The level of torture and sexual violence used by combatants against women and girls during the 15-year civil war in Lebanon shocked investigators, British newspaper The Guardian said.A report by the human rights organization Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) gathered testimonies that detailed horrific experiences of violence, including gang-rape, electrocution and forced nudity used to persecute women and girls – some as young as nine – from opposing communities.An amnesty law passed in Lebanon in 1991 granted immunity for crimes committed against civilians during the war, which has allowed a culture of impunity and lack of accountability to develop, the report noted.
The report itself, issued by LAW and UN Women, is horrific to read, with victim and eyewitness accounts of the most disgusting war crimes.
Yet the report doesn't say who performed these rapes and murders of women and girls. All it says are "state and non-state actors."
One has to read between the lines to understand that only Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian armed forces, Christian and Muslim militias were responsible for these rapes, not the IDF in its forays into Lebanon during the civil war. The report mentions the 1991 amnesty law, and subsequent Lebanese amnesty laws, as the major reason that there has been no investigation or prosecution, and why the victims have had no recourse. Yet the amnesty law would not cover any crimes by Israeli troops.
There's one other way to be certain that Israelis weren't involved. Because if they were, this report would be worldwide news. Besides the Guardian article, this report is not mentioned in mainstream media at all.
Obviously, saying that Jewish soldiers don't wantonly rape women and children is not a high moral or legal bar. Yet the disinterest in this systematic sexual abuse over 15 years in Lebanon only makes sense when you understand that the world expects Muslims and Christians, Lebanese and Palestinians to act like subhumans in war - it is the proverbial dog bites man story.
Israel is routinely accused of being a human rights monster. It is the only state currently accused of apartheid by the international humanitarian community. NGOs issue report after report, vying with each other to find novel angles to accuse Israel of yet more violations of human rights. Yet when it comes to the most horrific war crimes done by Arabs - virtually nothing.
Of course this is antisemitism. The goal of story after story on Israeli human rights abuses, most of them fictional or exaggerated, is to demonize Israel to the average news consumer - and one reason why stories about Arab human rights abuses don't get coverage is because that detracts from and waters down the narrative from the obsessive anti-Israel coverage.
Watch this story over the next week. See if CNN or the New York Times cover it at all - so far they haven't even though the Guardian story was published Thursday. If they do, see how many minutes CNN chooses to use for the story, see how many column inches it gets in the New York Times and on which page.
And if you think that a story from decades ago doesn't deserve major media coverage, compare this week's reporting or lack of reporting of the rape of hundreds of women with last month's coverage of a movie about an alleged Israeli war crime in 1948, against soldiers, based on a poorly written academic research paper that has been retracted.
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