Publiée le 16 sept. 2012 par TEDxYouth
Journalist for iloubnan.info on internet issues, Antoine Gregoire has a master in History, a master in War Studies and in his spare time he’s a reggae DJ and revolution writer and freedom researcher.
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On this day, 30 years ago, the soil of Lebanon was quenched with the blood of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese. It is said that chrysanthemums burst out of the earth at the place where martyrs’ blood flows. In the year 2012, however, no chrysanthemums are blooming in Sabra and Shatila. This bloody crime on the hands of the Israeli state, its US funder, its Lebanese proxy forces and the complicit Arab regimes that created the conditions for the massacre of 1982, is carefully skirted, quietly spun and wrapped in a cloak of silence. We are asked to forget our people or confuse the events surrounding their sudden disappearance; we are invited to debate these matters as a subject for narratives, disputes and counter narratives.
Palestinians were in Sabra and Shatila 30 years ago – and are in Shatila, in refugee camps throughout the Arab world, and around the world in exile and diaspora today – after being made refugees and forced from their homeland, Palestine, in 1948 in the Nakba which established the Zionist state through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Today, there are over 6 million Palestinian refugees. All of them have been denied their right to return to their homes and lands for over 64 years now, and yet have continued to struggle. The refugee camps have been incubators of Palestinian resistance, the core of our liberation movements, and a compass for our struggle – pointing towards liberation and towards return. Time and again, they have been subject to massacre, and time and again, they have remained the center of steadfastness and resistance.
Perhaps the chrysanthemums did not grow because they did not agree on the number of deaths amid the “conflicting” narratives and the exhumed mass graves that were quickly bulldozed over. Snipers were shooting at every possible witness who attempted to walk the streets or tried to search for a bottle of milk for a crying baby. Initial reports of the Lebanese Red Cross and Beirut hospitals tallied the death toll at 8,000. The US and European media report that the toll was no greater than 2,000 to 2,400. Israel seeks to evade its responsibility, saying that Lebanese forces committed the crimes. All in all about 4,500 Palestinian men, women, children and elderly were never accounted for after the records went missing. And all the while, US and Israeli officials obfuscated their role in the horror.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was meant to annihilate the Palestinian resistance movement once and for all. Led by Ariel Sharon as the minister of defense, Israel pounded Lebanon by land, sea and air murdering 40,000 people, the vast majority civilians, in a matter of few months. Like the previous Israeli massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese, the invasion was meant to psychologically defeat the will of a population to resist.
After the Palestine Liberation Organization agreed to a ceasefire and withdrawal of all armed fighters from Beirut, Israeli forces laid siege to Shatilla camp and the adjacent Sabra neighbourhood of Beirut and took over neighboring tall buildings as watchtowers, establishing checkpoints at all entrances and exits. On the morning of September 15th, 1982, a strict curfew was imposed and Israeli forces opened fire on all those who attempted to leave the camp. After coordination between military commanders and political leaders such as Sharon, Eitan, Habiqa, Dawri, Gemayel and Afram, Israeli forces shelled Shatila camp before their Lebanese proxies stormed the camps on the eve of September 16th, 1982 – as Israeli forces lit the sky with flares in order to aid their vision – and commenced brutal killing, rape and torture that lasted for 36 hours.
Men were lined up in front of walls and executed, then partially buried by bulldozers in an attempt to cover up the aftermath. Women shielding their children from the rain of bullets were found curled around the corpses of their offspring, sometimes with limbs protruding from the rubble.
Lebanese who heard the shooting and tried to enter the camp were militarily intercepted by the Israeli forces and in some cases murdered on site. Those who fled the blood bath were also intercepted by Israeli soldiers pleading ignorance. An amateur videographer documented an Israeli soldier telling a Palestinian family that he heard of no shooting but if the family would not return, they would start hearing it. He then proceeded to shoot close to their feet. This family returned to certain death.
Like Deir Yassin, Houla, Qibya, Bint Jbail, Nahr Al Bared, Jenin and Qana, Sabra and Shatilla was meant to hurt, demoralize and defeat. These events did not simply occur between a victimizer and a victim, nor were they an internal Arab matter. Sabra and Shatila is another of the long line of massacres committed by a pillaging occupier, an invader, a colonialist imposition against an indigenous population determined to resist, and who fought back against that invading force.
While Israel was attempting to expel resistance from the countries surrounding Palestine with military might, treaties and US-supported dictatorships, the fight was taken to the heart of Palestine. The invasion was followed by two uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza and today we witness a rising youth movement in the land occupied in 1948 confronting Zionist racism and genocidal practices. And all along, Palestinian refugees – in the camps in Palestine and the Arab world, in exile and diaspora everywhere – have kept their eyes and compass focused on return to Palestine and the full achievement of their liberation.
The Palestinian people continue to stand steadfast and see the accumulation of their continued resistance is isolating Israel internationally. A new global consensus is emerging calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions on the criminal state. Gaza may be under siege today, but the Palestinian people know that resilience will ultimately mean victory. This assertion is not a dream but it is built by the inspiration proven by the twice-liberated Southern Lebanon, the defeat of apartheid in South Africa, the wave of indigenous rule sweeping Latin America, the decolonization of the twentieth century and the brewing Arab revolutions of the twenty-first. We shall never forget nor forgive. The chrysanthemums shall return, as shall Palestine’s refugees, and a life of justice with return to Palestine is neither far nor near, but as Naji Al Ali stated, it is measured by the distance of the resistance.
The US Palestinian Community Network urges all chapters, members, supporters and our Palestinian and Arab communities and solidarity allies to act throughout September, to take this 30th anniversary and hold protests, educational events, meetings, and demonstrations about Palestinian refugees’ right to return.
These actions will remember the massacres at Sabra and Shatila – and the long history of massacres against the Palestinian people from 1948 to 2012 – and continue to inspire action to achieve justice for Palestine. Please contact us at uspcn@uspcn.org to inform USPCN about your right of return actions, meetings and demonstrations.
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There were three days of excellent Syrian films and on Sunday, which coincided with a day without cars, we had this solidarity chain that spread from Bozar to the European Parliament. In the morning we had a Round Table of utmost interest and quality. Father Paolo played an important role in mobilising our energies. He is the monk who renovated Mar Moussa and who has been expelled from Syria.
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A protestor at a Sydney march in support of the Syrian regime, August 2012 |GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty
By Jess Hill
How prominent commentators from the ‘anti-imperialist’ left have twisted the public discourse on Syria and, in the process, provided intellectual cover for the Assad regime.
Forget the ambitions of Syrians themselves — they’re just pawns in an international conspiracy.
“ He doesn’t kill his people. We’ve got militants in Syria. They’re terrorists.”
Demonstrators march in Sydney against foreign intervention in Syria, August 2012 |GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty
“ That is why they are asking the Crusaders to bomb them — because the Crusaders are asking their servants to ask them to bomb them.”
“ For Syrians who want dignity and democracy in a free country, the rapidly mushrooming dependence of their uprising on foreign support is a disaster — even more than was the case in Libya.”
President Assad in a rare public appearance in Damascus, January 2012 |STR/AFP/Getty
The moral of the Libyan story is that just because you fund a revolution, doesn’t mean you own it.
Journalist John Pilger in Kabul, Afghanistan |AAP Image/SBS
On no other topic have the ideologues been more ‘truthy’ than on the Houla massacre.
It was the first weekend of August, and on the highway leading out of Damascus, Syrian tanks rumbled northwards towards Aleppo. As 20,000 government troops mobilised outside the city, Syrian bomber jets shattered the shopping district of Salahedin, a rebel stronghold. Just metres away from the fighting, a Reuters reporter found a local couple, shaking with fear. “Just to hold power he is willing to destroy our streets, our homes, kill our sons,” cried Fawzia Um Ahmed as she waited for a car to take them to safety.
In Sydney that weekend the sun was out, and so were hundreds of Syrian Australians. In a rally organised by a group called ‘Hands off Syria’, they marched through the city, brandishing posters of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and signs that read, “Thank you Russia and China 4 Vetoes” and “Let the whole world hear: Syria is our Nation, Bashar is our Leader”.
“He’s a doctor, he studied in England,” ‘Naja’ told TruthNews in a broad Syrian-Australian accent, adding that President Assad had been ‘democratically elected’ by 75 per cent of Syrians. “He doesn’t kill his people. We’ve got militants in Syria. They’re terrorists.”
Flanked by cheering Assad supporters, Dr Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at Sydney University and a member of Hands Off Syria, made an impassioned speech in support of the Syrian president. “People in this country are very ignorant about what’s going on in Syria,” he began.
“That’s not a crime in itself. But what is unacceptable is the unethical use of this ignorance… Those people saying Assad must go, they have no ethical basis to make that sort of claim,” he continued, cheered by the crowd. To this, he added: “They haven’t
understood that it’s the foundation of the post-colonial era… that a people have a right to self-determination.”
Hang on a minute. Isn’t the Syrian opposition fighting the Assad regime for its right to self-determination?
Don’t try to make sense of this logically; think ideologically.
Anderson is among the ideologues who believe there is no greater enemy than American imperialism. That means the Syrian uprising poses a grave threat to the ‘Axis of Resistance’ — Iran, Syria and Hezbollah — which, according to them, is the only force blocking America’s imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. If Assad falls, they believe it is America, Israel and Saudi Arabia that have the most to gain.
This ideological war is being fought at varying levels of sophistication by leftists with far greater influence than Dr Anderson, such as The Guardian’s associate editor and columnist Seumas Milne, award-winning journalist John Pilger, military historian and intellectual Tariq Ali and British MP George Galloway.
At first glance, it might seem indulgent to slip from reporting on the facts, to reporting on the reportage. Many of us would like to ignore these commentators. Increasingly, however, journalists reporting from Syria are
being driven to despair as their reporting is dismissed as propaganda by anti-imperialist ideologues who claim to know ‘the truth’. Many Syrians I’ve spoken to are also aware that their fate is connected to how the conflict is reported.
Using tactics that vary from the overt to the insidious, these ideologues are willfully twisting the narrative on Syria to score points against the ‘imperialist West’. In the process, they are excusing and providing intellectual cover for the Assad regime. What’s worse, their ‘truth’ is filtering into the mainstream, with many in the public convinced that the conflict in Syria is now little more than a proxy war between the world’s great powers.
This is not to say that hawks who are cheering for intervention in Syria aren’t guilty of peddling their own kind of propaganda — they are. But right-wing hawks don’t typically claim to be champions of the oppressed. Those mentioned above do, and in the same breath, happily undermine a civilian-led uprising against a remorseless dictator, all because said dictator is (on paper, at least) opposed to
Israel and the United States.
“It’s a dreadful moral and political capitulation,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. “It surrenders all other leftist values to a reductive, hyper-simplistic, anti-Western stance which makes all regimes opposed by the West worthy of support by default… That means supporting fascist right-wingers, as long as they have the right enemies.”
Syria has been one of the hardest conflicts in living memory to report on, largely because of the extreme restrictions imposed by the Assad regime. Earlier this year, I wrote about how these restrictions were making it immensely difficult for reporters to sort fact from propaganda, and how important it was that we maintain a critical eye on both sides (‘Syria’s Propaganda War’, April 12).
Now the fog of the Syrian war is providing cover for conspiracy theories which are published as fact with increasing frequency.
Here in Beirut, the worst offenders in this category write for the leftist Hezbollah-friendly newspaper, Al Akhbar. In his scathing letter of farewell to the paper, former columnist Max Blumenthal decried its opinion pages as “a playpen for dictator enablers”.
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The Syrian government has has tried with great determination and dexterity to fragment the society and to exploit sectarian differences and class differences to prevent the emergence of a secular nonsectarian nationalist opposition. Michael Provence is the director of the Middle East Studies Programs at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the colonial and post-colonial Arab world, particularly popular insurgency and nationalism, and he has travelled and lived in many countries in the region including Lebanon and Syria.
Says OTW from Walls : I received the following letter sent from a dear expat friend of mine to her niece in Syria with a request to share it. In fact, this letter could have been sent from me to some of my own relatives by simply replacing “your aunt” with “your uncle, or you cousin“
To my niece with love
Dear niece.
You are my niece and I love you and will always do. I am going to explain to you my view point. Syria has been ruled by the Assads for over 40 years. I lived under their rule as a little girl all the way up to starting a business and working at the university and for Syrian TV, thus, I really do not need anyone to explain to me what the Syrian regime is all about. I left the country 20 years ago and went back almost every year to visit. I watched Syria falling slowly into the abyss. I could see it very clearly coming from outside the country, while people inside the country were completely oblivious. They genuinely believed that Syria was getting better and moving forward, while in reality it was inching backwards. They thought that having the Internet and being allowed on limited web sites was the ultimate achievement. They figured that having some private schools meant progress in education, but they truly had no clue what progress meant or required. As time went by, the few institutions that we had in Syria were slowly disappearing under the pressure of corruption and nepotism. Syria was no longer ruled by a government, it was ruled by a mafia. You could get anything and everything done if you knew the right person, businesses could only operate if they partnered up with the right people and law and order was completely based on fear and torture. This type of government was not sustainable. The people in Syria were either becoming filthy rich or dirt poor, the middle class slowly, but surly disappeared and young people could neither find jobs nor hope for a better future. In summary, the Assads could write the book on how to destroy a nation. Today, the people said enough is enough. They watched other Arab countries get rid of their dictators and decided that it is now or never. I was not born yesterday; I know that the FSA is committing some atrocities. I know that the CIA and the MI 5 and others are roaming free in Syria. I realize that some Jihadi elements are there too, but this, to me, is the natural result of what the Assad regime did and continues to do. Forty years of persecution of free thought and speech. Forty years of the outlawing of free assembly. With that in mind, I do not understand how anyone can expect a unified opposition of any sort. We have literally not talked to each other in forty some years. How are we going to immediately make the connection and understand each other?. This is beyond normal human abilities. The demonstrations started as purely peaceful demonstrations. The regime opened fire on them killing droves of people. Yet they continued and persevered. Giath Matar, from Daraya, organized residents to meet the army with roses and bottles of water. He was arrested and tortured to death. The regime said that they are open to talk to the opposition. Every single person who showed up to those meetings was either arrested, killed or fled the country after continuous molestation. I can go on and on, but you get the picture. I spent 5 days with your father when he came to visit me. I know exactly how he feels about this whole thing. He was one of the lucky ones who had a good life that is now destroyed. He is worried about the future and rightly so. We are all worried and are under no illusions that this will take many years to stabilize. From his perspective: he was doing well and living well and he did not need this disruption at this stage in his life. I do not blame him. I would have probably felt the same way, had I been through the same experience, but the life of a nation and 23 million people cannot be decided by individual interests. It has to be decided by the will of the majority. I am an ardent supporter of this revolution and of the Free Syrian Army. I cannot wait for the bastard-in-chief to go. I want Syria to have a chance in becoming a nation of institutions. A nation where people can thrive because of their abilities, not their connections. Please remember that this regime that you are supporting is bombing Halab with planes that we, the people, paid for. They do not really care about anyone except themselves. He wants to keep his power period. They hit hospitals by tanks with straight aims. Wake up and open your eyes. This is no longer a plain and simple “difference of opinion”. At this point, you are either with the murderer or with the victim you cannot even choose to be in-between.
Your loving aunt….
Qunfuz
Robin Yassin-Kassab
“Is the Prophet who is being insulted in Syria not the same Prophet who is being insulted in America?”
This video is not suitable for children nor for those of a nervous disposition. I include myself in the latter category. At first I couldn’t watch it, then I made myself do so in order to hear the words. Before the usual “Freedom? You want freedom?” the torturee is forced to declare that Bashaar al-Asad is his ‘lord’ (the Arabic word ‘rabb’, which means God). The violent (but very small) protests which have swept the Muslim world in response to a ridiculous low-budget smear of the Prophet Muhammad are in part the expression of a deeply humiliated people who remember Western support of Zionism and Muslim dictatorships, Western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. They are in part the result of the failure of Arab and Muslim dictatorships to build functioning education systems, and a symptom of a profound and generalised despair that requires wounded symbols through which to manifest itself.
Most importantly, they are signals of an opportunistic power play by the extreme right-wing Salafist minority. It’s a case of extreme right-wing Islamophobes, Zionists, Coptic extremists and American Republicans on the one hand and extreme right-wing Islamists on the other, feeding off each other. The furore has made the ridiculous anti-Islam film a Youtube hit. Nobody would have heard of it had Egyptian Islamists not publicised it, and had the American ambassador to Libya, apparently a friend of the Arabs who was critical of US policy on Palestine, not been murdered. As with all the episodes in the ‘culture wars’, it’s an enormous diversion from the really serious issues.
The torture video here was first pointed out by the Syrian activist Wissam Tarif. He asked a simple question. Where are the furious demonstrations against this blasphemy? Why have no Syrian embassies been burnt following the repeated bombing of mosques and churches, the murder, rape, torture and humiliation of tens of thousands of Syrian Muslims?
Here are some Syrian responses to the mess. Here’s Libyan novelist Hisham Matar on the violence in Benghazi. Here’s Matt Duss on the Islamophobic entertainment industry. And here’s Hamid Dabashi drawing lessons from the Iranian revolution. (The Syrian regime, meanwhile, organised its own small demonstration against the film. These people have been taking chutzpah lessons from Zionism).
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