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Israel, Burma and Sanctions Questio



Subject: Re: Israel, Burma and Sanctions Question 

from Paris, Dawn Star, for your interest...

SL8JS@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> There should be a call for economic sanctions against Israel, the last apartheid state in the world.  This nation supported the Apartheid 
government in South A
There should be a call for economic sanctions against Israel, the last 
apartheid state in the world.  This nation supported the Apartheid 
government in South Africa. Zionism is a racial doctrine.

Mustafa Tell wrote:
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 13:13:34 -0400
> From: MIDDLEEAST@xxxxxxx
> To: MIDDLEEAST@xxxxxxx
> Subject: EYEWITNESS TO MASSACRE, 2 Articles by Robert Fisk - MER Special
> 
> M I D - E A S T    R E A L I T I E S   -   S P E C I A L
> 
> [To receive MER regularly please send a message to
> MIDDLEEAST@xxxxxxx with the words "Send MER".
> 
> **********************************************************
> 
> The American media is so "inadequate" to say the least, when it comes
> to the Middle East.  Below, excerpts from two articles by Robert Fisk
> published in THE INDEPENDENT in London:
> 
>                 MASSACRE IN SANCTUARY; EYEWITNESS
> 
>                         By Robert Fisk
>                         The Independent 4/19/96, page 1
> 
> Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and
> Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese
> refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms
> or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a
> hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had
> scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter,
> believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the
> Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
> 
>     In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion
> headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey-
> haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse
> back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same
> words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier
> stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft
> the body of a headless child.
> 
>     "The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area,"
> a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank
> them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of
> the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof
> had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of
> my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
> 
>     Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day
> offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious,
> that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the
> ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day
> before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four
> days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a
> family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli
> helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.
> 
>     Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250
> metres from a UN convoy on which I was travelling, blasting a house
> 30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut
> to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last
> night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on
> the river bridge north of Sidon.
> 
>     Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and
> Chatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982
> doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by
> the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where
> the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine.
> 
>     The Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres may now wish to end this
> war.  But the Hizbollah are not likely to let him. Israel is back in
> the Lebanese quagmire.  Nor will the Arab world forget yesterday'a
> terrible scenes.
> 
>     The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams
> from the shell-smashed UN compound restaurant in which the Shiite
> Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon - who had heeded
> Israel's order to leave their homes - had pathetically sought
> shelter. Fijian and French soldiers heaved another group of dead -
> they lay with their arms tightly wrapped around each other - into
> blankets.
> 
>     A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag
> in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms.
> 
>     And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst
> into the compound. They had driven in wild convoys down from Tyre
> and began to pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their
> mothers and sons and daughters and to shriek "Allahu Akbar" (God is
> Great") and to threaten the UN troops.
> 
>     We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but
> Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom. One
> bearded man with fierce eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury.
> "You are Americans," he screamed at us. "Americans are dogs. You did
> this. Americans are dogs."
> 
>     President Bill Clinton has allied himself with Israel in its war
> against "terrorism" and the Lebanese, in their grief, had not
> forgotten this.  Israel's official expression of sorrow was rubbing
> salt in their wounds.  "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow
> myself up amid the Israelis," one old man said.
> 
>     As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that
> Israelis will pay for their killing of Lebanese civilians, its
> revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then
> turn out then to be all too aptly named.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>                 REALITY BITES FOR PR MEN AT QANA
> 
>                         By Robert Fisk
>                         The Independent' - 4/22/96
> 
> Qana, Southern Lebanon
> 
> Herve de Charette's face was as white as death.  The French Foreign
> Minister, neatly clad in blue suit and tie, had gingerly walked through the
> scene of last week's massacre at the UN's compound, nodding diplomatically
> as the UN's Fijian commander described the 12 minutes in which Israeli
> shells slaughtered up to 120 refugees, the sliced-up corpses that his
> soldiers were forced to pick up, the difficulty in identifying parts of the
> children who had been torn to pieces.  Mr de Charette listened with
> distaste.  But then he was confronted by a survivor.
> 
> Fawzaya Zrir, a small, frail woman in a scarf, simply walked up to the
> French Foreign Minister and began talking to him with an odd mixture of
> affection and anger.  "For us, France is our mother and God is our father,"
> she said in a flight of rhetoric that might have been written by the Quai
> d'Orsay public relations men, who beamed happily at this fortunate encounter.
> 
> Then things began to go wrong.  "We have lived through hell," Mrs Zrir
> continued.  "The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs.  They
> bleed, these people.  You should have seen the heads."
> 
> At the French foreign minister's right, a Lebanese softly translated the
> woman's dreadful words.  The PR men began to look uneasy.  "We have lived
> here 40 years and now we are treated like animals," the woman cried.  "Do
> you know what the dogs did at night after the killings?  They were hungry
> and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people."
> 
> Mr de Charette stared at her as if he had seen a ghost.  This had clearly
> not been part of the programme, a schedule that was supposed to have whisked
> the foreign minister from a light lunch at UN headquarters in Naqqoura to a
> photo-opportunity on the roof of the wrecked UN battalion HQ, a
> three-minutes press conference to give the impression of openness and a
> swift drive back to the coast and a helicopter to Beirut - everything, in
> fact, that would enhance France's much-trumpeted love for Lebanon.  Reality
> had very definitely not been part of the programme.
> 
> A UN soldier was quite blunt about it.  "This place is going to be turned
> into one of those awful pilgrimage sites for the great and the good," he
> muttered.  "Boutros-Ghali sent his emissaries today to express their horror.
> But they'll do no more than they did after Srebrenica.  They'll tut-tut and
> shrug it off.  and they wont even have the guts to condemn Israel even now
> - for this wickedness."
> 
> And indeed, the UN Secretary-General did send General Frank Van Kappen of
> the Netherlands army - not, perhaps, a happy choice after the Dutch army's
> disgrace at Srebrenica and he duly marched round the site of the worst
> carnage, asking how many rounds landed, where the Katyusha missiles were
> fired from and whether he could be shown this site to discover if any
> Israeli shells bad fallen there.
> 
> He would be meeting with General Amnon lipkin Shahak, the Israeli chief of
> staff, he said.
> Yes, he would be asking to meet the soldiers who fired the fatal artillery
> rounds - "fat chance of that," another UN soldier said as he listened to all
> this - and with that, Van Kappen, an immense figure in his steel flak jacket
> and huge helmet clanked out of the compound with a colonel from the Royal
> Engineers.
> 
> Mr de Charette was even more gentle of spirit.  What had happened on
> Thursday was 'unfortunate", an event for which France wished to show its
> sympathy for the Lebanese.  So how did it rank in the scale of civilian
> atrocities?  How did it rank, for example, beside the Sarajevo market
> massacre?
> 
> "Frankly," the Foreign Minister replied sharply, "I have not had an
> opportunity to make categories of unhappiness we have to work to do is to
> make it impossible for this to happen in the future in Lebanon."  And so say
> all of us. Did he believe Israel had given sufficient explanation of the
> massacre?  "I hear there is an inquiry we have to await the result."
> 
> The problem, however is  that neither America nor Europe are going to
> condemn a country which pounded refugees of Qana with 155mm shells for 12
> minutes; and such condemnation is about the only palliative that the
> Lebanese might accept for the moment.
> And you can see their point.  On the coast road back to Beirut last night
> there were burning cars, civilians deliberately targeted by Israeli warships
> north of Sidon, three of whom had been badly wounded.  Had this being a
> Syrian warship shelling Israeli civilians on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road, of
> course, Mr Clinton himself would have deplored -rightly- an act of
> "international terrorism".  But not a word of criticism about this
> scandalous targeting of Lebanese civilians was uttered by the foreign
> ministers of America, Russia, France and Italy as they sought to bring an
> end to an apparently unstoppable war.
> 
>  **********************************************************
> 
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