I appreciate Deacon’s post of

I appreciate Deacon’s post of the Alan Dershowitz piece from Haaretz. It discusses the same assassination I wrote about this past June, the 1973 assassination of US Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel and his deputy Curt Moore in Khartoum on the direct order of Yasser Arafat. Dershowitz’s piece misses the issue I raised in my piece: the American interest in bringing Arafat to justice separate and apart from Israel’s. Dershowitz urges the Israelis to try Arafat for murder.
I wonder why Dershowitz does not urge the government of the United States to do so for Arafat’s crimes against Americans, and why Dershowitz does not do so in an American newspaper. Noel’s murder is at the heart of Dershowitz’s piece, yet the state of Israel has absolutely no interest of any kind that would support a prosecution of Arafat for it. We do. Reasons of state might argue that we give Arafat a pass for all the American blood he has on his hands, and such reasons appear to have been operative to date in causing the American government to avert its eyes from Arafat’s crimes against Americans. But I think that most Americans would strongly disagree with the wisdom of our inaction if they knew of the evidence incriminating Arafat in the murder of American citizens, and that they would be right.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses