Which nobody seems to mention.

* Nir Rosen was on Democracy Now:

"AMY GOODMAN: Nir Rosen, you’ve just returned in the last hours from the Middle East. You were last in Lebanon, you were in Syria, you’ve been in Iraq for several years reporting. Yesterday, on This Week with George Stefanopolis, King Abdullah of Jordan was there, he said there are three civil wars that could be happening at once, Palestine and Isreal, in Iraq and in Lebanon. Your assessment of this?

NIR ROSEN: Well, there is a civil war in Iraq. There’s been for a couple of years now. There's a low-scale civil war in the Palestinian occupied territories, but Jordan is in part, responsible for that, because the Americans and the Jordanians have been supporting Fatah thugs, led for example by Mahmoud Ahmad, against the popularly elected Hamas government, which they fear. And Jordanian Special Forces have been training, what I think they call the “Badr brigade”, which is Palestinians who support Fatah against Hamas, they’re a militia, so I think he has a great deal responsibility for the chaos in the Palestinian Territories, occupied Palestine. However, in Lebanon, I think concerns are exaggerated. Having just spent three months there, I don't perceive the likelihood of civil war in Lebanon to be a problem right now. Much has been made of the assassination of Pierre Gemayel last week. And the American media portrait it as if ArchDuke Franz Ferdinand had been killed, or John F. Kennedy, but really this guy was a fairly insignificant politician. And not a vocal anti-Syrian critic. He does come from a party with fascist links that massacred thousands of Palestinians. Which nobody seems to mention.

AMY GOODMAN: Which Party?

NIR ROSEN: The Phalanges. They were responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982. It's important people mention this when they lionize this guy who belongs to basically one of the worst death squads in Lebanon. He was hardly democratic. Just like anybody else in Lebanon.