Assassin boss also Israeli hero

YEHOSHUA ZETTLER - STERN GANG LEADER
15-7-1917 — 20-5-2009

YEHOSHUA Zettler, the commander in Jerusalem of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, or Lehi — known to the British as the Stern Gang — who planned and supervised the assassination of the United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, has died in Israel. He was 91.

Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family, was sent to the Middle East by the UN to mediate between Israelis and Arabs over the future of disputed Palestine.

He recommended revising the boundaries envisaged by the UN Partition Plan of November 1947 to allow Palestinian refugees back to their homes, and suggested that the UN should take over control of Jerusalem. The plan was anathema to many Israelis, and the Stern Gang in Jerusalem concluded that the best way to prevent its implementation was to kill the mediator.

The gang's leaders — among them Yisrael Eldad, Nathan Yelin-Mor and Yitzhak Shamir (a future prime minister of Israel) — met in an apartment in Tel Aviv on September 10, 1948, to discuss the assassination. Zettler, who had come from Jerusalem, waited nervously in an adjoining room. Shamir later noted: "The idea was conceived in Jerusalem by Lehi members. Our opinion was asked, and we offered no opposition."

Having secured this tacit agreement, Zettler sped back to Jerusalem to pick his team of gunmen. One of them, Meshulam Makover, recalled later: "Zettler came to my room at Camp Dror, and within a casual conversation asked: 'What is your opinion regarding the liquidation of Bernadotte?' I did not hide my enthusiasm. Two or three days later Zettler came back and said: 'We have decided to do it. You will be on the operations team'."

Zettler also recruited Yehoshua Cohen, the man who would eventually pull the trigger.

Bernadotte arrived in Jerusalem on September 17, accompanied by General Aage Lundstrom, who later wrote: "We drove rapidly through the Jewish lines without incident … In the Katamon Quarter we were held up by a Jewish army-type Jeep, placed in a roadblock and filled with men in Jewish army uniforms. At the same time I saw a man (Yehoshua Cohen) running from the Jeep; he put a tommy gun through the open window on my side of the car and fired point blank at Count Bernadotte (who) fell forward. There was a considerable amount of blood on his clothes."

Zettler never regretted his part in the murder: "When we demonstrated in front of (Bernadotte) and told him 'Go away from our Jerusalem, go back to Stockholm', he did not respond. So we had no choice."

http://www.theage.com.au/world/assassin-boss-also-israeli-hero-20090524-bjfz.html?page=-1

The title of the article should have had 'terrorist' instead of 'assassin boss'.....

and yeah, undoubtedly a terrorist.

Ben Gurion referred to the Stern Gang as "a gang of rogues, cowards and low schemers". With which I would heartily agree.

I think Zettler was terrorist that operated far beyond the pale. Just because I am Pro-Israel does not mean I look at every article/issue the same.

The side of the issue you represent seems to be more forgiving of Palestinian violence. Do you think that has any truth to it?

funny i hear that a lot but this never gets mentioned...

"As US President Barack Obama prepares to welcome Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to Washington this week, and US lawmakers debate the proposed $900 million aid package to the PA, it is once again using its money to proclaim that killing Israeli woman and children is heroic.


Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Photo: AP
The PA chose to name its latest computer center "after the martyr Dalal Mughrabi," who led the most deadly terror attack in the country's history. Her 1978 bus hijacking killed 37 civilians, 12 of them children, including American photographer Gail Rubin. The new center is funded by Abbas's office, which is bolstered by Western aid money. (Al-Ayyam, May 5).

US law prohibits the funding of Palestinian structures that use any portion of their budget to promote terror or honor terrorists. But $200 million of the US's proposed $900m. aid package is earmarked to go directly to the Abbas government, which regularly uses its budget to honor terrorists. In fact, this latest veneration of Mughrabi is not an isolated case, but part of a continuing pattern of honoring terrorists that targets children in particular.

Last summer the PA sponsored "the Dalal Mughrabi football championship" for kids, and a "summer camp named for martyr Dalal Mughrabi... out of honor and admiration for the martyr." It also held a party to honor exemplary students, also named "for the martyr Dalal Mughrabi," under the auspices of Abbas and at which Abbas's representative "reviewed the heroic life of the martyr (Al-Hayat al-Jadida, July 23, 24 and August 8, 2008). All these PA-funded activities were to teach kids that a killer of women and children is a role model.

TWO MONTHS AGO, 31 years to the day after the Mughrabi murders, PA TV broadcast a special program celebrating the terror attack, calling the killing of 37 civilians "one of the most important and most prominent special operations... carried out by a team of heroes and led by the heroic fighter Dalal Mughrabi" (PA TV March 11). And its not just Mughrabi who is a Palestinian hero. Despite professions in English by Abbas and other PA leaders that they reject terror, the PA has a long and odious history in Arabic of celebrating terrorists as role models and heroes, often involving US money.

USAID spent $400,000 in 2004 to build the Salakh Khalaf soccer field. After Palestinian Media Watch reported that Khalaf was the head of the Palestinian terror group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and two American diplomats in Sudan, USAID publicly apologized and said it would demand that the PA change the name. The name was never changed.



In 2002, US money funded renovations of the "Dalal Mughrabi school for girls." After PMW alerted the US State Department to Mughrabi's terrorist past, the funding was cancelled. Within 24 hours, the PA said the name would be changed, and the American money was reinstated. Once the work was completed, however, the school was renamed for the terrorist. It bears Mughrabi's name to this day.

AT A RECENT hearing of the House Appropriations Committee, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged: "We will work only with a Palestinian Authority government that unambiguously and explicitly accepts the Quartet's principles, a commitment to nonviolence." And it's not just Clinton's pledge. US law interprets nonviolence to include not honoring terrorists: "None of the ... assistance under the West Bank and Gaza program may be made available for the purpose of recognizing or otherwise honoring individuals who commit, or have committed acts of terrorism" (2008 Foreign Operations Bill Sec. 657.B - C.1). This latest glorification of the terrorist Mughrabi, coming as Congress considers the administration's latest request to fund Abbas, imposes a profound responsibility on Congress. But it also creates a unique opportunity.

Will the US follow its own laws, and insist that the PA stop turning killers of women and children into heroes and role models before it receives another cent of US money? Congress and Obama can send a message to the PA that the US will not fund the PA, or any part of its budget, until it proves that it has ceased promoting terrorist murderers as heroes and role models. It can demand a statement from Abbas - in public, in Arabic and in the PA media - that murdering Israelis is terror, that terrorists are neither heroes nor holy martyrs and that they will no longer be honored.

Or they can send a different message to Abbas: that raising another generation of Palestinian children to the values of hate, murder and martyrdom is acceptable to the US - so acceptable that the US is even willing to fund it"

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=124325951556...

That's a pretty one-track mind there, Sezu. Do you have anything to say about the OP itself that involves talking about what was in the article? I know that might be really difficult for you seeing as how it doesn't contain anything negative about Arabs...

it against Israel. Why is that Violet? Want your cake and eat it too? Tough shit.

What sort of responses did you hope it would generate?

What about the article do you feel ought to be discussed?

What could be clearer?

in that article to support the statement that he is an Israeli hero. Odd, that.