August 15, 1982: Ronald Reagan expresses his "outrage" after 4 days of shelling & bombardments of #Beirut by Israeli forces. Lebanese authorities put the death toll at 156 civilians. The strikes were ordered by Ariel Sharon 1/ nytimes.com/1982/08/15/wee…
Several members of Israeli cabinet call for the Defense Minister's resignation. Sharon rejects call & continues to insist that what Israel is doing in Lebanon is perfectly justified as a response to / in defense against the "#terrorists" of the PLO 2/ nytimes.com/1982/08/15/wor… 
A month later, Christian Phalangist militias would entered the camps of Sabra & Shatila & massacre hundreds of women, children & older people. In shock, hundreds of thousands of Israelis would protest & call for Begin & Sharon's resignations 3/ nytimes.com/1982/09/26/wor…
Feb 1983: Kahan Commission finds Sharon bears "personal responsibility" for massacres. All this is well known. What is NOT well known is how Israel, while claiming to wage war on PLO terrorists, USED a secret terrorist group to "sow chaos" in Lebanon 5/ nytimes.com/1983/02/09/wor…
Indeed in 2018 @ronenbergman published "Rise & Kill First" & revealed that in 1979 Eitan, Dagan & Ben-Gal (all senior officers) created a fake terrorist group, the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon fm Foreigners (FLLF) in order to "sow chaos" in Lebanon: mondoweiss.net/2018/05/remark…
Countless bombings claimed by FLLF are in RAND & START terrorism databases. Between 1979 & 1983, the FLLF killed (w/ car bombs, truck bombs, bombs hidden in baskets, on mules etc...) several hundred civilians in Lebanon. Many were covered in US press: 7/
At the time, Palestinians & many Lebanese leaders insisted that the FLLF was a fiction & that ISR was really behind these bombings. Israel repeatedly denied such claims & insisted that such bombings were a kind of "Arab v Arab" violence 8/
As Bergman's book makes very clear, Israeli officers DID indeed create & run the FLLF. And this is where we meet Ariel Sharon again: as Bergman describes in detail, as soon as Sharon became Defense Minister in mid-1981 he decided to put the FLLF to use in Lebanon 9/
In late summer 1981, Sharon used the FLLF to conduct a series of bombings in Lebanon in order to provoke the PLO into breaking the cease-fire negotiated by the US. Sharon's hope: that the PLO's resort to terrorism would give Israel its justification to invade Lebanon 10/
Said differently: Ariel Sharon conducted a large scale terrorist bombing campaign in order to provoke the PLO into using terrorism so that Israel would have an excuse to invade Lebanon in the name of fighting the evil terrorists!!! 11/
Sharon's terrorist campaign was extraordinarily violent. But ultimately it failed: Arafat saw through the provocation. It would take the attempted assassination of Amb Argov in London (not by the PLO but by Abu Nidal, its arch-enemy) for Sharon to have his excuse to invade 12/
In a remarkable example of chutzpah, following the invasion of Lebanon Ariel Sharon took to the Opinion Pages of the @nytimes to repeatedly condemn the evil of terrorism & to justify the invasion as self defense vs the evil Palestinian terrorists 13/ nytimes.com/1982/08/29/opi…
This OpEd was published on August 29, 1982: one year after Sharon directed the FLLF to conduct its terrorist campaign vs Lebanon; 2 weeks after Sharon ordered the strikes that killed 156 Lebanese civilians; 2 weeks before the Sabra & Shatila massacre 14/
Bergman's book was published in 2018. Since then US media has been absolutely SILENT about his revelations re: FLLF, ie silent about the direct role that very senior Israeli officers played in what was at the time one of the largest terrorist car bombing campaigns in history 15/
1980/81: two Israeli journos investigated possibility that Israel was behind FLLF. Story was killed by military censor. Invasion of Leb took place AFTER this act of censorship. Hundreds of civilians were killed by FLLF AFTER this act of censorship 16/
There is so much that is absolutely crazy about the FLLF story: for example, Sharon's plan to bomb a STADIUM during the PLO's anniversary in the middle of Beirut, with bombs positioned inside AND truck bombs waiting outside for a "double tap" 17/
Bergman's revelations also appear to confirm that Israel may in fact have been behind the assassination attempt vs US Ambassador Gunther Dean in August 1981. Dean himself repeatedly insisted that he believed Israel was involved, directly or indirectly 18/
Gunther Dean passed away last year. His obituary in the @nytimes did note that Dean believed that Israel was behind the attempt on his life. But it made no mention of the FLLF revelations (even though Bergman works for the NYT): 19/ nytimes.com/2019/06/11/obi…
Conspiracy theories are extraordinarily dangerous, inimical to democratic process & necessary exchange of ideas & views. BUT in the real world, conspiracies DO at times exist. To defeat conspiracy theorists we MUST condemn all attempts at COVERING UP the REAL conspiracies 20/20
(last quick remark: this, about conspiracy theories, is a good basic primer: nymag.com/intelligencer/… )
