I shook hands with him once, a brisk, no-nonsense soldier's grip from Sharon as he finished a review of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood in the barracks square at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have thought, I asked myself then, that this same bunch of murderers - the men who butchered their way through the Palestinian Sabra and Chatila refugee camps only a few weeks earlier - had their origins in the Nazi Olympics of 1936. That's when old Pierre Gemayel - still alive and standing stiffly to attention for Sharon - watched the "order" of Nazi Germany and proposed to bring some of this "order" to Lebanon. That's what Gemayel told me himself. Did Sharon not understand this. Of course, he must have done.
Back on 18 September that same year, Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post and Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television and I had clambered over the piled corpses of Chatila - of raped and eviscerated women and their husbands and children and brothers - and Jenkins, knowing that the Israelis had sat around the camps for two nights watching this filth, shrieked "Sharon!" in anger and rage. He was right. Sharon it was who sent the Phalange into the camps on the night of 16 September - to hunt for "terrorists", so he claimed at the time.
The subsequent Israeli Kahan commission of enquiry into this atrocity provided absolute proof that Israeli soldiers saw the massacre taking place. The evidence of a Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky was crucial. He was an Israeli deputy tank commander and reported what he saw to his higher command. "Don't interfere," the senior officer said. Ever afterwards, Israeli embassies around the world would claim that the commission held Sharon only indirectly responsible for the massacre. It was untrue. The last page of the official Israeli report held Sharon "personally responsible". It was years later that the Israeli-trained Phalangist commander, Elie Hobeika, now working for the Syrians, agreed to turn state's evidence against Sharon - now the Israeli Prime Minister - at a Brussels court. The day after the Israeli attorney general declared Sharon's defense a "state" matter, Hobeika was killed by a massive car bomb in east Beirut. Israel denied responsibility. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Brussels and quietly threatened to withdraw Nato headquarters from Belgium if the country maintained its laws to punish war criminals from foreign nations. Within months, George W Bush had declared Sharon "a man of peace". It was all over.
In the end, Sharon got away with it, even when it was proved that he had, the night before the Phalangists attacked the civilians of the camp, publicly blamed the Palestinians for the murder of their leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon told these ruthless men that the Palestinians had killed their beloved "chief". Then he sent them in among the civilian sheep - and claimed later he could never have imagined what they would do in Chatila. Only years later was it proved that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original massacre were interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks.
#2
Notice that this bastard who teklls of the "vicious Phalangist militia" men would not object to shaking handds with one of the Palestinin bastards who perpetrated countless atrocities in Lebanon. (cf http://freelebanon.org).
#3
Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. "If you throw a stone at me, I will shoot you." But if you throw a stone at me, I say, I won't shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot you. He frowns. "Then I'd say you're out of your mind."
#4
Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. "If you throw a stone at me, I will shoot you." But if you throw a stone at me, I say, I won't shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot you. He frowns. "Then I'd say you're out of your mind."
This is hilarious. Fisk, the man whose name is imortalized as the internet word, "fisking" which came about due to his little adventure when a group (of palestinians?) began to attack him and the "cheek turning" Fisk fought back with his fists (or was it his camera).
As for this: I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old and New Testaments have just collided. The rabbi's dad taught him about an eye for an eye - or 20 homes for a stone - whereas Bill Fisk taught me about turning the other cheek. Judaism is bumping against Christianity. So is it any surprise that Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other? For despite all the talk of Christians and Jews being "people of the Book", Muslims are beginning to express ever harsher views of Jews.
Where do you start with the illogic of everything this man writes? "An eye for an eye" equals "20 homes for a stone" shows Christianity bumping up against Islam.... from a man who name is immortalized by turning the other cheek by fighting back? Muslimsbeginning to express even HARSHER views? Harsher since when? 2,000 years ago?
In the article: Ever afterwards, Israeli embassies around the world would claim that the commission held Sharon only indirectly responsible for the massacre. It was untrue. The last page of the official Israeli report held Sharon "personally responsible"
What the commission actually said: ... In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense 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-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.
We do not believe that responsibility is to be imputed to the Defense Minister for not ordering the removal of the Phalangists from the camps when the first reports reached him about the acts of killing being committed there. As was detailed above, such reports initially reached the Defense Minister on Friday evening; but at the same time, he had heard from the Chief of Staff that the Phalangists' operation had been halted, that they had been ordered to leave the camps and that their departure would be effected by 5:00 a.m. Saturday. These preventive steps might well have seemed sufficient to the Defense Minister at that time, and it was not his duty to order additional steps to be taken, or to have the departure time moved up, a step which was of doubtful feasibility.
I see nowhere that Sharon did anything other than take responsibility for the massacre even though no Israeli forces were involved and neither he nor the IDF had any control over the Phalangists, no were orders issued from his office directing forces to kill Palestians.
Sabra-Shatilla is an albatross that folks like Fisk and his Islamic allies like to hang around Sharon's neck.
#6
He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon in 2000. By 2002, he had built 34 new Jewish colonies on Palestinian land.
None of these agreements he opposed have brought a lasting peace, like they were supposed to. I think the big difference here is Sharon wants to end the wars by winning and then securing Isreal. Anything else would be just holding the terrorists at bay. I imagine Fisk see's Arafat as a statesman. But then Sharon is on his deathbed, no time like the present to kick him while he's down, may the flies of hell decend on you Fisk.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
01/08/2006 9:36 Comments ||
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#8
Fisk, an English leftie, also justifies 9/11 as "historical forces." This quote from the not conservative Salon, When he was almost killed by an enraged mob of Afghan refugees during the American invasion, Fisk wrote a column saying if he had been in their shoes he too would have attacked any Westerner he saw, which led some readers to send him Christmas cards expressing their disappointment that the Afghans hadn't "finished the job." This sentiment was more or less echoed by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which ran an article bearing the subhead "A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due." The right-wing columnist Mark Steyn wrote of Fisk's column, "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter."
#9
A slaughter of civilians... absolutely forgotten by the MSM enforced collective memory, because it doesn't fit their worldview, zionists = WWII nazis, paleos = WWII jews, West = imperialist warmongerers, islam = religion of the poors (as one french socialist mp put it right before the Afghan campaign),... more deaths than at S&C IIRC, but since the perps were paleos and the victims were worthless lebanese christians (who as fisk reminds us, were "nazi-like" anyway, some kind of vicious rightwingers, as christians always are, as opposed to the peace-loving muslim, or the benign atheist leftists), it's no big deal.
If one had any question about why the phalangists took their revenge on the paleos who started the war that ruined their country... and there was other christians massacres, too.
#10
nice shading and spin in the choice of every word written. He's nothing if not single-minded. It's too bad he wasn't made a martyr to himself by the afghans
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/08/2006 15:28 Comments ||
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#11
It is not clear to me why what Fisk has to say is any more worthy than what Obama has to say. It's hard enough to discern what's really going on from the news media, let alone trying to figure out what these Monday-morning-quarterback attention seekers are up to.
I have no doubt that Sharon was a tough guy who pursued his agenda very aggressively. So what? So was Arafat. So is Assad in Syria. So is Abdullah in Jordan. So is Mubarak in Egypt. It's a tough neighborhood. None of them are "men of peace" when they are threatened, and for Israel that's most of the time.
#12
Apart from this maggot propagandist Fisk, I have often wondered why there is no Christian nation in the mideast as vibrant as Israel. Even with its travails they are the fastest growing economy in the world. My question is with the common background which predates Islam why is the mideast christianfrei. Islam controls the largest land mass in the world. Truly no room at the Inn for Christians and Jews.
Of more contemporary relevance this from Frontpage: These are acutely trying times for the Christian remnant residing in areas âgovernedâ by the Palestinian Authority. Tens of thousands have abandoned their holy sites and ancestral properties to live abroad, while those that remain do so as a beleaguered and dwindling minority. They have faced virtually uninterrupted persecution during the decade since the Oslo peace process began, living amidst a Muslim population that is increasingly xenophobic and restless. Chaos, nepotism, and corruption are endemic. Their plight is, in part, attributable to the influence of Muslim religious law (Sharia) on the inner workings of the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the Christians have been abandoned by their religious leaders who, instead of protecting them, have chosen to curry favor with the Palestinian leadership. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20583
If the Christian in the mideast is not victim; get a new word for it.
#13
The only country in the MidEast where it is safe to be a Christian is also the only country in the MidEast where it is safe to be a Jew, or for that matter an atheist or a pagan. Israel.
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