| Pit Schultz on Sat, 4 May 96 23:57 MDT |
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| nettime: An Antidote 2: Other news on the Lebanon attacks |
>From: JSalloum@aol.com
An Antidote 2:
Other news on the Lebanon attacks
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date: Thu, Apr 25, 1996 1:13 PM EDT
Two articles by Robert Fisk published in THE INDEPENDENT in London:
MASSACRE IN SANCTUARY; EYEWITNESS
By Robert Fisk
The Independent 4/19/96, page 1
Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and
Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese
refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms
or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a
hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had
scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter,
believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the
Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion
headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey-
haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse
back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same
words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier
stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft
the body of a headless child.
"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area,"
a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank
them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of
the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof
had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of
my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day
offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious,
that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the
ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day
before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four
days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a
family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli
helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.
Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250
metres from a UN convoy on which I was travelling, blasting a house
30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut
to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last
night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on
the river bridge north of Sidon.
Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and
Chatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982
doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by
the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where
the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine.
The Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres may now wish to end this
war. But the Hizbollah are not likely to let him. Israel is back in
the Lebanese quagmire. Nor will the Arab world forget yesterday'a
terrible scenes.
The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams
from the shell-smashed UN compound restaurant in which the Shiite
Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon - who had heeded
Israel's order to leave their homes - had pathetically sought
shelter. Fijian and French soldiers heaved another group of dead -
they lay with their arms tightly wrapped around each other - into
blankets.
A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag
in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms.
And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst
into the compound. They had driven in wild convoys down from Tyre
and began to pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their
mothers and sons and daughters and to shriek "Allahu Akbar" (God is
Great") and to threaten the UN troops.
We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but
Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom. One
bearded man with fierce eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury.
"You are Americans," he screamed at us. "Americans are dogs. You did
this. Americans are dogs."
President Bill Clinton has allied himself with Israel in its war
against "terrorism" and the Lebanese, in their grief, had not
forgotten this. Israel's official expression of sorrow was rubbing
salt in their wounds. "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow
myself up amid the Israelis," one old man said.
As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that
Israelis will pay for their killing of Lebanese civilians, its
revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then
turn out then to be all too aptly named.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
REALITY BITES AT QANA
By Robert Fisk
The Independent' - 4/22/96
Qana, Southern Lebanon
Herve de Charette's face was as white as death. The French Foreign
Minister, neatly clad in blue suit and tie, had gingerly walked through the
scene of last week's massacre at the UN's compound, nodding diplomatically
as the UN's Fijian commander described the 12 minutes in which Israeli
shells slaughtered up to 120 refugees, the sliced-up corpses that his
soldiers were forced to pick up, the difficulty in identifying parts of the
children who had been torn to pieces. Mr de Charette listened with
distaste. But then he was confronted by a survivor.
Fawzaya Zrir, a small, frail woman in a scarf, simply walked up to the
French Foreign Minister and began talking to him with an odd mixture of
affection and anger. "For us, France is our mother and God is our father,"
she said in a flight of rhetoric that might have been written by the Quai
d'Orsay public relations men, who beamed happily at this fortunate encounter.
Then things began to go wrong. "We have lived through hell," Mrs Zrir
continued. "The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs. They
bleed, these people. You should have seen the heads."
At the French foreign minister's right, a Lebanese softly translated the
woman's dreadful words. The PR men began to look uneasy. "We have lived
here 40 years and now we are treated like animals," the woman cried. "Do
you know what the dogs did at night after the killings? They were hungry
and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people."
Mr de Charette stared at her as if he had seen a ghost. This had clearly
not been part of the programme, a schedule that was supposed to have whisked
the foreign minister from a light lunch at UN headquarters in Naqqoura to a
photo-opportunity on the roof of the wrecked UN battalion HQ, a
three-minutes press conference to give the impression of openness and a
swift drive back to the coast and a helicopter to Beirut - everything, in
fact, that would enhance France's much-trumpeted love for Lebanon. Reality
had very definitely not been part of the programme.
A UN soldier was quite blunt about it. "This place is going to be turned
into one of those awful pilgrimage sites for the great and the good," he
muttered. "Boutros-Ghali sent his emissaries today to express their horror.
But they'll do no more than they did after Srebrenica. They'll tut-tut and
shrug it off. and they wont even have the guts to condemn Israel even now
- for this wickedness."
And indeed, the UN Secretary-General did send General Frank Van Kappen of
the Netherlands army - not, perhaps, a happy choice after the Dutch army's
disgrace at Srebrenica and he duly marched round the site of the worst
carnage, asking how many rounds landed, where the Katyusha missiles were
fired from and whether he could be shown this site to discover if any
Israeli shells bad fallen there.
He would be meeting with General Amnon lipkin Shahak, the Israeli chief of
staff, he said.
Yes, he would be asking to meet the soldiers who fired the fatal artillery
rounds - "fat chance of that," another UN soldier said as he listened to all
this - and with that, Van Kappen, an immense figure in his steel flak jacket
and huge helmet clanked out of the compound with a colonel from the Royal
Engineers.
Mr de Charette was even more gentle of spirit. What had happened on
Thursday was 'unfortunate", an event for which France wished to show its
sympathy for the Lebanese. So how did it rank in the scale of civilian
atrocities? How did it rank, for example, beside the Sarajevo market
massacre?
"Frankly," the Foreign Minister replied sharply, "I have not had an
opportunity to make categories of unhappiness we have to work to do is to
make it impossible for this to happen in the future in Lebanon." And so say
all of us. Did he believe Israel had given sufficient explanation of the
massacre? "I hear there is an inquiry we have to await the result."
The problem, however is that neither America nor Europe are going to
condemn a country which pounded refugees of Qana with 155mm shells for 12
minutes; and such condemnation is about the only palliative that the
Lebanese might accept for the moment.
And you can see their point. On the coast road back to Beirut last night
there were burning cars, civilians deliberately targeted by Israeli warships
north of Sidon, three of whom had been badly wounded. Had this being a
Syrian warship shelling Israeli civilians on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road, of
course, Mr Clinton himself would have deplored -rightly- an act of
"international terrorism". But not a word of criticism about this
scandalous targeting of Lebanese civilians was uttered by the foreign
ministers of America, Russia, France and Italy as they sought to bring an
end to an apparently unstoppable war.
Forwarded by:
MID-EAST REALITIES
News, Information, & Analysis that Governments, Interest Groups, and the
Corporate Media Do Not Want You To Know! To receive MER regularly message to
MIDDLEEAST@aol.com with the words "Send MER".
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, Apr 18, 1996 7:54 PM EDT
From: JCOME
Subj: JCOME Condemns Israeli Policies Toward Lebanese & Palestinians -
Press Release
Jewish Committee On The Middle East
P.O. Box 18367 - Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 362-JCOME (362-5266) Fax: (202) 362-6965 Email:JCOME@aol.com
The only national organization led by American Jews advocating a
sovereign,
independent and truly democratic Palestinian State in all of the
occupied
territories with capital in Jerusalem
J C O M E P r e s s R e l e a s e - 4/18/96
For press spokesperson contact
(202) 362-5266, Ext 278, 24-hours.
JCOME condemns Israeli actions in Lebanon. Furthermore JCOME believes
the Israelis are involved in a gross campaign of disinformation and
deception regarding their actual policies and motives, both in regard
to the Palestinians as well as in Lebanon. This afternoon the Israeli Army
Chief of Staff said there have been "no mistakes on Israel's part" and Prime
Minister Shimon Peres blamed Lebanon and Hizballah for what Israel is doing
claiming Israel's policies of gross collective punishment are justifiable.
These Israeli attitudes, coupled with Israeli policies are totally
unacceptable. Furthermore, the complicity of the United States government,
especially the Clinton Administration, in arming and encouraging the
Israelis should be of growing concern to all Americans.
Just yesterday MID-EAST REALITIES sent out the information contained on page
2 which has appeared in the British press outlining the cynical Israeli
policy of targetting civilians and devastating Lebanon -- and this was
all published prior to today's tragic developements.
It should not be forgotten that Hizballah was created in the aftermath of
Israel's terrible destruction of Lebanon in 1982 -- during which tens
of thousands of people were killed and terrible massacres comparable to
war crimes occurred with clear Israeli complicity and knowledge.
Israel's occupation of parts of Lebanon ever since has created the conditions
for Hizballah's growth and support in opposing Israel's occupation.
JCOME believes Israel should immediately suspend all military operations
in Lebanon and should immediately agree to fully withdraw from all
Lebanese territory as a precondition for serious negotiations with Lebanon,
Syria, and Hizballah. JCOME further believes that Israel should stop its
policies of attempting to put Palestinians on reservations in the name of
peace and publicly accept Palestinian Statehood in all the areas of the West
Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
# # # #
Since 1988 JCOME has supported full Palestinian Statehood
in all of the territories occupied by Israel including
East Jerusalem, and full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon
to the recognized international border. JCOME helps
produce and distribute the unique weekly TV Program "Mid-
East Realities" showing on all cable systems in the
Washington area and regular MER information on the Internet.
JCOME Advisory Committee: Prof. Jane Adas; Rutgers Univ.; Prof. Alex
Alland, Columbia University; Prof. Michael Astour, Univ. of Southern Il.;
Prof. Howard Baumgartel, Emeritus Univ. of Kansas; Prof. Charles Black,
Emeritus Yale Univ Law School; Mark Bruzonsky; writer and lawyer; Former
Washington Representative, World Jewish Congress; Prof. Noam Chomsky,
M.I.T.; Mark Dow, Miami; Prof. Richard Falk, Princeton Univ.; Prof. Sherna
Gluck, CA State Univ (Long Beach); Prof. Clement Henry, Univ. Of TX; Prof.
Herbert Hill, Univ of WI (Madison); Prof. Elie Katz; Sonoma State Univ;
Prof. George Kent, Univ. Of Hawaii; Jeremy Levin, Former CNN Beirut
Bureau Chief and hostage; Prof. Seymour Melman, Columbia Univ.; Henry
Schwarzschild, New York; Prof. Herbert Schiller, Univ. of CA (San Diego);
Prof. J. David Singer, Univ of MI (Ann Arbor); Ms. Shifra Stern, New York.
With Jewish Professors at over 175 Universities
and supporters of all backgrounds nationwide.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
This email was received directly from someone in Beirut. It is a
compelling testimony of someone living through the horrors currently being
inflicted there. I will include her warning about the language in the post:
WARNING : THIS POST CONTAINS OBSCENE LANGUAGE. I
thought of editing it out, but then thought of giving you the choice
of whether or not you want the "real" thing. This here is the "real"
thing, from someone who is there, an eyewitness.
----- Forwarded message ------
Date: 18 Apr 1996 22:51:00 -0200
From: Aboudi@BIGnet.com.lb
Subject: Down but not out!
Hi.
Firas is in the states. I will hopefully be in the states
around the 1st week of July to join a research program.
This is the situation:
We are ready to evacuate
immediately, I think!!! Things here are NOT improving. I do not
know how much longer we can communicate - be it thru e-mail or phone.
The Israeli's are shelling nothing but civilian targets. They hit
not a single Hizbullah target. The sea ports are closed because of
Israeli gunboats warding off ships!! They shot three of the power
stations, rendering one of them totally nonfunctional. According to
the new, one of them has attained damages worth 3 millions USDs.
They are also shooting the telephone switchboards. They have gunned
one of the main ones, and off and on they have destroyed major
telephone cables around the country. I know that at least 18000
phones are out! Things are really NOT optimistic here. Schools have
been shut down for at least one more week. I do not know if my uni
will open. Please distribute this message please to as many people
as you can; it is important that they see the truth.
Today..... they attacked a UN center. It was a bomb shelter.
They massacred every soul in there - mentally and physically.
Hundreds of armless, helpless, hungry people were hiding in two
tents. The Israeli's attacked the base. People started fleeing into
the shelters, but they did not make it on time. The seen was a
giagantic shish kabab scene!!!! Bodies were charcoaled.... I
actually saw some guts, intestines, and other gross things..... it
was an open anatomy class, for heaven's sake.... my girlfriend burst
into tears... so did my mom!!! Who is the attacker here? A
motherfucker behind a tank or a child who is just looking for food
and shelter???? The folks from the south are all packed in schools
in Beirut. Things are not sanitary at all. Diseases are beginning
to spread! For God's sake who is the aggressor!?!?!? They showed us
how the Israelis take a moment of silence for the massacre of the
Jews in Germany!!!!!! What is this....
some kind of avenge?!?! We have to pay for it??!? Half a million
people were forced out of their homes because their presence would
threaten the heavily armed army of Israel..... the tanks are
vulnerable to an attack from young children!!! Children are
lethal...... we should abolish them....eh?????? Man... the
situation is not improving. What is the world after... destroying
Lebanon's new infrastructure because it could beat Israel's economy
in a few years???? Is it after taking away the Arab's arsenal and
money??
If Syria were to move, the American Air Force and the Israeli Air
Force would take it as an attack and a breach of peace!!!!!!! They
take our land.... and call us aggressors. They say that if we stop
attacking them with a few guerilla soldiers, they would leave..... is
this preposterous or what??? You occupy my house and I ask to leave,
but you refuse to because I am hitting you?!??!? Well..... leave my
house and I will not attack you. You just ought to see the brains of
3 day old splattered all over the blanket!!! His head lost its
top!!!!
Literally!!!! The 3-day-old had no top to his head.... his brains
were over the blanker and on the floor. They wiped out 2 families of
12 people in one building...... their argument.... Hizbullah fired
a Katyusha from that area..... bullshit!!!! Since the beginning of
the attacks, the Israeli army has hit nothing.... NOTHING... but
civilian targets..... An ambulance with 4 children and old folks was
hit by a rocket from a plane.... their excuse: The driver was
Hizbullah.....
now give me a break!!!!!! WE ARE THE KILLERS....WE OWN THE HI-TECH
STUFF..... For God's sake, we do not even have an airforce!!!!!!!
We have one bloody fucked up jet.... just one!!!!!!!!!
Tomorrow morning I am taking my car to all the near grocery
stores to buy as much baby milk as the car can carry and distribute
it all to the schools that have lactating children or children in
need of milk.
Our academic year has been disrupted because the southerners have
been placed in schools.
If anyone wants the true scenes, please contact me and I will do
my best to send a copy.
I have two INTERNET addresses:
ziad-g@beirut.com
aboudi@bignet.com.lb
I am now using the aboudi one. Please send your messages to both.
Take care.
Aboudi
# Pit Schultz, Kleine Hamburger Str. 15, 10117 Berlin, pit@contrib.de
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