Comments Elsewhere

Oh sure. Once Arabs murder someone, there will be always a lot of people who will say “well, actually Jews organised that”. There’s a lot of nutjobs out there, and some of them happen to hate Jews and Israel. You are not alone.

Frodo, do you know anything in particular about how the Sabra and Chatila massacres occurred? This isn’t just some bullshit conspiracy theory about ZOG or Mossad. It’s a simple fact about how it was that Phalangist militias came to be in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, and how it came to be that Palestinian refugees could not get out once the slaughter began. It’s not very complicated: the Israeli military surrounded Sabra and Chatila with tanks, and then asked the Christian Phalange militias to pass through the encirclement in order to “restore order” and “liquidate” the mythical “terrorists” in the camps (which were populated by unarmed women, children, and old men after the PLO withdrew to Tunisia). The Phalange at the time was smarting for revenge for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. What did they think the Phalange was going to do? Deliver cookies?

Numerous Israeli military officers have said that they could see what was happening in the camps, and told their commanders, and told Sharon, but that they would not do anything to stop it. After the massacre, over 400,000 Jews in Israel rallied in protest and denounced then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon as a murderer. All raving anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, I’m sure. Or perhaps not.

Save your complaints about “hating Israel.” The issue here is not who lives in Israel or what it is. The issue is that atrocities like Sabra and Chatila are completely indefensible. That would be true, no matter who committed them.