Twain's Ghost

The spirit of Samuel Clemens, harsh critic of US
imperialism, is, so to speak, alive and well. I hopes to channel it as
frequently as possible. I'll toss in a few other things as well. Like capitalism
and authoritarianism and maybe something about religion once in awhile. You
know, all the socially-unacceptable, politically-incorrect topics. Oh, and my
name is Ron Leighton. I'll be your blogger.

Your Brains Are Already Washed ~ Get 'em Dirty
Again!

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«
Israeli Hints At Preparation To Stop Iran | Main

Sunday, January 22, 2006

The CAMERA Never Lies

Unless it is the pro-Israel 'Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reports in America'

CAMERA paints false picture of Ariel Sharon’s massacre responsibility and
Israeli history even as it notices Christopher Hitchens’ hypocrisy.

It is important to note that accuracy is not the aim of the Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reports in America (CAMERA). In its latest
'CAMERA ALERT' (January 10, 2006), CAMERA promotes the long-discredited
notion that Ariel Sharon, and Israel in general, bears no responsibility for the
September 1982 massacres in the Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila, and attacks a recent piece at Slate by Christopher
Hitchens.

To support this notion, the writer Ricki Hollander plays a silly game with
facts. She states (emphasis mine):  "Yes, there was a massacre in the
Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, but these were not carried out
by Israeli soldiers.  Christian Phalangist militia men under Elie Hobeika,
operating in territory controlled by Israel, were responsible for the
attack."  The first problem with this is the fact that no one, starting
with the focus of Hollander's and CAMERA's wrath, Christopher Hitchens, has said
Israeli soldiers took direct part in the massacre. The second problem is that
she leaves out something when she admits that the Phalangists (Lebanese Christian
fascists modeled on the Spanish Falangists) were "operating in territory
controlled by Israel." Not only were they operating in territory controlled by
Israel, damning enough as this is, they were also given access to the refugee
camps by Sharon, whose troops had encircled the camps earlier. Not only that,
according to the BBC documentary, 'The
Accused', Ariel Sharon didn’t want the Israeli troops to enter the camps,
that he specifically sent the Lebanese militia into the camps. And, asks the BBC
narrator, Fergal Keanne, "Could Ariel Sharon have been in any doubt about what
would have happened if you sent the Phalangists into a Palestinian refugee camp,
an undefended camp?" Of course, the likely reason Sharon didn't want Israelis to
enter the camps is that he and troops under his command had been caught
massacring civilians twice in the past, at El-Bureig in August 1953 and at
Qibya, Jordanian-occupied West Bank in October 1953.  Better to merely
facilitate their Christian fascist allies to do the killing.

Hollander cites the Kahan Commission report, an Israeli government commission
report that essentially exonerated Sharon and Israel. Unlike Hitchens, Hollander
doesn't mention that Noam Chomsky has written a, as Hitchens put it, "mordantly
brilliant critique" of that report, which has been called a cover-up and part of
which remains secret. But, the Kahan report nevertheless found the following (as
quoted and annotated in the Counterpunch article, 'The Crimes of Ariel Sharon',
published as he rose to the peak of Israeli government power in early 2001):

"It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of
Defense [Sharon] for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have
been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed
by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having
failed [i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into
account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. 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".

Hollander apparently cannot refute Chomsky’s argument against that report as
a wrist-slapping for Sharon, so she does the worst but most effective thing
possible: she defames Chomsky. She refers to Chomsky and another Jewish critic
of Israel, Israel Shahak as "rabidly anti-Zionist extremists." (It is worth
noting, and a bit amusing, that while Hitchens does not even mention Israel
Shahak, Hollander does. Look into Israel Shahak’s critiques of Israel and
Zionism. They are, like Chomsky's, devastating and I imagine Hollander may be
end up being sorry she mentioned him. A eulogy for him was
published in The Nation by none of than Christopher Hitchens.)

Hollander also disputes Hitchens' (accurate) depiction of Sharon's role in
the destruction of the Palestinian village of Qibya in 1953. The West Bank town
had in fact been a refuge of Palestinian fighters  (always "terrorists" in
Zionist-CAMERA parlance) much like Tel Aviv is a refuge of Israeli fighters! But
what the Israelis under Sharon's direct command did was akin to what the Nazis
did in the Czechoslovak town of Lidice in 1942, a comparison made long before I
made it just now. After the death of high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich at
the hand of Czech fighters (or "terrorists", as the
Nazis put it), the Nazis leveled the town, killing everyone. In the case of
Qibya, the killing of three Israeli civilians by unknown infiltrators led to the
slaughter of some 67 Arab civilians, the making of a couple thousand refugees
and the total destruction of the town. This imbalance of death has always
characterized the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.

Let me deal with the remainder of Hollander's claims paragraph by
paragraph:

"Rather than providing hard facts, the author fills his column with
innuendo and false comparisons.  Leaving out all context, he describes
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon as "being one of the most disastrous as well
as the most gruesome operations in recent history," with the implication that
the invasion was an unprovoked, brutal attack led by Ariel Sharon."

Menachem Begin, like Sharon, a long-standing
Zionist terrorist, and who was the Prime Minister of Israel in 1982 when
Sharon was the Minister of Defense, referred to the invasion of Lebanon as a
"war of choice", which implies that it was more than a mere reaction to
provocation, and that Israel in fact started the war (as it did the wars of 1956
and 1967, according to
Begin. The invasion of Lebanon involved much more than attacking PLO
fighters near the border, which were often responding to Israeli attacks (see
Noam Chomsky’s book Fateful
Triangle). It was a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. So it was
unprovoked given its scope as well as due to Begin’s admission. It was also
brutal. It involved the
slaughter of 20,000 people at the hands of the Israelis, including the
facilitation by the Israelis of the previously mentioned massacres at Sabra and
Shatila. Disputing the invasion’s brutality is ridiculous. And Sharon was the
civilian commander, ranking just below Begin, in charge of the invasion. So it
is also ridiculous to dispute that he led the invasion.

"But this is wrong. The PLO, with a multi-thousand man army, had taken
over southern Lebanon and terrorized Lebanese of all faiths, as well as
shelling northern Israeli communities, and carrying out cross-border attacks
against Israeli civilians. Israel's decision to invade Lebanon was made in an
attempt to stop the Palestinian terrorism emanating from that
territory."

The Palestinians, including the PLO fighters in southern Lebanon in 1982 were
refugees from their own homeland, now occupied by the Zionist Israelis. To
object to or be surprised by their attacks on Israel as unjust is to object to
and be surprised by all rightful anger. But it remains the case that it was
Israeli behavior that was provocative, in keeping with their behavior in other
"wars of choice".

Also, the Palestinians did not exactly "take over" southern Lebanon, they fled there (as well as
to Syria and Jordan) after the 1948 war, after being chased at gun-point from
their homes in what became Israel. (The Lebanese government mistreated them,
much as Palestinians are mistreated in Israel, but such mistreatment is no
excuse for Israeli mistreatment, as it seems often to be used.)

Palestinian "attacks on Lebanese of all faiths" is Zionist spin for their
battles with the Israeli-aligned fascist Lebanese Christian militia, the
Phalange; the same group that, with Israeli help, butchered thousands of
Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. There have been
many acts of terrorism in the long war between Palestinians and the Israeli
Zionist occupiers. There is no doubt that horrible things have been done in the
name of the Palestinian cause. But they do not compare to the horrors that have
been committed in the name of the Israeli cause. The Palestinians have always
suffered the most. Compounding the fact they have been shoved off their own
lands. For the core fact remains: Israel/Palestine is the homeland of
Palestinians and they have been ethnically cleansed from their land. That is the
only reason for the long dispute even if other Arab governments use the matter
for their own ends!

"For example, PLO terrorists from July 1981 and June 1982 killed 15 and
wounded 250 in Israel, the West Bank, and overseas. Aborted or disrupted plans
included a rocket attack on Eilat, blowing up buses and phone booths, and an
attempt to explode a kindergarten near Tel Aviv. In March 1982, Israeli
offices in Paris and Athens were attacked, and on April 3, PLO terrorists
murdered an Israeli embassy official in Paris.  The final provocation was
the attempted assassination of  Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to
Britain by Palestinian terrorists."

Recall Hollander’s insistence on the importance of context? Well, in the time
in takes her to write two of her own paragraphs, she forgets context, perhaps
realizing how it would hurt her argument. She mentions the attempted
assassination of Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov in London and the fact that 15
Israelis were killed and 250 wounded in the year before the invasion.

First of all, the attack on the Israeli diplomat in Paris was not carried out
by the PLO. It was carried out by The Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction
(LARF) (as
stated at the Israel website of the Institute of Counter-Terrorism, which
also says the Israeli official, Yaacov Barsimantov, was injured, not murdered in
the attack). The LARF   "grew out of the grew out of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations Group
(PFLP-SOG)", an enemy of the PLO. This latter group is often
(intentionally?) confused with the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Special
Operations Group was never part
of the PLO.

Second of all,  the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov in London is
also not tied to PLO.  The attack on Argov was the
work of an enemy of the PLO, the Abu Nidal Organization, a frequent
murderer of PLO officials. It is important to note that The Abu Nidal group,
in seeming irony, has been tied
to the Israeli government (false
flag operations being a frequent tool of the Israelis)!!

The attempted assassination Argov in London and the other Israeli diplomat in
Paris (both carried out by fringe enemies of the PLO) was used as an excuse to
bomb the Palestinians in Lebanon. The PLO then responded with rocket attacks
across the border into Israel. The Israelis then used this as the excuse to
launch its “war of choice” aggression against Lebanon and the Palestinian
refugees living there which caused the deaths of 20,000 – considerably more than
the 15 Israelis Hollander mentions.

And to reiterate on the matter of accuracy: Twice Hollander managed to
attribute (if in the second case, vaguely) to the popular PLO the actions of
minor groups not affiliated and often violently opposed to it!

"And the "gruesome" nature of the violence was due to the fact "the PLO
had become permeated with thugs and adventurers" (Washington Post, June 25,
1982), with numerous Lebanese telling of rape, mutilation and murders
committed by PLO forces.  For example, Palestinians and Lebanese leftists
destroyed the city of Damour and massacred hundreds of its inhabitants.
According to then- New York Times correspondent David Shipler, the PLO had
turned the town into a military base, "using its churches as strongholds and
armories" (New York Times, June 21, 1982)."

Gruesome crimes by some PLO members do not explain Israeli atrocities against
both Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. The attack against Damour was a real
crime, and an inexcusable one. But again, context tells a fuller story. The
Damour massacre came after a massacre two days
earlier of 1000 Palestinians at the town Karantina at the hands of fascist
Lebanese Christian Phalangists. That Hollander offers the massacres at Damour
(devoid of context) as a counterpoint to Israeli brutality and
massacres suggests she does not give a crap about such atrocities but only that
she wants to deflect attention from Israeli or Israeli supported atrocities.
This hardly serves as a convincing defense of Ariel Sharon’s humanity.

"Similarly Hitchens leaves out facts and context to portray Ariel Sharon's
military actions in the 1956 Suez campaign as a "lawless attack"and his
counter-terrorism operations in Gaza as "brutal enforce[ment] of occupation,"
suggesting that Israel has no right to defend itself or its citizens."

The factually and contextually challenged Hollander has some nerve. Recall
that Menachem Begin admitted Israel chose to start the 1956 war, thus it was
hardly a case of self-defense. It was a war of aggression, not a war of
"self-defense", carried out following a then secret British, French and Israeli
agreement that Israeli should attack with their support (Britain and France were
smarting over Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal). Ariel Sharon’s
actions in that war of aggression were considered questionable even by the
Israeli government at the time! I am not familiar with Sharon's actions in Gaza
in the period after 1967, but frankly I doubt they were qualitatively different
than the actions that characterized the remainder of his military and political
life.

"Hitchens also inaccurately describes an Israeli "status quo of mingled
apartheid and colonization," parroting Palestinian and leftist propagandists,
but offering no examples or substantiation of this false allegation.  In
fact, 23% of the country is non-Jewish, mainly Arab Muslims and Christians,
and they are the freest Arabs of the Middle East, with members of these
communities serving in the Israeli parliament, the armed forces, and the
Supreme Court. The term "colonization" (which implies an alien community
established in foreign territory by an imperial power) also certainly doesn't
apply to Israel's presence on the land of the Jews' ancient kingdom in the
disputed territory."

It should be pointed out that Israeli apartheid has been called as much by
those who suffered under the South African version of it, including Jewish and
Christian South Africans, and thus recognize it for what it is.  As for
colonization, Israel is clearly a colonized land. The Jewish inhabitants of
Israel came from somewhere else to settle in land taken from the Palestinians or
descend from people who did in the last fifty years. This is colonization, if
words mean anything. Ancient ownership means nothing.

The author describes Sharon's "conversion" as exemplified by his
willingness to accept a Palestinian state as "one of the better ironies of
history."  But the real irony is that while Hitchens' own conversion is
exemplified by loudly defending the U.S. war on terrorism – ["the important
thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious.
The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt
to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part" (from
an interview with Front Page Magazine)] - he does not feel that Israel shares
this right to defend itself and confront terrorism.  When it comes to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hitchens reverts to his past.  As he told
Jamie Glazov in the Front Page interview: "One of the advantages of a Marxist
and internationalist training is that it exposes one to the early writings of
those Jewish cosmopolitans who warned from the first day that Zionism would be
a false Messiah for the Jews and an injustice to the Arabs.

Here, Hollander is on firmer ground against Hitchens, even if the argument
reverts to an unfavorable place upon serious consideration. Yes, Hitchens is
inconsistent in that he has become an excuse-maker for American atrocities such
as the war in Iraq even as he remembers his better self in attacking Sharon and
Israel for theirs. But that hardly means he is wrong about Sharon and Israel.
I’ll let Hitchens' words to Jamie Glazov stand as the best and truest thing he
said in that interview.

The question is why Slate -- knowing Hitchens' anti-Zionist views --
considered it appropriate for him to "eulogize" Sharon?

Salon didn’t choose Hitchens to eulogize Sharon. Hitchens, in his weekly
column, chose to write about Sharon. Duh.

In fact, Hitchens does offer a “good word” (eulogy) about Sharon in the sense
that he mentions that Sharon, of all people, may have finally come to realize
both the immorality of the Israeli occupation and the futility of Zionist dreams
of a great Israeli Reich stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates:

"Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest";
in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried
more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts
it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if
he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.) Thus, when
Ariel Sharon—the Arik who had been the hero of the settlers and of those who
believed in "transfer" or expulsion—announced that "occupation" was the only
word to describe the situation in the territories, the shock was quite
something. When he added that the idea of Eretz Israel Ha'shlema—the
"complete" land of Israel—was in fact a demographic impossibility, the shock
was even greater. Together with his colleague and possible successor, Acting
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he publicly told the old Zionist hard-liners that
the expansionist dream of Vladimir Jabotinsky was one that would have to be
abandoned. He must have been aware of the ideological danger here, because he
had always been the first to say that any challenge to the right of settlement
anywhere was implicitly a challenge to the legitimacy of the state itself. It
didn't cost him too much to let Sinai go—for some odd reason, the meeting
place of Moses and his maker isn't included in the God-given territories—but
any retreat on the West Bank or Gaza would have been a challenge to his core
beliefs."

I am sure Hollander and other Zionist extremists are very careful in their
eulogies to the Butcher of Beirut to leave out such discomforting insights from
their hero.

Thus is the quality of all pro-Zionist extremists’ arguments.

(See also Confessions
of a newly-minted Zionist apologist )

Posted by Ron Leighton on Sunday,
January 22, 2006 at 05:13 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink

Comments

A very illuminating and well
reasoned post, Ron.
Footnote:
Nobel
Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg that said, "religion is an insult to
human dignity: without it you'd have good people doing good things and evil
people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things it takes
religion."

Posted by: Peter | Sunday,
January 22, 2006 at 06:42 PM

Thanks Peter.

And that is a very insightful thing Steven Weinberg said. I am glad to know
of it now and disappointed that I hadn't heard of it before!

Thanks for that too.

Posted by: Ron Leighton | Sunday,
January 22, 2006 at 06:56 PM

Yeah. It's one of those quotes that has to have been
staring one in the
face...
then you see it.

My blinder is civility and
deference: I work with all
types (union
electrician) and
among them are a few who've
clearly benefitted -- by
their account, and I've no
reason to think otherwise -- from their
Christian
transformation. Needless
to say, sharing the "insult
to human
dignity" part has
its limitations!

Posted by: Peter | Sunday,
January 22, 2006 at 08:06 PM

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