LET’S PUT THINGS INTO CONTEXT.- Mandate for Palestine

LET’S PUT THINGS INTO CONTEXT.

Following the assassination of a British district commissioner by a Palestinian in Jenin in the summer of 1938, British authorities decided that "a large portion of the town should be blown up" as punishment. On August 25, 1938, a British convoy brought 4,200 kilos of explosives to Jenin for that purpose.

In the Jenin operation and on other occasions, local Arabs were forced to drive "mine sweeping taxis" ahead of British vehicles in areas where Palestinian terrorists were believed to have planted mines, in order "to reduce [British] landmine casualties."

On another occasion, British forces responded to the presence of terrorists in the Arab village of Miar, north of Haifa, by blowing up house after house in October 1938. "When the [British] troops left, there was little else remaining of the once-busy village except a pile of mangled masonry," The New York Times reported.

Under Emergency Regulation 19b, the British Mandate government could demolish any house located in a village where terrorists resided, even if that particular house had no direct connection to terrorist activity. Mandate official Hugh Foot later recalled: "When we thought that a village was harboring rebels, we'd go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we'd blow up the house we'd marked."
The British describe having demolished 237 houses in a few days. See the document at:
<http://honestreporting.com/a/r/210.asp>
In response to concerns about the morality of these methods, Lord Dufferin of the British Colonial Office said: "British lives are being lost and I don't think that we, from the security of Whitehall, can protest squeamishly about measures taken by the men in the frontline."

Sir John Shuckburgh defended the tactics on the grounds that the British were confronted "not with a chivalrous opponent playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and murderers."
Ironically, the British became the target of a smear campaign by Arab propagandists, who alleged that British soldiers gouged out the eyes of Arab prisoners. These charges were publicized widely in the Nazi German press and elsewhere. "How the British Fought Terror in Jenin," by Raphael Medoff - April 19, 2002)



“Beginning on the 19th June, certain areas in the Old City of Jaffa on the hill overlooking the Port were demolished. These house demolitions were carried out by the Army after notice to evacuate had been given to the inhabitants involved, to whom the Government promised compensation. Those who became homeless and destitute were given relief.

The operations were carried out without loss of life, and in all 237 houses were demolished. As a result, not only has public security been greatly improved in a quarter of the town where, on account of narrow difficult streets and lanes, police work had always--and in particular during the disturbances following on the outbreak of the 19th April--been notoriously difficult, but also two wide streets which by the end of the year were open to traffic, have been created which will improve public health conditions and contribute both to the commercial and residential amenities of the town. During the autumn, a housing scheme for the accommodation of those rendered homeless by the demolitions was initiated by Government. Further reference to this scheme will be found in paragraph 34 of Chapter XX (Public Health)  British Report on Palestine, 1936





During "Black September" when Palestinians rioted in Jordan and tried to take it over in 1970, King Hussein massacred 2,500 Palestinians in 10 days.

The Palestine Liberation Organization had been firmly entrenched in Jordan, with its large Palestinian population, since the organization was founded in the 1960s. As the PLO’s military power grew it became a state within a state, challenging King Hussein’s rule and clashing repeatedly with the Jordanian army and security forces.

King Hussein blamed Yasir Arafat and the PLO for their attacks on Israel that provoked damaging retaliation. His attempts to prevent such PLO attacks were met by a number of assassination attempts. Finally, in September 1970 a PLO group hijacked three Western airliners to Jordan and blew them up after evacuating the passengers. On September 15, seemingly not in control of his country, or his capital, which was dotted with PLO checkpoints, King Hussein appointed an emergency cabinet composed of loyal generals and declared martial law. The stage was set for a showdown with Yasir Arafat and the PLO. (Jordan’s Palestinian Challenge, 1948-1983, Clinton Bailey; Israel: the Embattled Ally, Nadav Safran)

The next day the Jordanian army:

... trained its artillery on fedayeen headquarters and other targets in the al-Wahdat and Husayni refugee camps adjacent to the capital. On the next day, ruthless mop-up operations began in Amman itself to dislodge Palestinian fighters from bunkers and rooftops. These operations, which lasted for ten days, were heavy-handed, causing great loss of life and damage to property. The two refugee camps were almost razed to the ground and buildings were destroyed on top of their occupants. In Amman, most buildings harboring fedayeen nests were summarily shelled. (Bailey, p 57)

The Palestinian death toll in 11 days of fighting was estimated at 3,400, though Arafat claimed that 20,000 had been killed. (Bailey, p 59, The Making of a War, John Bulloch, p 67)  

Camera Backgrounder, November 9th 2000

In the same way, Syrian President Assad slaughtered 30,000 of his own people during civil unrest in Hama. He sealed up their homes, pumped in poison gas and then paved over the dead- 30,000, a toll that the Israel intifada would need 100 years to match.

"February 2nd (2002) will mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre that victimized the city of Hamat. Select [Syrian Army] units... under the command of General 'Ali Haydar, besieged the city for 27 days, bombarding it with heavy artillery and tank [fire], before invading it and killing 30,000 or 40,000 of the city's citizens... in addition to the 15,000 missing who have not been found to this day, and the 100,000 expelled…"

"But Hamat was not the only massacre... To repress armed Islamic opposition, the [Ba'ath] regime focused on repressing the spirit of opposition in the entire Syrian street, from Aleppo through Jisr Al-Shaghrour, Deir Al-Zour, Latakia, to the infamous massacre of Tudmor. [The use of violence] was part of an overall framework; this was no mere military repression, destruction of cities, and minor massacres in prisons, neighborhoods, and streets...

Following is a brief review…"

“A few months later, the regime launched a wide-scale offensive against some opposition parties, first and foremost the Syrian Communist Party and between March and May of 1980, the regime perpetrated a series of massacres, one after the other, among them as cases in point those at Jisr Al- Shaghrour (200 killed), Souq Al-Ahad (42 killed), the Hananu neighborhood (83 killed), and Aleppo and Tudmor (700 killed) and Hamat's Al-Bustan neighborhood (200 killed, on this occasion by shooting!)"Subhi Hadidi: Al-Quds Al-Arabi (London), January 11, 2002.


Saddam Hussein also slaughtered many thousands of Kurds, merely because they are Kurds.
“After 16 March 1988 0ne word came to symbolize the tragedy of the kurds: Halabja. The events of the day in that Iraqi frontier town did more than any other single incident in seventy years of rebellion against central authority. Halabja was a turning-point from which many nationalists mark the birth of national consciousness spanning the borders which divide the Kurdish people.

“In the late afternoon of 16 March the first wave of Iraqi planes appeared over the town to drop their bomb-loads of mustard gas, nerve gas and cyanide. Within a few minutes as many as 5000 people were dead and as many again lay burned and gasping for breath from the effects of the chemical attack.

“The actual death toll was never independently verified, but the aftermath of the attack indicated the scale of the disaster. Bodies littered the streets, as the victims fell where they were standing when the attack came. Men, women and children lay dead with no visible marks of injury, but with faces distorted by asphyxiation. The body of a man lay face down at his doorstep, his arm wrapped around the body of his dead baby in a futile gesture of protection.

“The kurds call Halabja the Kurdish Auschwitz, not because the scale of the massacre was comparable with that of the Nazi death camp, but because the victims were chosen merely because they were Kurds.

“It was not the first time the Baathist regime had used chemical weapons against the Kurds. Mullah Mustafa Barzani complained to the United Nations as early as 1963 that Baghdad was using chemicals. Nor was it to be the last. In twelve months leading up to the raid on Halabja there had been chemical attacks against villages, civilians and Peshmerga units in isolated valley on twenty-one separate days. After a raid on the Balasan valley in Arbil province on 16 April 1987, 286 injured Kurds made their way to Arbil city for medical attention. They were all captured and killed by Iraqi army. But Halabja was the most ruthless and deadly operation until then, and had been directed at targets-civilian citizens of Iraq with no possible military significance.

“Despite the scale of the massacre and the fact that Western journalists were on the scene within days, the international reaction to the bombing was muted. Although no one took seriously the attempts of some Iraqi officials to deny responsibility, or, indeed, to blame the Iranians, there appeared to be little appetite within the international community for taking any form of punitive action against Baghdad. The eight-year Iran-Iraq war had entered its end game, and the world powers were unwilling to take action against Iraq for its use of illegal weapons in such a way as to appear to be siding with Iran.

“The Arab states stayed firmly on Iraq's side, although they were in no doubt as to what happened. When a Kurdish delegation appealed to Kuwait to protest against innocent civilians being sprayed with poison gas, they were asked by a Kuwaiti official: "What did you expect to be sprayed with, rose-water?". The Incident at Halabja, by Azad at Luleå, University Of Technology of Sweden , May 03, 1996

IRBIL, Iraq - An Iraqi Kurd faction allied to President Saddam Hussein on Monday stormed the last stronghold of its main rivals to take control of almost the whole of northern Iraq. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) said it seized the city of Sulaymaniyah from the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) without a fight. A U.N. official in Sulaymaniyah confirmed its capture and said the city was "calm and quiet" after KDP fighters moved in.

KDP forces found the city of 800,000 almost deserted after thousands of families fled toward the Iranian border ahead of the group's advance, aid workers said. According to U.N. figures, 8,000 Kurds were heading toward Iran in scenes reminiscent of 1991 when hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the mountains as Saddam crushed a Kurdish uprising….

As the KDP closed in on the city Monday, the PUK made desperate appeals for U.S. intervention to prevent what it called an "imminent massacre."

"Saddam Hussein's tanks, army and secret police are advancing northward to Sulaymaniyah," a PUK statement said.

"The United States and its allies cannot abandon the people of Kurdistan to the terrible vengeance of Saddam Hussein."  Laurence Chabert, Agence France-Presse

IS ISLAM  A  RELIGION OF PEACE?
IS ISLAM  A PEACEFUL FAITH?
WHO STARTED THE WAR IN 1947?
WHY  DID THE ARABS LEAVE ISRAEL?
HOW MANY ARABS FLED?
ARAB HELP FOR THEIR REFUGEES.

Let’s put things into context
A  comparison with refugees worldwide
WHAT IF THE JEWS LOST ANY  WAR?
Dear Prime MinisterTO THE BRITISH PEOPLE
Three very  brave Arabs
A  Palestinian speaks out
Joseph Farah speaks
We must stop blaming Israel
Do Palestinians really  want  peace?
What  do the Palestinians  really  think about Israel?
TO THE MOSLEM ARABS

Israel’s best defence
TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE IN ISRAEL
HOW WILL IT ALL END?