Don Wagner Accuses Israeli Soldiers of Wearing Phalangist Uniforms

Regular visitors to CAMERA’s website are familiar with Rev. Dr. Don Wagner, a Presbyterian “peace” activist who has compared Israelis to a “killer-vine” choking a rosebush in his backyard in Chicago.

Wagner is no longer teaching at North Park University in Chicago, but is now at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. He is still engaged in anti-Israel activism. Speaking at an event in Buffalo a few months ago, Wagner accused Israeli soldiers of wearing Phalangist uniforms and murdering Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.

Ernest Sternberg, a member of the faculty at the University of Buffalo where Wagner was speaking reports at that Wagner said that “most likely many Israelis were in the Phalangists’ military uniforms and they denied responsibility.”

This is a new and novel accusation, Sternberg reports in a Feb. 2 article published by Scholars for Middle East Peace (SPME):

Both the New York Times and Washington Post covered the massacre extensively in late September 1982, and vociferously condemned Israel for its role, but none of the articles states that Israelis themselves had carried out the murders. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and the Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity contain detailed articles on the massacre, but neither mentions Israelis disguising themselves as Phalangists. The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa has an entry that is highly antagonistic to Israel, and gives far more attention to it than to the Phalangist perpetrators, yet makes no mention of direct Israeli involvement in the killings.

Rashid Khalidi, author of Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War (Columbia University Press, 1986) and no friend of Israel, had extensive access to people on the ground during the 1982 war and to Palestine Liberation Organization leaders and documents, and represented PLO’s position at the time. He, too, makes no mention of Israelis dressing up as Phalangists.

Despite the enormous volume of slander against Israel easily found on the internet, a moderate amount of searching on my part turned up no other instance of this claim. In further searching, it may well pop up, floating on internet sewers. In the meantime, the “Israelis disguised as Phalangists” libel appears to have been invented at the University at Buffalo.

Wagner was speaking at a commemoration of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre organized by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee held on October 22, 2010.