Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 86
in his fight to take over Palestinian properties in Israel, another case where a terrorist for
one is a freedom fighter for the other.
Had it not been for President Reagan’s clear determination to force all the warring
factions out of Beirut, the Israeli leadership would have taken over that country too, as it
was feared was their covert desire. An era of even greater violence would have ensued.
Presently, we, as a nation, are standing semi-idle while Israel infers in the word
Palestinian the same meaning as in the word terrorist. This exacerbates our already
tenuous posture in the Moslem world and is a main cause to draw hate upon us.
Over the years, not necessarily because it was a bad concept, but because of the
heavily flawed way in which it was accomplished, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship has
become the most de-stabilizing event in the fragile Middle East. Seen from the
Palestinian point of view, where many of the seeds of wailing discontent originate, after
three consecutive generations of continued hopeless misery outside their former
homes, life is not worth living. For many of them and their Islamic brothers elsewhere, it
has become preferable to die seeking revenge.
Once endless despair becomes the prevalent sense of the people, it does not matter
what arguments those outside the circle of despair can advance, even if they are logical
and historically correct. Reason no longer works, only feelings; in this case the feeling of
absolute hatred of the usurper-oppressor (Israel) and his accomplice godfather (USA).
In Palestinian eyes we are the unrepentant suppliers of the instruments of torture and
methods of oppression used against them. A terrorist to us is a freedom fighter to them.
This is a case where bad policy, or better-said, badly executed policy, has begotten
bedlam at its worst.
The sad historical truth is that if the heads of all terrorist organizations and all of their
minions were miraculously stamped out from the earth, within one generation their
scourge would re-appear in full force, for whatever reason. If the source of despair were
left untouched, the return of terrorism wouldn’t take a generation, it would never go
away. Ireland is an example worth considering, the so-called “oppression” of Catholics
in Northern Ireland is non-existent compared with the plight of the Palestinians, and yet
terrorism is intractable in the British Isles.
I agree now, I agreed when Che Guevara terrorized Bolivia, and I will always agree that
a legitimate role of government is to find and destroy the perpetrators of uncontrolled
fear on an innocent population. It should also be self-evident that the root-sources that
may have caused such actions be eliminated as soon as possible, as we have done in
America for our minorities.
Cooler-head politicians and other opinion makers, including more than one Jewish
friend, have privately recognized that to forestall Moslem terrorists in America, our
government must force Israel to change its policies toward Palestinians. Once the
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