Would You Believe Human Rights Watch?

One of the albatrosses around Ariel Sharon's image neck was the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.

You might have read this today:

Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement on Saturday, stressing that Sharon “died without facing justice for his role in the massacres of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by Lebanese militias in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982.”... The militias killed between 700 and 800 people, according to Israeli military intelligence estimates; other estimates were much higher. The dead included infants, children, pregnant women, and the elderly, some of whose bodies were found to have been mutilated.

Uri Dan, in his "Blood Libel", quotes on page 15 from the report by Assad Germanos who found that 460 had been killed in the camps but only 15 were women and 30 children.  The majority of those killed were of the age of terrorists.

Thomas Friedman vehemently disagreed not only with those findings but with the man and his mission.

In a letter-to-the-editor to his own newspaper (!), he wrote, in part, 

...the only organization that kept even partial records of the dead was the International Committee of the Red Cross, which helped to bury many of them in a mass grave. The committee, according to its report, which is available in its Beirut office, listed 356 people as having been buried - 146 by friends and relatives and 210 by the Red Cross. Of the 210 the Red Cross buried, 38 were women, 32 were children and 140 were men of all ages. The same one-to-three proportion of women and children to men is assumed to apply to the other 146 known buried and the other several hundred buried by family and never recorded - a far cry from Mr. Roche's figures.

He also surmised a supposition after making an assumption there above:-

...No doubt many young Palestinians of fighting age were killed. I saw bodies of all ages. But I have news for Mr. Roche: if there had been as many ''terrorists'' in the camp as he claims, they would have been strong enough to defend themselves and there never would have been a massacre. 

Who, or what do you believe?

And read EOZ.



^