Ihsan Alkhatib

The Lebanese movie The Insult re-introduced the Lebanese civil war as a subject of interest. The movie offered the Lebanese right narrative that blames the Palestinians for the civil war. That narrative is important. I visited Abraham Lincoln’s Presidential Library last weekend and one of the frames read, as to slavery, in part: “At its most personal level, it [slavery] was a demeaning and barbaric institution that destroyed families and lives. Racism was a logical outgrowth of slavery, as slave holders tried to find moral justification for their behavior.” The last part, “moral justification for their behavior” is key. The myths and the lies the Lebanese right, Muslim and Christian, tells and promotes, is anti-Palestinian racism, used as “moral justification” for the butchering, the besieging, the starving as in Tal el- Zaater and Sabra and Shatila or as justification for continuing state violence against them by denying them the most basic of human rights.