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Book Review
God Cried
By Tony Clifton and
Catherine Leroy.
London: Quartet Books Ltd., 1983.
141 pp.
$29.95
Reviewed by James
G. Abourezk
October 3, 1983, Page
7
Tony Clifton is a journalist who has plied his trade in various
parts of the world, among them Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Saigon,
Iran and in Beirut. Catherine Leroy is a photojournalist who has
done the same in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Africa, Cyprus, Iran and in
Lebanon. Both have won awards for their reporting and photography.
Together they have produced a book that is stunning in its
photography and searing in its prose. Catherine Leroy's selection of
photographs move the reader around Beirut from the beginning of the
Israeli siege during the summer of 1982, to the departure of the PLO
and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in September.
Clifton makes a significant point, which I happen to agree with,
and which I have made a number of times in discussing the Israeli
invasion. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila drew attention away
from the larger crime committed by the Israelis in its grossly
inhumane butchery all during the summer.
Bitterness and Passion
Although Clifton gives
deserved credit to Leroy's excellent photography, it is his bitter
and passion-filled prose which carries the book and makes it almost
required reading for anyone interested in the Mideast, or, for that
matter, in humanity.
It is an extremely well-written chronicle of his own experiences
and observations during the siege of Beirut. For good measure he has
included his memories of parts of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and
1976. The author admits, at the outset, the non -objectivity of his
writing, on the grounds that participants in a siege must
necessarily see the war from the perspective of those around them
who share in the suffering. In this case it was the Palestinians and
the Lebanese who lived in West Beirut and who refused to leave
despite the constant threat to their lives.
It is also a document which will rekindle the anger of those who
read it-anger toward the Israeli war machine and all those who
supported it and made excuses for the horrendous slaughter which it
wrought on the people of West Beirut.
Everyone will find a page or a story or a photograph in God
Cried that will adhere in his or her brain forever, and there
is practically no limit to those in this book. Leroy photographed
and Clifton recorded the story of the Assaf family in a way which
will be impossible for me to forget. A shell crashed in the
children's bedroom in the middle of the night.Her mother found
eleven-year-old Lina Assaf lying with the blood fountaining out of
the stump where her left leg used to be. Beside her drenched in
blood was her seven-year-old sister, Linda, screaming hysterically.
The trauma washed away Linda's mind and she remains a mental cripple
to this day.
Catherine Leroy became obsessed at one point with the phenomenal
collapse, after being bombed, of a high rise building in the Rue
Assi, burying several hundred people in the rubble. She returned day
after day to photograph the search for bodies and was asked by a
young man who was obviously waiting for a lost relative, why she
took so many photographs. She replied that she did not want things
like this to be forgotten. The young man asked why shouldn't it be
forgotten? "Who cares about us? They'll keep doing this to us again
and again. You're wasting your time here."
It was a story which made Clifton wonder if all the journalists
were wasting their time so far as the Lebanese and Palestinians were
concerned. All of them, he said, wrote about cluster bombs and
phosphorous bombs, but nothing happened, nothing changed, and he
wondered if they saved any lives at all.
Sanitizing the Blood
I
recall the press coverage of the invasion and the siege last year.
It started out with the American press corps reading Israeli
military communiqués, then when the slaughter became so obvious not
even the press could turn their heads to protect Israel, they
started delivering something approximating the truth of the Israeli
blitzkrieg. Not even all of Israel's apologists working overtime,
repeating the big lie about no casualties and about how accurate
Israel's bombing was and wasn't it just great that Israel was
testing America's new weapons could cover up the butchery. No matter
that the television news editors sanitized the blood from the
screen, and that Tony Clifton's editors deleted all references to
"indiscriminate bombing" on the ground that the Israelis would never
do anything as nasty as shell a city indiscriminately, because
Americans had finally had enough. The blood was finally showing
through the protective curtain, and that was when Reagan thought it
was safe to call Menachem Begin to ask him to stop.
As Tony Clifton said, the world pretty much sat out the siege of
Beirut, but unless they are brought around to some kind of
preventive memory of it, some other bloody-minded Sharon or Begin
will do it all over again. What is happening in Lebanon today smells
like the beginning.
Perhaps the young man on the Rue Assi was right, but I pray to
God he's not.
James G. Abourezk, a former Senator from South Dakota,
practices law in Washington, D.C. and has also worked as a
photojournalist. |
