Why Didn’t the French Try and Stop Jimmy Carter and Suharto in East Timor?

Introduction:

When we all read about “The Great Catastrophe” that occurred in Israel in 1948 and the 2,000 Palestinians who were killed; we are, of course, first called upon to reflect that during the Arab Revolt in 1936-39 the British killed over 5,000 Palestinians….buy hey: Who’s counting…?

Nevertheless, just like Israel sends high school students to Poland to see what is the true meaning of the word: “holocaust”, I think perhaps Palestinians should send their children to East Timor so that they can learn the true meaning of the word: “catastrophe”.

In late 1975, during the last year of the Ford Administration, an invasion of East Timor began and the murders, rapes and other atrocities continued un-abated throughout the entire Carter Administration, culminating in the deaths of approximately 200,000 men, women and children, the vast majority of who were civilians (i.e. a lot more than were killed during "the disproportionate response" against Gaza in 2014).

Just to sum up  the role of the Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations, this quote from Wikipedia:

The US supplied weapons to Indonesia during the invasion and the subsequent occupation. A week after the invasion of East Timor, the National Security Council prepared a detailed analysis which found that the vast majority of the military equipment was US supplied.^[203] While the US government said they had suspended military assistance from December 1975 to June 1976, military aid was actually above what the US Department of State proposed and the US Congress continued to increase it, nearly doubling it.^[201] Between 1975 and 1980, when the violence in East Timor was at its climax, the United States furnished approximately $340 million in weaponry to the Indonesian government. US military aid and arms sales to Indonesia increased from 1974 and continued through to the Bush and Clinton years until it was stopped in 1999.^[201] US arms provisions to Indonesia between 1975 and 1995 amounted to approximately $1.1 billion.^[204]

The UN's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) stated in the "Responsibility" chapter of its final report that US "political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation" of East Timor between 1975 and 1999. The report (p. 92) also stated that "U.S. supplied weaponry was crucial to Indonesia's capacity to intensify military operations from 1977 in its massive campaigns to destroy the Resistance in which aircraft supplied by the United States played a crucial role."^[

What is interesting here is that Indonesia and the United States were NOT "responding" to anything; proportionately or disproportionately.

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The issue for this article has to be: Why are the French suddenly so anxious to hold a “peace conference” about the Palestinian problem, when at this very moment wars are actually raging in Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Syria Yemen and Somalia ?

I mean: the 200,000 people who were killed in East Timor were Roman Catholics and France, supposedly, is a Roman Catholic country. Why didn’t France organize a peace conference for East Timor in 1976? Or 1979? Or 1985? Or 1995?

The fact is that France never did anything for East Timor and neither, by the way, did Pope John Paul II who everyone claims was such a saint…

200,000 of his flock are raped and massacred, including small children, yet he did absolutely nothing…

And, Jimmy Carter: “the friend of the Palestinian people”. Isn’t he a religious Christian? A Sunday school teacher? How is he going to explain all this to Jesus on Judgment Day?

Jimmy Carter can’t claim, like Ronald Reagan, that he didn’t know anything, because Jimmy Carter was the most “hands on” president of the 20^th century. He was intimately involved in every decision and every action taken by his administration.

YET !!!

France has no problem stepping in to defend the Palestinians. Charles De Gaulle cut off military supplies to Israel in 1966…and now here is France hosting a peace conference in 2016….maybe it is: “A 50th Anniversary Commemorative Peace Conference”?

What we can all agree upon is that France does not want peace, nor does it care about peace…As the wars in Indo-China and Algeria clearly demonstrate, not to mention what they did in Syria after World War I...

Nor apparently does France care very much about Roman Catholics either…

The only think the French seem to care about are Palestinians…