Madam, - Paul Scanlon asserts (January 11th) that "the visit by Ariel Sharon to the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem" was the "final straw" which sparked the second intifada in 2000.
In fact, Sharon's visit was to neither of the two mosques mentioned, but to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, only part of which is occupied by the mosques. The visit may have been unwise, but the first intensive violence did not begin until the following day, after a sermon at the Al-Aqsa mosque had incited worshippers with false rumours of a Jewish plan to tear down their mosque.
The Palestinian Authority's communications minister, Imad al-Faluji, stated in 2001: "Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque is wrong. This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton." The jailed terrorist Marwan Barghouti said the same year: "The intifada did not start because of Sharon's visit to Al-Aqsa. The intifada began because the Palestinians did not approve of the peace process in its previous form."
There was nothing spontaneous about the uprising. A Boston Globe journalist at the time reported seeing the stone-throwing youths being supplied all day with wheelbarrows full of rocks from inside the Al-Aqsa compound. Another Palestinian Authority minister, Faisal Husseini, admitted to encouraging the start of the stone-throwing and, equally, to turning it off within minutes at about 5pm.
In referring to Sharon's "role in the massacre" of 17,000 Palestinians and Lebanese in 1982, Mr Scanlon grossly exaggerates the figure of about 3,000 civilians massacred in the Sabra and Chatila camps, Muslim Arabs murdered by Christian Arabs in the cycle of bloodletting which was the Lebanese civil war (and the day after the blowing up of the Christian leader Bashir Gemayel with dozens of others).
The Kahan Commission found that Sharon, in allowing the Phalangist militia into the camps to fight the PLO, had neglected his "duty. . .not to disregard. . . [ the possibility] that the Phalangists were likely to commit atrocities". Hardly an indictment of authorship of a massacre. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.