On my talk

"On a different note, As’ad Abu-Khalil held a talk for an overcrowded Issam Fares Hall at AUB yesterday night, which he characteristically started by lambasting the AUB for 15 minutes, before going on to lambast every side in the Lebanese civil war and after for betraying the Palestinian cause and destroying the Palestinians at every opportunity – most recently with the destruction of the Nahr al-Bared camp by the Lebanese army. ‘Don’t give up your arms,’ he warned the Palesinians in Lebanon, ‘because you can never trust the Lebanese to treat you well.’ Just as characteristically, the only people to take offense at all this were members of a Fatah delegation, who destroyed every opportunity for a serious debate during the Q&A session afterwards by monopolising the microphone for half an hour, shouting and ranting about Abu Khalil’s ‘defamation of the martyr (sic) Yasser Arafat’, all because Angry Arab quite rightly compared the function of the Fatah Abbas and Dahlan in the West Bank now with that of Antoine Lahd’s South Lebanese Army during Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon, i.e. a bunch of bought off collaborators who do the Israelis’ dirty work for them. The general audience (including many Palestinians) did not appreciate the Fatah squad’s aggressive intervention, shouting back things like ‘Don’t worry, fatso, you’ll get your paycheck’…" (thanks Bart)