in the Shatila and Burj el-Barajneh refugee camps
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/eed216406b50bf6485256ce10072f637/3720 a75efcd2c931852568770052c2a3!OpenDocument
7. On 19 May, extremely heavy fighting broke out once again in the Beirut area. Violent clashes between Amal militiamen and Palestine refugees, resulted in heavy losses in human lives. There was widespread destruction in the Shatila and Burj el-Barajneh camps and an estimated toll of 635 dead and 2,500 wounded.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,963603,00.html
So what's the difference?
Sabra and Shatila were done by Christian Militiamen whereas the Shatila and Burj el-Barajneh massacres were done by Arabs against Arabs.
Some of the repercussions of the Sabra and Shatila massacre(which again was carried out by Christians, not Jews)
n Europe, the news of the massacre resulted in a backlash against Jews and Israel. In Italy, airport workers boycotted the Israeli airline El-Al, badges were distributed with the star of David and swastika intertwined, and the slogan "Nazisrael" came to be used. Bombs were exploded in synagogues in Milan and Rome — the latter resulting in the death of a two-year-old boy and the wounding of 34 other people. At the demands of labor unions, a Milan hotel cancelled a scheduled bar mitzvah reception. In France, on September 21, a group of teachers at Lycée Voltaire, one of the leading French high schools, stopped all classes between 10 a.m. and midday. They drafted two letters, one to the French president, demanding the breaking of all diplomatic and economic relations with Israel and official recognition of the PLO; the other to the Israel embassy in Paris, demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. The letters were read to the students of the school assembled in the courtyard.[23]
The massacre provoked outrage around the world. On December 16, 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide.[24] Paragraph 2, which "resolved that the massacre was an act of genocide", was adopted by ninety-eight votes to nineteen, with twenty-three abstentions: All Western democracies abstained from voting. [25][26]
According to William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland,[27] "the term genocide (…) had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision”.[26] This opinion is a reflection of the comments made by some of the delegates who took part in the debate. While all acknowledged that it was a massacre, the claim that it was a genocide was disputed, for example the delegate for Canada stated "The term genocide cannot, in our view, be applied to this particular inhuman act".[26] The delegate of Singapore added that "My delegation regrets the use of the term "an act of genocide" (…). [as] , the term 'genocide' is used to mean acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".[26] and that "We also question whether the General Assembly has the competence to make such determination",[26] and the United States commented that "While the criminality of the massacre was beyond question, it was a serious and reckless misuse of language to label this tragedy genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention (…)".[26]
Citing Sabra and Shatila as an example, Leo Kuper notes the reluctance of the United Nations to respond or take action in actual cases of genocide for most egregious violators, but its willingness to charge "certain vilified states, and notably Israel", with genocide. In his view:
This availability of a scapegoat state in the UN restores members with a record of murderous violence against their subjects a self-righteous sense of moral purpose as principled members of 'the community of nations'... Estimates of the numbers killed in the Sabra-Shatila massacres range from about four hundred to eight hundred - a minor catastrophe in the contemporary statistics of mass murder. Yet a carefully planned UN campaign found Israel guilty of genocide, without reference to the role of the Phalangists in perpetrating the massacres on their own initiative. The procedures were unique in the annals of the United Nations.[28]
Bernard Lewis argues that the response to the massacre was so overwhelming because the event presented an opportunity to blame Jews: "There is no evidence that the teachers of [the Lycée Voltaire] had ever been moved to such action by events in Poland or Uganda, Central America or Afghanistan, South Africa and Southeast Asia, or for that matter in the Middle East where the massacre of Sabra and Shatila... lacked neither precedents nor parallels".[29] He contrasts the reactions to the Sabra and Shatila massacre with those to the Hama massacre which was perpetrated in the same year by the Syrian army and in which tens of thousands were killed, but on which, according to Lewis, "not a dog barked".[30]
And what was the outcry over the worse massacre in Burj el-Barajneh and Shatila?
Virtually nothing.
