Feeding time at the asylum

Okay, that is it. The next thing the British papers will be reporting is that the Mossad was behind the poisoning of Snow White. The Scotsman reports:

The Israelis may have been behind the hijacking of an Air France airbus at Entebbe, according to an extraordinary claim in secret Government documents released yesterday. The Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Beit, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) joined forces in an "unholy alliance" to seize the aeroplane in June 1976 and re-write French Middle East policy, it was suggested.

The theory, recalled by a British diplomat at the Paris Embassy, comes from a contact at the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association. The aeroplane was hijacked shortly after take-off from Athens and flown to Entebbe, Uganda, where 98 people were held hostage. The document, released by the National Archives, was penned to the Foreign Office on 30 June 1976 as the world wondered how the hostage crisis would end and if it would lead to bloodshed.

DH Colvin of the Paris Embassy writes: "According to his information, the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Beit. "The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans.

"Their nightmare is that after the November elections, one will witness the imposition in the Middle East of a Pax Americana, which will be the advantage of the PLO (who will gain international respectability and perhaps the right to establish a state on evacuated territories) and to the disadvantage of the Refusal Front (who will be squeezed right out in any overall peace settlement and will lose their raison d'etre) and Israel who will be forced to evacuate occupied territory). "Hence the unholy alliance of the hijacking. "My contact said the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis."

I am not surprised that the theory originated with a contact from the Euro-Arab Parlimentary Association. I have been reading Arab newspapers long enough to realize they see either a Jew or a Mossad agent behind every rock, tree, blade of grass or grain of sand in the world but what astonishes me is that a British intelligence actually gave the rantings of a delusional mind enough credence to pen it down on paper. Apparently, the British Foreign Office makes no distinction between the Shin Beit which is strictly an internal Israeli security agency and the Mossad. Is it any wonder that Philby had a field day which lasted decades with these people?