can a small country "disappear"??, page-61

olive let's drop it? Olive. Read up on the "The Indirect Responsibility"

Information & Press Library
Resource Library

The Kahan Commission Report

Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the events at the refugee camps in Beirut, 8 February 1983.
Introduction

A Description of the Events

• The Period Before the Events in Beirut
• The Assassination of Bashir Gemayel and the I.D.F.'s entry into West Beirut
• The Events from the Entry of the Phalangists into the Sabra and Shatilla Camps until their Departure
• The Departure of the Phalangists and the Reports of the Massacre
The Responsibility for the Massacre
• The Direct Responsibility
• The Indirect Responsibility
• The Responsibility of the Political Echelon
• Personal Responsibility
• The Prime Minister, Mr. Menachem Begin
• The Minister of Defense, Mr. Ariel Sharon
• The Foreign Minister Mr. Yitzhak Shamir
• Others
The Functioning of Establishments
Recommendations and Closing Remarks

We do not believe that responsibility is to be imputed to the Defense Minister for not ordering the removal of the Phalangists from the camps when the first reports reached him about the acts of killing being committed there. As was detailed above, such reports initially reached the Defense Minister on Friday evening; but at the same time, he had heard from the Chief of Staff that the Phalangists' operation had been halted, that they had been ordered to leave the camps and that their departure would be effected by 5:00 a.m. Sat*urday. These preventive steps might well have seemed sufficient to the Defense Minister at that time, and it was not his duty to order additional steps to be taken, or to have the departure time moved up, a step which was of doubtful feasibility.

Mr. Sharon held five cabinet posts before being appointed foreign minister. But he was held indirectly responsible by a commission of inquiry for the massacre by Christian Phalangist forces of hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in theSabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.

The commission forced him to resign as defense minister. Stung by critical press accounts of his role in Lebanon, Mr.Sharon filed a libel suit against Time magazine.

The jury found defamation and falsehood, but no malice, and so he lost.

And don't think you are the only one who can't handle the Kahan Commision report.

Last night I found a Jewish source who has problems with it. However after chasing down the guy, a Doctor Joseph Lerner it became clear that he has a "problem". A problem with everything that does not match his view on life.

I think readers have had enough on this matter and I would say have been in a position to make up their minds, long ago.

My last comment.

February, 22 2001
By Uri Dan

Michael Lerner has, of course, the right to be opposed to Ariel Sharon, who was elected as prime minister in a political victory having no precedent in Israeli history. After all, Lerner is not a self-hating Jew but a self-loving one, who probably hates all those who reject his views.

But in the name of this hate, even Lerner does not have the right to write the kind of lies that appeared in his article "The scary Sharon"(February 13) in which he deplored Sharon's victory.

In Lerner's opinion, "...Barak played to his Right. He insisted that he would never compromise on Jerusalem or dismantle settlements."

One could have expected that Lerner would have done his homework before making such an accusation against Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Every newspaper reader and TV viewer in Israel knows that Barak was ready to give away to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat most of east Jerusalem, to abandon Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount and to dismantle about a 100 settlements, while conceding 97 percent of Judea and Samaria to Arafat.

Lerner, however, has always been a self-appointed "Last of the Just," a professional tzaddik, so one should not confuse him with facts after he has made up his tortured mind and crystallized his disturbed views.

Although representing a minority of Jewish pseudo-intellectuals, who create a disproportionate amount of noise and havoc in their criticism of a strong and viable Jewish state, Lerner does not hesitate to spread a blood libel when, of course, it comes to Sharon himself, who served as defense minister during the Lebanon War. He says: "Though his troops only supervised, and didn't personally conduct the shooting of the hundreds of civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, the Israeli public knew of his previous acts of terror during his years in the army."

The Sharon hate virus is so deeply implanted in the blood vessels of this self-loving Lerner that he goes far beyond the opinion of the Kahan Commission, that explicitly stated that no Israeli of any branch or any rank had been involved in this painful tragedy. The committee therefore placed, at most, "indirect responsibility" on several Israelis, including Sharon himself, for not foreseeing that the Christian-Arab Phalangist Lebanese troops might kill the Moslem-Arab Palestinians, after joining Israeli troops in fighting against the Palestinian terrorists in Beirut.

Once Sharon received a report about the savage behavior of the Phalangists, he ordered the Israeli forces to take steps to stop them and get the Christian militia out of Sabra and Shatilla.

However, Lerner finds it very easy to spread the blood libel that the Israeli troops "supervised" the shooting. He is very eager to brand Sharon and the IDF with the mark of Cain, and not only them, but Israel itself.

Poor Lerner - the Israeli public, by giving Sharon a landslide victory in the elections, declared that it knows Sharon, not because of "his previous acts of terror," but for his outstanding activities in the defense of the Jewish state, over the course of dozens of years: commanding special operations against Palestinian terrorism during the Fifties; smashing the main deployment of Egyptian armor in Sinai during the Six Day War; brilliantly crossing the Suez Canal in 1973, thus turning the tide of war from an Israeli defeat into a decisive victory, that brought Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem four years later to ask for peace.

Lerner's blood libel recalls a similar one published by Time magazine in February 1983.

Sharon sued Time for libel, and an American jury found in Sharon's favor - that Time had libeled him by publishing lies about him as a result of negligent and reckless reporting. It became a landmark case in US media libel history.

Lerner's blood libel doesn't even warrant a libel trial here. His punishment is that by virtue of his self-loving, he hates others.

Enjoy