Word: beirutization
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Doing his best to hide his concern--secrecy is his middle name--Arafat is terrified to the point of paranoia, some of his confidants say, about Sharon's coming to power. Here is the former general who tried to kill him with air strikes on his Beirut bunker, who was found by an official Israeli report 18 years ago to bear "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Maybe the coming of the old warrior is what recently led a clearly unnerved Arafat to grab a machine gun from a bodyguard and leap...
...chance than Barak of beating Sharon, who enjoyed a huge lead despite being held responsible for two decades of Israeli misery in Lebanon, not to mention the Israeli military's findings over his culpability in the case of massacres of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut in 1982. Sharon's own popularity in this year's polls was eclipsed by that of Netanyahu, despite his having been hounded out of office by an electorate all but holding its nose some 18 months ago. And of course the man they elected by a near landslide to replace...
MIDDLE EAST Those Who Live by the Sword . . . The former Lebanese warlord whose Israel-allied Christian militia slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 was assassinated in a Beirut car-bomb explosion. Elie Hobeika had no shortage of enemies, but initial suspicion has fallen on Israel. Hobeika met earlier last week with Belgian officials considering war crimes charges against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The potential charges, permitted under Belgian law, stem from Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when Sharon was Defense Minister and strongly allied to Hobeika's Lebanese Forces. Sharon was forced...
Finally, interviews of the Cole's crew indicate that they were issued weapons without ammunition and instructed to take no hostile action unless fired upon. This is extraordinary in light of the known threat environment and long-standing Navy ship defense doctrine. It seems the lessons of the 1983 Beirut bombings and the fateful decision not to arm Marine guards at the Tehran Embassy in 1979 were not learned. Given the evidence, the Cole was apparently aware of the possibility of terrorist attack but not permitted to take preventive action because of a Navy order preventing the sailors from firing...
...peaceniks don't buy it. To them, Sharon embodies the old expansionist Israel of settlements and the Lebanon war. For Palestinians, he's a symbol of the slaughter that befell them at the hands of Israel's Lebanese Christian militia allies in the Sabra and Shatila refugee area near Beirut. The official government report found that Sharon as Defense Minister had "indirect responsibility" for the massacres, and that event remains an essential part of the Arab vision of him.* "For us," says Ziad Abu Amr, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council from Gaza, "he could never be anything except...