by Anonymous Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese poet of a philosophical bent, in the early part of the last century wrote: Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero… Pity the nation that raises not its voice...save when it walks in a funeral… Robert Fisk shared a key memory of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) with "L’Orient Today" in 2019. He recounted the horror story of Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian camps in Beirut’s suburbs where Christian fascist militias carried out a massacre in September 1982, directly under the watchful eyes of and generous lighting of their allies—the Israeli army occupying the sector; the Israeli force blocked at least some Palestinians from fleeing the camps. Fisk arrived “while the murderers were still there,” he says, and had to hide with other journalists. “That Saturday morning, upon entering the camps, I saw so many bodies... Women, children… Dozens of corpses of men… I have never seen a massacre of this scale…Barely half an hour after entering the camps, I immediately said: ‘This is a war crime.’” In 2004, I visited Beirut, one of the good years, when a certain degree of optimism was felt in the country. The escalating violence now breaks a piece of my heart that remembers the revived downtown, coffee and tea with local Quakers, and walking along the sunlit shoreline. Let’s stop arming Israel, goddammit! (Watch it: at library or on Kanopy, "This is Not a Movie," camps' massacre at 36 minutes in.)