Thread by @RBrulin

The Greatest "Terrorist" Campaign You Never Heard About:
Dec 1981: Israeli officials (incl Sharon) put Op Olympia 2 in motion
Target: Stadium where PLO would celebrate anniv of its creation on Jan 1
Means: Bombs inside+truck bombs outside
Dec 31: PM Begin decide to abort
THREAD

Operation Olympia would have involved agents of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF.) The FLLF was created by senior Israeli officers (Dagan, Ben-Gal, Eitan) in late 1979. Between 1979 & 1983, it used car bombs & killed hundreds of civilians in Lebanon

In 1981, Ariel Sharon used the FLLF & its car bombs (ie "terrorism") to provoke the PLO into using "terrorism" against Israeli civilians, so that Israel would have an excuse (the fight against "terrorism"!!) to invade Lebanon. Arafat saw the trap however. Hence Operation Olympia

Betw 1979 & 1983, FLLF (ie senior Israeli officials) conducted "terrorist" campaign that killed hundreds of civilians. This was described in extraordinary detail in Ronen Bergman's "Rise & Kill First" in 2018. Since then, US media has remained SILENT

https://twitter.com/RBrulin/status/1187067870192250880?s=20

The quotes above come from this article I wrote in May 2018: mondoweiss.net/2018/05/remark…

All the information about the FLLF comes from Bergman's book. The information in his book comes from Israeli officials involved in the operation or who were aware of it at the time

Remarkably, the FLLF "terrorist" campaign took place at the EXACT same time that Israeli officials (eg Benjamin Netanyahu) were engaged in a "hasbara" (propaganda) campaign to convince the world (esp the US) that it was waging a righteous war on the "evil terrorists" in Lebanon

Most remarkable of all perhaps? In August 1982, Ariel Sharon took to the pages of the NYT to denounce the absolute immorality of the "Palestinian terrorists." By then, he had, through the FLLF, been conducting his OWN murderous campaign of "terrorism" for one full year

Ariel Sharon's OpEd can be read here:
nytimes.com/1982/08/29/opi…
Note of course that all the arguments at the heart of Israel's discourse on "terrorism" today are already present here ("they" are entirely evil, "we" only defend ourselves, "we" respect human life, "they" don't, etc)

Finally, note that all the arguments used by Israel (or the US & others) to justify their uses of force vs "the evil terrorists" could have been used at the time by the Palestinians or Lebanon to justify THEIR uses of force vs the FLLF & its Israeli backers

Needless to say, no one would accept the claim that the Palestinians or Lebanon had the right to bomb the kibbutz were the FLLF bombs were built, or to target Sharon/Eitan/Dagan/Ben-Gal for assassination, "in self defense vs these evil terrorists"

If that is the case then how can Israel (or the US &others) justify THEIR uses of force vs "the evil terrorists"?
This is, of course, why the absolute SILENT of media (& "terrorism experts") about the FLLF is so important: without such silence, whole discourse would collapse
END

Note: When Bergman's book was published, a few reviews DID mention Olympia 2, ie an operation that was (at very last minute) canceled. These reviews did not however note that FLLF would have been involved &did not say a WORD about dozens of FLLF attacks that Begin did NOT cancel

The media discussion about Rise & Kill First fits rather neatly with Chomsky's and Herman's "worth and unworthy victims," with a twist. See what I wrote about this in my May 2018 article.
Today is December 31, 2019, and the media's absolute silence continues.

A longer THREAD on the FLLF, Olympia and the US media's silence about these revelations:

https://twitter.com/RBrulin/status/1212429497351462912?s=20