Sat Sep 19, 2009 at 16:37:03 PM EDT
|
| I've lost count the number of times these past years I've seen Zio-bloggers spin the Sabra & Shatila massacre, where thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees(and some Lebanese) died, into anti-Palestinian propaganda Gold. The technique of burying the backstory and relying on the genuine disinterest of the US populace usually works like a charm. Great post from Richard Seymour today, near its anniversary.
http://leninology.blogspot.com...
Long before Sabra and Shatila, the earliest targets of the war included refugee camps such as Rashidiyeh, which was reduced to rubble. Its residents fled or were killed, and those who were caught were rounded up and taken to a nearby beach to watch the destruction. All males of teenage years and older were blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken away. And they were not heard from again. Again, the Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp was largely flattened by bombing, and its mosque bulldozed afterwards. Approximately 100 mangled bodies were found under the mosques ruins. Hospitals were destroyed, orphanages flattened by cluster and phosphorus bombs, a school in Sidon was destroyed with 300 inside killed and, with ruthless efficiency, the Israeli army blew housing blocks and apartments to craters, if they suspected that there might be PLO activists inside. Hundreds of thousands of refugees - mostly women and children, since males were more robustly dealt with - were wandering aimlessly through Lebanon's carnage, starving and out of their minds with terror, before Sabra and Shatila. And all the while, incidentally, liberal and left-wing figures from the United States were taking IDF tours of southern Lebanon, cheering on the bloodshed. Jane Fonda, who had funded the Viet Cong, found herself conscripted to Israel's army of overseas cheerleaders, as did Tom Hayden, the former Sixties radical. Michael Walzer's verdict can be summarised in the simple phrase: "just war".
 
|
| Laura :: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" |
In September 1982, a month after Israel's demolition of the PLO had been consecrated, the IDF sealed off the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. On Thursday 16 September 1982, truckloads of Phalangist and Haddad troops entered the camp from behind IDF lines. The Phalangists selected for the attack were drawn from the most extreme elements of the militia, while the Haddad troops were more or less direct auxiliaries of the Israeli army. They killed and killed for days. At night, they killed by they light of flares, methodically massacring the inhabitants, scooping them up with bulldozers and burying them under the rubble. Those bodies which could not be buried were taken away in trucks. On Friday 17 September, the Israeli chief of staff and met with the Phalangist high command, commended their hard work, and offered them a truck with IDF markings so that they might better do their work. They were given another 12 hours in the camp to finish their work, which they duly completed by 5am on Saturday 18 September. After the massacre was completed, journalists began to arrive on the scene. Robert Fisk was one of them, and reported:
"What we found inside the Palestinian Chatila camp at ten o'clock on the morning of 18th September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination ... there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into the rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment and empty bottles of whisky ... Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.
"The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old ... On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead ... One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror." (Robert Fisk, Pity The Nation: Lebanon At War, Oxford University Press, 1992).
 
|
|
|
