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Note to Helen: Tell Them to go home
American Thinker ^ | 6-7-10 | Norman Berdichevsky

Posted on 06/07/2010 5:17:48 PM PDT by SJackson

 

Note to Helen: Tell Them to go home

Norman Berdichevsky

Helen Thomas, has long been considered the quirky darling of the Left for her strong anti-Bush stance and remarks that she would shoot herself if he were reelected.

What is all the more ironic and galling is that this woman of Lebanese-Christian ancestry is apparently distantly related to comedian Danny Thomas, who played in several lead roles including Al Jolson in a modern remake of the Jazz Singer. A generous philanthropist, humanitarian and great American, Thomas founded the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee in 1962.The hospital has treated thousands of children for childhood cancers.

The plight of the thousands of Lebanese driven from their homes in the South of the country by the PLO and the atrocious massacres perpetrated (see Damour -an event almost entirely neglected by the media) whose victims were mostly helpless civilian Christians, Shi'ites and Druze, never was nor is of any concern to Helen Thomas. It is the PLO she should have told to go home.

The Damour Massacre occurred on Jan. 20, 1976 as part of a series of events during the Lebanese Civil War, in which Palestinians joined the Muslim forces, in the context of the Christian-Muslim conflict. Subsequently, Beirut was divided along the infamous Green Line, with Christian enclaves to the east and Muslims to the west.

At Damour, PLO guerrillas locked in the women and children before lighting the church on fire. The attackers destroyed the buildings in the seaside village systematically and then took revenge on the remaining Christian inhabitants. The Christian cemetery was destroyed, coffins dug up, the dead robbed, vaults opened, and bodies and skeletons thrown across the graveyard. The church was burnt and an outside wall was covered with a mural of Fatah guerrillas holding AK47 rifles. A portrait of Yasser Arafat was placed at one end.

Twenty Phalangist militiamen were executed and then civilians were lined up against a wall and sprayed with machinegun fire. None of the remaining inhabitants survived. Estimate of the civilian dead is 584.

According to N. Y. Times correspondent, Thomas Friedman, it was the Phalangist Damouri Brigade which carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacres during the 1982 Israeli incursion sought revenge not only for the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel, but also for what he describes as past tribal killings of their own people by Palestinians including those at Damour.


The indigenous population of South Lebanon including Muslims supported Israel against the PLO and was mobilized in the South Lebanon Army (SLA). The SLA was abandoned to its fate by Israeli "peaceniks" in May, 2000,  convinced that by fully withdrawing from Southern Lebanon, they would find the central Lebanese government more ready, willing and able to prevent the border from being used as a staging ground for attacks against Israel. This was a vain hope.

Of those who initially fled to Israel, some SLA members and their families accepted Israel's offer of full citizenship and a financial package similar to that granted to new immigrants, and settled permanently in Israel.


TOPICS: Editorial; Israel
KEYWORDS: helenthomas; israel
Historical Fact: The Massacre and Destruction of Damour
 
http://www.lebaneseforces.com/blastfromthepast002.asp

Damour lay across the Sidon - Beirut highway about 20 km south of Beirut on the slopes of a foothill of the Lebanon range. On the other side of the road, beyond a flat stretch of coast, is the sea. It was a town of some 25,000 people, containing five churches, three chapels, seven schools, private and public, and one public hospital where Muslims from near by villages were treated along with the Christians, at the expense of the town.

On 9 January 1976, three days after Epiphany, the priest of Damour Father Mansour Labaky, was carrying out a Maronite custom of blessing the houses with holy water. As he stood in front of a house on the side of the town next to the Muslim village of Harat Na'ami, a bullet whistled past his ear and hit the house. Then he heard the rattle of machine-guns. He went inside the house, and soon learned that the town was surrounded. Later he found out by whom and how many -- the forces of Sa'iqa, consisting of 16,000 Palestinians and Syrians, and units of the Mourabitoun and some fifteen other militias, reinforced by mercenaries from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and a contingent of Libyans.


Father Labaky telephoned the Muslim sheikh of the district and asked him, as a fellow religious leader, what he could do to help the people of the town. 'I can do nothing,' he was told 'They want to harm you. It is the Palestinians. I cannot stop them.'

While the shooting and some shelling went on all day, Father Labaky telephoned a long list of people, politicians of both the Left and the Right, asking for help. They all said with apologies and commiserations that they could do nothing. Then he telephoned Kamal Jumblatt, in whose parliamentary constituency Damour lay. 'Father,' Jumblatt said, 'I can do nothing for you, because it depends on Yasser Arafat.' He gave Arafat's phone number to the priest. An aide answered, and when he would not call Arafat himself, Father Labaky told him, 'The Palestinians are shelling and shooting at my town. I can assure you as a religious leader, we do not want the war, we do not believe in violence.' He added that nearly half the people of Damour had voted for Kamal Jumblatt, 'who is backing you,' he reminded the PLO man. The reply was, 'Father, don't worry. We don't want to harm you. If we are destroying you it is for strategical reasons.'


Father Labaky did not feel that there was any less cause for worry because the destruction was for strategical reasons, and he persisted in asking for Arafat to call off his fighters. In the end the aide said that they, PLO headquarters, would 'tell them to stop shooting'.By then it was eleven o'clock in the evening. As the minutes passed and the shooting still went on, Father Labaky called Jumblatt again on the telephone and told him what Arafat's aide had said. Jumblatt's advice was that the priest should keep trying to make contact with Arafat, and call other friends of his, 'because', he said, 'I do not trust him'.

At about half-past eleven the telephone, water and electricity were all cut off. The first invasion of the town came in the hour after midnight, from the side where the priest had been shot at earlier in the day. The Sa'iqa men stormed into the houses. They massacred some fifty people in the one night. Father Labaky heard screaming and went out into the street. Women came running to him in their nightdresses, 'tearing their hair, and shouting "They are slaughtering us!" The survivors, deserting that end of the town, moved into the area round the next church. The invaders then occupied the part of the town they had taken. Father Labaky describes the scene:

'In the morning I managed to get to the one house despite the shelling to bring out some of the corpses. And I remember something which still frightens me. An entire family had been killed, the Can'an family, four children all dead, and the mother, the father, and the grandfather. The mother was still hugging one of the children. And she was pregnant. The eyes of the children were gone and their limbs were cut off. No legs and no arms. It was awful. We took them away in a banana truck. And who carried the corpses with me? The only survivor, the brother ofthe man. His name is Samir Can'an. He carried with me the remains of his brother, his father, his sister-in-law and the poor children. We buried them in the cemetery, under the shells of the PLO. And while I was burying them, more corpses were found in the street.'


The town tried to defend itself. Two hundred and twenty-five young men, most of them about sixteen years old, armed with hunting guns and none with military training, held out for twelve days. The citizens huddled in basements, with sandbags piled in front of their doors and ground-floor windows. Father Labaky moved from shelter to shelter to visit the families and take them bread and milk. He went often 'to encourage the young men defending the town'. The relentless pounding the town received resulted in massive damage. In the siege that had been established on 9 January the Palestinians cut off food and water supplies and refused to allow the Red Cross to take out the wounded.

Infants and children died of dehydration. Only three more townspeople were killed as a result of PLO fire between the first night and the last day, 23 January. But on that day, when the final onslaught came, hundreds of the Christians were killed. Father Labaky goes on: 'The attack took place from the mountain behind. It was an apocalypse. They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting 'Allahu Akbar! God is great! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad 'And they were slaughtering everyone in their path, men, women and children.'

Whole families were killed in their homes. Many women were gang-raped, and few of them left alive afterwards. One woman saved her adolescent daughter from rape by smearing her face with washing blue to make her look repulsive. As the atrocities were perpetrated, the invaders themselves took photographs and later offered the pictures for sale to European newspapers. Survivors testify to what happened. A young girl of sixteen, Soumavya Ghanimeh, witnessed the shooting of her father and brother by two of the invaders, and watched her own home and the other houses in her street being looted and burned. She explained: 'As they were bringing me through the street the houses were burning all about me. They had about ten trucks standing in front of the houses and were piling things into them. I remember how frightened I was of the fire. I was screaming. And for months afterwards I couldn't bear anyone to strike a match near me. I couldn't bear the smell of it'.

She and her mother Mariam, and a younger Sister and infant brother, had been saved from being shot in their house when she ran behind one Palestinian for protection from the pointing gun of the other, and cried out 'Don't let him kill us!'; and the man accepted the role of protector which the girl had suddenly assigned to him. 'If you kill them you will have to kill me too,' he told his comrade. So the four of them were spared, herded along the streets between the burning houses to be put into a truck, and trans-ported to Sabra camp in Beirut. There they were kept in a crowded prison hut. 'We had to sleep on the ground, and it was bitterly cold.'

When eventually Father Labaky found the charred bodies of the father and brother in the Ghanimeh house 'you could no longer tell whether they were men or women'.

In a frenzy to destroy their enemies utterly, as if even the absolute limits of nature could not stop them, the invaders broke open tombs and flung the bones of the dead into the streets. Those who escaped from the first attack tried to flee by any means they could, with cars, carts, cycles and motorbikes. Some went on foot to the seashore to try to get away in boats. But the sea was rough and the wait for rescue was long, while they knew their enemies might fall upon them at any moment. Some 500 gathered in the Church of St Elias. Father Labaky went there at six in the morning when the tumult of the attack awakened him. He preached a sermon on the meaning of the slaughter of innocents. And he told them candidly that he did not know what to tell them to do. 'If I say flee to the sea, you may be killed. If I say stay here, you may be killed.'

An old man suggested that they raise a white flag. 'Perhaps if we surrender they may spare us.' Father Labaky gave him his surplice. He put it on the processional cross and stood it in front of the church. Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door, three quick raps, then three lots of three. They were petrified. Father Labaky said that he would go and see who was there. If it was the enemy, they might spare them. 'But if they kill us, at least we shall die all together and we'll have a nice parish in Heaven, 500 persons, and no check points!' They laughed, and the priest went to the door.

It was not the enemy but two men of Damour who had fled the town and had seen the white flag from the seashore. They had come back to warn them that it would not help to raise a flag. 'We raised a flag in front of Our Lady, and they shot at us.'

Again they discussed what could be done. The priest told them that one thing they must do, although it was 'impossible', was to pray for the forgiveness of those who were coming to kill them. As they prayed, two of the young defenders of the town who had also seen the flag walked in and said, 'Run to the seashore now, and we will cover you.

The two youths stood in front of the church and shot in the direction from which the fedayeen were firing. It took ten minutes for all the people in the church to leave the town. All 500 got away except one old man who said he could not walk and would prefer to die in front of his own house. He was not killed. Father Labaky found him weeks later in a PLO prison, and heard what had happened after they left. A few minutes after they had gone, 'the PLO came and bombed the church without entering it. They kicked open the door and threw in the grenades.' They would all have been killed had they stayed. The priest led his flock along the shore to the palace of Camille Chamoun. But when they got there they found it had already been sacked and partly burnt. They found shelter, however, in the palace of a Muslim, who 'did not agree with the Palestinians', and then got into small boats Which took them out to a bigger boat, in which they sailed to Jounieh. 'One poor woman had to give birth to her baby in the little open boat on the rough winter sea.'

In all, 582 people were killed in the storming of Damour. Father Labaky went back with the Red Cross to bury them. Many of the bodies had been dismembered, so they had to count the heads to number the dead. Three of the men they found had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths.


The horror did not end there, the old Christian cemetery was also destroyed, coffins were dug up, the dead robbed, vaults opened, and bodies and skeletons thrown across the grave yard. Damour was then transformed into a stronghold of Fatah and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The ruined town became one of the main PLO centers for the promotion of international terrorism. The Church of St Elias was used as a repair garage for PLO vehicles and also as a range for shooting-practice with targets painted on the eastern wall of the nave.

The commander of the combined forces which descended on Damour on 23 January 1976 was Zuhayr Muhsin, chief of al-Sa'iqa, known since then throughout Christian Lebanon as 'the Butcher of Damour'. He was assassinated on 15 July 1979 at Cannes in the South of France.

1 posted on 06/07/2010 5:17:48 PM PDT by SJackson
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To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..
Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

..................

For those not familiar with the Damour massacre, one of many, see post one. Whether Christians were in the Church when it was burned is a matter of debate, but the Lebanese Armed Forces site has a pic with this caption.

2 posted on 06/07/2010 5:19:58 PM PDT by SJackson (Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided, Barack Hussein Obama)
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To: SJackson
this woman of Lebanese-Christian ancestry is apparently distantly related to comedian Danny Thomas,

Interesting, I just made a comment to the Mrs. that O'Really should ask Phil Donahue what he thinks of Helen Thomas. I didn't know this. Those eyes would be popping out of his head again.

3 posted on 06/07/2010 5:32:32 PM PDT by Hillbillary (I know how to deal with Communists, I still wear their scars on my back from Hollywood-Ronald Reagan)
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To: Hillbillary

I meant to comment on that, it’s really not relevant at all. Interesting, but no reason for the author to have included it.


4 posted on 06/07/2010 5:36:10 PM PDT by SJackson (Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided, Barack Hussein Obama)
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To: SJackson

Why did you have to besmirch the memory of Danny Thomas by attempting to link him with that old hag. Do you think that calling her a Danny Thomas relative removes any of the stink from HER hateful anti-semite persona? If you cannot resist sucking up to an anti-American, anti-Israel ingrate, please do it in private.


5 posted on 06/07/2010 6:16:44 PM PDT by Tucker39
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To: SJackson

Note to Helen: Go home.

Thanks for the enlightening historical post.


6 posted on 06/07/2010 6:39:47 PM PDT by green iguana
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To: SJackson
Very disturbing, but thank you for posting this information. I have the site bookmarked in case I get into any arguments concerning 'tolerant' Islam.

They found shelter, however, in the palace of a Muslim, who 'did not agree with the Palestinians', and then got into small boats

This shows there do exist some good-hearted Muslims. It's really the culture which is rotten, so thoroughly that I wouldn't take a chance on trusting any Muslim the way things are today. Unilateral tolerance only leads to more death for Christians, or any non-Muslims.

It's obvious to me that prayer and high spirits kept these survivors from dying in that church.

7 posted on 06/07/2010 6:42:47 PM PDT by ARepublicanForAllReasons (BORDERS, LAWS and LANGUAGE)
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btrl


8 posted on 06/07/2010 8:50:04 PM PDT by Clinging Bitterly (We need to limit political office holders to two terms. One in office, and one in prison.)
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To: SJackson

Thanks for the information. It’s truly sickening.

I will never forget how the PLO kidnapped William F. Buckley, the CIA station chief, and tortured him for over a year before dumping his body in front of the Embassy.

Those koranimals deserve zero.

Absolutely nothing.

Animals.


9 posted on 06/08/2010 5:42:11 AM PDT by bayouranger (The 1st victim of islam is the person who practices the lie.)
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To: SJackson

I was totally unaware of this massacre. How horribly sad. Thank you for posting it, and for the ping.


10 posted on 06/08/2010 6:15:54 AM PDT by LibertyRocks (http://libertyrocks.wordpress.com ~ Anti-Obama Gear: http://cafepress.com/NO_ObamaBiden08)
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To: SJackson
What is all the more ironic and galling is that this woman of Lebanese-Christian ancestry is apparently distantly related to comedian Danny Thomas, who played in several lead roles including Al Jolson in a modern remake of the Jazz Singer. A generous philanthropist, humanitarian and great American, Thomas founded the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee in 1962.The hospital has treated thousands of children for childhood cancers.

Uh, don't think so. Thomas isn't even his real name. It's Amos Alphonsus Muzyad Yakhoob.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Thomas

11 posted on 06/08/2010 10:30:26 AM PDT by Cyber Liberty (Build a man a fire; he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire; he'll be warm the rest of his life)
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