Viewpoint
Inside Lebanon: A misnster's View
Sumter Daily Item - Jan 29, 1983
... The PLO came to Lebanon 12 years ago, after it was evicted from Jordan by King Hussein, that "Black September" in 1970, Hussein's troops killed 10,000 PLO fighters in the expulsion from Jordan of these terrorists which were an increasing threat to the stability of his government. Eight years ago, in 1974, war broke out in Lebanon, as the PLO attempted to wrest this ancient country from its own people.
From 1974 to 1982, over 100,000 people were killed in Lebanon by the PLO, half a million were injured, and one million were left homeless, without any significant world objection. The PLO siege of Lebanon, which has been incorrectly portrayed as a civil war, was in fact a reign of terror, during which anyone who refused to cooperate with the PLO was forcibly evicted from his home, watched his wife and daughters raped and mutilated, was tortured and killed, or perhaps just quietly disappeared. The Lebanese people — both Moslem and Christian — were prisoners within their own country.
In additions to the systematic terrorization of Lebanon, the PLO over the past eight years has repeatedly shelled the northern area of Israel, crossed the Israeli border in attacks on civilian people, and from Beirut directed attacks on Israeli diplomats and offices throughout the world, the most recent being the attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador to England, Shlome Argov. The people of Lebanon were fed up with the situation, and some of the several Lebanese factions, mainly Christian, appealed to Israel for assistance, Israel, equally fed up with the constant endangerment of the population of the Galilee, concurred, and in early July of this year the Israeli Army entered South Lebanon.
... We saw the PLO headquarters in Sidon, built near the town square, but underground, beneath a large and popular amusement park (complete with ferris wheel and roller coaster),
"hiding beneath the skirts of women." We saw the Moslem hospital which the PLO used as an armament depot, marking their crates of live ammunition with the symbol of the Palestine Red Crescent (the local version of the Red Cross, and whose chairman is the brother of Yassar Arafat; most of the tragically inflated statistics on civilian casualties in Lebanon were provided by the Palestine Red Crescent issued without confirmation by the International Red Cross, which has since discovered how it was manipulated and has issued a formal retraction of the civilian casualty statistics). We talked with young men and old men in the streets of Sidon, candidly and happily. They told us how glad they are to have the Israeli army come in, how their freedom has been restored after eight years.
They called the Israeli army "the army of liberation." Nowhere could we find a dissenting opinion.
We were on a hill at the end of the Beirut airport, looking over West Beirut, where the Israeli army estimates that 9,000 PLO terrorists are holding several more thousand Lebanese civilians as hostages. The Israeli army a few days ago asked those civilians who wished to leave West Beirut to come to the beach to be picked up; on their way to the beach, the PLO killed all those citizens, denouncing them as traitors.
... We drove back south, to the Maronite (Greek Catholic) village of Damour. Once a village of 40.000 Christians,
they massacred over 10,000 of the citizens, and drove the rest out of the village. The village was taken over as a PLO barracks.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=7YgiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=v6oFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4952,3652451&hl=en