Joseph Stalin: in addition to being one of the most proficient mass murderers in history, great with kids and in possession of a mean tennis backhand (quite possibly only one of those things is true), he also had an underappreciated knack for delivering corking one-liners. For instance, "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" shows off Joseph's more mischievous, almost playful side. But I still think my favourite would have to be the positively Wildean "Death solves all problems. No man, no problem".
Bon mot, Joseph Stalin, bon mot. What a cheery guy.
But that's a quote with a certain aptness today, because if there's one thing we can learn from the last week's worth of news, it can probably be summed up in the phrase
"Don't fuck with the Mossad". Israel's secret service has found itself the subject of perhaps more journalistic scrutiny than your average secret service would prefer after the canny fellows in the Dubai police department managed
to trace and identify 11 people believed to have been involved in the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in mid January. Almost all of which was captured on CCTV. Extra points for the tennis outfits.
Only problem was none of the people identified were actually involved in the killing - they were all simply foreign passport holders currently living in Israel, probably having a fairly straightforward day at the office while 11 secret agents pretending to be them went about suffocating a man in a Dubai hotel. I could imagine it's quite the shock to wake up and find out that you're wanted on suspicion of killing a man in a hotel 2000-odd kilometres away. What in God's name are you getting up to while you're asleep? "Now, Cynthia, you're going to be reading some crazy things about Daddy in the papers today. I just want to promise you that Daddy is not a paid killer. Now go place this backpack underneath that car".
Mossad are a bit of a rarity in this day and age of diplomatic niceties and respecting the sovereignty of other nations in that if they want to kill somebody, well then they're just going to walk in there and kill them. And then deny to the world that they had anything to do with it. Refreshing, in a strange way. "Who, us? No way. That could have been any old squad of highly-trained killers in there. Have you asked the Albanians? You should ask them. They always struck me as being a little shifty. You can tell, their eyes are closer together..."
Of course, this does have a tendency to piss of pretty much everyone, and Britain especially are a bit up in arms about this incident given that no less than six of their passports were used in the killing. OOOOOH! BUSTED! And this after extracting a promise from Israel in 1987 that British passports would never again be used when Mossad decided to get all 'Around the World in 80 Dead Terrorists'. A phrase which, upon closer inspection, makes it sound like the Mossad agents were flying around in a hot-air balloon made from dead terrorists. Although something that would have really jazzed up the Jules Verne novel, this was almost certainly not the case.
But for all its seemingly clinical precision, this has actually been
quite the cock-up for Mossad. When one goes to the effort of forging 11 passports, using disposable mobile phones and orchestrating numerous outfit changes in order to evade detection, it seems a little strange that one would overlook the presence of a really quite remarkably large number of CCTV cameras scattered throughout the hotel. That and the fact that everyone involved left the country within hours of the killing. Subtle.
Which does make you think: perhaps Mossad actually wanted it to all go a bit pear-shaped. Even Mossad know that they can't well go and kill every Hamas officer that they have an issue with (although they'll give it the good ol' college try), so perhaps they wanted as much publicity as is humanly possible for this attack so that all the other Hamas leaders out there started reconsidering their political affiliations. Hell, I know I would. Even writing this is probably getting me added to some kind of blacklist (No, I promise, I really like you guys, you're great. Let's go grab some ice-cream or something). Because this isn't any old namby-pamby, American style "We don't negotiate with terrorists" position. This is a "We don't negotiate with terrorists. We kill them" position. Which, as a motto, you gotta admit has a certain potency. They should probably put it on their shield or something.
Anyway, that's probably plenty. And, you know, not to blow my own horn or anything, but I think I've just managed to slalom my way through a discussion of the Israel-Palestine situation without casting a single moral judgment on either party. Whew. Flame war avoided... I hope.