A closer look at the facts suggests you overlook quite a few. Among them: Israel is not an apartheid state. You do a disservice to those who worked tirelessly against apartheid by confusing a dispute over land with a governing philosophy.

Also among your thought errors: in Lebanon, more than 100,000 people had been massacred before any Israelis showed up. And, when the Israelis showed up, Arabs continued to kill Arabs far more effectively than Israelis did.

Now, we have propagandists who act as if Israel, not the Phalange militia which committed the massacres, is solely responsible. That is old fashion racism. It sends the message to Arabs that they are mere animals, incapable of moral action. But again: we are all responsible for what we do. That applies to Arab as well.

So, as I said, Israel bears some fault in the events. However, the primary fault is certainly the militia which actually committed the massacres. And that was not Israel. It was the Phalange.

I hate to disappoint you. I made and make no defense of those with any responsibility – directed or indirect – for the massacres in question. And, I do not defend that which is not, in my view, right. Clearly, Israel’s use of the Maronite Arab Phalange militia in Palestinian Arab camps, given that Maronites and Palestinian Arabs spent much of a decade massacring each other in an unspeakable orgy of horror and slaughter, was wrong. And, clearly General Yaron bears some very considerable degree of indirect responsibility for what the Maronite Phalange did to Palestinian Arabs.

What I argue instead is that those who leave out the moral and legal responsibility of those who committed the outrage – that is, about the party which is, in this case, clearly the most responsible, morally and legally – are generally racist in attitude. Such people tend to view massacres committed by Arabs against other Arabs as unimportant because they believe – a racist notion – that Arabs are not capable of moral judgment or moral action. Then, I ask the reasonable question: where does Professor Boyle stand on all of this – not just on the narrow topic he raises -, since he appears to take a very narrow view of who is to blame.

To Professor Boyle:

Given that the atrocities were carried out by Arabs with their own agenda, why do you focus only on Israelis? By what sort of principles do you operate in making such a narrow selection of villains? And, where do you stand – please give actual examples, not just platitudes – on those Arabs who committed the massacres in question? And – also providing examples -, where do you stand on the morality and legality of the policy adopted by the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and by the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade of using the massacre as a policy of common choice in their war against Israel?

Received from Francis Boyle – Sep 20, 2007

KPFA (San Francisco’s Pacifica station) airs “Flashpoints.” Yes, there
ARE still a few bright spots on Pacifica radio, giving Lew Hill moments
of respite from spinning in his grave. (Lew Hill founded Pacifica.)

On September 18, 2007 25 years after the Sabra and Shatila slaughters
(with the killers still free) “Flashpoints” aired a report from
the ground in occupied Palestine.

The “Sabra and Shatila Massacre 25-Year Anniversary” segment
also featured Professor Francis Boyle, of the University of Illinois. A
scholar in the areas of international law and human rights, Professor
Boyle received a J.D. degree magna cum laude and MA and Ph.D. degrees
in political science from Harvard University. Prior to joining the
faculty at the College of Law, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard and
an associate at its Center for International Affairs. Professor Boyle
discusses the fates and fortunes of those found culpable and
responsible for the horrific massacres in an interview by Nora
Barrows-Friedman.

FLASHPOINT LINKS: Their main website page gives many links and other
good information: http://flashpoints.net/

Flashpoints 9/18/07 – http://flashpoints.net/index.html#2007-09-18

Listen:
http://www.kpfa.org/cgi-bin/gen-mpegurl.m3u?server=aud1.kpfa.org&port=80&file=dummy.m3u&mount=/data/20070918-Tue1700.mp3

I did not drag in unrelated stories. The material I quoted pertained explicitly to Lebanon and to the massacres in issue. And, frankly, the attitude of most of those who condemn the Israelis while saying nothing much about those who committed the massacres – who were, in fact, not Israelis – is old fashioned racism, in this case rendering Arabs into non-moral agents on the level of animals. That, my friend, is what is involved here.

P.S. This is how Orwell defined Nationalism (among variants of which he counted Zionism):

the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

And, it is to be pointed out that such massacre was only one of many. One need only recall that the civil war in Lebanon caused the death of more than 100,000 people and the number of massacres committed by all sides of that war – including by Palestinian Arabs – is not small. So, there is much blame to go around, if morals are to play any role in our thinking.

As noted by Bernard Lewis:

The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila that same year was carried out by Lebanese militiamen, led by a Lebanese commander who subsequently became a minister in the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese government, and it was seen as a reprisal for the assassination of the Lebanese President Bashir Gemayyel. Ariel Sharon, who at the time commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon, was reprimanded by an Israeli commission of inquiry for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre, and was forced to resign from his position as Minister of Defense. It is understandable that the Palestinians and other Arabs should lay sole blame for the massacre on Sharon. What is puzzling is that Europeans and Americans should do the same. Some even wanted to try Sharon for crimes against humanity before a tribunal in Europe. No such suggestion was made regarding either Saddam Hussein or Hafiz al-Assad, who slaughtered tens of thousands of their compatriots. It is easy to understand the bitterness of those who see the implication here. It was as if the militia who had carried out the deed were animals, not accountable by the same human standards as the Israelis.

So, why is the outrage by Professor Boyle so selective? By what sort of principles does he operate?

Sadly, it was a response by Christian Lebanese to atrocities committed against them by Palestinian immigrants to Lebanon. The larger context of this tragedy is the 15 year Lebanese Civil war, spawned by none other than Yassir Arafat and his cronies after the failed Palestinian usurpation of the Jordanian monarchy. In the wake of that, Jordan’s King Hussain’s troops butchered some 20,000 Palestinians or more in an action remembered as “Black September.”

All that the investigations into Israel Military conduct during Sabra and Chatilla concluded was that the soldiers “should have known” that a massacre was possible. No other culpability was ever proven against any of the commanders or participants, though opponents to the existence of the Jewish State Israel would have you believe otherwise.

A copy of this is being kept in case this “unacceptable viewpoint ” is erased by “management.”