President Bush today described Antoine Ghanem, who was assassinated yesterday in Beirut, as "an anti-Syrian, pro-Lebanese, pro-democracy" politician. Anti-Syrian perhaps. But Bush didn't mention that Ghanem was a leading member of the Lebanese Phalangist party, called Kataib in Arabic, which is an extreme right-wing, Nazi-leaning political organization. It was founded in the 1930s by Pierre Gemayel and his allies, modeled on the fascist forces of the Spanish Falangists, and Gemayel himself was an admirer of Hitler.

The media doesn't bother with history when reporting events like Ghanem's murder. It rarely (if ever) mentions the fact that Ghanem's militia was responsible in 1982 for the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Palestinian men, women and children at two refugee camps outside Beirut. (That action, of course, was carried out with the support of Ariel Sharon's Israeli army, which was then occupying Lebanon and parts of Beirut itself.)