| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 6:48 pm Post subject: The UN's Mideast Mission |
| This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060731/un_mideast_mission
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The UN's Mideast Mission
by IAN WILLIAMS
[posted online on July 20, 2006]
April marked the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Qana, when Israeli Defense Forces poured shells onto a UN peacekeepers' base where more than 800 Lebanese civilians had taken shelter. The shells killed 106 people and, according to some accounts, resulted in the sacking of UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for releasing a report that showed that the IDF shelling was no accident.
A decade later, the Qana massacre all seems forgotten. But Israel's attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and on Hamas in Gaza appear to be a replay of the 1996 military campaign known as Operation Grapes of Wrath. Then as now, civilians are caught in the crossfire between Israel and its enemies. Then as now, the attacks seem designed to demonstrate Israel's toughness for a domestic audience. Then as now, there are calls to the United Nations for an international force to quell the conflict.
Israeli leaders have become accustomed to the impunity that superpower support has given them. To use bombs supplied by Washington to destroy the Gaza power station that US taxpayers have insured to the tune of almost $50 million is the very definition of chutzpah.
There have been some changes in the world since 1996, one of them being the International Criminal Court. Ironically, if it were not for the baleful influence of Damascus, Lebanon would probably have signed and ratified the ICC treaty--which would have considerably disrupted the vacation plans of the Israeli Cabinet and military commanders now engaged in making thousands of Lebanese homeless--and a considerable number lifeless. They would have been subject to international arrest warrants and a quick trip to The Hague.
It is true that Hezbollah and the Hamas factions that are rocketing civilians are also breaking international law, but no more so than the rockets and bombs from Israeli helicopters eviscerating families on the beaches of Gaza and in the apartments of Beirut.
Only the most meager special pleading could describe Israel's counter-blast at Lebanese civilians, not to mention the ongoing attacks in Gaza, as a legitimate or proportionate response. Since the invocation of Israel guarantees a free pass in much of the Western world, it may be useful to substitute different terms.
Imagine if the British had been buzzing Dublin Castle to show their displeasure with the Irish Republican Army, whose political wing is, after all, represented in the Irish Dail. The IRA kidnap some British soldiers. In return, London blockades Ireland, shells and strafes the area closest to the Northern Ireland border, bombs Shannon and Dublin airports, knocks out roads, power stations and gas stations, in between sending in snatch squads to kill and kidnap Irish citizens and politicians it considers connected to the IRA. And in between London threatens Rome, because after all the IRA are Roman Catholics, and Boston and New York, because after all that is where the IRA were getting their money.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush and the European Union would have supported such a measured response to "terror." Like hell they would.
Luckily for all, the British finally bit the bullet and sat down with the "terrorists"; both parts of Ireland are much more peaceful for it. And by the way, London did not insist that the IRA recognize that it was right that Northern Ireland was established, nor that it should forever be a safe homeland for Irish Protestants. Almost as bad as the illegality of the Israeli assaults is their irrationality. To begin with, a massively indiscriminate attack like this is hardly the best way to persuade Gilad Shalit's captors to show mercy.
On the contrary, from the days of Likud's origins in the Stern Gang, on through the FLN in Algeria, one of the most successful tactics of terrorism has been to provoke massive collective reprisals by the authorities. And Israel's actions only create more sympathy for Hezbollah and Hamas.
If, as many observers suspect, Israel does invade Lebanon, it will show that it is still being ruled by the essentially brain-dead Ariel Sharon, with no foresight for the lethal consequences. Either the IDF stays, and suffers the type of continuous bloodletting that drove them out last time, or they ransack the place and evacuate, leaving an even more embittered and hardened Hezbollah-supporting populace.
Sadly, it would appear that George W. Bush's brain is in no better working order than Sharon's. In Iraq, he has 150,000 potential hostages to Iran, Syria and the Shiites. He has oil prices just waiting to shoot through his bubble economy. Someone should really sit down and tell him about the unintended consequences of the extrajudicial execution of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914.
And the best Bush can do is to tell Kofi Annan to get on the phone to Damascus "to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."
The neocons who gave us Iraq seem to have persuaded Bush that if you are up to your neck in a cesspool, the only way out is down. The idea that Hezbollah is a tool of Tehran is about as substantive as the idea that Israel is a puppet of Washington. But the canard that Damascus and Tehran may be behind it all is hypnotically attractive to those who want the United States to attack them. One notes with worry that American media are accepting the Administration's simplistic fictions almost as readily as they swallowed Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
While it is almost reflexive to appeal to the United Nations, sadly, there is little or nothing that Annan or the international body can do about this. Annan's idea for an international force has been tried before--and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was regularly targeted by the Israelis and ignored by both the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Any force there would have to be prepared to take on Israeli incursions as well as controlling Lebanese militia or it would have no legitimacy. It would likely end up being disarmed by Hezbollah rather than vice versa. The United Nations can be a useful tool in settling the crisis, but only with US support, and that support has to include pressure on Israel and some declared support for international law. Only Bush can balance that equation by getting on the phone to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and telling him to stop.
It would help if the other member states of the UN--and the Secretary General--stopped accommodating Bush's simplistic view of the world. It would also help if they had the courage to put first things first: Resolution 242, telling Israel to quit the occupied territories has been waiting for UN action long before Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming Hezbollah. If the UN could succeed in doing that, who knows--Bush might even take notice--and if he emulated his father's refusal to support settlements, even Israel might reconsider.
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With regard to what Israel is currently doing in Lebanon, take a look at the following (pages 141-144 from Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book):
...About the same time, beginning on April 11, 1996, a series of shock waves rumbled through the Muslim world as a result of Israel's massive bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon, which Israel had by then been occupying for fourteen years. Known as "Operation of Grapes of Wrath," it was the first time Israel had attacked Beirut since Ariel Sharon's ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. According to Israeli writer Israel Shahak, the real purpose of the attack was to capture as much Lebanese territory as possible.
"It is quite obvious," wrote Shahak, "that the first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes of Wrath' is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon -- to be exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip."
Two days after it began, on April 13, ambulance driver Abbas Jiha from the village of Mansouri was busy rushing patients wounded in the fighting to a hospital in the town of Sidon. On his return to Mansouri, panic had broken out and explosions were taking place. People began pleading for him to take them to Sidon. Jiha quickly squeezed four of his children into his ambulance along with ten other people, including a family, and began driving toward Sidon.
Suddenly, an Israeli helicopter began chasing his ambulance. Minutes later, two missiles were fired, one of which exploded through the rear door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it sixty feet through the air. Thrown clear, Abbas Jiha began running toward the flaming heap of twisted metal. "My God, my God," he screamed, shaking his fist at the sky, "my family has gone." In all, six people were killed, including Jiha's nine year-old daughter and his wife.
Israeli officials later admitted the ambulance had been targeted but claimed, falsely, that the vehicle was owned by Hezbollah and was transporting one of the group's fighters. Jiha had no connection with terrorist groups, and the thought that Israel could target an ambulance packed with innocent people, including many children, outraged Muslims throughout the Middle East.
On April 18, one week into Operation Grapes of Wrath, a reporter for London's newspaper The Independent was traveling in southern Lebanon with a United Nations convoy. Robert Fisk, Britain's most highly decorated foreign correspondent, spent a quarter of a century covering the Middle East and was the recipient of the British International Journalist of the Year Award seven times, including for 1996. As the vehicles were approaching the small village of Qana, Fisk could hear the sound of artillery, he recalled.
The convoy had stopped at Qana that morning and noticed it was crowded with about eight hundred refugees. They had been transported there for their safety by armored UN vehicles from nearby villages that had come under Israeli bombardment. When the convoy finally arrived in Qana shortly after two in the afternoon, fire was everywhere and proximity shells were bursting in the air. Antipersonnel weapons designed to explode about two dozen feet above ground, they would shower down razor-sharp shrapnel, butchering anyone beneath.
"It was a massacre," wrote Fisk in a front-page story. "Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive -- 206 by last night --- has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 -- the youngest was a four-day-old baby -- when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home."
The Israeli government later claimed the attack on the UN refugee camp at Qana was a mistake. But a formal, top-level United Nations investigation came to a different conclusion. "It is unlikely" that Israeli gunners simply erred, said the report, and demanded that Israel pay $1.7 million in damages. "Contrary to repeated denials," said the report, "two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling." Amnesty International also conducted an investigation of the massacre, and they concluded "that the IDF [Israeli Defense Force} intentionally attacked the UN compound."
Arieh Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, noted: "How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We did not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification, because this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on." And the international edition of Time magazine noted, "Around the Middle East... Qana is already a byword for martydom. The southern Lebanese village figures as a shrine drawing up to 1,000 pilgrims a day: busloads of schoolchildren, Cabinet ministers from Beirut, even a daughter of Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Black banners overlooking rows of graves decry the 'barbarity' of Israel."
While largely ignored by the American press, the massacre at Qana was front-page news in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle East, where the story continued for days. Already burning with hatred for America and Israel, the pictures of headless Arab babies and other grisly photographs that appeared throughout the media were likely the final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli - United States alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning five years later....
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US Support for Israel PRIMARY MOTIVATION for tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on 9/11 as well:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Jul 26, 2006 1:58 am; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 7:19 pm Post subject: Muslims Use Day of Prayer to Protest |
| July 21. 2006 1:13PM
Muslims Use Day of Prayer to Protest
By MAGGIE MICHAEL
Associated Press Writer
Syrian demonstrators hold up the photos of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, left, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Holy Koran during a protest against Israeli raids on Lebanon in Damascus Friday July 21, 2006. (AP Photo/Bassem Tellawi).
Thousands across the Muslim world used Friday's Islamic day of prayer to protest Israel's attacks on Hezbollah, urging Sunni-Shiite unity to defeat the Jewish state.
Waving posters of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, thousands gathered after Friday prayers at Cairo's Al-Azhar Mosque, the most prominent Sunni Muslim institution in the Arab world.
"Sunnis or Shiites (there is) no difference; all together to resist the enemy," Sameh Ashour, head of the Arab Lawyers Union, told the crowd. "Resistance is the solution."
The fighting between Israel and the Shiite guerrillas in Lebanon has exposed divisions, as leaders in some predominantly Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have criticized Hezbollah's actions. But many people - both Sunnis and Shiites - support Hezbollah because of its willingness to fight Israel.
During a fiery sermon at a Damascus mosque, one of Syria's most prominent Sunni Islamic clerics assailed his Arab neighbors for condemning the capture this month of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas.
"Our Arab people have been surprised by our Arab leaders who have ignored what is being said on the streets," said Sheik Salah Keftaro.
In Iraq, radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr predicted Israel would collapse like the World Trade Center if Sunnis and Shiites join together to fight.
"I will continue defending my Shiite and Sunni brothers, and I tell them that if we unite, we will defeat Israel without the use of weapons," al-Sadr said in the southern city of Kufa.
Protesters in Cairo shouted anti-Israel slogans and condemned Arab leaders' reluctance to show their support for Hezbollah.
Thousands of police surrounded the demonstrators, beating some with batons when they tried to move into the streets. Police said three protesters were injured.
Protesters also took to the streets in other cities, including several thousand in Tripoli, Libya. About 2,000 angry demonstrators shouted praise for Hezbollah in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
"No to the Arab silence on the Zionist crimes," read one banner.
Police used batons and smoke grenades to break up hundreds of protesters who blocked traffic in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Demonstrators in Pakistan burned Israeli and U.S. flags, and protesters in Indonesia and Malaysia accused Israel of terrorism.
About 2,000 Muslims also marched in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 11:56 pm Post subject: |
| Forwarded:
Excellent article on Israeli attack on Gaza and Lebanon and a review of
recent and not so recent history.
http://www.counterpunch.com/Cockburn07212006.html
A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks
ago
Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the
message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit
bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.
The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should
be
denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to
anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of
an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the
headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of
Hezbollah’s fighters.
Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.
Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June
20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in
an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between
Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed
three Palestinian children and wounded 15.
Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a
van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive
barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.
Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9,
2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians
and
injuring 32.
That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies
of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most
of them women and children.
Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the
time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve
the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the
right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their
water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call
them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.
Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to
the
people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah,
or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a
car
or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port
that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have
something
to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off.
You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.
Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the
least.
Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is
the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits
as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told
the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of
moral outrage than a Lebanese one.
None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of
Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or
bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website
fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the
site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.
You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove
it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into
history.
This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into
history.
Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before
O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had
already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they
are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green
light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.
In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut,
was
making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with
Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a
two-state solution.
Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN
resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right
next
door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase
the
PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters
had
broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern
Israel.
Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well,
because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the
United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border,
invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in
mid-Manhattan
and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year
there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.
With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did,
and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and
bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people,
and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees
in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.
The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers
and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House
the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 --
of
two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of
Palestine.
When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several
miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied,
in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal
local
militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center
at
the prison of Al-Khiam.
Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face
resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah
ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard
Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.
The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all
possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal
settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all
the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by
bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to
organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.
Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders
make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the
old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot
endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the
Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with
barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can
murder them pretty much at will.
So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon
in
1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t
endure
the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing
they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to
the
stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first
stop
on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.
Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another
Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for
Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just
voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to
deplore
Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though
history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth.
But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of
Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as
of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.
Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help
much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after
the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the
basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician
is
prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and
Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
