Israeli Hitmen 'Terminate' Dissidents

• Human rights leaders are protesting Israel's illegal, but accepted practice of assassinating dissidents. If you've been reading The SPOTLIGHT, you already know the truth.

Israel's dirty secret is finally out: the Mideast country's government employs dozens of hit squads and special technology to assassinate anyone, anywhere whom it thinks a "danger to the security of the state."

For the past half-century, any American who wanted to know the truth about the criminal and barbaric practices implanted in the heart of the Middle East by Israelis had to turn to this populist newspaper for the facts. Now the Israeli government it self admits that it uses murder as a key instrument of its statecraft, perhaps in an attempt to strike terror into the heart of its rapidly multiplying critics and opponents.

Notable among these critics is Amnesty International (AI), the leading worldwide human-rights organization.

In a report issued on Feb. 21, AI noted that in the past 100 days, Israeli hunter-killer teams have assassinated more than 30 Palestinian leaders, "terminated" be cause they supported the freedom fight of their occupied and oppressed people.

"These extra-judicial killings are unacceptable," declared the AI paper after the sniper shooting of Mahmoud al-Madan, an Islamic leader, a few days earlier near the city of Nablus. It noted that if any of the murder victims were really guilty of anything illegal, Israel had the means to simply arrest them.

Under the norms accepted by the world's civilized governments, "lethal force may only be used against individuals who are themselves posing an imminent threat to life," warned AI, adding that the unbridled murder tactics used by Israel amount to nothing less than "state terrorism."

That presents America with a bitter and humiliating paradox. Ever since the Reagan administration, Israel has been encouraged and generously financed here in its propaganda campaign to accuse Islamic nations of practicing "state terrorism."

Israeli "experts" and lobbyists proliferated in the U.S. mass media and in so-called "think tanks" pretending to teach na ive Americans how to investigate and deal with "state terrorism." The principal adviser of Congress on so-called "counter-terrorism" is an Israeli activist, Josef Bodansky, who is believed to have links to Israel's secret services.

"Looking at the role Israel has played in American public life, we are looking at one of the 'big lies' of our lifetime," said Jake Thurmond, a veteran congressional investigator, now retired. "It has served to deceive this nation into dozens of misguided policies that have cost us blood, sweat, tears -- and hundreds of billions of wasted dollars."