Militia boasts of role in Sabra massacre

[Englander]

Inigo Gilmore in Beirut
Sunday October 30, 2005
The Observer

It was one of the most shocking massacres to scar the Middle East, the slaying of more than 2,000 Palestinians by Christian militiamen in the wretched Lebanese refugee camps.

Now a film has returned to the story of Sabra and Shatila. But for the first time it has told the story of the slaughter through the voices of the killers. In Massaker, six former Christian Phalange militiamen tell of their training by Israeli allies and recount the events of 16-18 September, 1982, when hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children were killed in the Beirut camps.

Although the identities of the men are disguised in the 90-minute documentary, they make no attempt to hide the gruesome details of the massacre, with some boasting about their killing skills with AK-47 assault rifles and butchers' knives.

Several parts of the film assault the viewers' senses, including one where a man describes how another militiaman, a butcher, took pleasure in carving up his victims. Another recalls how even the wails of old Palestinian women 'left them cold' as they systematically moved into the camps, tossed grenades into houses and sprayed rooms with gunfire, killing at close range.

More at;
The Observer/Guardian Unlimited


________________________________

Swissfilms;

"Massaker"

Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen

Between September 16 and 18, 1982, for two nights and three days, the killers of Sabra and Shatila went about their heinous crimes. In the end, they had murdered between 1,000 and 3,000 Palestinian civilians, predominantly women, children and old people. The precise number of victims – both those killed and those missing – is not known to this very day. The perpetrators primarily originated from the ranks of the Forces Libanaises, Christian militia affiliated to Israel. The logistics for this massacre were provided by the Israeli Army, under the auspices of the former Minister of Defence and current Minister President, Ariel Sharon. In 1982, the massacre in the Lebanese Palestinian camps deeply shook the public throughout the world, but today it has been (almost) entirely forgotten. This is despite the fact that it is a role model for all the massacres that followed: for example that in Rwanda or those committed during the Yugoslavian wars. Again and again, the unanswered questions surface: what drives people to such excesses of brutality, and how are the perpetrators able to live on? Massaker is – both in contents and aesthetically – a psycho-political study of six perpetrators, who participated in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila both on orders and on their own personal initiative. The film intertwines the mental dispositions of the killers with their political environment and broaches the phenomenon of collective violence through their accounts.

SwissFilms

[acmavm]

1. One of the truly evil and bloodthirsty monsters of our time (and any

other):

<snip>
...under the auspices of the former Minister of Defence and current Minister President, Ariel Sharon.
<snip>

Over 60 years of killing. The old butcher must feel proud of himself.
He's every bit as evil as any other mass murderer that you can think of.

[newyorican]

9. As I stated in a previous thread...

Sharon (& by extension the IDF) were following Halakhah precepts...

[Jim Sagle]

2. "When goyim kill other goyim, they come to hang the Jews".

-- Menachim Begin.

Same as it ever was - even on a site whose members are "progressive" enough to know better.

[Coastie for Truth]

4. Jim - I am so friggin sick of "Progressives"

That I cancelled out of an Ant-Schwarzenegger Voter Registration Rally yesterday ("Too busy") -

Gettin worn out by "Progressives" -- Gimme the old time, big city, cigar chompin, machine politicians like Dave Lawrence and Bill Green and Daley and John Dingle and Dan Rostenkowski and Lyndon Johnson - back when the Dems won elections.

[Jim Sagle]

5. Jimmeh Cahtuh put an end to that.

[Englander]

11. I think your memory needs refreshing -

Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab world.
Chapter 10-The Lebanese Quagmire 1981-1984, 415-417.

On 14 September, three weeks after his election, Bashir
Gemayel was assassinated in his party headquarters, most probably
by agents of Syrian intelligence. The assassination knocked out
the central prop from underneath Israel's entire policy in Lebanon.
With Gemayel's violent removal from the scene, Sharon's plan for
a new political order in Lebanon-a plan predicated from the start
on Bashir Gemayel personally-collapsed like a house of cards.
Sharon feared that the leftist militias and a couple of thousand
PLO men allegedly still at large in Beirut would destroy the
prospect of a stable, pro-Israeli regime in Lebanon. The assassination
was used as the pretext for sending Israeli forces into West Beirut
the following day to take up the areas formerly held by the PLO.
Sharon ordered the IDF commanders to allow the Phalangists
to enter the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, on
the south side of Beirut, in order to “clean out” the terrorists
who, he claimed, were lurking there. {46}
Inside the camps the revenge-thirsty Christian militiamen
perpetrated a terrible massacre, killing hundreds of men, women,
and children. Israel estimated the number of dead at seven to eight
hundred, while the Palestinian Red Crescent put the number at over
two thousand. The carnage went on from the evening of Thursday,
16 September, until Sunday. Already on Thursday evening, not
long after dropping their Christian allies outside the camps, Israeli
soldiers got wind of the massacre but did nothing to stop it.
Begin heard about the massacre when listening to the BBC
on Saturday afternoon. He called Sharon, who promised to get
a report from the IDF. At first official spokesmen tried to
obscure the fact that the Christian militia men entered the refugee
camps with the knowledge and help of the IDF commanders.
Begin himself said, more than a touch self-righteously, “Goyim
are killing goyim, and the whole world is trying to hang Jews
for the crime.” Nevertheless, as Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a liberal
American-Jewish leader, prophetically observed, Menachem
Begin could not remain in office “if he has squandered Israel's
fundamental asset-its respect for itself and the respect of the
world.” {47} The sense of shock and revulsion in Israel and
the international outcry forced the government to appoint
a commission of inquiry under Supreme Court Justice
Yitzhak Kahan.
.........The Kahan Commission presented its report on 7 February
1983. It concluded that Israel bore indirect responsibility for the
massacre at Sabra and Shatila, inasmuch as the Phalange entered
the refugee camps with the knowledge of the government and
with the encouragement of the army. It recommended the removal
of the minister of defense and a number of senior officers from
their posts. Sharon immediately announced his rejection of the
findings and the recommendations of the Kahan Commission. On
14 February the cabinet decided, by a majority of sixteen against
Sharon's single vote, to accept the recommendations of the Kahan
report. Sharon remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.
He was replaced as minister of defense by Moshe Arens, the
ambassador to the United States.

{46} Naor, Ayre. Cabinet at War: The Functioning of the Israeli Cabinet during the Lebanon War (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Edanim, 1988. 150-51, 155, and 158
{47} Shindler, Colin. Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics and Ideology from
Begin to Netanyahu. London: I.B. Tauris, 1995. 161 and 164.

[bemildred]

3. The Truth Sets You Free. nt

[pelsar]

6. except when its nonsense...

s despite the fact that it is a role model for all the massacres that followed: for example that in Rwanda or those committed during the Yugoslavian wars
________________________________

what kind of absurd statement is that?...those massacres, weapons used, the environments were totally different...maybe there was a seminar i missed out on?.......

i read crap like that and you just KNOW they're going after the jews....i couple probably find a whole bunch more in those few paragraphs.....

[bemildred]

7. Truth is nonsense?

Now that sounds like nonsense. It is never
wrong to recount events as they occurred.

This piece never mentions Jews. It mentions
Jabba and his role in this, but it really seems
to me to be about the Christian (is that not a
joke?) militias and the bloody business they
went about.

[Behind the Aegis]

8. snip

BERLIN: Six Lebanese Christian militiamen who took part in the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatilla in September 1982 have spoken out for the first time in the documentary "Massacre," which had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in mid-February. Members of the Christian militia Forces Libanaises describe in detail taking part in killing some 1,000 (according to the film) unarmed Palestinian civilians. Anonymous, with faces hidden, they claim they were ordered by Lebanese security officials to "kill them all and wipe out Sabra and Shatilla" as revenge for the assassination of then-Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel, a fellow Christian, two days earlier. Lokman Slim, a Beirut-based publisher who is one of the film's three directors (with Monika Borgmann and Hermann Theissen), told a press conference that not only Christians took part in the massacre, but also Lebanese Shi'ite Muslims, though none have been willing to speak out.

http://jrep.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=ArticlePage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enZone=Articles&enDispWho=Article^l676

[Englander]

10. The link's broken. n/t