliamentary commission to discuss the case, and a columnist with the newspaper Ha’aretz has described Mossad’s chief, Meir Dagan, as “belligerent and heavy-handed,” and has called on him to quit.
     In his article, Milne poses the question as to what would have been the response if, for example, Iranian intelligence had done a similar thing. “You can be sure it would have triggered a major international storm,” he writes, “with demands for harsher sanctions against an increasingly dangerous Islamic republic.”
     The whole operation is typical of those in Israel who pay scant regard to peace in the Middle East. They get away with it because the likes of the US and Britain let them.

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