Posted on 11/18/2001 12:31:33 AM PST by IcommGen
Among the lessons that should be drawn from the fall of Kabul is the fact that the world owes Ariel Sharon and Israel an apology.
I say this because of the massacres now being calmly and indifferently reported from Afghanistan. When the Northern Alliance took Kabul and other areas, it made short shrift of any remaining Taliban fighters, and, no doubt, many Afghans to whom they simply took a disliking, as well.
These Sabras and Chatilas in Afghanistan took place right under the noses of the U.S. military, and with U.S. ground forces in the area and directing the fighting. While U.S. troops did not do the killings themselves, they also failed to stop them. A bit like Rwanda?
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't really think the U.S. had the ability to prevent the Northern Alliance from looking for a bit of catharsis on the hapless denizens of Kabul. Such things happen in war, and that ultimately the responsibility for them lies with those who started the war in the first place — in this case, the Taliban.
Which brings us to one of the worst blood libels of the 20th century: the accusation that Israel in general and Ariel Sharon in particular were directly to blame for the massacres of Palestinian Arabs by Lebanese Arabs at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps outside Beirut in 1982.
It will be recalled that in 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon after years of shellings and terrorist incursions into Israel by Palestinians, backed by Syria and Lebanon. These same Palestinians had long played a role in the Lebanese civil war — a war that claimed thousands of lives and reduced Lebanon to being a puppet of the Syrian dictator — and they were responsible for countless atrocities inside Lebanon itself, between 1970 and 1982. When the Israeli troops entered Lebanon, many an Arab greeted them with flowers.
But all did not go smoothly. When Israeli troops closed in on Beirut and on the PLO headquarters there, the world started grumbling. On September 14, 1982, the Christian president of Lebanon, Pierre Gemayel, was assassinated by a bomb planted by Palestinians. In response, the Christian-Arab Falange militias that had been headed by Gemayel entered Sabra and Shatilla and killed some people, probably about 400, but estimated by some to have been as high as 800.
In Afghanistan, massacres are being dismissed casually, as minor byproducts of Third World militiamen's quaint way of settling scores. The events in Beirut, by contrast, became the focus of one of the worst anti-Jewish libels since the Middle Ages. The media (especially the Israeli media, long the occupied territories of Israel's far Left) insisted that Ariel Sharon knew or should have known what the Christian Falange militiamen would do in the camps, despite the fact that the Falange were the official praetorian guards of the late elected president of Lebanon. The Western press insisted that Sharon could have stopped the killings before they happened. Strangely, those same journalists are not making the same claim today about Tony Blair or George W. Bush. None of the journalists who insisted that the Sabra and Shatilla killings should have been expected had printed predictions, in the days before they occurred, that they would. More of that 20/20 hindsight.
Failure to prevent the massacres then became the rallying cry for the world's anti-Zionists and Israel-bashers, who were intent on proving that Israel is a bloodthirsty, savage country surrounded by peaceful Arab Quakers. President Reagan expressed his "revulsion" at Israel's failure to prevent Arabs from killing Arabs, comparing it to the Holocaust. (No one is comparing the piles of dead Taliban this week to the Holocaust.)
But the blood libel gained a life of its own. When Time magazine accused Sharon of complicity in the massacre, he sued them for libel and won. When a left-wing Israeli newspaper accused Sharon of having hidden his battle plans from the prime minister, he sued them for libel and won. No one seemed to notice when a Lebanese researcher, Robert Maroun Hatem, cleared Sharon of any culpability for the killings in his book From Israel to Damascus: Lebanon, the Mystery of the Unknown.
Ever since, Sharon has been the Jew anti-Semites most love to hate. The same Belgians trying to indict Sharon for the Sabra and Chatila killings are not preparing similar indictments of Blair and Bush. Neither is the BBC, which ran a recent series on Sharon's guilt. The United States declared Sharon persona non grata after the 1982 events, and only agreed to treat him as semi-human after he won the prime ministership in Israel by a landslide. The Israel-bashing media are still blaming Sharon for the Palestinian Intifada because he took a "controversial" stroll on the Temple Mount last year, a stroll about as controversial as a walk in the Vatican by an Italian politician.
Ariel Sharon has more than his fair share of faults, but he has long served as the Middle East's mine canary; more often than not, the assaults and slanders directed against him are indicators of a more vulgar sentiment regarding Israel and Jews in general.
As the body count in the streets of Kabul and other Afghan cities rises, the world should seriously consider proffering Sharon, Israel, and the Jews a humble apology.
While I happen to share his "opinion" of Ariel Sharon, I resent his tone and his needless analogy of the Vatican and an Itlaian policeman.
In fact, i'd say he is doing a pretty good job of holding 'his tone' back, because what he is talking about, what the world has hypocritically created out of Shabra and Shatila (including the United States government and media) has GREATLY contributed to the arsenal of the terrorists/dictatorships/evil regimes of the world, in their quest to DESTROY Israel and annihilate its Jewish citizens, including this professor.
His analogy is fantastic. His reference to the Vatican and an Italian politician is accurate, and his tone is right on the money.
You stated your opinion of the good professor's "opinion piece" and I have stated mine. Leave it at that. :)
The population of the refugee camps, which was over 50,000.
The ratio of the men of fighting age vs. women and children among the dead. The estimates I've seen of this range from 3:1 to 8:1.
The number of non-locals among the dead. As I understand it, many of the dead were from Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and so on. Consider the fate of the non-Afghans at the hands of the NA.
Just as America gave a strict warning to the rebels not to massacre people in the cities, so did the Israelis.
Just like America went to war in Afghanistan after being attacked by Bin Laden (in Afghanistan) after he attacked the United States, so did Israel. Arafat launched thousands of terror attacks to the North, and Israel went after him.
Just as America isn't criminally negligent for the actions of the Northern Alliance, neither is ISRAEL.
Stop being a hypocrite. If you're going to say Israel was wrong, say America is wrong to. Then i'll just think you're a moron. But your arguement that what America is doing is okay, but when Israel did it, that's wrong, well that just shows your a plain old racist. Pure and simple.
On September 14, 1982, the Christian president of Lebanon, Pierre Gemayel, was assassinated by a bomb planted by Palestinians. In response, the Christian-Arab Falange militias that had been headed by Gemayel entered Sabra and Shatilla and killed some people, probably about 400, but estimated by some to have been as high as 800.
Aside from minimizing the estimates of people killed, the article is historically inaccurate. Pierre Gemayel was not then president of Lebanon. Nor was he killed. It was his son, president-elect Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated. Also, Bashir Gemayel, as it turned out, was killed by a Syrian intelligence agent. (Apparently, any excuse to slaughter Palestinians will suffice.) From Al J. Venter's article on President Lahoud's Rise to Power:
For all his vices and there were many said New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman, Bashir Gemayel was both brilliant and charismatic. He charmed his own people and seduced the Israelis into invading the country in 1982. As was to be expected, there were even some Sunni Muslim factions that offered him support, if only to be rid of the pesky Palestinians. There are still more than 350,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon, most of them scattered about in a dozen squalid, overcrowded camps that are closely monitored by the army.
But, as Friedman reports, it was Syrian President Hafiz Asad who had Gemayel killed. Habin Tanous Shartouni, a Syrian intelligence agent, planted a bomb in the apartment above his office. He detonated it while Bashir was in council. It was not the first time that Syria had liquidated a Lebanese leader. Only five years before, Asad had Druze tribal chief Kemal Jumblat (Walid's father) killed after he had dared to cross him in public.
For a more historically accurate picture of Sharon's responsibility for Sabra and Chatila see Robert Fisk's article, The legacy of Ariel Sharon. A relevant section is extracted below:
...Israel had invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982 with a plan – known to Sharon but not vouchsafed to his Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin – to advance all the way to Beirut and surround Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation guerrillas in the Lebanese capital. Officially named "Operation Peace for Galilee" (the real Israeli military codename was "Snowball"), the invasion was supposedly a response to PLO rocket attacks across the Israeli border.
But the rocket attacks had followed a series of Israeli air-raids on Lebanon which had ended a UN-brokered ceasefire and which were supposedly in "retaliation" for the attempted murder of the Israeli ambassador to London – though his would-be killers came from the Abu Nidal group which had nothing to do with the PLO and hated Arafat. But Sharon had anyway received an earlier American "green light" for his operation from Alexander Haig in the spring of 1982. After two months and almost 17,000 deaths, most of them civilians – the majority killed by Israeli gunfire and air attack – the PLO withdrew from Beirut under international protection, leaving their unarmed families behind. At which point Sharon announced that 2,000 "terrorists" remained in the Sabra and Chatila camps. These mythical "terrorists" prompted a small advance by Israeli tanks – contrary to an agreement with Washington – towards the Palestinian camps. A French UN officer who tried to photograph the advance was shot dead by an "unknown" sniper. Sharon repeated his extraordinary claim that "terrorists" remained in the camps. And it was then that the Christian Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel – the leader of the Phalange militia which had already murdered thousands of surrendering Palestinians in the Tel el-Zaatar camp in 1976 – was assassinated.
Sharon paid his condolences to Gemayel's father, Pierre. He must have known the old man's history. Pierre Gemayel had founded his party after being inspired by the Olympics in Nazi Germany in 1936 ("I liked their idea of order," he once confided to me). Not for nothing did Israel's militia allies use the fascist "Phalange" as their name. As the Christians prepared to bury their hero, Sharon – again contrary to assurances he had given the Americans – ordered the Israeli army into west Beirut to "restore order". The Israelis then asked the Christian Phalange – armed and uniformed by Israel and allied to Israel since 1976 – to enter the Israeli-surrounded camps to "liquidate" the "terrorists". Which is why, on Thursday 16 September, guided by signposts which the Israelis had laid across a Beirut airport runway, the Christian gunmen walked through the southern entrance of Chatila, some of them drunk, a number on drugs – all under the eyes of the Israelis – and embarked on a war crime.
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