Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas M. who wrote (12745)	3/18/2002 6:12:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23908

I guess that one day, Israelis will experience the same qualms about their foredoomed war against the Palestinians as the French are feeling about their Algerian debacle.... Breaking silence The Franco-Algerian war has been a taboo subject in France for much of the past 40 years. Now the truth about the rape, torture and other atrocities is coming out, writes Lara Marlowe. ireland.com Excerpt: Although Rotman's film is a shocking indictment of both Algerian and French atrocities, it is also what he calls "a collective questioning" of human nature. How was it that ordinary young Frenchmen, most of whom had done their Catechism and learned the classics, became war criminals in Algeria? Rotman's witnesses venture explanations - racism, peer pressure, the abuse of alcohol, anger and the desire for revenge. Most disturbing is a former soldier's mention of "a form of pleasure - doing whatever you want to a body, fulfilling your most perverse and deep desires". Unlike other colonies, Algeria was considered an integral part of France. The Crémieux decree of 1870 made all Jewish Algerians citizens of France, but the Muslim majority were doomed to remain impoverished outcasts in their own country, cannon-fodder for two world wars. In 1947, a feeble attempt to create a two-house assembly in which 900,000 "Frenchmen of European Origin" would have elected 60 representatives and eight million "French Muslims" 60 others, failed because the pieds-noirs (European settlers) opposed it. In the coming conflict, they would die in approximately the same proportion - 10 Muslims to every European. [...] The French military tortured mainly with electricity - electrodes attached to the ears, armpits, sexual organs and toes. Prisoners were hung on poles, from the ceiling, or bound to metal chairs or tables that conducted current. Sometimes children were tortured to make their parents talk, or vice versa. Dirty liquid was forced down prisoners' throats through a funnel until their stomach swelled like balloons. One of Rotman's witnesses tells of rows of prisoners left to bake in the sun. "The light burns their retinas so they keep their eyes shut. From their swollen, deformed lips with bleeding blisters hang whitish tongues, which have long lost all trace of moisture. Flies buzz around them, go into their eyes, flock around their mouths, enter their nostrils or agglutinate on oozing wounds, where the metal rings hold their ankles." Talking did not bring salvation. The murder of torture victims was called the corvée de bois. "It's a guy you've interrogated who you want to liquidate," Jacques Zéo, a volunteer in Algeria, told Rotman. "So you tell him he can leave and you shoot and kill him. It's cleaner than killing him under torture. Anyway, there's no hope for him. Someone who's been interrogated, even if he doesn't talk, if you let him go without killing him, the FLN will kill him." [snip] ______________________ BTW, so much for pro-Arab Europe.... LOL!

To: Thomas M. who wrote (12745)	3/19/2002 9:32:02 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

He brings up Damour, without the crucial background information. Without the "crucial background information" which makes the slaughter of Christians at Damour OK. Besides the Damour victims deserved it since some Palestinians had been massacred by Christians sometime earlier. What Christians - who cares - maybe the people killed at Damour, let's insinuate. Oh yes, let's don't forget to play around with numbers of dead - minimizing the Damour dead and maximizing the dead elsewhere.