Letter to the
Editor:
As a Lebanese American who lived through most of the so-called "civil war" in
Lebanon (1975-1990), your "Atrocity in tel Aviv" (Editorial, 07 Jan. 2003)
raises a couple of interesting points. First, it fails to specify that the Palestinian
terrorist group claiming responsibility from Lebanon, albeit accurately reported to be
funded by Iran, is in fact affiliated with the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Second, it
issues a warning against "meddling by malign outsiders" in the ongoing intifada,
implying that Lebanon now has become a meddling party in the "civil war" between
Israelis and Palestinians, and going even so far as to cite the Lebanese "civil
war" as an example to avoid. Consistent with the historicallly flawed reporting by
the American press on the Lebanese question, your editorial fails to denounce the Syrian
occupation of Lebanon as the sole reason for the presence of terrorist groups on Lebanese
soil.
The "civil war" of Lebanon was in fact engineered by Syria to dominate and rule that country, and use it as a launching pad for anti-Western terror acts. The US press and administration alike refuse to acknowledge that fact. The parallels between the current situation in Israel and the "civil war" in Lebanon are unavoidable. The difference is simply the double standard. When the car bombs of Palestinian and other Syrian-supported terror groups were ripping the bodies and livelihoods of ordinary Lebanese civilians, the Lebanese victims - its people and its government - were blamed for their "divisions" and "sectarian ethnic hatred". When the Syrian army would blindly shell entire civilian neighborhoods for months at a time, the Lebanese people would be blamed for being "unruly" and "barbaric".
Lebanon the victim was blamed by many observers for being an artificially created nation because of the diversity of its constituent communities. Yet, no one hears similarly "balanced" reporting on the ongoing savagery between Palestinians and Israelis, or any debate on whether Israel is an articial country.
The American people need to forgive the Lebanese people's "we told you so" attitude, because no one listened to their cries of despair then. The descent of civilized Lebanon into the existential chaos in which it remains today was indeed the first large scale act of terror carried out by the same forces that we are fighting today.
September 11 actually started in Beirut on October 23, 1983, when a truck suicide bomber blew himself up killing 241 peacekeeping US Marines. The difference is that, then, the US packed up and fled Beirut abandoning Lebanon to Syria and its terrorist proxies. It is hard not to see the direct line from Beirut (October 2983) and New York (September 2001).
Joseph Hitti
New England Americans for Lebanon
08 January 2003