God Cried

By Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy. London: Quartet Books Ltd., 1983. 141 pp. $29.95

Reviewed by James G. Abourezk

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.