UK silent on Sabra Shatila massacre

[KABAVAKO]

Britain went out of its way earlier this month to condemn the 1972 killing of 11 Israeli athletes, but it has failed to even raise the horrific Sabra and Shatila massacre of more than 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Israeli-affiliated terrorists ten years later. The Israeli regime unleashed Phalange terrorists on Muslim residents of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the Lebanese capital of Beirut between September 16 and 18, 1982. The terrorists entered the refugee camps, supposedly guarded by Israeli regime’s forces, on September 16, while Israeli troops fired flares to help attackers in their butchery of innocent Muslims including scores of children, women and old men. As many as 3,500 people were slaughtered with many women raped before being killed. In December 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre in Resolution 37/123 with a massive 123 yes votes, without any opposition as an act of “genocide,” for which the Israeli regime was implicitly blamed. However, Britain joined hands with its western allies the US, Germany, Canada and France to abstain on the resolution apparently because Tel Aviv was indirectly blamed, while later in February 1983 the Israeli regime found -- in what British journalist David Hirst called a flawed inquiry full of omissions of evidence to rid the regime of full responsibility for the massacre -- that its forces were “indirectly” responsible for the butchery. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on the 40th anniversary of the Munich attacks on Israeli team members on September 5 that he and his colleagues “reiterate our determination to confront terrorism and stand with the victims of terrorism wherever it may occur.” Nonetheless, Britain seems not to include victims of Israeli state terrorism in its list of terror victims, nor consider Palestinian and Lebanese civilians massacred by the regime both in 1982 and later in the 2008 Gaza Massacre as worthy of a “sad” remembrance.