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 mong
the lessons that should be drawn from the fall of Kabul is the fact
that the world owes Ariel Sharon and Israel an apology.
I say this because of the massacres now being calmly and indifferently
reported from Afghanistan. When the Northern Alliance took Kabul
and other areas, it made short shrift of any remaining Taliban fighters,
and, no doubt, many Afghans to whom they simply took a disliking,
as well.
These Sabras
and Chatilas in Afghanistan took place right under the noses of
the U.S. military, and with U.S. ground forces in the area and directing
the fighting. While U.S. troops did not do the killings themselves,
they also failed to stop them. A bit like Rwanda?
Now, don't
get me wrong. I don't really think the U.S. had the ability to prevent
the Northern Alliance from looking for a bit of catharsis on the
hapless denizens of Kabul. Such things happen in war, and that ultimately
the responsibility for them lies with those who started the war
in the first place — in this case, the Taliban.
Which brings
us to one of the worst blood libels of the 20th century: the accusation
that Israel in general and Ariel Sharon in particular were directly
to blame for the massacres of Palestinian Arabs by Lebanese Arabs
at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps outside Beirut in 1982.
It will be
recalled that in 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon after years
of shellings and terrorist incursions into Israel by Palestinians,
backed by Syria and Lebanon. These same Palestinians had long played
a role in the Lebanese civil war — a war that claimed thousands
of lives and reduced Lebanon to being a puppet of the Syrian dictator
— and they were responsible for countless atrocities inside
Lebanon itself, between 1970 and 1982. When the Israeli troops entered
Lebanon, many an Arab greeted them with flowers.
But all did
not go smoothly. When Israeli troops closed in on Beirut and on
the PLO headquarters there, the world started grumbling. On September
14, 1982, the Christian president of Lebanon, Pierre Gemayel, was
assassinated by a bomb planted by Palestinians. In response, the
Christian-Arab Falange militias that had been headed by Gemayel
entered Sabra and Shatilla and killed some people, probably about
400, but estimated by some to have been as high as 800.
In Afghanistan,
massacres are being dismissed casually, as minor byproducts of Third
World militiamen's quaint way of settling scores. The events in
Beirut, by contrast, became the focus of one of the worst anti-Jewish
libels since the Middle Ages. The media (especially the Israeli
media, long the occupied territories of Israel's far Left) insisted
that Ariel Sharon knew or should have known what the Christian Falange
militiamen would do in the camps, despite the fact that the Falange
were the official praetorian guards of the late elected president
of Lebanon. The Western press insisted that Sharon could have stopped
the killings before they happened. Strangely, those same journalists
are not making the same claim today about Tony Blair or George W.
Bush. None of the journalists who insisted that the Sabra
and Shatilla killings should have been expected had printed predictions,
in the days before they occurred, that they would. More of that
20/20 hindsight.
Failure to
prevent the massacres then became the rallying cry for the world's
anti-Zionists and Israel-bashers, who were intent on proving that
Israel is a bloodthirsty, savage country surrounded by peaceful
Arab Quakers. President Reagan expressed his "revulsion"
at Israel's failure to prevent Arabs from killing Arabs, comparing
it to the Holocaust. (No one is comparing the piles of dead Taliban
this week to the Holocaust.)
But the blood
libel gained a life of its own. When Time magazine accused
Sharon of complicity in the massacre, he sued them for libel and
won. When a left-wing Israeli newspaper accused Sharon of having
hidden his battle plans from the prime minister, he sued them for
libel and won. No one seemed to notice when a Lebanese researcher,
Robert Maroun Hatem, cleared Sharon of any culpability for the killings
in his book From Israel to Damascus: Lebanon, the Mystery of
the Unknown.
Ever since,
Sharon has been the Jew anti-Semites most love to hate. The same
Belgians trying to indict Sharon for the Sabra and Chatila killings
are not preparing similar indictments of Blair and Bush. Neither
is the BBC, which ran a recent series on Sharon's guilt. The United
States declared Sharon persona non grata after the 1982 events,
and only agreed to treat him as semi-human after he won the prime
ministership in Israel by a landslide. The Israel-bashing media
are still blaming Sharon for the Palestinian Intifada because
he took a "controversial" stroll on the Temple Mount last
year, a stroll about as controversial as a walk in the Vatican by
an Italian politician.
Ariel Sharon
has more than his fair share of faults, but he has long served as
the Middle East's mine canary; more often than not, the assaults
and slanders directed against him are indicators of a more vulgar
sentiment regarding Israel and Jews in general.
As the body
count in the streets of Kabul and other Afghan cities rises, the
world should seriously consider proffering Sharon, Israel, and the
Jews a humble apology.
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