The interesting thing is that Fatah al Islam fighters are mostly foreigners. How did they get in the country without the knowledge of the Lebanese government?

This is pretty wild. There are so many different takes out there on why this is happening and whom to blame. One interesting point is that the article I read pointing to the Lebanese Government and Saad Hariri in particular was written by very experienced westerner journalists who are in Lebanon now, talking to people in the camps including members of Fatah al Islam. They not only point back to the Siniora government and Saad Hariri, but to Western Neocons as instigators. I don't know enough to assert this as truth, but, given the events of last summer, and the pressure put on them by Hizbollah from one side, and their Western allies from the other, the story is plausible.

Meanwhile, I noticed a couple of interesting events that give context to this story. One is that on May 11, Fouad Siniora had an Editorial letter printed in the New York Times where he expressed his support for the Arab League Peace Initiative for the Israeli Palestinian conflict. He also chastises Israel for the violence perpetrated on Lebanon last summer, and says this is why Israel should accept the Arab initiative. He says he want's the US to take a leadership role in making this happen; no mention of the US role in last summer's debacle.
What I want to say is that this is kind of odd, for him to suddenly jump up and make these statements to an American audience, just then. And now, 2 weeks later, the army is shelling a Palestinian refugee camp. One might say "how could he have known? This was an accidental crisis". But Alastair Cooke says that the leadership of Fatah al Islam robbed the bank because their supporters in the Lebanese Government suddenly cut off their pay. If that were true, then the incident would have been more or less deliberately triggered at this time.

The other background information that isn't in the current discussion of the event is coverage in March of the group Fatal al Islam in the Arabic and Lebanese press, and also the New York Times. The New York Times had a very negative article stating that the leader of Fatah al Islam was a terrorist, most recently come from Iraq. The piece complained that he was protected in the Palestinian camp which was described as a kind of den of inequity unfairly protected by arbitrary Lebanese political rules. (Dang!)

The features in the Lebanese and Arab press were aired on Mosaic on March 15th and 16th. The group is accused of the bus bombing that had occurred a couple of months before. But, New TV had 2 consecutive days of somewhat sympathetic coverage of the group. I wondered at the time what the political stance of the station is and it still isn't clear to me from other contexts. However, they had an interview with a soft spoken young man who expressed his affection and loyalty to Lebanon and the Lebanese people, and his passion to regain Jerusalem for his own people. It occurred to me at the time, that he might be a naive youth drafted to spokesperson so as to put a Palestinian facade over whatever the leader's true agenda might be.

All together, this situation converged very rapidly with a lot of bizarre and rather inexplicable details that dovetailed to cause a disaster, once again for the already devastated Palestinians. Easy scapegoats.

Some analysts say that the recent clashes in Lebanon could be a ploy by the Western-backed Lebanese government to push its efforts to set up an international tribunal to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, which has been blamed on Syrian officials by an uncompleted UN probe. Syria denies any involvement in Hariri’s murder, and dismisses claims by some members of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian parliamentary majority that it wants to block the formation of the tribunal.