The curious case of the vengeful pilot

Robert Fisk's latest fictional work

Bataween
Point of No Return
09 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

A Jewish couple was driven out of a Lebanese village. Their son, an Israeli pilot, is said to have wreaked his revenge by bombing the village during the 1982 Lebanon war. And bingo! An anti-Israel lie is born.

Commenter Avi deconstructs the lie on Harry's Place:

"Robert Fisk wrote (in The Independent) about the lynching of an Egyptian in a Lebanese village. However you can’t have a story about the Middle East without a dig at the “root cause of all evil (in the world)” can you?


” The story in Ketermaya, a mixed Druze-Sunni village, is that way back in 1975, a Jewish couple who lived here – there was a tiny Jewish community in Lebanon at the time – were driven from their homes and that their son, an Israeli pilot, bombed the village in revenge during the Israeli invasion of 1982.

By extraordinary chance, I was sitting on the hillside above Ketermaya in 1982 and saw the lone plane attack, repeatedly bombing the village on the morning of 7th June.

There were no Palestinian fighters there – just civilians, of whom at least 50 were hiding in their homes – and they were all in their graves within 24 hours.”

"The story smells from a number aspects. Firstly, how did the omniscient Fisk know who the pilot was in the plane? He was sitting on the ground.

(Read full story)

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