Among the rogue’s gallery of names familiar to the world when it comes to the Arab Israeli conflict none rings with more guilt and shame than Sabra and Shatilla, the two Palestinian refugee camps that were the scenes of massacre in 1982. The only name the world associates with that tragedy is Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Defense Minister who resigned after the Kahan Commission found him indirectly responsible for not anticipating the attack by Christian Phalangists.

Not so well known is the name Elie Hobeika, the Lebanese commander in charge of the forces that killed those hundreds of civilians in Sabra and Shatilla. Nor are the months of May, 1985 or February 1987 standard commemorative dates for those that purport to defend Palestinian rights. Those dates mark successive massacres of Palestinians inside the same and other Lebanese refugee camps committed by various Arab sectarian armies. Thanks to the indefatigable work of the anti-Israel lobby, the mainstream media and ideologues like Alexander Cockburn, Norman Finkelstein, Anthony Lewis, and Noam Chomsky, those events remain virtually unknown to the world. Why unknown? Simply because the Jews of Israel cannot be easily linked to the atrocities.

Incidentally, the perpetrator of most of those massacres, Mr. Hobeika, went on to become, absurdly, Lebanon’s Minister for Social Affairs and the Handicapped in 1992.

It would seem that the long-standing practice of exculpating Arab murderers of other Arabs is as staunch as ever with the recent fighting in Lebanon between that country’s army and Fatah al Islam, Al Quaeda allies who have allegedly hijacked the Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Tripoli. Reportedly, the remaining residents of the camp, like those in 1987 have resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Why the residents of Nahr al Bared never reported their “hijacking “ to Lebanese authorities when they “took over” the camp a year ago is never plumbed by reporters or pundits.

Instead, the deplorable events of the past month have been reported as if some natural disaster has befallen the residents of the camp. No emotional expressions of blame surround the onslaught by the Lebanese army, nor have any “peace groups” like the International Solidarity Movement or Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch assigned blame to the attacking forces that have killed dozens of civilians, wounded hundreds and made thousands more homeless. Unlike their carefully crafted omission of Hezbollah militants using Lebanese civilians as human shields during last summer’s war, Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch declared recently that “Fatah al-Islam militants must not hide among civilians, and the Lebanese army must take better precautions to prevent needless civilian deaths.”

A more tepid response to the crisis can hardly be imagined. HRW Director, Kenneth Roth, went to extraordinary and dubious lengths to indict Israel for “indiscriminate bombing” in spite of the photographic evidence of Hezbollah launching rockets from within civilian neighborhoods.
On May 21st of this year, The Boston Globe headlined its story about the battle inside Nahr al Bared:

“Lebanese Soldiers Battle Militants”

A similarly tepid headline, indeed. In 1982, there were hundreds of “militants” within Sabra and Shatilla as well. Can anyone envision a headline back then that might have read:

“Israeli Christian Allies Battle Militants”

Of course not.

It’s as if today’s civilian deaths represent a local squabble unworthy of a “progressive’s” outrage. Needless to say, had a Jew or an Israeli been involved, there would be marches down the main streets of Berkeley, Cambridge, Ann Arbor and Madison on a daily basis. “Teach-ins” would have been convened on hundreds of American campuses, European unions (as if they needed encouragement) would have accelerated their boycotts of Israeli academics and goods and the World Court would have been hastily convened to indict the errant Jews. Countless psychiatrists and counselors would be appearing on NPR and the BBC analyzing the effects of the Lebanese army’s actions on the already battered psyches of Palestinian children.

Meanwhile the killings in the Arab and Muslim world continue and grow with the inevitable involvement of the west at that world’s “bloody borders” as Samuel Huntington presciently put it a decade ago.

And underlying the tragedy in Lebanon are the begging questions: Why are there Palestinian refugee camps in the first place in a country that is often touted as a fledgling democracy? Why are the Palestinians the only refugee population in the world with a UN agency assigned to their designed and permanent refugee condition? Why, in the exchange of populations following the 1948 war of extermination waged by the Arab states against their neighbor when over 800,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab lands and 500,000 Arabs mostly fled Palestine in anticipation of victory, did one state welcome and absorb those refugees while Arab states made the calculated decision to keep their refugees in poverty and permanent misery?

Lebanon does deserve our tears and pity. But finding a solution to its tragedy will not be found by ignoring endemic Arab violence in the hopes of eventually finding a Jewish villain.

NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon -- Heavily armed foreign jihadists have been entering Lebanon from Syria from around the time Western authorities noticed a drop in the infiltration of foreign fighters from Syria to Iraq, Lebanese officials say.

Syrian authorities, hoping to disrupt Lebanon so they can reassert control of the country, "have stopped sending [the jihadists] to Iraq and are now sending them here," charged Mohammed Salam, a specialist in Palestinian affairs in Lebanon. "They sent those people to die in Lebanon."...