Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Robert Fisk: The Palestinians "were inviting their own doom." Robert Fisk (with Abed standing close by) schmoozing with friends in North Lebanon: "We found two colonels in one garage, who politely offered us coffee, and a lieutenant who had lived in Montreal and who called a mutual friend of ours - a Lebanese army colonel in the south of Lebanon - who roared with laughter down his mobile phone: "Robert, what are you doing in Nahr el-Bared?" As if he didn't know."
But the worst is this: Fisk blame the Palestinians for their misery: They were" inviting their own doom."
But in fairness, he does cover in this article the civilian casualties: "The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia?...My sister was beside me and fell down with her head bleeding. She haemorraged from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At last my brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this. The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say 'thank you' to him and let us have more shelling. "And I would like to thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say thanks - really thanks - very much to George Bush and to Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank them for these shells and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice really wants to send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better hurry up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man - and then we'll see!"