The radical Shiite Moslem group that has claimed responsibility for kidnapping and killing seven Lebanese Jews in the past 21 months has now stepped up its campaign of terror by again threatening to kill all remaining hostages unless its demands are met.
What makes this particularly ominous is that the renewed threat by the self-styled “Organization of the Oppressed (Mustadafin) in the World” was delivered to the Beirut paper An-Nahar on January 6, only a week after the terrorist group had announced the execution of three Lebanese Jewish hostages.
The Shiite terrorist group contended that the men had been executed because they were “spies for the Israeli Mossad” who had supplied Israel with information on the Islamic Resistance, a coalition of Lebanese anti-Israeli groups. The timing of the latest executions, it declared, was “in retaliation for Israel’s attacks against the south and western Bekaa (Valley) and the terrorist attacks against our people in occupied Palestine.”
(A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry responded that “the gratuitous murder of three innocents reveals the true nature of terrorist movements in Lebanon,” and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed that Israel would seek out and punish “these barbarians” who again had “used defenseless Jews as a means of hitting at Israel.”)
THE LATEST VICTIMS
The latest victims were reported to be Elie Srour, an electrical engineer, near 50, who had been kidnapped on March 28, 1985; Youssef (Joseph) Benesti, 33, kidnapped in mid-May 1985; and Henri Menn, a man in his fifties who lived alone in Moslem-controlled west Beirut. Until the publication of Menn’s photograph and the announcement of his “execution” by the Organization of the Oppressed, there had been no information that he had been abducted.
(There had been reports earlier this month that another man named Elie Srour, 68, had been executed. But this man, a pharmacist, is alive and well in Paris.)
FANATICAL GROUP IS DEADLY SERIOUS
The kidnapping and murder of Menn provides further evidence that this fanatical group was deadly serious when it first declared, on December 28, 1985, that it would strike against other Jews “on whom we may lay our hands” unless its demands against Israel were met.
That threatening statement was issued at the time of the murder of the first two hostages: Haim Cohen, 38, a department store accountant, on December 24, 1985; and Prof. Isaac Tarrab, 70, a retired professor of mathematics, whose body was found at the end of the month.
Neither Cohen nor Tarrab was involved in partisan Lebanese polities or in the Arab-Israel conflicts in any way. Indeed, it was precisely because they felt themselves deeply rooted in Lebanon that they and the other Jews who have become victims of Shiite terrorism remained behind when the vast majority of Lebanese Jews emigrated either to Israel or to join relatives in other countries during the decade of turmoil that has engulfed Lebanon.
Dr. Rosemary Cohen, the sister-in-law of Haim Cohen, has declared that he “was given the opportunity to go to Israel. But he did not want to go so as not to have to face the possibility of killing his Arab friends.”
A neighbor and former student of Tarrab stressed to me that he was not a Zionist and in fact had virtually no connection with Jewish life. “He was not interested in anything but his figures and his pipe.” The killing of this gentle old man, she said, was “a senseless death.”
DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS OF THE VICTIMS
The kidnap and murder victims are of diverse backgrounds and ages. They have only two things in common: they were known to be Jews and they had the bad fortune of living in west Beirut, which made them targets of opportunity for the radical Moslem elements. (There are fewer than 10 Jews in west Beirut and about 70 in east Beirut.)
The third murder victim was Ibrahim Benesti, 34, the brother of Joseph. Ibrahim’s body was found by the police on February 19, 1986. The coroner’s office reported that he had been shot twice and strangled. The body also bore signs of torture and beatings to the head. Both Ibrahim and the father of the two men, Yehuda Benesti, 70, had been kidnapped earlier in February.
It is tragically ironic that when Joseph had been abducted the previous May, the father at first did not report the disappearance to the police, because he believed that his friends and customers of his shop within the surrounding Shiite and Palestinian communities would discreetly intervene on behalf of his son and secure his release.
The fourth victim was Dr. Elie Hallak, 58, vice president of the Lebanese Jewish community. Hallak was one of the four Jews kidnapped over the last weekend in March. Reportedly, armed men in uniform had dragged him from his home on a Friday night, during the Sabbath meal. His “execution” was announced in a statement published on February 19 in the Lebanese press.
The Organization of the Oppressed said that it would not release his body until Israel “stopped its criminal operations” in southern Lebanon, withdrew from “all of the occupied territories” and released “all our brothers detained in Khiyam,” a South Lebanese Army detention camp.
The same conditions were reiterated by the group when it refused to release the bodies of the latest three victims. It is speculated that the bodies have not been released either because the Shiite terrorist group does not want to reveal evidence that it had also tortured them or because they may have been killed some time ago.
‘HE WAS TOTALLY APOLITICAL’
Rachel Hallak still vainly hopes that her husband may yet be alive. In public appeals to the kidnappers, she has stressed how her husband, a noted pediatrician, was known as “the doctor of the poor,” because he would not collect fees from those who could not pay, “whatever their religion.”
His patients included many Shiites in Beirut and in the villages of the south. His neighbors, she writes, all “could bear witness that he was totally apolitical, for the simple reason that his profession had shaped his entire life.” (In fact, one of his patients was the son of a prominent PLO leader.) The Organization of the Oppressed has stated that it is still holding the following persons: Isaac Sasson, 66, the president of the Lebanese Jewish community, who was kidnapped on March 31, 1985 on his way from the airport in west Beirut on his return from a business trip for the pharmaceutical firm he directed; and Yehuda Benesti, whose two sons were among those murdered by the group.
It is generally believed that the group may also be holding Salim Jammous, 56, the secretary-general of the Lebanese Jewish community, who was abducted near the synagogue in west Beirut on August 15, 1984. Nothing is known of the whereabouts of Clement Dana, an elderly man who lived alone and disappeared in April 1985.
The formation of a worldwide group under the name of “the Party of the Oppressed” was suggested by Ayatollah Khomeini during a meeting with the Syrian Foreign Minister on August 16, 1979, in which Khomeini declared it to be “the same as the ‘Party of God’ (Hezbullah.)”
At a memorial meeting in New York on January 8, 1986 on behalf of the first two Jewish victims, the Rev. Joseph O’Hare, president of Fordham University, poignantly declared: “It is once again a cruel irony that the murderers of Haim Cohen and Isaac Tarrah should dare to call themselves representatives of the oppressed of the world. No greater human oppression is possible than the reduction of individual human beings to nameless symbols whose lives are snuffed out in some sterile political gesture.”
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