Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 6:
“I shook hands with him once, a brisk, no-nonsense soldier’s grip from Sharon as he finished a review of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood in the barracks square at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have thought, I asked myself then, that this same bunch of murderers – the men who butchered their way through the Palestinian Sabra and Chatila refugee camps only a few weeks earlier – had their origins in the Nazi Olympics of 1936. That’s when old Pierre Gemayel – still alive and standing stiffly to attention for Sharon – watched the “order” of Nazi Germany and proposed to bring some of this “order” to Lebanon. That’s what Gemayel told me himself. Did Sharon not understand this? Of course, he must have done.”