Something Unique in Australian Journalism?

Has veteran Australian journalist Tony Walker done something unique in Australian journalism? Call on a bloviating Zionist lobby operative to put his money where his mouth is:

"In an opinion piece in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, likened [Melissa Parke's] criticism (ill-defined) of Israel to a 'new anti-Semitism'. 'Disguising itself as anti-Zionism, the new anti-Semitism uses criticism of Israel as a Trojan horse to perpetuate age-old stereotypes about Jews under a quasi-intellectual cover,' Leibler wrote. I reached out to Leibler to ascertain what criticism of Israel might be acceptable in the interests of enabling reasonable discussion about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and its attitudes more generally to the peace process. He did not respond." (Melissa Parke incident raises difficult questions about Israel, Tony Walker, smh.com.au, 17/4/19)

Israel's Similes & Ours

In enumerating the reasons for the latest Israeli wilding in the Gaza Strip, which has to date resulted in the death of 25* and the wounding of 80, Jerusalem Post journalist, Yaakov Katz, has written matter-of-factly that "lastly, the IDF is using this as an opportunity to do some 'maintenance work' in Gaza and to mow the lawn, so to speak, with regard to terrorism, with the main goal of boosting its deterrence and postponing the next round of violence for as long as possible." (Analysis: Easy to start, hard to end, 10/3/12)

[*As of 12/3/12]

Maintenance? Mowing the lawn? Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day! I've got a wonderful feeling. Everything's going my way. Hm, I think I'll go out and mow the lawn before it gets away on me. Gotta keep those nasty weeds in check, eh? For example, there's Mohammed Mustafa al-Hassumi, 65, and his daughter Faiza, 30. And there's Nayif Qarmout, 14, and Ayoub Assaliya, 13. Oh, and his 7-year old cousin too. Too damn many to mention, if you must know. OK, what'll it be? I've got so many damn new-fangled American mowers, snippers, trimmers and other whizzbangs in the garage I can hardly keep up with them all. Then there's the weedicides... but don't get me started on those. Maybe I'll just make do this time with the Apache helicopter, and the F16 and V-58 fighter jets. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go...

Oh well, I suppose horticultural similes come naturally to the kind of folk who, legend has it, made the desert bloom, but for the rest of us mere mortals, whenever we see Israelis in action, somewhat different, darker similes generally spring to mind. Similes like these, for example, from Australian journalist Tony Clifton, who witnessed Israeli industry and whizzbangery like you wouldn't believe in Lebanon in 1982:

"Israeli attempts to get into [Beirut] were like the efforts of a madman trying to smash down the door of a house with an axe. He flails away in a crazed frenzy, then he tires and his battering slackens; but then the rage grips him again and he hacks away with greater vigour." (God Cried*, p 23)

"Watching the Israeli air force smashing Beirut to pieces yesterday was like having to stand and watch a man slowly beat a sick dog to death with an axe handle." (ibid, p 24)

"[Israeli Prime Minister] Begin was not stopped by a phone call from President Reagan... he ended the war because he had got what he wanted, just as a rapist stops humping after he has had his orgasm." (ibid, p 13)

[*One of the finest pieces of engaged journalism/photojournalism ever written. For excerpts, click on the Tony Clifton tab below. Better still, do yourself a favour and pick it up on Amazon; See also my 13/2/09 post Backburning the Palestinians?]

Waltz with Bashir

"Why the Zionist focus on the Sabra and Shatila massacre and not all the other massacres committed by the Zionist aggressor in 1982 when it killed close to 20,000 civilians? The reason is clear, and it has no connection with the atrocities committed by the Lebanese Forces which fill any history of the Lebanese civil war. In its propaganda focus on Sabra and Shatila to the exclusion of others, Israel wants to evade - not to assume - responsibility." (The Angry Arab News Service, 2/3/09)

The above analysis (in its entirety of course) of Ari Folman's film Waltz with Bashir should be supplemented by Gideon Levy's 'Antiwar' film Waltz with Bashir is nothing but charade (Haaretz, 21/2/09), and this, written over 25 years ago:-

"'I was one of the Christian gunmen on that Palestinian shoot down Sabra and Chatila way in September last year [1982], and all I can say is, I cannot imagine what all the uproar is about. As these hunts go, it was nothing out of the ordinary at all, very much like the drive in Karantina in 1976 when we got a very good bag of Kurds. The camps were like Karantina because they were very much of a fun thing: a few days out in the open air and a good bag to show at the end of it. Nothing at all like Tal Zaatar, I can tell you, because Tal Zaatar took for ever, and it was bloody dangerous as well. If you like comparisons, Sabra and Chatila were like a pheasant shoot; Tal Zaatar was like a tiger hunt, much more exhausting and dangerous, but more rewarding. Not that Sabra and Chatila didn't bring you out in a healthy sweat of course, because you have to run like hell to catch those ten year olds - they move like rabbits when they see old grannie with her head half off. All in all, an entertaining few days after sitting around for two months doing nothing while the Israelis had all the fun; I'd forgotten how much enjoyment you can have, picking off a nippy teenager on the run. And easy for the Palestinians as well - I doubt if one in ten felt a thing.

"'But the fuss, the uproar, the breast-beating! If we'd shot a load of human beings, it couldn't have been any worse. Television cameras all over the place, reporters saying it was the worst thing to happen in the Middle East since the fall of Byzantium, and those bloody Israelis leaping up and down in a frenzy, saying they had nothing to do with it, and it was all so unexpected, and deary me, how could people do such dreadful things to innocent civilians.

"'Well, bugger me with the rough end of a pineapple, the Israelis of all people asking how we could do it! We do a little bit of tidying up at the end of their season, clean up the ground after they've had their fun on it... and they start doing their nuts. Can you imagine they could have the gall to ask how we could do what we did! They spent two months bombing and shelling those camps every day; they used cluster bombs and incendiaries and phosphorus shells; they leave kids with their guts split open and their legs sliced off; they burn old men and women to death; they leave people in the ruins of their houses, watching the smoke rise from their chests as the phosphorus burns through to their lungs; they can't understand why we wanted a share in the fun. That murderous oaf Sharon, up to his guts in blood, has the outstanding nerve to stand in front of his own commission of inquiry and say, perfectly straight-faced, "These atrocities stand in contradiction not only to the values towards which we were educated and which we teach... we were surprised, astounded and shocked by the massacre that took place in those neighbourhoods in Beirut'.

"I wrote the last lines in a fine rage, thinking that irony was the only way to express what I feel about what the Israelis did in Beirut in 1982. The fury was on me because the buggers were going to get away with what they did, and the reason they will is that the massacre at the finish completely wiped out the memories and indignation about what had gone on before the killings in the camps. If I'd been doing public relations for the Israeli army I couldn't have thought of a more brilliant scheme to get them off the hook than having those last few hundred people killed in the camps. As soon as the news leaked out, the whole of the world's attention was focused on Sabra and Chatila and away from the butchers of Beirut. Suddenly the villains were Christian militiamen; and attention was distracted even more by the question whether it was Haddad's people or Gemayel's Phalangists. The Israelis got a little mud splashed on them through guilt by association, because whoever did the killings couldn't have done them without the Israelis opening the way. But compared with the real weight of condemnation they deserved for what they had done to Beirut, the confused and bewildered indignation over the camp killings was easy to deal with.

"The fact is that the Israelis are as responsible for the deaths in the camps as they were for the deaths in the war, just as a Nazi commander would be judged guilty of mass murder, even if he had just stood by while his Ukrainian Einsatzgruppe slaughtered the Jewish peasants in the town his troops had first broken open. In the two months of the siege the Israelis established that everyone in west Beirut was a legitimate target; they hit every part of the city, using the vilest of modern weapons and showing absolutely no concern for the lives of civilians; more than anything, their obsessive shelling of camps like Sabra and Chatila showed they considered the people who lived in these areas had even less right to live than the other citizens of the city.

"Whatever you might say of them, the Christian militiamen are not ignorant, unthinking peasants. They read the reports coming out of west Beirut every day, they heard the Palestinian and Muslim militiamen's radio broadcasts about what was happening in west Beirut. They knew it was open season on purely civilian areas; they knew the Israelis were deliberately terrorizing west Beirut. The Israelis were responsible for the climate of mindless violence and the downgrading of human life to less than nothing in west Beirut. Nothing the Christians did in the camps was in any way more reprehensible than what the Israeli armed forces had done for two months preceding the final massacres.

"I find it much easier to understand what the Christians did in the camps than what the Israelis did to west Beirut. I was in Beirut during the civil war and although I was not in Damour, I know how Christian families were butchered there. Both sides committed atrocities, although, in terms of the mathematics of horror, the Christians have more to answer for: Karantina, Tal Zaatar, Jisr al-Basha and now Sabra and Chatila, as against Damour and Jiyeh. I name these alone, because nobody has ever tallied the individual acts of brutality that left the eyeless corpses under the Fuad Chehab flyover, the burnt bodies on either side of the crossing-points between east and west. However, because of the civil war there is hardly a family on either side in Lebanon that does not remember the violent death of a relative or friend. The Christian gunman carefully lining up the six-year-old girl in his sights in Sabra may have remembered a tragedy of his own as he created another. I would feel much more comfortable with such a man - as I would with a Palestinian who throws a grenade into a school in a kibbutz - than I ever would with an Israeli bomber-pilot or commander of an artillery crew... This is not to say that I support what any of them are doing; but the man who stares down the barrel or pulls the pin has to make the decision to kill someone, he must watch them die, he has to live with that vision for the rest of his life and almost invariably with the Palestinian, he knows he will soon die because of what he has done. The pilot or the soldier pulling the lanyard on a howitzer performs an action no more stressful than ringing a doorbell; if his co-ordinates are anywhere near right he has done ten times the damage and causes fifty times the misery of any half-baked little 'terrorist', yet he never hears a scream or sees a tear or has to watch blood spurt. He will sleep peacefully every night of his life because there is no raw material for his conscience to weave into nightmares." (God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983, pp 135-136)

The Banality of Evil

"'Well, son, you've graduated, you've got a good chemistry degree, you're a fine worker with a great future - what do you think you're going to do with your life?' Old Jack Mathews looked proudly at his son. He had worked hard for the boy and put in long hours of overtime in the steel mills so his son could have the best education money could buy; now here was John Jr, fresh from the graduation ceremony, still in his gown, holding mortar and graduation scroll awkwardly in one hand, clinging to his mother's hand with the other. It was a high point in all their lives the old man thought, as they stood among the crowds of excited students and proudly smiling parents.

"The boy hesitated, wondering how to express himself. It was something he had thought about for these past two years, the years when he realized he had the talents to become a really great scientist - not just a glorified bottle-washer and lab assistant, but an innovator, a man who could transmute ideas into reality. He had an honours degree of such quality that recruiters from industry were besieging him like scouts from the major leagues trying to sign the school's ace pitcher. 'Well, Dad', he said hesitantly, almost shyly. 'I've given it a lot of thought. I've looked at the prospectuses, I've talked to the dean of the chemistry school. I've talked it over with all my friends. Dad', he burst out excitedly, unable to hold back the secret any longer, 'I'm going into ordnance'.

"Seeing the puzzled looks on the old people's faces, he felt he had to explain, the words tumbling over themselves as his innermost thoughts jostled for expression. 'See, I've been reading a lot about high-explosive shells, about mines and bombs and rockets, and I feel there's a lot I can contribute there. It's a field with real problems and challenges, Dad. I mean - well, how do you get white phosphorus liquid enough so that it will really splash when the shells explode - not just in lumps, but soft so that it will spread all over a person's body? And how do you develop the sort of alloys that fracture into razor blades, so they really slash through kids' arms and legs? And bombs - Dad, I could think about bombs all day. Someone, and it could just be me, is going to work out one day how you get a bomb that will bore through 8 floors of an apartment block and then explode, so the whole thing crunches up like a deck of cards. And cluster bombs - they're so primitive now - I mean, half of those bomblets don't go off at all, and the rest of them are so under-powered they'll barely take a hand or a foot off. Dad, I tell you, there's a whole new world out there, and I mean to be part of it. It's my future, Dad!' Well, somebody must have thought like that you reflect, as you stand in the Gaza Hospital and look at what, on a backyard barbecue, would be a marvellous piece of T-bone. Dark brown and crackly on the surface, the deeper cracks showing the rare red meat underneath, the juices trickling down on the crisp sesame roll - sorry, on to the pillow - and in the middle of that juicy piece of protein a pair of eyes - pure Magritte, my dear. I do wish you could have seen it, complete with that little blue plug at the bottom to let the air get to the centre of the meat, but it went off, unfortunately, and just had to be thrown away after a couple of hours... such a waste. Plenty more, of course, but that one - just a touch of tabasco, maybe a little mayonnaise, and Graig Claiborne would have had it in colour in The New York Times magazine.

"Some little Arthur or Carl-Heinz or Nathan or Kenzo or whoever probably spent a year or more working on that phosphorus problem. From my days at school, I seem to remember that it came in big hard yellow lumps and didn't spread at all. Someone with a Ph.D. in chemistry sat up all night worrying about Willie Pete and how you get it to spread like jello. No point in having a shell that explodes and just gives someone a headache when he gets whacked by a great hard lump of phosphorus - you've got to thin it out so it spreads like something Helena Rubenstein dreamed about: dragon-licks on your face and your arms and your tits and your balls, fizzing through your skin... the ultimate wrinkle-remover. Great thing about it, ordnance-wise, is that the bugger doesn't stop burning if you bandage it or throw water on it, or even so forget your dignity as to writhe in the dust: it just keeps burning and smoking away.

"Not that you absolutely had to be barbecued - the nice thing about Beirut this time was that everyone was given a wide variety of choices: everyday, something different. If you wanted a body that would have looked good as a rib joint, you stayed in your seaside apartment and waited for the navy to pump phosphorus shells in to the living-room - somehow, the navy more than anyone else seemed to have a real affection for the stuff. But if you wanted something a bit cleaner - more surgical, really - then it was better to hang around in the camps and wait for tank rounds and the 155s to open up. Lots of shrapnel flying around to slit you open, rip your guts out, cut your throat - and you hardly felt it until you saw the looks on the faces of the ambulance guys picking you up: first a foot, then your body, put that leg in the plastic bag, maybe they can sew that chest up. There was even something for the kids: cluster-bombs, such fun things. Big grey-white bean-pods that opened up and then these cute little golf balls all over the place. Kids just love playing with things like that . . . and they weren't all that harmful. I mean, they'll take your hands off and split your forearms open so they look like red orchids, and maybe little Abdul will come home slightly blinded, and there's always some klutz who will kick one in the dark and ruin his chances of playing for Spurs; but basically those little balls gave kids a chance to participate, actually participate in a war, and still be around afterwards to tell their kids about what fun it all was. Looking back on it, that was the nice thing about the Beirut siege: the Israelis made it everyone's siege; they spread the fun around so that, at the end of it, nobody in west Beirut could complain that he'd been left out of the action." (God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983 pp 69-70)

"The Times has identified stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells from high-resolution images taken of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) artillery units on the Israel-Gaza border this week. The pale blue 155mm rounds are clearly marked with the designation M825A1, an American-made WP munition... The rounds, which explode in a shower of burning white streaks, were first identified by The Times... when they were fired over Gaza at the start of Israel's ground offensive. Artillery experts said the Israelis would be in trouble if they were banned from using WP because it is the simplest way of creating smoke to protect them from enemy fire. There were indications last night that Palestinian civilians have been injured by the bombs, which burn intensely. Hassan Khalass, a doctor at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told The Times that he had been dealing with patients who he suspected had been burnt by white phosphorus. Muhammad Azayzeh, 28, an emergency medical technician in the city, said: 'The burns are very unusual. They don't look like burns we have normally seen. They are third-level burns that we can't seem to control'." (Gaza victims' burns increase concern over phosphorus, Michael Evans, 8/1/09)

"Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor who worked in Gaza's hospitals during the conflict, said that Israel was using so-called DIME (dense inert metal explosive) bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small place. The bombs are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries. Dr Fosse said he had seen a number of patients with extensive injuries to their lower bodies. 'It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds', he said. 'Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been in war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before'. However, the injuries matched photographs and descriptions in medical literature of the effects of DIME bombs." ('Tungsten bombs' leave Israel's victims with mystery wounds, Raymond Whitaker, The Independent, 18/1/09)

"... other foreign doctors working in Gaza have reported injuries they cannot explain. Professor Mohammed Sayed Khalifa, a cardiac consultant from Sudan, said that 2 of his patients had had uncontrollable bleeding. 'One had a chest operation, and continued bleeding even after having been given large quantities of plasma', he said. 'The other had what seemed to be a minor leg injury, but collapsed with profuse bleeding. Something was interfering with the clotting process. I have never seen such a thing before'. Dr Ahmed Almi, an Egyptian cardio-thoracic consultant at al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, said he had seen a number of patients with inexplicable injuries. A boy of 14 had a small puncture wound in his head, but extensive damage to his brain, making it impossible to save his life. 'I don't know the nature or type of these weapons that make a very small [entry wound] and go on and make massive destruction in the tissues', he said." (ibid)

F-16s/Apaches/F-16s/Apaches/F-16s/Apaches

So mesmerised are we by the 'rockets/militants' mantra in The Daily Blah that we don't always appreciate the hard work of the 'heroes' of the Israeli airforce. So let's hear it for these quiet achievers. Different time, different place, maybe, but same people, same shit:

"There was no question but that the Israelis could hit anything they wanted to when they were really trying. Five times they flattened buildings just after Arafat had been in or near them. He'd appear in one of his little convoys; 20 minutes later, a couple of F-16s would appear out of nowhere, plunge down like sharks, 'wallop', then away, leaving the great red cloud of dust rising like blood in still water and the building they had just whacked collapsing in a rain of broken glass and concrete. If they wanted an apartment block or a hotel or one of the Palestinians' tired old tanks, they just came and got it: flip by in air-conditioned comfort; no need to hurry, no need to worry about the silly little Sam-7 rounds falling 5,000 feet short; no need to do all that Second World War stuff like getting targets in cross-wires and braving the ack-ack to get on target. Let the computers do the thinking, head in the general direction of the target, press the button when told to, then get back to base in time to meet the press corps and announce another successful mission against the terrorists. Everything wire-guided, electronically steered, computer-controlled, laser-directed. Sit in your cockpit or your tank turret or your cabin, eat a knish with one hand and press the red button with the other."(God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983, p 70)

Talk to the hand 'cause the face ain't listening, Gareth!

"If the Israelis have ever managed to convince American administrations about anything, it is that anyone connected with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is certainly not human, is almost certainly a total psychopath and is also very likely to be so contaminated with communicable diseases that standing downwind from one of these monsters when he exhales is certain to lead to the clap, palsy and yaws. Begin was able to draw out his extermination campaign in west Beirut by insisting that Philip Habib [Reagan's special Middle East envoy] should not be allowed to talk to the Palestinians; Phil talked to Saeb Salam, the grand old man of orthodox Lebanese Muslim politics...and Saeb, immunized by years of mixing with the terrorists, passed on Phil's thoughts to one of Arafat's men...who asked Arafat what he thought; then Arafat passed on the message to Saeb who - presumably after having his hands washed by a security man and a careful gargle to remove the contamination - talked to Phil, who passed on the thought to Begin's men. This system won whole days for the Israelis to knock off hundreds more civilians - far more than they could have blown away if Phil had simply called up Arafat and said, 'Yasser, this is what we've got for you today'. " (God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983, p 132)

Free at last from the constraints of toeing the party line (increasingly dictated so far as the Middle East conflict is concerned by the Israel lobby), former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans, now president of the International Crisis Group, has argued sensibly in The Christian Science Monitor (27/3/08) that "The policy of isolating Hamas and applying sanctions to Gaza has been a predictable failure. Violence to both Gazans and Israelis is rising. Economic conditions are ruinous...The credibility of PA President Mahmoud Abbas...has been grievously damaged. The peace process is in tatters. It's time to stop digging this hole. Maintaining extreme pressure on Hamas in the hope of undermining its rule or stopping the rockets has gone nowhere. A new direction is needed, one that attempts to stabilise the situation by engaging the movement with the immediate goal of reaching a mutual ceasefire and the opening of Gaza's border crossings...the ceasefire should entail reciprocal commitments to stop all attacks, an opening of the crossings that recognises Hamas' role while restoring a PA presence in Gaza...The status quo is untenable. Israel cannot be expected to accept rockets targeting its civilians. Hamas will not sit idly by as Gaza is choked." You can read it all at http://www.crisisgroup.org/

Help! Ceasefire! The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) executive director, Dr Colin Rubenstein, predictably followed Israel's grand tradition of saying Lo! (Hebrew 'no') to Palestinians, even those as supine and collaborative as PA President Abbas (Israeli Infrastructure Minister Ben-Eliezer has described current negotiations between Israel and the PA as "only virtual negotiations." Haaretz, 5/4/08). Col, in his alarm, reeled off the familiar talking points: Hamas is "firmly committed to Israel's destruction" [While Israel is actually engaged in throttling Gaza and colonizing the West Bank]; "negotiating with Hamas 'rewards violence' " [Where are the pacifist PA's rewards?]; a ceasefire "will allow [Hamas] to rearm" [While the latest American weaponry continues to flood into Israel]. (AIJAC denounces call to re-engage Hamas, AJN, 4/4/08). What's more, Col, always more Zionist than the Zionists, maintained his knee-jerk rejectionism despite a recent Haaretz poll "showing that 64% of Israelis want their government to negotiate with Hamas to broker a ceasefire" (Talk to Hamas, Israelis tell government as attacks continue, Toni O'Loughlin, The Guardian, 28/2/08).

Equally predictably, the Rudd government took a head-in-the-sand approach at Evans' outrageous suggestion. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith "would not comment...saying he had not seen the article" (Labor snubs call to engage Hamas, The Australian, 1/4/08). The Australian's report went on to remind us that "Hamas' military wing has been designated as a terrorist organisation since 2003 under Australia's Criminal Code Act" and that "guidelines on official contact with Palestinian representatives advise that contact with Hamas or affiliated people should be avoided."

On the eve of last year's federal election, the then opposition leader Kevin Rudd said: "Tomorrow Australians face a stark choice - a choice between the future and the past. Between a Government that has sat on its hands for 11 years and doesn't understand the new challenges we face - or a new leader with fresh ideas...Australia needs a newleadership with fresh ideas. That is what Labor government will be all about." And what happens post-election? Not only does Foreign Minister Smith not come up with a fresh idea about Middle East peace, but, when a former Labor foreign minister does, he doesn't want to know about it lest Col get cross with him. As far as Middle East policy is concerned, it looks like the Rudd government will hypocritically continue the Howard government's practice of "sitting on its hands."

In the unlikely event that Rudd or Smith ever do get off their hands on this one, they will of course need to acknowledge the real reasons why the Israeli government doesn't want a ceasefire with Hamas: not only because the pressure would then be on for Israel to curtail its settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and even, God forbid! end its 40 year long occupation, but also because there's gold (& even more valuable PR) in them thar rockets: "Like the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Sderot is now a must-see stop for those who support Israel or are being urged to do so [my italics]. Several groups have set up offices to arrange visits to a damaged home or a trauma center. Foreign diplomats have been bused here by the government; a UN officer says he has brought top officials here 5 times; Senator John McCain came last month; Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, residents say, cannot be far behind. Israelis and their supporters are lining up to volunteer. Money is pouring in for bomb shelters, social services and an Orthodox religious seminary" (A town under fire becomes a symbol for Israel, Ethan Bronner, NYT, 5/4/08).

So it's 'Talk to the hand, 'cause the face ain't listening', Gareth!

The Indigenous Israeli Berserk: Beirut 82 - Gaza 08

"The worst days were Sunday, 1 August, Wednesday, 4 August, and Thursday 12 August, and if I had to give prizes to the Israeli army, then the Ariel Sharon prize for Sheer Mindless Savagery would probably go to the whole of the Israeli High Command for 12 August. This was the last of the 3 major assaults on the city, and by then I had pretty well run out of new ways of describing what was going on. On 1 and 4 August, I had run through 'shock' and 'terror' and 'mindless brutality' and 'worst since World War II' and most other ways of describing what they were trying to do to us, so that by the time I got to Thursday I had to begin by saying, 'Watching the Israeli air force smashing Beirut to pieces yesterday was like having to stand and watch a man slowly beat a sick dog to death with an axe handle.' I remember looking at that line at the time and thinking I was laying it on a bit thick - real old Fleet Street horseshit of the 'I watched in horror today as bullets stitched a delicate tracery in the age-old palace of the emperor and an empire collapsed around me' school of British pop journalism. But looking back on it, it's not a bad simile, because Beirut was as defenceless against air attack as any sick animal is to attack by a sadist, and the Israelis were quite simply intent on brutalizing the place." p 24

"We used to sit around all night in the Commodore debating the question: are [the Israelis] doing it all on purpose, or are they just spraying it around and hoping for the best? The crew led by Tom Friedman of The New York Times, said it was mainly just 'shoot an arrow into the air, it falls to earth I know not where' stuff. They actually argued that a lot of that shelling and bombing was indiscriminate (a word you can use around the bar of the Commodore with impunity, but not one you can get into The New York Times). The Friedman theory roughly went like this: it had to be indiscriminate because that incoming shit hit everything: hospitals, that Temple of Truth the Commodore Hotel, the apartment blocks full of middle-class Lebanese, movie theatres, even the Magen Abraham Synagogue. It squashed middle-class Christians in their big apartments in Ramlet al-Baida; it blew the legs off Kurdish cigarette salesmen in Hamra; it burned the faces off teenage girls in Sabra camp and minced old men playing backgammon in their antique shops in Basta. The theory that the Israeli soldiers manning the Ring of Steel round west Beirut didn't care what they hit was one supported by probably 80% of the hacks; but the others said those guys knew exactly what they were doing, and if they blew the feet off some 70-year-old woman silly enough to be crossing an open road on the way to the bakery, it was because they wanted to drive the shoemakers out of business, and luck had nothing to do with it." p 70 (from God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983)