The Hama Massacre
Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorists
execute man at point blank range during the
Damour Massacre.
One of my Muslim readers, mSalama, in response to my article The Mohammed Al Dura Hoax Explained recently accused Israel of committing a massacre when Israeli commandos boarded the fake aid ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, and killed nine terrorists posing as aid workers.
When Israelis are attacked and kill in self-defense, it is always called a massacre. Allow me to explain what a massacre really is.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Ikhwanul Muslimin (1) in Syria attacked the regime of Hafez Assad with political assassinations and urban guerilla warfare. In February 1982, the Brotherhood ambushed Syrian soldiers who were searching for Islamists in the city of Hama.
In response, a few thousand Syrian troops using armor, artillery, and bulldozers leveled the city. First they bombed all the roads so no one could escape by vehicle. Then they shelled the city. They did not risk going in house to house to determine who was an insurgent and who was not. It was far safer and quicker to shell everyone from afar, let Allah sort it out.
Then, to make sure everyone was dead, they went from district to district, robbing, raping, and killing everyone in sight even going into mosques, shooting everyone and then setting the mosques on fire.
There were claims made that the Syrian military pumped lethal hydrogen cyanide gas into buildings where insurgents were said to be hiding.
Bulldozers were brought in to rake over the rubble to make sure all were dead. Instead of going through the debris to look for survivors, most of the city was turned into a parking lot.
During the three weeks of slaughter, it was estimated that as many as 40,000 Sunni Muslim insurgents and civilians lay dead; Assad's brother Rifaat, who commanded the assault, boasted of killing 38,000 people. The attack has been described as possibly being "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East." (2)
The Syrian Human Rights Committee called it a Genocide and A crime against Humanity:
SHRC.org, Massacre of Hama
The genocide Hama witnessed did not spare anything. Intentional destruction did not spare the environment, buildings, distinctive archaeological premises and even key installations. According to some statistics, the destruction included most of the ancient districts and buildings. The following districts have been completely destroyed: "al-Aseeda", "al-Shamaliya", "al-Zanbaqi", and "al-Kilaniya". As for "Bin al-Hireen" and "al-Sakhana" districts, the destruction reached nearly 80%. In the suburbs, like the road to Aleppo, the destruction reached 30%. The destruction process took place in threes stages: random bombardment, bombardment focused on specific targets, and destruction by detonating or bulldozing buildings. In a systematic destruction, the authorities used the artillery, tanks, surface-to-surface missiles, bulldozers and explosives.
Most American have never heard of this massacre and why should they have, American media only care about the Middle East if Jews are doing the shooting. The Hama incident, as Syria calls it, was fighting between Alawite Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims. And Muslims do not care if one sect slaughters another, ho hum.
And why should American media care when the entire Arab world was silent about the matter?
The Independent, Conspiracy of silence in the Arab world
When the Hama massacre occurred, neighbouring Arab states were silent. Although the Sunni prelates of the city called for a religious war, their fellow clerics in Damascus - and, indeed, in Beirut - were silent. Just as the imams and scholars of Islam were silent when the Algerians began to slaughter each other in a welter of head-chopping and security force executions in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, my Muslim readers practically explode with rage against Israel for allowing Christian militia to kill 400 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Both events happened in the same year, 1982. But while Assad gets a pass for slaughtering 100 times as many Muslims, Israel is the only one who is accused of committing a war crime, of genocide.
Muslims conveniently ignore the fact that the Sabra and Shatila attacks were in retaliation for the Damour massacre where Palestinians killed Christians in the city of Damour where over 4,000 people died. Whether Israel was there or not the Sabra and Shatila attacks would have happened anyway. Palestinians in Lebanon should never have involved themselves taking the side of Muslims against Christians. They brought this on themselves.
So please, Ahmed, stop this nonsense about Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Assad killed more civilians on purpose in a few weeks than Israel has in 62 years unintentionally, through the fog of war.
Want there to be peace in the Middle East? Support Israel. A strong Israel is the only hope for true democracy in that area of the world. Stop supporting Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, which bring only death and destruction to Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
ENDNOTES
(1):
Wiki, The Muslim Brotherhood
The Society of the Muslim Brothers, often simply الإخوان Al-Ikhwān, The Brotherhood or MB) is a Sunni transnational movement and the largest political opposition organization in many Arab states. The world's oldest and largest Islamic political group, it was founded in 1928, in Egypt by the schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna.
...
The Brotherhood's stated goal is to instill the Qur'an and Sunnah as the "sole reference point for ... ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community ... and state"
(2):
Wright, Robin, Dreams and Shadows : the Future of the Middle East, Penguin Press, 2008, p.243-4
