Wars and Conflicts permalink
On this day, 1982
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Message 1.
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Thursday, 16th September 2010
On this day, 16th September, 1982.
A group of 150 Christian Phalangist militia entered the Sabra and Chatilah refugee camps in West Beirut and began murdering the Palestinian men, women and children within. There was little armed resistance, the Phalange reported only two casualties.
The Phalange were in a murderous mood because they had been told, by the Israeli forces surrounding the camps, that their Maronite leader, Bachir Gemayel, who had been assassinated two days previously, was the victim of a Palestinian bomb. The Israeli forces knew this was untrue. Bachir Gemayel’s assassin was in fact a Syrian agent, Habib Shartouni. But it served the IDF to stir-up psychopathic hatred of the Palestinian refugees among the Maronites and the Phalange. The IDF plan worked well.
Having sealed both camps on the 15th, the IDF equipped the Phalange killers by providing them with transport, arms and radios and in at least one case, provided a helicopter airlift of Phalange into the killing ground, the following day.
IDF controlled the entire perimeter of both camps during this time, and throughout the 48 hours of the massacre, prevented the Palestinian civilians from escaping. Throughout both nights (16th and 17thSept.), the Israeli forces fired illumination rounds to aid the work of the murderers. The Israelis monitored Phalange radio reports of the murders.
In the face of growing international protest (even within the US), the Israelis ordered the Phalange to withdraw from the camps on the 18th, providing the killers with a bulldozer, hurriedly to hide hundreds of corpses under a thin layer of earth.
Survivors were taken through IDF checkpoints to Beirut’s ‘Cite Sportive’ stadium, which was also under IDF control. Most women prisoners and old men were released after checks but men under forty simply ‘disappeared’. Some were detained by Sin Beth but the bulk were handed over to Christian Lebanese “to be dealt with” as the latter wished. At least one 13 yr old Palestinian boy was taken to Bikfaya for execution. (Fisk, 2003; page 1025)
About 700-800 victims were killed in the two camps, perhaps another 1,000 ‘disappeared’ after the sports stadium was cleared. (estimates of dead range from 800 to 3,500)
The International Mac Bride Commission (1983) found Israel had “no legitimate reason for invading Lebanon”.
The Israeli Kahan report found Ariel Sharon “personally responsible” for allowing the massacres to go ahead. He was forced to resign as defence minister.
Sources:
Robert Fisk, (2006) “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East”. See esp. pages 1020 to 1026.
Robert Fisk, (1990) “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War” (2003) Andre Deutsch. (Later editions OUP 2003)
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Message 2
Posted by Thomas_B (U1667093) on Thursday, 16th September 2010
There you go again, riding your hobby horse and digging on every thing to find against Isreal. Wouldn´t it been the case that your arguments are so often one-sided, I possibly would bother to read more of your posts and occassionally the links you´re providing with.
As for you obviously can´t make a balanced view on both sides of the middle east conflict, it makes no sense to join any debate on such topics like this thread. -
Message 3
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Thursday, 16th September 2010
To Thomas.
I believe you might have the necessary sense of irony to realise how strange it is for a German of your generation, instantly to spring to the defence of Israel, at its most venal.
Your father's generation would, no doubt, have seen things rather differently. His generation probably shared the very opposite bias. The truth lies between these two extremes of your cultural imagination
My post offers a number of sources of information, from liberal Jewish, through liberal secular, to factual 鶹Լ reporting.
If you think I'm biased please have the courage and scholarship to identify any inaccuracies in my post.
If you are unable to respond, then I shall take it that you still dislike this theme, but you lack the skills to counter it.
The bias is yours my friend, Germans of your generation share no guilt for Auschwitz, nor for that matter, the debacle of the Munich Olympics.
You need not defend the excesses of modern Israel in such an absurdly grovelling way.
Please take the time to read the links. -
Message 4
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 16th September 2010
U3280211
Your post made me think once again of the parent of a pupil of mine about 15 years ago who had grown up in Beirut, and had married and settled in London. I only met her when her daughter started in our secondary section.But about five years before, when the girl was still in our primary section, the father/husband was the only fatality in an IRA bombing in East London. Six years later the mother could see almost the irony of having survived Beirut just to be widowed in London.. But I would say she was coping better than the girl. You just do not expect your Dad to get blown up in London.
As Neville Chamberlain said "war is a terrible thing".
In the piece that I am just writing I have reflected on the difficulty of someone of my generation (born 1944) getting used to the idea as a child that Auschwitz was an example of the Nazis doing "their worst" while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an example of us doing "our best". And I could never watch those war films with the climactic last scene with victory being achieved, at a human cost.
My grandfather died from the consequences of a working life stoking fires in a steel works. Well. The world has not yet run short of inflammable material,for as Herr Diesel showed at the right temperature and under the right pressure almost anything can be inflammable.
But after the ovens of Auschwitz I am not sure that Jewish people are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat.. Daniel went into the Lions Den and survived. But who was it in the Bible who survived the fiery furnace?
However, if you do know the answer that will provide the solution to the Middle Eastern question that has vexed great minds for more than half a century, I think that those locked in the present talks would love to hear from you.
Thomas B
The piece that I am writing is my "Work in Progress" introduction to part III.. Nearly complete.
Cass -
Message 5
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Thursday, 16th September 2010
Cass.
A good and thoughtful post. I would like to reflect on it for a few hours and reply tomorrow, if I may.
You offer me a challenge (to draw-up a plan for middle east peace). As you say, this challenge has defeated all nations for 60 years.
I have some ideas, rather more radical than those hitherto proposed. They can be no worse than what has gone before, nor worse than the 'new plans' which will fail next month.
IMHO, even an Obama-lead America (and his input has been superb, in this regard) cannot possibly be seen as a fair intermediary, given Truman's recognition of the state of Israel, and the consequent permanent displacement of the Palestinians.
I'll sketch-out some ideas tomorrow. Social justice is the key, I believe. -
Message 6
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 16th September 2010
U3280211
As you say it is a problem that has vexed people for a long time, but going back to my early childhood- spent as a kind of "Labour Party" activist, I tend to feel that the kind of British working class attitude that said that foreign affairs had nothing to do with "the common people" -and that Brits had done more than their duty to mankind already having "stood alone" against Hitler all tended to a general mood of abdication. It was not Britain's job to sort out other people's problems. They must sort them out themselves. So we rushed the exit from the Indian sub-continent with an "apres nous le deluge" attitude. Two million dead, and several wars later, finally ending up with a MAD situation between India and Pakistan, I am not convinced that the passage of time has made it easier rather than more difficult to resolve the problems.
Much the same seems to apply to the whole question of Israel. The British had been handed a responsibility for the area after the First World War. But some crucial things had happened already. My school's most famous old boy had gone out there with a determination forged in his schooldays to make history [the old walls perhaps encourage delusions of grandeur].. I suspect that he was determined to make good. At some point in his life in our very staid Oxford he must have discovered that he and all his brothers were illegitimate and that their parents were not married, his father being an Irish aristocrat (married) and his mother one of their Scottish domestics. Nevertheless he was an invaluable tool for various people and encouraged various elements of an Arab uprising against Turkish rule.
I finally got around to coping with my own demons about the old school last year,(a working class lad like me was not one of the swanks in Lawrence House) to read "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom".. And I noted the crucial money and resources that Lawrence was given in order to make "his Arabs" not only interested in the struggle but also sufficiently armed to make a contribution to the task of defeating the Turks.
But I have seen interviews with various Arab monarchs- the Faisal family perhaps- who expressed the view that they liberated themselves from Turkish rule, which is why the land belongs to them and there should be no place for the Jews. Of course what really disgusted T.E. Lawrence was that he discovered that, having given "the word of an English gentleman" [so interesting that back then the son of an Irishman and a Scot born in Wales was so insistant on being a true Englishman] he then discovered that the British Government had made this commitment to support a Jewish homeland- in return for Jewish finance to help Britain to win the war.. In 1917 John Maynard Keynes whose job it was to know these things, said that- even with this Jewish money, Britain only had enough money for one more week of war. After that, he told his friends, Britain would have to sueue for peace.
Fortunately German stupidity forced the USA into the war, and the USA was willing to extend loans.. But loans mean payback. Wars in Europe had depended on them since at least the time of the Fuggers and the Medici back in the fifteenth century: and that Jewish money was probably crucial in the Arabs getting the right to have any kind of nation states.
However one evening after teaching practice in 1966-67, while queuing up in the University canteen, the word went around that there was a war in the Middle East. After eating lost of us went to the common room to watch the news coverage. All of the Arab states around Israel had launched a coordinated assault determined to accomplish the declared Arab policy of wiping the Jewish state off the face of the Earth.. I suppose that some ideas of "ungentlemanly conduct" and "bullying" in such a one-sided conflict were widespread. But Israel won the war, and rather like the USSR that had been attacked in a similar way by Nazi Germany they seized some buffer zones.
The road from there to where we are has been difficult, but generally the surrounding Arab states have all signed up to the existence of an Israeli state. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the whole idea of solving problems by rational discourse that underpinned the Versailles Settlements has given way to the rather different approach of the UN, where the use of force is more of an option (even a supposed peace-keeping one- as in the Congo or Serbia)..Surely if ever an city merited being treated as "an international city" like Danzig, it would be Jerusalem..
But unfortunately for the last couple of hundred years ownership has been a more divisive issue than religion was before that.
Cass -
Message 7
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 17th September 2010
U3280211
Going back to your original post, one should perhaps point out that a historian is not the same as an archivist or chronicler.. Facts do not speak for themselves , even when the chronicler choses to use "weighted" words rather than dispassionate ones: and even straight story telling is- to my mind- suspect since it deliberately tries to bypass human reasoning and go straight to visceral response throgh its selectivity- the details that are highlighted as significant.
I just do not like people's attempts to manipulate and impose upon me.
I am often surprised at how often my mind goes back to the experience of one of my classmates who recounted back in 1963 how he had been approached down in Brighton, where he had gone to attend an interview for Uni, by a homosexual, who assured him that, if he consented to trying some gay-sex just for two minutes, he would then not want it to stop.. Well boys of my generation were familiar with Nazi experiments on camp inmates that expored the nature of the sexual drive.
My immediate reaction to my classmates story crystalised for me the fact that I lived with the idea that we all need to have some idea of where things may lead before we start, and to try to only engage in avenues that tend to go in the "right direction" as far as we are concerned..
I suppose that my attitude to homosexuality was that (in those days at least) it was by its very nature bioogically sterile with no power to create a future,-- and it was not obvious from your OP that the same does not apply to your approach to this subject-- hence my request.
I have in the meantime looked back at your previous thread starting with 1948 that seems to be essentially similar in character.
I believe that the study of history has tended to become a sterile mere combing over the past in order to pass judgement on other people of whom we know much less than we know about ourselves. But purposeful history is about trying to learn the lessons of the past and trying to find answers for the future.
By the way a good starting point is "love thine enemy"..
That does not mean "have no enemies". Rather "try to love your enemy as you love yourself,and accord them all the rights to a future that you demand for yourself"..
Cass -
Message 8
Posted by Thomas_B (U1667093) on Friday, 17th September 2010
U3280211
There is no "necessary sense of irony" needed and neither is it strange for me, as German, born in the end of the 1960s, to spring to the defence of Israel, because in my opinion the State of Israel has always been and still is, in an conscutive state of selfdefense.
People like you and me, living in European Countries without war since 1945 (the Yougoslavian Civil War and the Kosovo conflict are exceptions on the end of the 20th Century), can´t be familiar with the situations down there in the Middle East which lasts since generations.
You have too much pity for the so "peace-loving" and "peacefully" Palestininas for which I wouldn´t give any sense of understanding knowing that they still support their terrorist fellows, which are responsible for the terror acts towards Israel. To me, the people there appeare at least as such fanatics as the Germans in the last year of the second world war, supporting the Nazis by facing their cities flattened.
Sorry for those Palestinians killed accidentally, but where is the Palestinian Resistance to breach the might of their terrorists? Apparently, there is none.
Why can´t the "peaceful" Palestinians drive their terrorist organisations out? Because they won´t do it and they stick to the aim of all radical Palestinians and Arabs to kill all the Jews and wipe out the State of Israel. What do you think might be the reason that all that Nazi rubbish is still published in the Arabic countries, translated into their language? Simply because of the "common sense" of anti-semitism.
Your links just mention the situations based on the state of war, but they don´t mention whether among these Palestinian refugees, has been potentially terrorists or not. As we know up to the present that these cowards use their people to cover themselves and launch terrorist acts from the homes of the ordinary Palestinian people, who could guarantee you that they didn´t had the same tactics already back in 1982?
The bias is yours my friend, Germans of your generation share no guilt for Auschwitz, nor for that matter, the debacle of the Munich Olympics.
There is no need to me for reminding me on Auschwitz nor for Munich Olympics, because I´m on the side of Israel because they had to fight for their own survival since 1948, surrounded by enemy states which all of them, they´ve beaten and it´s no question to me, that they achieved this from the 1950s onwards also with support and help from the USA. But they fought their wars alone.
Look at your own country, which had nearely gone down to lose the first world war in 1917 and as well in the second world war if Britain hadn´t had the USA as an powerful Ally. Neither the whole of the then British Empire would had been able to tackle these huge efforts, needed by material and men to bring victory on the Allied side.
You need not defend the excesses of modern Israel in such an absurdly grovelling way.
Would you look at your own biases please and check for once youself how "absurdly grovelling" your way of talking on these matters is. -
Message 9
Posted by Thomas_B (U1667093) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Thomas B
The piece that I am writing is my "Work in Progress" introduction to part III.. Nearly complete.
䲹
That´s the third part of the Towards project, I suppose?
Thomas -
Message 10
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Thomas B
Yes. And thanks for helping me towards that concept..
Hope all is well with you.
Cass -
Message 11
Posted by Thomas_B (U1667093) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Thanks Cass,
I notice that you´re still working on the project and you´ve yet to consider the publishing, do you?
I´m currently stick on Irish history, reading some book with the title "The Squad", dealing with the Irish War of Independence. It´s interesting to read about the background and M. Collins´ Elite to struck the English in Ireland, but on the other hand, it´s more a chronicle about how, when and where the assassination took place and who was "executed". I´ve brought some books with me from the recent holiday in Ireland, concerning the Irish history of the 20th Century.
It was nice there and the weather, as well as when I´ve been in London, better than back home. Sounds odd, but we´ve got the lucky week in that regards.
Ireland is a nice country with most of the people there friendly, but it must have anything to do with my Grandmother, that I emotionally stick more to England than to other countries on the so called British Islands.
Hope all is well with you too.
Have you been in France again recently?
Regards,
Thomas -
Message 12
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Thomas B
I have noticed your interest in Ireland on the MB..Everyone tells me it has lovely parts; and an ex-colleague went to the West Coast for most of her holidays.. She has a very basic cottage there, and a sailing boat.. Her husband is a very keen yachtsman and they sail around skirting the Atlantic and picnicking on beaches when the weather suits.. Sound idyllic-- except like our place in France, there are of course, always jobs to do.
We came back from France a couple of week ago.. And that was where I started writing because I had taken a book to read that would take me right away from history. But when I read it I realised that it was written in such an attempt. So it gave me a start.
But typing up my first draft here with access to all my books, I have taken the opportunity - as usual- to find things that other people, with more authority, have written that support and illustrate my argument.. Another thing that I try to take to heart [though perhaps not enough] is a piece of advice from Dr. Johnson to aspiring writers. Whenever you find a passage that gives you particular pleasure and satisfaction, strike it out. You were probably being self-indulgent.. Much better as an historian to use evidence of other people's thinking.
Thoughts of publishing for the moment are 'on hold'.
Regards
Cass -
Message 13
Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Friday, 17th September 2010
'Your father's generation would, no doubt, have seen things rather differently'-... in case with Ivan Dem'yanjuk who was wounded in fighting near the Dnieper River by their German shell and needed emergency treatment to remove a large silver of shrapnel from his back. By 1942 he was fighting in the Crimea where Germans captured him and his unit. He was taken to a POW camp where he 'willingly'( ????????? ) ...in POW camp and 'willingly'....such turn...'volunteered' to serve Germans. Now they put him on trial...those grandsons of the unwanted Crimean guests.
It is a real mockery really... -
Message 14
Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Friday, 17th September 2010
It will be better for them to shut up, U2.
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Message 15
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Friday, 17th September 2010
It will be better for them to shut up Here's another free advice: based on the attached, you'd better think of less obvious connotations in your login ID.
rozumiv? -
Message 16
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Thomas.
Thanks for getting back, and for your robust response.
Firstly, I note that you have not taken issue with any elements of the OP or the book sources and links I offered. The books are by Robert Fisk, who was living in Beirut in 1982 and witnessed the results of the massacre described here. Is it the case that you no longer wish to challenge the OP as an historical record of the events outlined?
You go to great lengths to associate Palestinians with "terrorism".
here are some of the negative things you say about Palestinians:
Palestinians for which I wouldn´t give any sense of understanding knowing that they still support their terrorist fellows, which are responsible for the terror acts towards Israel.
Why can´t the "peaceful" Palestinians drive their terrorist organisations out?
they stick to the aim of all radical Palestinians and Arabs to kill all the Jews and wipe out the State of Israel.
You associate the Palestinians with Nazism:
that all that Nazi rubbish is still published in the Arabic countries, translated into their language?
That last is a little rich, since in a previous thread this year (when we spoke about Count Claus Von Stauffenberg) you said that Nazism was on the resurgence in modern Germany!
To regard Israel as the peaceful nation surrounded by vulgar terrorists is such an assault on history that it beggars belief.
How, exactly, do you suppose Israel 'invented itself' if it was not through terrorism, bombs, torture, extra-judicial killings, massacres and lynchings?
Have you not heard of Menachim Begin (peace prize winner!!) ever wondered what he was doing in 1946?
Here's the answer:
.
Heard of the Zionist Stern Gang who asked to do a deal with the Nazis?
.
Just because you were born in 1960, does not mean that the history Palestine began the same year!
How did a majority Arab Palestine (1947)suddenly become a majority Jewish state a year later?
If you start all middle east history in the 1960's then no wonder you are hopelessly muddled about "terrorists".
I also note your snide comments about Britain's dependence on America in two world wars.
Those comments are hardly relevant to the Sabra and Chatila massacres but I understand why you wish to flail around in my general direction.
Well, here is a snide comment of my own:-
Has it ever occurred to you why Germans are such loyal supporters of modern Israel?
Could it possibly be because a strong Israel deprives the European Jews who settled there of any excuse to return to the German-controlled Europe from which they were displaced.
This is much the same as Stalin's surprising support for Israel (despite his paranoia about Jews). The existence of a Jewish state, regardless of its legitimacy, gave him somewhere to send the Russian Jews he disliked, without the cost of the Gulag. Brezhnev continued the tradition.
Israel can be useful for anti-semites, remember? -
Message 17
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Heard of the Zionist Stern Gang who asked to do a deal with the Nazis?
“Hitler is an important ideological weapon helping us win just about any argument with right-wingers. As such he must be viewed as pure evil at all times. This, of course, creates a philosophical paradox: it is common knowledge that morality is relative and there is no such thing as absolute good and evil. The answer is that Hitler is a necessary exception. If he didn't exist he'd have to be invented. What makes him so evil? It doesn't matter. He's evil, period. You needn't know unless you are an advanced student of the progressive theory. If you are, then you must know that Hitler was also building socialism, only it was for Arians only (National Socialism), in which minorities would slave for the White man. We the progressives want quite the opposite. Hitler's idea of uncompensated labor for The Greater Good™ (labor camps) was very different from our idea of uncompensated labor for The Greater Good™ (labor camps). That's where it gets tricky and any further discussions should only be allowed to Party-approved professors of progressive science.”
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Message 18
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Keep them coming Suv.
Every evasion of yours merely confirms the veracity of the OP.
Did the Israeli Kahan commission get it wrong, when it said that Ariel Sharon carried "personal responsibility" for the massacres? -
Message 19
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Keep them coming Suv You had me at your Eric Blair comment.
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Message 20
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Cass (7)
I am often surprised at how often my mind goes back to the experience of one of my classmates who recounted back in 1963 how he had been approached down in Brighton, where he had gone to attend an interview for Uni, by a homosexual, who assured him that, if he consented to trying some gay-sex just for two minutes, he would then not want it to stop.. Well boys of my generation were familiar with Nazi experiments on camp inmates that expored the nature of the sexual drive.
My immediate reaction to my classmates story crystalised for me the fact that I lived with the idea that we all need to have some idea of where things may lead before we start, and to try to only engage in avenues that tend to go in the "right direction" as far as we are concerned..
Are you responding to another thread? This one is about the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982.
Do you accept that they actually happened?
By the way a good starting point is "love thine enemy"..
Sounds like an exotic form of masochism to me.
Are you seriously suggesting that the few survivors of the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Chatila should love the IDF?.
That Jewish survivors of the Holocaust should pray for Himmler?
You must have gone to a very different school.
Let me ask you some specifics, since you seem to have the capacity for infinite wind-baggery.
1) Do you support Israel having nuclear weapons? (Israel has nuclear weapons but does not admit this)
2) Do you believe that Iran has the right to produce nuclear weapons? (It claims not to be trying to produce them, but it is)
3) What do you think is likely to happen in the middle east if Iran acquires nuclear weapons?
4) What do you think will happen in the middle east if Israel launches a strike on Iran, to stop it acquiring nuclear weapons?
5) Should the USA continue to fund Israel's nuclear arsenal whilst trying to stop Israel's neighbours acquiring nuclear technology? -
Message 21
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Friday, 17th September 2010
Suv (19)
You forgot to answer my question from the earlier post:
Did the Israeli Kahan commission of 1983 get it right when it said Ariel Sharon was "personally responsible " for the Sabra and Chatila massacres?
If you keep evading the question, I'll keep asking it. -
Message 22
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 17th September 2010
U32...
As I inferred I cannot see that what you call "a thread" has any thread in it at all--
Your statement was a bland statement -an opening and closing- in which you used some words like "murder", where someone else might use "killing"..It seems however that you have already heard enough to be judge, jury and perhaps even instrument of punishment.
But,as I think that we have agreed, this is a conflict that has been going on for some time: and solutions usually have to address the reasons why a conflict started in the first place.
As I remember there were a number of things that shaped this tragedy,including- I am sure you will correct me- the whole question of the internal power struggle within Lebanon, with external meddling by Syria.
But one is entitled to wonder why the Palestinians have/had been kept in the refugee camps for so long..
Was it not after these killings/massacres that Yasser Arafat accepted to leave and accept a move to Libya?
If, for example, one contrasts with the treatment of the Ethiopian Jews by Israel, who decided that as Jews, if they were not able to stay where they felt that they had their homeland, they were welcome to go to Israel for as long as was necessary. Surely this is the kind of behaviour that we are seeing all over the world when people are made homeless by disaster.
You seem to be very much aware of the way that the Israelis have "played their hand", but is there not also a case for the mass of the Palestinian refugees being used by (a) neighbouring Arab states, and (b) militant Palestinian groups because the desperate conditions, the desperate measures that they encourage from both sides, and the recruiting potential for new generations of terrorists all add power to their appeal to their sympathisers.
In another long conflict it served the interests of the IRA in Northern Ireland to sabotage the economy and keep the RC population in conditions that were much worse than they would have been had Northern Ireland been really prosperous.
As for "loving your enemy", the colleague of mine who was an Auschwitz survivor was certainly not prepared to be eaten up with hatred, anger or resentment. These are the means of destroying yourself, not other people.
And as for your war games, the reason why I specialised in Five Year Plan era of the History of the USSR was because, like many of my generation, I was determined that we should try to work towards situations in which humankind can avoid such tragedies. So I regard all of the military initiatives that you mention as sterile too. As are most political solutions.
But I will be interested to read yours.
Cass -
Message 23
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
U32...
Further to my last.. and I write as someone whose life was been intimately bound up with exile and refugee status from the time of my birth when a refugee couple was billeted on my parents... one has to ask just why the question of the Palestinian refugees is so important.
Of course, as you point out, Israel owes much of its strength (quite out of proportion to that of its Arab neighbours) to the support that it gets from the wider Jewish community, especially that in America. This is a very powerful lobbying force in US politics. But, to some extent, only because of the Cold War perception that many Arab countries were more pro-Communist than Capitalist- or perhaps like Nasser of Egypt were prepared to "play that hand".
But behind the doctrinal and political implications of this there lie the attitudes to wealth and property. Many years ago I discovered that one of my wife's lecturers in France was a member of the Communist Party, and as such all of his salary was paid to the Party, who then paid him "according to his needs". Not surprisingly such an ideology resulted in the fact that the majority of members in the CP were people of low income who were materially better off because they belonged to the party. On a national and anti-Imperialist scale this was a philosophy that justified the seizing of foreign-owned assets from "Persia" to Cuba, and the use of that wealth in order to support whatever structure the new owners wanted. In Cuba this has been a popularist Communism, but within Islamic countries (apart from a good reason to overthrow the "Westernized" middle class) it has been a good reason to support royal families that claim some connection to the Prophet (pbuh)or to give practical power to the Muslim clerics.
As ways of life, government, and economic growth these approaches are counter-to the development of real and effective power.. This has been the experience of Great Britain where the post-war Labour Government similarly had a revolution that seized the wealth and put it in the hands of its own secular "clerical caste" who were entrusted with looking after everyone "From the Cradle to the Grave"..
Perhaps Israel would not be so strong if the Israeli people thought that they had any choice in the matter. ..One thinks of the seige of Leningrad when those who had lost the will to struggle on, just froze to death within minutes.
But I can remember the time before the Oxford Committee for Emergency Relief changed to the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. For the great emergency facing the world in 1945 was two-fold (a) rebuilding damaged and shattered countries after a war that had killed 55 million people:
and (B) trying to deal with the massive refugee problem which, if one includes 1950, comprised of almost the same number of people who were uprooted with "no direction home" [20 million of them were in the Indian Sub-Continent alone]
I suspect, however, that the problem of Israel, Palestine and Jerusalem suffers from the fact that it is not treated as just part of that more general picture but as one more episode in the long history of Crusades, Intafadas, and Holy Wars which have vexed this region since at least the time of Judas Maccabeus.
Cass -
Message 24
Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
'Here's another free advice: based on the attached, you'd better think of less obvious connotations in your login ID.
www.solonin.org/othe...
rozumiv? '- you missed the Ukrainian letter 'z' into the word, Suvorovetz.
Well, ni ... ya ne zrozumiv. Who is that solonin and what the destiny of Ivan + my 鶹Լ nick.. the both have to do with these lies of that man ?
1. Nobody invited Germans in the Crimea to take Ivan in the POW camp in order he could 'willingly agree ' to serve Germans.
2.In Israel, in 1991, the assistant prosecutor Dafna Bainvol seems to sum up the Israeli attitude to Ivan's case when he said he said :'We are going to prove to the Supreme Court that he is a Nazi who was at least in Sobibor and Flossenburg'. In 1991 they all failed even to prove part of it ...in Israel....and were forced to choose 'helpers' among the grandsons of those Germans who truly served Nazis....I mean those ones who never been invited in the Crimea in 1941.....
3. The Ivan himself was a victim of the Ukrainian Holodomor ( the existing of which the modern Israel is strongly opposed 1 ). Ivan was born on 3 April 1920, in the Ukrainian village of Dub Macharenzi. Both his parents were disabled - his father from wounds received in the WWI and his mother from pneumonia.During the Stalin's Holodomor ( when Stalin's 'agricultural collectivization' policies created a famine that killed TEN MILLION people, solonin ) Ivan moved to Moscow when his father sold the house for eight loaves of bread. Ivan was lucky to gain employment in 1938 as a tractor driver on one of the state farms...and in 1941 when Germans launched their Barbarossa -THE CONQUEST OF THE UKRAINE, Dem'janjuk was called up in Stalin's army, given basic and later artillery training.
4. Now I see that they both ....those sons of Holocaust&grandsons of those ones who Created it (!!!!! ) doing their best in trying .....
IT'S LIKE THEY CAN'T GET HIM ON ONE THING IN ISRAEL SO THEY WILL FISH AROUND UNTIL THEY GET HIM ON ANOTHER IN GERMANY. -
Message 25
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Well, ni ... ya ne zrozumiv. Who is that solonin and what the destiny of Ivan + my 鶹Լ nick.. the both have to do with these lies of that man? You mean to say that Stakhov or Stakhiv - whatever you want to call him - is a liar?
-
Message 26
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Message posted by U3280211
On this day, 16th September, 1982.
A group of 150 Christian Phalangist militia entered the Sabra and Chatilah refugee camps in West Beirut and began murdering the Palestinian men, women and children within. There was little armed resistance, the Phalange reported only two casualties.
Well memorialised.
Of the many unforgiveable atrocities committed by Zionist Israel, this has to be one of the most shameful. -
Message 27
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
A group of 150 Christian Phalangist militia entered the Sabra and Chatilah refugee camps in West Beirut and began murdering the Palestinian men Well memorialised.
Of the many unforgiveable atrocities committed by Zionist Israel, this has to be one of the most shameful. Predictable thought process. Yet, none of the resident Jew baiters attracted here by the designated ring leader originating these threads with admirable regularity, never ever once complained about Hashemites wiping out the very same Arafat's followers in the thousands in 1970 in Jordan. Because, for as long as the Jews or the Christians were not involved in any way, shape or form, who cares? -
Message 28
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Political opposition to the form of extreme nationalism known as Zionism is not anti-semitic, by definition.
You have been told that many times, and know it to be true. Why continue the game unless you are deliberately trying to provoke offense and derial the dialogue? -
Message 29
Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
'Chatilah refugee camps in West Beirut and began murdering the Palestinian men'- a question...where they were ( I mean the American Jews ) when Nazis wasted in dust their European brothers and sisters ?
-
Message 30
Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
A. They sponsored Zionist gangs in Palestine...who fought against Brits...who fought against Nazis in Europe.
-
Message 31
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Political opposition to the form of extreme nationalism known as Zionism is not anti-semitic, by definition. Complete rubbish.
You have been told that many times is not the same as know it to be true For example, Marxist claptrap you're so devoted too, I've probably been exposed to it to much greater extent than you ever would. Yet, I have functional brain and clear bill of mental health to fall for it.
Why continue the game unless you are deliberately trying to provoke offense and derial the dialogue? I haven't started none of these Jew-baiting threads you're calling "the dialogue." -
Message 32
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
How is opposition to Scottish Nationalism 'Scot-Baiting'?
I'm afraid your paranoia is having the same effect on your output that it has on the psyche of the Zionist state.
It is destroying your ability to tell truth from lies. -
Message 33
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
They sponsored Zionist gangs in Palestine...who fought against Brits...who fought against Nazis in Europe. Interesting comment by the OUN-UPA guy. You know, both OUN and UPA killed people fighting the Nazis too. But you haven't answered my question about Stakhov. Also, what colors do you use - they're not red and black, by any chance, are they?
-
Message 34
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
I'm afraid your paranoia is having the same effect on your output that it has on the psyche of the Zionist state.
It is destroying your ability to tell truth from lies. That's rich coming from a Marxist.
-
Message 35
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
where they were ( I mean the American Jews ) when Nazis wasted in dust their European brothers and sisters? Good question, by the way. But don't ask me - I'm neither a Jew, nor I had been an American back in the day.
-
Message 36
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
As I was saying to a friend this morning, such a passion for things that take one back to the Sixties..with the Palestinian situation being the new Vietnam. As then the impasse was based on the fact that Chinese support for one side balanced off US support for the other.
But also-in 1969 Bruno Bettelheim published "The Children of the Dream"..Back cover "The dream is the kibbutz, one of the most enduring modern attempts to create a Utopian human society. The children of the dream are the first generation to be born and reared on kibbutzim. Bruno Betteheim, a pioneer in the study of children's emotional development, spent months of intensive research at a kibbutz, visited others and interviewed a wide variety of people...."
It was an interesting study of how the idealism encouraged by Wilson's Fourteen Points impacted on the instabilities of the inter-war period. This applied especially to idea of a state for every nation and self-determination. Both encouraged hopes and aspirations that no-one was willing to back- not even the USA of which Wilson was the President: and the world still suffers from the aspirations of groups that like to play the part of nations- though lacking the political will and the economiic strength to live up to the international obligations and responsibilities of nationhood.
That probably applies in this case to both Israelis and Palestinians.. As it applied to the newly unified German and Italian nations that descended into obscene play-acting during that period when the Fourteen Points still cast a long and deep shadow over history.
Cass -
Message 37
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
All very interesting to some no doubt, but no excuse for the massacres of Sabra and Chatilla.
The state of Israel is now more in crisis than ever. Morally bankrupt and without any other credibility except as a nuclear power, it doesn't have much to look forward to unless it comes to terms with the modern world and realises that Bronze Age promises don't apply.
Many of Judaism's own fundamentalists condemn Zionism as an abomination of the Torah. And their interpretation is the only one which can result in peace.
-
Message 38
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
You may be on to something, Cass The dream is the kibbutz, one of the most enduring modern attempts to create a Utopian human society. I personally suspect that Marxists are so viscerally hateful toward the Zionists because Ben Gurion had fooled them, Stalin in particular. Granted, he was a socialist - not a thumbs up in my book, as you imagine - but he was smart enough to disarm and disperse Israeli Communists very early on for them to stir any trouble. And, of course, kibbutzim are predictably on life support, and it's probably time to pull the plug already.
-
Message 39
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Marxism and any sort of nationalism are not compatible. Look it up.
It's political, not 'visceral', whatever that's supposed to mean. -
Message 40
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Re: Message 15.
Suvorovetz,
it isn't because OUNUPA understands Russian and I a little bit that...
I think you meant this:
Kind regards,
Paul. -
Message 41
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Marxism and any sort of nationalism are not compatible...It's political, not 'visceral', whatever that's supposed to mean. Meaning, primitive and/or irrational, which is what at the end of the day Marxism is. But, of course, Marxists flirted with nationalist and all kinds of other movements all the time. When Stalin's enormous invasion army fell apart and virtually seized to exist in June - September of 1941, he threw the world revolution and comintern postulates out the window and appealed to the Russian nationalism. Later on, Brezhnev french-kissed Arab nationalists Nasser and Sadat. And now, of course, Marxists are in bed with Islamists. They always count on being the first to cut the other guy's throat, when the time is right. So far, it's been a mixed bag at best.
Look it up. What's with your reading comprehension? I've just told you that I've been looking this up more than you'd ever hope for. -
Message 42
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Paul Suvorovetz,it isn't because OUNUPA understands Russian and I a little bit that...
I think you meant this:
www.solonin.org/en
unfortunately, the piece I've been referring to on Solonin's site is not available in English. -
Message 43
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
This might sound naive, but it was a Lebanese militia killing people, so why is everyone desperate to condemn/excuse Israel whilst ignoring the Lebanese who actually carried out the atrocity?
-
Message 44
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 18th September 2010
Re: Message 42.
Suvorovetz,
you are right. Although it don't add to this thread I nevertheless did the research about Mark Solonin
From my former URL in my previous message
. :
Kind regards,
Paul. -
Message 45
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Sunday, 19th September 2010
Suv,
Before you went on your 'hunt for Marxists',
you somehow forgot to answer my question from my earlier post (19):
Did the Israeli Kahan commission of 1983 get it right when it said Ariel Sharon was "personally responsible " for the Sabra and Chatila massacres?
As I mentioned before, If you keep evading the question, I'll keep asking it.
Denial seems to be your forte. -
Message 46
Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Sunday, 19th September 2010
Cloudyj
This might sound naive
It does.
The IDF surrounded the camps and sent-in a gang of Christian proxy-killers to do their dirty work. They equipped them and prevented the Palestinians from escaping their killers
If a sadistic boy puts his pet rabbit and a stoat in a sack, do the parents punish the boy or the stoat when they find the rabbit dead? -
Message 47
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 19th September 2010
NOT A SERIOUS PROPOSAL
But a judgement of Solomon approach might consist of putting a time limit on sorting out this business of "the Holy Land" with the equivalent of Solomon's threat- i.e. nuke the whole area. It might reveal- as Solomon's judgement did whose motivations are based upon a genuine love for the place and not for themelves.
I suppose a less drastic approach was the way that the Irish American constituency that had been vital to the IRA declared that it would no longer support the armed struggle put pressure on the Republican movement. But that took the "special relationship" of Clinton and Blair, who, though regarded as a Thatcherite withdrew from a "Fortress Falklands" attitude to Ulster.
Is everybody aware of the marvellous Youth Orchestra initiative of Daniel Barenbohm?
Cass -
Message 48
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Sunday, 19th September 2010
Did the Israeli Kahan commission of 1983 get it right when it said Ariel Sharon was "personally responsible " for the Sabra and Chatila massacres? I don't know, but, as far as I know, Kahan was a Zionist himself, so I don’t see any reason for you to take his word for granted.
As I mentioned before, If you keep evading the question, I'll keep asking it. Obviously, you don't apply same strict demands to yourself. For you keep evading the ethnicity riddle you trapped yourself in with respect to comrade Pappe. -
Message 49
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Sunday, 19th September 2010
Suvorovetz,
you are right. Although it don't add to this thread I nevertheless did the research about Mark Solonin Yes, Paul, it's a bit off this very boring by now topic, so, I suggest to sample this piece of Solonin's work to appreciate how brilliant this guy is (one little draw down here is that his English web master seems a little sloppy and a few paragraphs have been posted twice in the same thread):
-
Message 50
Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Sunday, 19th September 2010
Oul'lela alam oul we sam'ma /Arab./ ( Tell the world and let them hear )
Di ahla forsa'shan negtama /Arab./ ( That's the best chance to gather )
We wettna fi lam'metna /Arab./( and our strength in our gathering )
Binheba ba'ad awi we benshagga /Arab./ ( we love each
other so much and cheer)
Tashgae'na egabii'aba /Arab./( our cheer is of course positive )
Tashgaa malyan bel'hob /Arab./ ( cheer full of love )
Haseen en'nena ahrar /Arab./ ( We feel we're free )
Sawa hanshagga mel'alb, habibi /Arab./( together we'll cheer from the heart, my darling )
Ta'raflak Hatla'eii helmak /Arab./ ( For your information know that you'll find your dream )
Oum meddi edak /Arab./( Give me your hand )
Shagga ba'alamak dah /Arab./ ( cheer with your flag )
Ba'alamak da..ba'alamak da /Arab,/( This flag..this flag )
When I get older I will be stronger
They'll call me freedom
Just like a wavin' flag...
So wave your flag..Now wave your flag !
Da mafeesh agmal mel lahazati /Arab./( There's nothing better then this moment )
In the streets our heads are liftin'.
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