ISRAEL;WHEN WILL THE WEST DO SOMETHING... PART II

[UCM]

Here goes....

I catch your drift hub2dee... and your point about the PLO. If you're interested in the 82 war though, worth looking at this piece which was aired by the BBC on Weds

The called it the longest Arab-Israeli war -- eighty-eight days from the moment Israeli armoured columns swept north into Lebanon in early June 1982 until the last PLO units sailed from Beirut under a ceasefire agreement at the end of August. An estimated eighteen-thousand people died in the destruction of the Palestinian state-within-a-state in Lebanon, the vast majority Palestinian and Lebanese civilians but including also many Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian soldiers. The Syrian forces then stationed in Lebanon were quickly pushed aside by the invasion force, and thereafter the Lebanese capital was on its own, besieged and bombarded for six weeks by Israeli forces from land, se and air. But the killing did not stop with the PLO's departure. After Israeli troops entered the city their Lebanese militia allies massacred many hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the camps of Sabra and Chatila. By then Israel's plans to install a friendly government in Beirut had already gone awry, the new president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, assassinated in a bomb attack. It would take another eighteen years for Israeli troops to extricate themselves from what is remembered today as Israel's Vietnam, a war that divided the Israeli people as no other had. It also gave birth to Hezbollah as the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon, with Iran's backing, took up arms against the Israeli occupiers. In the year following the invasion Hezbollah was blamed for what was then a shocking new type of attack, when a suicide bomber killed two-hundred-and-forty-one American marines who had been sent to Beirut as peacekeepers.

Wikipedia says that Israel 'hyped up' militant attacks as a pretext for the 82 invasion:

According to former chief of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was accompanied by deceit at the highest political levels. Harkarbi cites misleading statements to the cabinet by Ariel Sharon and Begin, inaccurate announcements by Israel's military spokesmen and the Likud government's gross exaggeration of terrorist acts conducted from Lebanon. Defence Minister Rabin admitted in the Knesset[citation needed] that during the eleven-month ceasefire preceding the war, Israel's northern settlements had been attacked only twice and that during this period Israel had suffered a total of two killed and six wounded from terrorist attacks. These attacks had been preceded by Israeli strikes in response to the planting of a bomb on a bus and the attack on Shlomo Argov.

Mud just to clarify i think your last post was directed at bluejelly,not to me. And i agree with Greensleves.

I thoguht this article was interesting, considering it's from a Jewish Israeli source, and the repeated assertions from some posters that Israel is yearning for peace and it's the Arabs who won't accept it.....

And as for Israel only targetting Hizbollah really??

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.'

If you want to read further

"Yesha Rabbinical Council: During Time of War, Enemy has no Innocents."

source

Never posted a link before Hub2dee
Here goes for the wikipedia one

\link {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_invasion_of_Lebanon#Casualties}

didn't work try this

Great it worked.
As for the BBC one, I was sent that so no link, sorry

hi bj - Glad to see you have developed link capability !

I note in your first post (BBC Weds) - "After Israeli troops entered the city their Lebanese militia allies massacred many hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the camps of Sabra and Chatila." - I don't think these milita were Israelis nor Jews (just by the by, doesn't change the numbers of course). Also, I would make the point that even if Hezbollah was born of this conflict, their "shocking new type of attack" although highly 'effective' still remains, to my eye, unacceptable. I wouldn't like to think there's an acceptable justification for the behaviour of suicide bombers.

Re - your second post - Interesting ! Reminds, or course, of the UK's own 'sexed up' docs ! I'll point out, for fairness, that the wiki article also contains some other background:

"Reasons for the war

Starting in 1968, Palestinian groups in southern Lebanon raided northern Israel, and bombarded Israeli towns with katyusha rockets.
Secondly, Israel argued it could derail the establishment of a base of operations for the PLO, from which they could mount assaults in the international arena such as the 26 December 1968 attack on an Israeli civilian airliner in Athens.
Another reason given for the invasion was as an intervention in the ongoing Lebanese Civil War to counteract Syrian influences in Lebanon, and possibly enable the establishment of a stable Lebanese leadership from the Christian population, which would strengthen a central Lebanese Army, restore security and agree to diplomatic relations with Israel."

... which perhaps gives some other explanations that warrant considering.

Mud - if you or any of your friends here are referring to me being a racist or anti-semite - then please have the guts to say it OUT LOUD rather than hinting at it covertly.

It reminds me of (Red) Ken Livingstone - being told his comment to a Jew (whom he did not even know was a Jew when he made the comment) re. concentration camp guard was anti-semitic. Ken was even punished for it, how absurd.

Anyone with the smallest bit of intelligence would reaslise that his comparison of a journalist (who by many accounts was behaving like a rottweiler) to a concentration camp guard was akin to the exact opposite of being anti-semitic: he was saying he detested anyone who behaved like a Nazi, i.e. Nazism was a bad thing, get it ????

Ken Livinstone is a moron in many respects, but I respect the man for having had the courage to keep mentioning that London's cultural/religious diversity must be celebrated. His closest work colleagues have said calling the man an anti-semite was obsurd because he is well-known for his liberal attitude vis a vis other religiosn and cultures.

I must say such mud-slinging and crying wolf every time someone opens their mouth brings ABSOLUTELY no sympathy to the cause of Zionism.

mimoyello - though i think it is cowardly for Mud and others to sling grave accusations at people without naming names, I don't agree with your opinion on the Ken Livingstone incident. I thought that was a rather flippant and insulting comment and that he should have known better, regardless of whether he knew the person was Jewish or not.

Oh and quoting from Henry Kissinger is a real hoot. The man should have been declared a war criminal for his sanctioning of more and more troops to Vietnam to napalm the Vietnamese people out of existence.

He came to an Oxford University debate once and couldn't/wouldn't answer any questions properly, all the students there were roaring with laughter, the man was such a right-wing nutcase just like his friend Nixon.

In fact many of the miserable things happening to the Palestinians and Lebanese have their roots in the foreign policy disasters of Mr Kissinger and his master President Nixon.

ruty - you are entitled to your opinion. I have stated mine and those who know Ken know him to be no where near an anti-semite the way he was made out to look like one by the Jewish press here in London.

The Israeli army were heavily involved in the sabra and shatila massacres indeed plenty of evidence that ariel sharon (defence minister at the time) orchestrated, aided and abbetted the killing.

Time magazine linked him directly to it, he sued Time and lost

Oh dear failed to add the link
give me a sec

bluejelly - exactly right. Amnesty and other human right orgs. have cupboards full of evidence on that targic incident sanctioned by Sharon.

Unfortunatley there just isn't the international will to bring such people in front of the International Criminal Court. The US refuses to ratify the ICC, how convenienet is that with Iraq and Afghanistan, etc going on ?

Over and over and over again, we see attacks, massacres, supervision of massacres, use of latest and fancy weaponry, use of precision-guided weapons that kill civilians - the conclusion is that civilians are what these weapons have been precisely guided for,

and yet we continue to hear of the moral superiority of such perpetrators. Why? because the West is civilised, the British government is civilised,

and for Israel the justification is that Jews suffered a Holcaust

Why should the Holocaust be a justification for the atrocious behaviour of Israel?

It is paranoia, but since when are paranoids allowed to kill and kill and kill.

shatila massacre info

PeaceDove - the world is being run by paranoids. It used to be that the "Red Commis'" were hidding under our beds, now it's Al Quaida hiding in caves or Hizbollah hiding in basements.

It goes something like this: "I think I saw something dodgy in my fridge the other day, was it mould or a shadowy Middle Eastern person with a turbun and beard ?"

It is a fantastic excuse to keep the military-industrail complex churning out more bombs.

I've read some of the link, bj and it sounds like a terrible set of events. I would reiterate though that it was Labanese Christian militias whom the article says carried out the attack though it holds Sharon et al 'indirectly responsible'.

pd - I'm not sure statements like this really develop the debate in a helpful way: "and for Israel the justification is that Jews suffered a Holcaust... Why should the Holocaust be a justification for the atrocious behaviour of Israel? "

why h2d

Isn't there a time when one decides that paranoia can no longer be an excuse for mass murder and destruction, and the people concerned should now receive therapy, not weapons?

There is an innovative solution by a Leeds man who is now a US citizen. If I could find a way to post images, I would post the graphic he has produced.

hub - Sharon gave the green light for the Christian militas to go in, knowing full well that there would be bloodshed. There is nothing "indirect" about it ?

If you are the commander of a refugee camp responsible for the security and saftey of its inhabitants and you allow your enemy's enemy to go in with guns, that is pretty darn well DIRECT responsibility for a massacre.

Because, pd, in a single statement, you are reducing the complexity of the situation - not to mention the gravity of the loss of life - to a simple explanation: 'for Israel the justification is that Jews suffered a holocaust'. Personally, I don't think that develops the debate in a particularly constructive way.

I used the word 'indirect' because as far as I can tell from the link that was the conlusion of the affair, from the wiki text bj linked to.