|
The world remembered
the September 11 barbaric terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington, but there’s another September massacre
which the world media has chosen to ignore because of
the ethnicity and religion of the people — the savage
massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila
camps in Lebanon.
In September 1982, the
anti-Christ Lebanese Maronite Christian militias were
sent by Israel to Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in
Beirut, Lebanon, to kill helpless Palestinian refugees.
The Palestinians
asserted at that time that between 3,000 and 3,500 were
killed, and described the action as "genocide".
The massacre was
authorized by the Israeli IDF, under the command of
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon that held the territory
around Beirut at that time as a result of the June 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In the three-day slaughter,
thousands of Palestinians were tortured, and raped;
pregnant women had their stomachs torn open while
militias took bets on the sex of the foetus.
The world woke up to a
horrifying scene of the stockpile of bodies in the
refugee camps, and Israel was held directly responsible
for the atrocity.
Evidences suggested that
certain Israelis, among them Ariel Sharon, were
personally responsible. And on September 25, a massive
demonstration of 300,000 Israelis was held in Tel Aviv
calling on Prime Minister Menahem Begin and Sharon to
resign.
The prominent British
journalist, Robert Fisk, recollects the crimes
graphically. "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 after being lined up at an execution wall; a
pregnant woman with her stomach slit open sideways and
then upwards, her eyes wide open, her dark face frozen
in horror; babies tossed into rubbish heaps alongside
discarded U.S. army ration tins; Israeli flare canisters
lying around still attached to their tiny parachutes."
In February 1983, an
Israeli commission appointed to investigate the crimes,
headed by Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan, issued
its report in which it laid the entire blame for the
massacre on Christian Phalangists and found the Israeli
occupation forces and Ariel Sharon only indirectly
responsible for ignoring the danger of revenge and
bloodshed by the Phalangists.
The Kahan Commission
ignored the evidence that the Phalangist troops operated
under Israeli command and with full Israeli assistance.
With regard to Sharon,
the panel stated that he:
“... draw the
appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the
defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he
discharged the duties of his office" - in other words,
that he resign; or, if necessary, that the prime
minister exercise his authority to remove a minister
from office.
“In our view, the
minister of defence made a grave mistake when he ignored
the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed by the
Phalangists against the population in the refugee camps
... It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed
to the minister of defence for having disregarded the
danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the
Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps,
and having failed to take this danger into account when
he decided to move the Phalangists into the camps.
“In addition,
responsibility is to be imputed to the minister of
defence for not ordering appropriate measures for
preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a
condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps.
These blunders constitute the non-fulfilment of a duty
with which the defence minister was charged. The
genocide earned Ariel Sharon a nick name of "the butcher
of Beirut".
The atrocities followed
in the wake of Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon in
June 1982, with the aim of “cleansing” the Palestinian
fighters who sought refuge in Lebanon.
After fierce battles
that lasted for two months and claimed the lives of
about 18,000 Palestinians, U.S. envoy Philip Habib
mediated an agreement that stipulated that the PLO
(Palestine Liberation Organisation) fighters leave
Lebanon under international escort, Israel refrain from
occupying West Beirut after the departure of the
fighters and the U.S. guarantee the security of the
remaining Palestinian civilian population.
On September 1, the
fighters left Lebanon, by Sept 3, Israel occupied Bir
Hassan in the suburbs of Beirut; violating Habib’s
agreement, and between Sept 10 and 13, the American and
international forces left Beirut two weeks before its
mandate expired.
On Sept 14, Bashir
Gemayel, the Maronite Christian President (with his
known allegiance to the Israeli occupation) was
assassinated. Using Gemayel's assassination as a
pretext, Ariel Sharon, the then Israeli Defence
Minister, ordered the occupation of West Beirut and the
Israeli army, under the Fourth Geneva Convention and
Protocol 1, became responsible for the security of the
civilian population there.
But instead of
protecting the Palestinian refugees in the camps, Sharon
held meetings with Israeli ally Major Saad Haddad,
leader of the South Lebanon Army militia, and Phalangist
militiamen and politicians Elie Hobeika, Fadie Frem,
Zahi Bustami, Amin and Pierre Gemayel. The Israeli
soldiers were ordered to seal off the camps,
only permitting the fanatical Phalangists to enter and
go on a murder spree.
Victims were buried in
mass graves, and soldiers were ordered to turn back any
refugee who tried to escape.
But the world media,
with its double standards when it comes to treating the
Arabs and Muslims with fairness and justice, has already
blotted any mention of this dreadful massacre. |
