| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2006 9:01 am Post subject: Israeli war crimes aimed at “cleansing” south Lebanon |
| Israeli war crimes aimed at “cleansing” south Lebanon
By Bill Van Auken
9 August 2006
On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes struck the southern Lebanese town of Ghaziyeh, killing at least 14 people. Missiles demolished civilian homes just as some 1,500 mourners were participating in a procession to bury 15 of their relatives and neighbors slain just the day before. The explosions sent the crowd running in panic, dropping shrouded corpses in the street.
Ghaziyeh’s normal population of 23,000 has reportedly been swelled by a wave of refugees. It is a predominantly Shiite town near Sidon, a region where most of the population is composed of Sunni Muslims. Many people from further south had fled there to stay with relatives and friends.
There was no indication that the town was used to launch rockets against Israel or had any intrinsic strategic significance. The objective was merely to further terrorize people who have already suffered the loss of their homes and seen members of their families massacred in the relentless Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon. The aim is to force them to flee further north, or kill them.
Israeli planes have dropped leaflets on southern Lebanon announcing an open-ended curfew, violation of which is punishable by death from the air. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has warned that any vehicles on the roads will be struck. Anyone disobeying these orders will be considered a terrorist and a target for Israeli bombs, missiles and shells.
This threat, combined with the escalating air war against the south, has effectively shut down attempts by the International Red Cross and other relief agencies to bring desperately needed food, water and medical supplies into the ravaged south. The bombing of roads and the destruction of the last bridge crossing the Litani River into the southern city of Tyre has cut off the region from rest of Lebanon and the rest of the world.
The head of the International Red Cross, Jacob Kellenberger, accused Israel of violating the Geneva Conventions—that is, committing a war crime—by threatening aid convoys with military attack. Kellenberger dismissed Israel’s claims that its leaflets warning of imminent air strikes somehow justified violent attacks on civilians. “By letting down leaflets, you cannot get rid of your responsibilities under international humanitarian law,” he said.
The Israeli practice is akin to a serial murderer telephoning death threats to people before killing them and then blaming the victims for their own deaths, because, after all, “they were warned.”
This is the real context in which the United Nations Security Council is going through the motions of considering a US-French resolution designed not to end the fighting, but to allow it to continue until US-Israeli objectives are met. This document demands that Hezbollah disarm, while it allows the 10,000 Israeli troops occupying Lebanese territory to remain and permits Israel to continue “defensive” air strikes and artillery bombardments.
It essentially demands that Hezbollah, a mass movement of Lebanon’s impoverished Shiite population, commit suicide and that the government of Lebanon accept the status of an occupied protectorate. By presenting an utterly unacceptable proposal, Washington aims at provoking Lebanese rejection and then using this supposed opposition to “peace” as a justification for continuing the month-old war.
In a further indication that it has no intention of compromising on the terms of its UN diktat to the Lebanese people, the Bush administration Tuesday dismissed a Lebanese proposal to send 15,000 Lebanese troops to the south to take control of the area from the Israeli army. A State Department spokesman declared that the Lebanese army is not “a robust enough entity to be able to, on their own, exercise total control of that southern area of Lebanon.”
This word “robust” is endlessly repeated to describe a proposed multinational force to be sent into the region. It is a euphemism for an occupation army that will utilize murderous force against the local population to achieve US and Israeli war aims.
In a rare moment of candor at the UN, the Qatari foreign minister told the Security Council on Tuesday: “It is most saddening that the council stands idly by, crippled, unable to stop the blood bath which has become the bitter daily lot of the defenseless Lebanese people.”
He warned that adoption of the US-French resolution posed the “danger of civil war in Lebanon.” This is no idle threat. The proposed smashing of Hezbollah would be seen by the Shiite population as an attempt to disenfranchise and oppress them, reversing the results of Lebanon’s previous civil war and restoring the power once wielded by Israel’s traditional ally in the country, the Maronite Christian right.
Such social reengineering of the country—carried out under George Bush’s slogans of “freedom” and a “new Middle East”—would undoubtedly ignite a new round of bitter sectarian warfare.
What the US-Israeli offensive aims to accomplish as its immediate goal is the thorough ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon.
This is a term that never appears in the mainstream media in relation to the present war in Lebanon. It appears only in the occasional stories following the continuing tensions in former Yugoslavia, where US-led NATO forces intervened in 1999 with a savage bombing campaign against Serbia, which was carried out under the pretext of halting ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo. The end result has been a thorough ethnic cleansing of the Serb population at the hands of the Kosovar nationalists whom Washington supported.
In the Israeli offensive against south Lebanon, the media invariably refers to air strikes and ground assaults against “Hezbollah strongholds,” a formulation meant to conceal the fact that the real target is the Shiite population as a whole. Missiles, cluster bombs and artillery shells are employed to massacre men, women and children in order to terrorize the entire population and send them fleeing north.
Unlike the wave of moral outrage generated by the US media over the alleged ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, which was critical in conditioning public opinion and providing a pretext for Washington’s war against Serbia, there is no similar condemnation of Israel for the mass expulsion of a population.
One major television network, the ineffable Fox News, expressed more concern for the lost dogs of northern Israel than for the Lebanese women and children buried beneath the rubble of buildings demolished by US-supplied Israeli bombs.
The IDF has had little success in defeating Hezbollah or even halting its rocket attacks against Israel, but its strategy against the civilian population has proven effective. While more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and approximately 3,500 wounded—the majority of them women and children—one million Lebanese, fully a quarter of the national population, have been turned into refugees, most of them driven from their homes in the south.
Ethnic cleansing is nothing new for Israel. The very foundation of the Israeli state was bound up with the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and farms. The Zionist leaders employed massacres and terror to drive out the native population.
As the well-known Israeli historian Benny Morris acknowledged in a 2004 interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads.”
In 1967, with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, military terror was once again utilized to drive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land, paving the way for the Zionist settlements in the occupied territories and Israel’s claims over all of Jerusalem.
There is no reason to believe that anything different is being planned for Lebanon. Once again Israel, in the name of “security,” is driving an Arab population off of its land. Where does this process end?
There is every indication that the IDF is now being deployed to conquer Lebanese territory between the Israeli border and the Litani River, 18 miles to the north. A new senior officer known to favor a far more extensive ground assault, Deputy Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, has been placed in charge of the Lebanon operation. Haaretz reported that his mission would be “to coordinate land, air and sea operations in case of a widescale offensive.”
There is more at work in the current Lebanon war, however, than Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Shiite population and the potential annexation of Lebanese territory. Prodding the Israeli government to intensify its attacks is the Bush administration. It sees the IDF offensive as a means of furthering its own objective of setting the stage for new wars of aggression in the Middle East, to achieve “regime change” in Iran and Syria and bring the extensive oil reserves of the entire region under uncontested US control.
This is the reality behind the Bush’s rhetoric, casting the conflict as one between “freedom” and “democracy,” on the one side, and “Islamic fascism,” on the other.
If anything in the present war recalls the crimes of fascism, it is not the Lebanese, who are fighting an Israeli army that his invaded their land, but rather the regimes in Washington and Israel, which are utilizing overwhelming military force to conquer an oppressed people.
Like the one-sided wars waged by fascist regimes that shocked the world’s conscience in the 1930s—from the rape of Ethiopia to the incineration of Guernica—the destruction of Lebanon contains the seeds of a global conflagration.
See Also:
Behind Bush’s “truce” plan: the drive towards a wider Middle East war
[8 August 2006]
UN resolution on Lebanon: blueprint for intensified war and colonial occupation
[7 August 2006]
US-Israeli war aim is to annihilate Lebanon
[5 August 2006] | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 7:31 am Post subject: What about Israel’s Defiance of UN Resolutions? |
| What about Israel’s Defiance of UN Resolutions?
8/10/2006 3:00:00 PM GMT
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Israeli missiles struck a convoy of Lebanese fleeing the village of Merwaheen, killing 15
By: Dr. Steven Harris
In what is becoming a depressingly familiar pattern, the Israeli ‘Defence Forces’ have invaded Lebanon and are causing death and destruction by land, sea and air. What was astonishing to neutral observers was Israeli spokesmen talking about the need for Lebanon to observe UN Security Council Resolution 1559 passed in 2004. This called for a number of steps to happen for Lebanon – which included the call for militias to be disbanded. This Resolution was passed by 9 votes in favour and 6 abstentions – and those who chose to abstain included Russia and China.
The Israelis were displaying their usual ‘chutzpah’ – a Jewish word roughly translated as audacity or effrontery. Israel has the dubious distinction of having had more negative UN Security Council Resolutions passed against it than any other member state. At last count the number was 66 and if the U.S. had not exercised its veto to save Israel the embarrassment of having yet another Resolution to ignore, the number would be 95! In fact, every U.S. veto used since 1986 in the Security Council was to protect Israel.
Israel owes its existence ultimately to a United Nations vote in 1947 and so it is surely ungrateful to ignore all the Resolutions directed at it from that same body.
The first Resolutions to be ignored dealt with an issue which is still one of main sticking points for any future peace in the Middle East; namely the right of Palestinian refugees to return home – UN General Assembly Resolution 194. This stated:
"Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible."
There then followed the by now famous and most pointedly ignored; Security Council Resolution 242, passed on 22 November 1967 that calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in the war that year and;
"The acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."
There then followed one in 1979 regarding Israel’s colonial settlements; Security Council Resolution 446, March 22, 1979
"Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East."
In the light of the Resolutions listed below, it might not be a good idea for Israel to remind the world of the need to enforce UN Resolutions. The UN has also suffered directly at the hands of Israel. The recent shelling and death of 4 unarmed UN observers in Lebanon may have been a genuine accident but given Israel’s track record with the UN, even the reticent Kofi Annan was forced to say that the shelling was ‘apparently deliberate’. The US threatened to veto any Resolution condemning Israel. Israel’s contempt and hatred for the UN goes back to its inception. Back in 1948, the UN sent a Special Representative, Count Folke Bernadotte to Palestine/Israel to report on the growing disquiet of Jewish settlers killing and terrorizing the Palestinian population.
On September 17, 1948, four men dressed in Israeli Army uniforms murdered Count Bernadotte. The four killers were never brought to justice.
Israel's founding Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, knew who the assassins were: members of the so-called Stern Gang, a Jewish terrorist group of several hundred members founded in 1940. The man who organized the killing of Count Bernadotte was Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983. The other Israeli terrorist organization operating at the time was Irgun. Many of its leaders were later honoured by the state of Israel and the current Foreign Minister of Israel, Tzipi Livni is the daughter of a prominent Irgun member, Eitan Livni, who was sentenced to 15 years in jail by the British for terrorism.
In meanwhile, as Israel continues to defy worldwide opinion of its activities in relation to its neighbours and most importantly towards the Palestinians; it can rest assured that having ignored so many UN Resolutions in the past, in the unlikely event it is called on to withdraw yet again from Lebanon, it can ignore the call without any threat of sanctions.
The Islamic world can hardly fail to be outraged by the double standards regarding the definition of terrorism and selective memory regarding UN Sanctions. Given the increasingly blatant misuse of the UN, it may not be long before the UN goes the same way as the League of Nations set up between the 2 World Wars but failed to prevent any war, aggression or even to punish. Sound familiar?
1. Resolution 106: The Palestine Question (29 Mar 1955) 'condemns' Israel for Gaza raid.
2. Resolution 107: The Palestine Question (30 Mar)
3. Resolution 108: The Palestine Question (8 Sep)
4. Resolution 111: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for raid on Syria that killed fifty-six people".
5. Resolution 127: " . . . 'recommends' Israel suspends it's 'no-man's zone' in Jerusalem".
6. Resolution 162: " . . . 'urges' Israel to comply with UN decisions".
7. Resolution 171: " . . . determines flagrant violations' by Israel in its attack on Syria".
8. Resolution 228: " . . . 'censures' Israel for its attack on Samu in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control".
9. Resolution 237: " . . . 'urges' Israel to allow return of new 1967 Palestinian refugees".
10. Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967): Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area. Calls upon Israel to withdraw its forces from land claimed by other parties in 1967 war. Interpreted commonly today as calling for the Land for peace principle as a way to resolve Arab-Israeli conflict.
11. Resolution 248: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for its massive attack on Karameh in Jordan".
12. Resolution 250: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to refrain from holding military parade in Jerusalem".
13. Resolution 251: " . . . 'deeply deplores' Israeli military parade in Jerusalem in defiance of Resolution 250".
14. Resolution 252: " . . . 'declares invalid' Israel's acts to unify Jerusalem as Jewish capital".
15. Resolution 256: " . . . 'condemns' Israeli raids on Jordan as 'flagrant violation".
16. Resolution 259: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's refusal to accept UN mission to probe occupation".
17. Resolution 262: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for attack on Beirut airport".
18. Resolution 265: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for air attacks for Salt in Jordan".
19. Resolution 267: " . . . 'censures' Israel for administrative acts to change the status of Jerusalem".
20. Resolution 270: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for air attacks on villages in southern Lebanon".
21. Resolution 271: " . . . 'condemns' Israel's failure to obey UN resolutions on Jerusalem".
22. Resolution 279: " . . . 'demands' withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon".
23. Resolution 280: " . . . 'condemns' Israeli attacks against Lebanon".
24. Resolution 285: " . . . 'demands' immediate Israeli withdrawal form Lebanon".
25. Resolution 298: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's changing of the status of Jerusalem".
26. Resolution 313: " . . . 'demands' that Israel stop attacks against Lebanon".
27. Resolution 316: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for repeated attacks on Lebanon".
28. Resolution 317: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's refusal to release Arabs abducted in Lebanon".
29. Resolution 332: " . . . 'condemns' Israel's repeated attacks against Lebanon".
30. Resolution 337: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for violating Lebanon's sovereignty".
31. Resolution 338 (October 22, 1973): cease fire in Yom Kippur War
32. Resolution 339 (October 23, 1973): Confirms Res. 338, dispatch UN observers.
33. Resolution 347: " . . . 'condemns' Israeli attacks on Lebanon".
34. Resolution 425 (1978): 'calls' on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon". Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon was completed as of June 16, 2000.
35. Resolution 350 (31 May 1974) established the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, to monitor the ceasefire between Israel and Syria in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.
36. Resolution 427: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to complete its withdrawal from Lebanon.
37. Resolution 444: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's lack of cooperation with UN peacekeeping forces".
38. Resolution 446 (1979): 'determines' that Israeli settlements are a 'serious obstruction' to peace and calls on Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention".. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories thus declared illegal.
39. Resolution 450: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to stop attacking Lebanon".
40. Resolution 452: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories".
41. Resolution 465: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's settlements and asks all member states not to assist Israel's settlements program".
42. Resolution 467: " . . . 'strongly deplores' Israel's military intervention in Lebanon".
43. Resolution 468: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to rescind illegal expulsions of two Palestinian mayors and a judge and to facilitate their return".
44. Resolution 469: " . . . 'strongly deplores' Israel's failure to observe the council's order not to deport Palestinians".
45. Resolution 471: " . . . 'expresses deep concern' at Israel's failure to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention".
46. Resolution 476: " . . . 'reiterates' that Israel's claim to Jerusalem are 'null and void'".
47. Resolution 478 (August 20, 1980): 'censures (Israel) in the strongest terms' for its claim to Jerusalem in its 'Basic Law'.
48. Resolution 484: " . . . 'declares it imperative' that Israel re-admit two deported Palestinian mayors".
49. Resolution 487: " . . . 'strongly condemns' Israel for its attack on Iraq's nuclear facility".
50. Resolution 497 (17 December 1981) decides that Israel's annexation of Syria's Golan Heights is 'null and void' and demands that Israel rescinds its decision forthwith.
51. Resolution 498: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon".
52. Resolution 501: " . . . 'calls' on Israel to stop attacks against Lebanon and withdraw its troops".
53. Resolution 509: " . . . 'demands' that Israel withdraw its forces forthwith and unconditionally from Lebanon".
54. Resolution 515: " . . . 'demands' that Israel lift its siege of Beirut and allow food supplies to be brought in".
55. Resolution 517: " . . . 'censures' Israel for failing to obey UN resolutions and demands that Israel withdraw its forces from Lebanon".
56. Resolution 518: " . . . 'demands' that Israel cooperate fully with UN forces in Lebanon".
57. Resolution 520: " . . . 'condemns' Israel's attack into West Beirut".
58. Resolution 573: " . . . 'condemns' Israel 'vigorously' for bombing Tunisia in attack on PLO headquarters.
59. Resolution 587: " . . . 'takes note' of previous calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and urges all parties to withdraw".
60. Resolution 592: " . . . 'strongly deplores' the killing of Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University by Israeli troops".
61. Resolution 605: " . . . 'strongly deplores' Israel's policies and practices denying the human rights of Palestinians.
62. Resolution 607: " . . . 'calls' on Israel not to deport Palestinians and strongly requests it to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
63. Resolution 608: " . . . 'deeply regrets' that Israel has defied the United Nations and deported Palestinian civilians".
64. Resolution 636: " . . . 'deeply regrets' Israeli deportation of Palestinian civilians.
65. Resolution 641: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's continuing deportation of Palestinians.
66. Resolution 672: " . . . 'condemns' Israel for violence against Palestinians at the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount.
67. Resolution 673: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's refusal to cooperate with the United Nations.
68. Resolution 681: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's resumption of the deportation of Palestinians.
69. Resolution 694: " . . . 'deplores' Israel's deportation of Palestinians and calls on it to ensure their safe and immediate return.
70. Resolution 726: " . . . 'strongly condemns' Israel's deportation of Palestinians.
71. Resolution 799: ". . . 'strongly condemns' Israel's deportation of 413 Palestinians and calls for their immediate return.
Galloway Defends Hezbollah, Attacks Israeli Offensive in Lebanon
"It's Israel who's invading Lebanon"
http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,31200-galloway_060806,00.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=12207 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 12:34 am Post subject: |
| ANTHONY JOSEPH GEHA YUJA wrote:
Please click on link below to watch/listen to MP George Galloway fearlessly and pointedly taking to task Sky News and its Jerusalem correspondent for their fraudulently distorted reporting on Israel's (long planned) devastation in Lebanon and for deliberately ignoring the continued victimization of millions of Palestinians living the Jewish State's racist and criminal occupation. AJGY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbEv0T2rwgo&mode=related&search=
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http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley08052006.html
August 5 / 6, 2006
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Boycott Now!
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
Johannesburg, South Africa.
It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel. Good cause for a boycott has, of course, been in place for decades, as a raft of initiatives already attests. But Israel's war crimes are now so shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so helpless, and the international community's need to contain Israel's behavior so urgent and compelling, that the time for global action has matured. A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel's aggressive acts and crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem.
That second goal of the boycott campaign is indeed the primary one. Calls for a boycott have long cited specific crimes: Israel's continual attacks on Palestinian civilians; its casual disdain for the Palestinian civilian lives "accidentally" destroyed in its assassinations and bombings; its deliberate ruin of the Palestinians' economic and social conditions; its continuing annexation and dismemberment of Palestinian land; its torture of prisoners; its contempt for UN resolutions and international law; and especially, its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. But the boycott cannot target these practices alone. It must target their ideological source.
The true offence to the international community is the racist motivation for these practices, which violates fundamental values and norms of the post-World War II order. That racial ideology isn't subtle or obscure. Mr. Olmert himself has repeatedly thumped the public podium about the "demographic threat" facing Israel: the "threat" that too many non-Jews will - the horror - someday become citizens of Israel. It is the "demographic threat" that, in Israeli doctrine, justifies sealing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip as open-air prisons for millions of people whose only real crime is that they are not Jewish. It is the "demographic threat," not security (Mr. Olmert has clarified), that requires the dreadful Wall to separate Arab and Jewish communities, now juxtaposed in a fragmented landscape, who might otherwise mingle.
"Demographic threat" is the most disgustingly racist phrase still openly deployed in international parlance. It has been mysteriously tolerated by a perplexed international community. But it can be tolerated no longer. Zionist fear of the demographic threat launched the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population in 1948 and 1967, created and perpetuates Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, inspires its terrible human rights abuses against Palestinians, spins into regional unrest like the 1982 attack on Lebanon (that gave rise to Hezbollah), and continues to drive Israeli militarism and aggression.
This open official racism and its attendant violence casts Israel into the ranks of pariah states, of which South Africa was the former banner emblem. In both countries, racist nationalist logic tormented and humiliated the native people. It also regularly spilled over to destabilize their surrounding regions (choc-a-block with "demographic threats"), leading both regimes to cruel and reckless attacks. Driven by a sense of perennial victimhood, they assumed the moral authority to crush the native hordes that threatened to dilute the organic Afrikaner/Jewish nations and the white/western civilization they believed they so nobly represented.
A humiliated white society in South Africa finally gave that myth up. Israel still clings to it. It has now brought Israel to pulverize Lebanon, trying to eliminate Hezbollah and, perhaps, to clear the way for an attack on Iran. Peace offers from the entire Arab world are cast aside like so much garbage. Yet again, the Middle East is plunged into chaos and turmoil, because a normal existence -- peace, full democracy -- is anathema to a regime that must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify the rejectionism that preserves its ethnic/racial character and enables its continuing annexations of land.
Why has this outrageously racist doctrine survived so long, rewarded by billions of dollars in US aid every year? We know the reasons. For too many Westerners, Israel's Jewish character conflates with the Holocaust legacy to make intuitive sense of Israel's claim to be under continual assault. Deep-seated Judeo-Christian bias against Islam demonizes Israel's mostly Muslim victims. European racist prejudice against Arabs (brown-skinned natives) casts their material dispossession as less humanly significant. Naïve Christian visions of the "Holy Land" naturalize Jewish governance in biblical landscapes. Idiot Christian evangelistic notions of the Rapture and the End Times posit Jewish governance as essential to the return of the Messiah and the final Millennium (even though, in that repellent narrative, Jews will roast afterwards).
All those notions and prejudices, long confounding international action, must now be set aside. The raw logic of Israel's distorted self-image and racist doctrines is expressed beyond confusion by the now-stark reality: the moonscape rubble of once-lovely Lebanese villages; a million desperate people trying to survive Israeli aerial attacks as they carry children and wheel disabled grandparents down cratered roads; the limp bodies of children pulled from the dusty basements of crushed buildings. This is the reality of Israel's national doctrine, the direct outcome of its racist worldview. It is endangering everyone, and it must stop.
Designing the Campaign
Much debate has circulated about a boycott campaign, but hitherto it has not moved beyond some ardent but isolated groups. Efforts have stalled on the usual difficult questions: e.g., whether a boycott is morally compulsory to reject Israel's rampant human rights violations or would impede vital engagement with Israeli forums, or whether principled defense of international law must be tempered by (bogus) calls for "balance". Especially, recent debate has foundered on calls for an academic boycott. Concerns here are reasonable, if rather narrow. Universities offer vital connections and arenas for collaboration, debate, and new thinking. Without such forums and their intellectual exchange, some argue, work toward a different future is arguably impeded.
But this argument has exploded along with the southern Lebanese villages, as Israeli university faculties roundly endorse the present war. As Ilan Pappé has repeatedly argued, Israel's universities are not forums for enlightened thought. They are crucibles of reproduction for racist Zionist logics and practice, monitoring and filtering admissible ideas. They produce the lawyers who defend the occupation regime and run its kangaroo "courts"; the civil planners and engineers who design and build the settlements on Palestinian land; the economists and financiers who design and implement the grants that subsidize those settlements; the geologists who facilitate seizure of Palestinian aquifers; the doctors who treat the tortured so that they can be tortured again; the historians and sociologists who make sense of a national society while preserving official lies about its own past; and the poets, playwrights, and novelists who compose the nationalist opus that glorifies and makes (internally, at least) moralistic sense of it all.
Those of us who have met with Jewish Israeli academics in Israeli universities find the vast majority of them, including well-meaning liberals, operating in a strange and unique bubble of enabling fictions. Most of them know nothing about Palestinian life, culture, or experience. They know strangely little about the occupation and its realities, which are crushing people just over the next hill. They have absorbed simplistic notions about rejectionist Arafat, terrorist Hamas, and urbane Abbas. In this special insulated world of illusions, they say nonsense things about unreal factors and fictionalized events. Trying to make sense of their assumptions is no more productive that conversing about the Middle East with the Bush administration's neo-cons, who also live in a strange bubble of ignorance and fantasy. Aside from a few brave and beleaguered souls, this is the world of Israel's universities. It will not change until it has to - when the conditions of its self-reproduction are impaired and its self-deceptions too glaring.
The Real Goal: Changing Minds
The universities represent and reproduce the bubble world of the Israeli Jewish population as a whole. And no people abandons its bubble willingly. In South Africa, Afrikaners clung to their own bubble - their self-exonerating myths about history, civilization, and race -- until they were forced by external sanctions and the collapsing national economy to rethink those myths. Their resistance to doing so, while racist, was not purely vicious. Many kind and well-meaning Afrikaners simply didn't believe they had to rethink ideas that manifested to them as givens and that shaped their reality. (One valued Afrikaner friend here recalls her life during apartheid South Africa as being like The Truman Show, a film in which a man unknowingly grows up in a television show, set in an artificial dome world designed to look like a small town.) When their reality fell apart, suddenly no one would admit to ever having believed or supported it.
The Zionist worldview is an even more complete system. All historical and geographic details are provided to create a total mythical world, in which Jews have rights to the land and Palestinians have none. It is a fully realized construction, like those Hebraized maps carefully drawn by the Zionist movement in the 1930s to erase the ancient Arabic landscape and substitute Hebrew biblical references. It is also very resilient. The "new historians" have exposed the cherished national historical narrative of 1948 and 1967 as a load of fictions, but the same fictions are still reproduced by state agencies to assure Israeli and diaspora Jews of their innocence and the righteousness of their cause. The vast majority of Israelis therefore remain comfortable in their Truman Show and even see any external pressure or criticism as substantiating it. We need no more graphic evidence of that campaign's success than the overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for the present catastrophic assault on Lebanon, reflecting their sincere beliefs that nuclear-power Israel is actually under existential threat by a guerrilla group lobbing katyushas across the border. Staggering to observers, that belief is both sobering and instructive.
To force people steeped in such a worldview to rethink their notions, their historical myths, and their own best interests requires two efforts:
(1) Serious external pressure: here, a full boycott that undermines Israel's capacity to sustain the economic standards its citizens and corporations expect, and which they associate with their own progressive self-image; and
(2) clear and unwavering commitment to the boycott's goal, which - in Israel as in South Africa - must be full equality, dignity, safety, and welfare of everyone in the land, including Palestinians, whose ancestral culture arose there, and the Jewish population, which has built a national society there.
That combination is essential. Nothing else will work. Diplomacy, threats, pleading, the "peace process," mediation, all will be useless until external pressure brings Israel's entire Jewish population to undertake the very difficult task of rethinking their world. This pressure requires the full range of boycotts, sanctions, and divestment that the world can employ. (South African intellectual Steven Friedman has observed wryly that the way to bring down any established settler-colonial regime is to make it choose between profits and identity. Profits, he says, will win every time.)
What to Target
Fortunately, from the South African experience, we know how to go forward, and strategies are proliferating. The basic methods of an international boycott campaign are familiar. First, each person works in his or her own immediate orbit. People might urge divestment from companies investing in Israel by their colleges and universities, corporations, clubs, and churches. Boycott any sports event that hosts an Israeli team, and work with planners to exclude them. Participate in, and visit, no Israeli cultural events - films, plays, music, art exhibits. Avoid collaborating with Israeli professional colleagues, except on anti-racist activism. Don't invite any Israeli academic or writer to contribute to any conference or research and don't attend their panels or buy their books, unless their work is engaged directly in anti-racist activism. Don't visit Israel except for purposes of anti-racist activism. Buy nothing made in Israel: start looking at labels on olive oil, oranges, and clothing. Tell people what you are doing and why. Set up discussion groups everywhere to explain why.
For ideas and allies, try Googling the "boycott Israel" and "sanctions against Israel" campaigns springing up around the world. Know those allies, like the major churches, and tell people about them. For more ideas, read about the history of the boycott of South Africa.
Second, don't be confused by liberal Zionist alternatives that argue against a boycott in favor of "dialogue". If we can draw any conclusion from the last half-century, it is that, without the boycott, dialogue will go nowhere. And don't be confused by liberal-Zionist arguments that Israel will allow Palestinians a state if they only do this or that. Israel is already the only sovereign power in Palestine: what fragments are left to Palestinians cannot make a state. The question now is not whether there is one state, but what kind of state it comprises. The present version is apartheid, and it must change. However difficult to achieve, and however frightening to Jewish Israelis, the only just and stable solution is full democracy.
Third, be prepared for the boycott's opposition, which will be much louder, more vicious, and more dangerous than it was in the boycott of South Africa. Read and assemble solid documentable facts. Support each other loudly and publicly against the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism. And support your media against the same charges. Write to news media and explain just who the "Israel media teams" actually are. Most pro-Israeli activism draws directly from the Israeli government's propaganda outreach programs. Spotlight this fact. Team up to counter their pressure on newspapers, radio stations, and television news forums. Don't let them capture or intimidate public debate. By insisting loudly (and it must be sincere) that the goal is the full equality of dignity and rights of everyone in Israel-Palestine, including the millions of Jewish citizens of Israel, demolish their specious claims of anti-Semitism.
Finally, hold true to the principles that drive the boycott's mission. Don't tolerate the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism in your own group or movement. Anti-Jewish racists are certainly out there, and they are attracted to these campaigns like roaches. They will distract and absorb your energies, while undermining, degrading, and destroying the boycott movement. Some are Zionist plants, who will do so deliberately. If you can't change their minds (and don't spend much time trying, because they will use your efforts to drain your time and distract your energies), denounce them, expel them, ignore them, have no truck with them. They are the enemy of a peaceful future, not its allies - part of the problem, not the solution.
Boycott the Hegemon
This is the moment to turn international pressure on the complicit US, too. It's impossible, today, to exert an effective boycott on the United States, as its products are far too ubiquitous in our lives. But it's quick and easy to launch a boycott of emblematic US products, upsetting its major corporations. It's especially easy to boycott the great global consumables, like Coca-Cola, MacDonald's, Burger King, and KFC, whose leverage has brought anti-democratic pressures on governments the world over. (Through ugly monopoly practices, Coke is a nasty player in developing countries anyway: see, for example, http://www.killercoke.org.) Think you'll miss these foods too much? Is consuming something else for a while too much of a sacrifice, given what is happening to people in Lebanon? And think of the local products you'll be supporting! (And how healthy you will get).
In the US, the impact of these measures may be small. But in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Arab and Muslim worlds, boycotting these famous brands can gain national scope and the impact on corporate profits will be enormous. Never underestimate the power of US corporations to leverage US foreign policy. They are the one force that consistently does so.
But always, always, remember the goal and vision. Anger and hatred, arising from the Lebanon debacle, must be channelled not into retaliation and vengeance but into principled action. Armed struggle against occupation remains legitimate and, if properly handled (no killing of civilians), is a key tool. But the goal of all efforts, of every stamp, must be to secure security for everyone, toward building a new peaceful future. It's very hard, in the midst of our moral outrage, to stay on the high road. That challenge is, however, well-known to human rights campaigns as it is to all three monotheistic faiths. It is what Islam knows as the "great jihad" - the struggle of the heart. It must remain the guiding torch of this effort, which we must defend together.
Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.
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Brit Muslim groups write letter: foreign policy terror cause
Foreign policy in support of Israel's agenda in the Middle East is the root cause of terror problem in UK and USA:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4786159.stm | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 8:33 am Post subject: Robert Fisk: If you want the roots of terror, try here |
| Robert Fisk: If you want the roots of terror, try here
Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14516.htm
I would love to have the Met in Beirut to counter terror in my part of the world
By Robert Fisk
08/12/06 "The Independent" -- -- When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house - just as they vibrated across all of Beirut - as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: "Terror Plot". Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force - the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him - had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.
I'm sure Independent readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects - or "British-born Muslims" as the BBC defined them in its special form of "soft" racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?) - are still in custody in a couple of weeks' time.
And I'm sure it's quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday - with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara's shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak - to save the world. After all, it's scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armoured vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day - again quite by chance, of course - that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair's intended invasion of Iraq.
So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting "Islamic fascism". There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror - although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.
And there, of course, was the same old problem. To protect the British people - and the American people - from "Islamic terror", we must have lots and lots of heavily armed policemen and soldiers and plainclothes police and endless departments of anti-terrorism, homeland security and other more sordid folk like the American torturers - some of them sadistic women - at Abu Ghraib and Baghram and Guantanamo. Yet the only way to protect ourselves from the real violence which may - and probably will - be visited upon us, is to deal, morally, with courage and with justice, with the tragedy of Lebanon and "Palestine" and Iraq and Afghanistan. And this we will not do.
I would, frankly, love to have Paul Stephenson out in Beirut to counter a little terror in my part of the world - Hizbollah terror and Israeli terror. But this, of course, is something that Paul and his lads don't have the spittle for. It's one thing to sound off about the alleged iniquities of alleged suspects of an alleged plot to create alleged terror - quite another to deal with the causes of that terror and to do so in the face of great danger.
I was amused to see that Bush - just before my electricity was cut off again - still mendaciously tells us that the "terrorists" hate us because of "our freedoms". Not because we support the Israelis who have massacred refugee columns, fired into Red Cross ambulances and slaughtered more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians - here indeed are crimes for Paul Stephenson to investigate - but because they hate our "freedoms".
And I notice with despair that our journalists again suck on the hind tit of authority, quoting endless (and anonymous) "security sources" without once challenging their information or the timing of Paul's "terror plot" discoveries or the nature of the details - somehow, "fizzy drinks bottles" doesn't quite work for me - nor the reasons why, if this whole panjandrum is correct, anyone would want to carry out such atrocities. We are told that the arrested men are Muslims. Now isn't that interesting? Muslims. This means that many of them - or their families - originally come from south-west Asia and the Middle East, from the area that encompasses Afghanistan, Iraq, "Palestine" and Lebanon.
In the old days, chaps like Paul used to pull out a map when faced with folk of different origins or religion or indeed different names. Indeed, if Paul Stephenson takes a school atlas, he'll notice that there are an awful lot of violent problems and injustice and suffering and - a speciality, it seems, of the Metropolitan Police - of death in the area from which the families of these "Muslims" come.
Could there be a connection, I wonder? Dare we look for a motive for the crime, or rather the "alleged crime"? The Met used to be pretty good at looking for motives. But not, of course, in the "war on terror", where - if he really searched for real motives - my favourite policeman would swiftly be back on the beat as Constable Paul Stephenson.
Take yesterday morning. On day 31of the Israeli version of the "war on terror" - a conflict to which Paul and the lads in blue apparently subscribe by proxy - an Israeli aircraft blew up the only remaining bridge to the Syrian frontier in northern Lebanon, in the mountainous and beautiful Akka district above the Mediterranean. With their usual sensitivity, the pilots who bombed the bridge - no terrorists they, mark you - chose to destroy the bridge when ordinary cars were crossing. So they massacred the 12 civilians who happened to be on the bridge. In the real world, we call that a war crime. Indeed, it's a crime worthy of the attention of Paul and his lads. But alas, Stephenson's job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened.
Personally, I'm all for arresting criminals, be they of the "Islamic fascist" variety or the Bin Laden variety or the Israeli variety - their warriors of the air really should be arrested next time they drop into Heathrow - or the American variety (Abu Ghraib cum laude) and indeed of the kind that blow out the brains of Tube train passengers. But I don't think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice. And I have to say, watching his performance before the next power cut last night, I thought he was doing a pretty good job for his masters. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 10:24 am Post subject: Robert Fisk: As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real w |
| http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219037.ece
Robert Fisk: As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real war begins
Published: 14 August 2006
The real war in Lebanon begins today. The world may believe - and Israel may believe - that the UN ceasefire due to come into effect at 6am today will mark the beginning of the end of the latest dirty war in Lebanon after up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and more than 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. But the reality is quite different and will suffer no such self-delusion: the Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah's onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.
In all, at least 39 - possibly 43 - Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past day as Hizbollah guerrillas, still launching missiles into Israel itself, have fought back against Israel's massive land invasion into Lebanon.
Israeli military authorities talked of "cleaning" and "mopping up" operations by their soldiers south of the Litani river but, to the Lebanese, it seems as if it is the Hizbollah that have been doing the "mopping up". By last night, the Israelis had not even been able to reach the dead crew of a helicopter - shot down on Saturday night - which crashed into a Lebanese valley.
Officially, Israel has now accepted the UN ceasefire that calls for an end to all Israeli offensive military operations and Hizbollah attacks, and the Hizbollah have stated that they will abide by the ceasefire - providing no Israeli troops remain inside Lebanon. But 10,000 Israeli soldiers - the Israelis even suggest 30,000, although no one in Beirut takes that seriously - have now entered the country and every one of them is a Hizbollah target.
From this morning, Hizbollah's operations will be directed solely against the invasion force. And the Israelis cannot afford to lose 40 men a day. Unable to shoot down the Israeli F-16 aircraft that have laid waste to much of Lebanon, the Hizbollah have, for years, prayed and longed and waited for the moment when they could attack the Israeli army on the ground.
Now they are set to put their long-planned campaign into operation. Thousands of their members remain alive and armed in the ruined hill villages of southern Lebanon for just this moment and, only hours after their leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, warned Israel on Saturday that his men were waiting for them on the banks of the Litani river, the Hizbollah sprang their trap, killing more than 20 Israeli soldiers in less than three hours.
Israel itself, according to reports from Washington and New York, had long planned its current campaign against Lebanon - provoked by Hizbollah's crossing of the Israeli frontier, its killing of three soldiers and seizure of two others on 12 July - but the Israelis appear to have taken no account of the guerrilla army's most obvious operational plan: that if they could endure days of air attacks, they would eventually force Israel's army to re-enter Lebanon on the ground and fight them on equal terms.
Hizbollah's laser-guided missiles - Iranian-made, just as most Israeli arms are US-made - appear to have caused havoc among Israeli troops on Saturday, and their downing of an Israeli helicopter was without precedent in their long war against Israel.
In theory, aid convoys will be able to move south today to the thousands of Lebanese Shia trapped in their villages but no one knows whether the Hizbollah will wait for several days - they, like the Israelis, are physically tired - to allow that help to reach the crushed towns.
Atrocities continue across Lebanon, the most recent being the attack on a convoy of cars carrying 600 Christian families from the southern town of Marjayoun. Led by soldiers of the Lebanese army, they trailed north on Saturday up the Bekaa valley only to be assaulted by Israeli aircraft. At least seven were killed, including the wife of the mayor, a Christian woman who was decapitated by a missile that hit her car.
In west Beirut yesterday, the Israeli air force destroyed eight apartment blocks in which six families were living. Twelve civilians were killed in southern Lebanon, including a mother, her children and their housemaid.
An Israeli was killed by Hizballoh's continued Katyusha fire across the border. The guerrilla army - "terrorists" to the Israelis and Americans but increasingly heroes across the Muslim world - have many dead to avenge, although their leadership seems less interested in exacting an eye for an eye and far more eager to strike at Israel's army.
At this fatal juncture in Middle East history - and no one should underestimate this moment's importance in the region - the Israeli army appears as impotent to protect its country as the Hizbollah clearly is to protect Lebanon.
But if the ceasefire collapses, as seems certain, neither the Israelis nor the Americans appear to have any plans to escape the consequences. The US saw this war as an opportunity to humble Hizbollah's Iranian and Syrian sponsors but already it seems as if the tables have been turned. The Israeli military appears to be efficient at destroying bridges, power stations, gas stations and apartment blocks - but signally inefficient in crushing the "terrorist" army they swore to liquidate.
"The Lebanese government is our address for every problem or violation of the [ceasefire] agreement," Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said yesterday, as if realising the truce would not hold.
And that, of course, provides yet another excuse for Israel to attack the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.
Far more worrying, however, are the vague terms of the UN Security Council's resolution on the multinational force supposed to occupy land between the Israeli border and the Litani river.
For if the Israelis and the Hizbollah are at war across the south over the coming weeks, what country will dare send its troops into the jungle that southern Lebanon will have become?
Tragically, and fatally for all involved, the real Lebanon war does indeed begin today. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 10:27 pm Post subject: Charlie Reese: Still Racist |
| http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20060814/index.php
Still Racist
If you step back a moment and look objectively, you can plainly see that the U.S. and most of Europe still have a racist, colonialist attitude toward the Middle East and all its people -- except, of course, the Israelis.
It's still difficult to tell if President George Bush is just a callous liar or if he lives in his own little world, which bears no resemblance to the real one. In his press conference in Texas last week, he contradicted himself with a perfectly straight face.
Giving his usual lecture on the blessings of freedom and democracy, he completely ignored the fact that when Hamas members were elected in a free and fair election in Palestine, he refused to recognize them, cut off all aid and refused to talk to them. Now, now, Mr. President, democracy means you recognize the outcome of an election even if you don't like the results. Hence, he contradicts himself when he claims to be the Billy Graham of democracy.
The next contradiction came when he praised the government of Lebanon and talked about how warmly he supports it while claiming that Hezbollah is trying to destroy it. Duh, Hezbollah is a part of that democratic government. Furthermore, Bush ignored that Lebanese government when he blocked calls for an immediate cease-fire. What that democratic government wants is completely ignored. Bush and the other folks at the U.N. talk about Lebanon as if it were a child with no say in its own destiny.
Bush will decide what's good for Lebanon, and there is no need, in his mind, to consult with the Lebanese.
The truth is that Israel had been planning to attack Lebanon for more than a year, and its attack had nothing to do with two kidnapped soldiers. The truth is that Bush approved of Israel's attack and has been deliberately holding up a cease-fire call to give the Israelis a chance to destroy Hezbollah. The truth is that Bush doesn't give a tinker's damn about the deaths of innocent Lebanese people, the destruction of the country's infrastructure and the displacement of a million people.
Israel has a right to defend itself but no right to commit mass murder and the destruction of a whole country. If Israel wanted its soldiers back, all it had to do was start negotiations for a prisoner exchange. That's why Hezbollah kidnapped them in the first place. Israel has exchanged prisoners in the past, so don't believe the nonsense about not negotiating with terrorists. Furthermore, Israel itself kidnaps people all the time. Most of the elected representatives of the Palestinians have been snatched and stuck in Israeli prisons.
Two of our soldiers were kidnapped (and later murdered) in Iraq, but we didn't decide to bomb Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk to get them back. Israel has systematically destroyed the bridges, the roads, the airport, the ports, businesses, shops and people. I didn't know there were so many terrorist babies and children who lived in Lebanon. I didn't realize there were so many terrorist mothers and grandmothers, and so many terrorist houses and apartment blocks and terrorist bridges and roads.
Hezbollah, by the way, didn't launch rockets against Israel until it launched its airstrikes against Lebanon. The night of the kidnapping -- which, after all, was a legitimate raid by soldiers against soldiers -- a few rounds from mortars were fired as a distraction. No Israeli civilians were killed or hurt. As a matter of fact, from 2000 -- when Israel was driven out of Lebanon -- until this year, only six Israelis had been killed by Katyusha rockets, according to Informed Comment. Hezbollah only fired them in response to Israeli violations of Lebanon's borders.
The final hypocrisy of Bush is the fact that all during Israel's 18-year occupation of Lebanon, he never opened his mouth about the need for Lebanon's government to have "sovereignty over all of its territory." George Bush has sewn a terrible crop of hatred that will fall on innocent Americans for God knows how many years in the future.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 8:02 am Post subject: Robert Fisk: In the face of Bush's lies, it's left to Assad |
| http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219457.ece...
Robert Fisk: In the face of Bush's lies, it's left to Assad to tell the truth
Published: 16 August 2006
In the sparse Baathist drawing rooms of Damascus, reality often seems a long way away. But it was a sign of the times that President Bashar al-Assad was able to bring the great and the good of Damascus to their feet by the simple token of telling the truth - which no other Arab leader has chosen to do these past five weeks: that the Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla army has, in effect, won this round of their war with Israel.
There was plenty of hyperbole in the Assad speech. A conflict that has cost 1,000 Lebanese civilian lives can hardly be called a "glorious battle" but he did at least reflect more reality than his opposite number in Washington who, driven by self-delusion or his love of Israel, claimed that Hizbollah had been defeated in Lebanon.
Israel's "victory" in Lebanon presumably has to be added to our own famous "victories" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria and Iran, according to Mr Bush, were responsible for the "suffering" of Lebanon - which contains the seeds of truth since Hizbollah provoked this war by capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing three others on 12 July - although it wasn't the Syrian or Iranian air force that was slaughtering the convoys of innocent refugee civilians in Lebanon. So it was that President Assad must have enjoyed his little peroration in Damascus yesterday.
"This is a [American] administration that adopts the principle of pre-emptive war that is absolutely contradictory to the principle of peace," he said. "Consequently, we don't accept peace soon or in the foreseeable future."
Mr Assad can say that again. Indeed, there is no more sign that Hizbollah intends to "disarm" under the terms of UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701 than Israel is prepared to abide by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and withdraw from Arab territories it occupied in 1967.
However, it is clear that President Assad now sees himself back at the centre of Arab power after his army's humiliating retreat from Lebanon last year. There was no more need for defeatism among Arabs, he said - a sentiment widely held in the real Arab world but quite absent from President Bush's fantasy Middle East.
That it should be Syria, of all nations, which can state this to so much applause probably says more about Washington than it does about Damascus. And it is, of course, the return of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights - see UN Resolution 242 - that lies behind this whole disastrous war.
The truth is Israel opened its attack on Lebanon by claiming the Lebanese government was responsible for Hizbollah's attack - which it clearly was not - and that its military actions would achieve the liberation of the captured soldiers.
This, the Israelis have signally failed to do. The loss of 40 soldiers in just 36 hours and the successful Hizbollah attacks against Israeli armour in Lebanon were a disaster for the Israeli army.
The fact that Syria could bellow about the "achievements" of Hizbollah while avoiding the destruction of a blade of grass inside Syria suggests a cynicism that has yet to be grasped inside the Arab world. But for now, Syria has won.
Iran, as Hizbollah's principal supporter, clearly thinks so too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who usually talks far more than he thinks, condemned the US for supplying Israel with the weapons it used on Lebanese civilians - perfectly true. But he did not say Hizbollah's missiles come from a new-generation Iranian arsenal that did not even exist during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. While the US will be keen to assess the effectiveness of its weapons - albeit largely used on civilians - no one should doubt that Iran will also be assessing the success of its new Fajr missiles - and their effect on the Israeli army. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 9:38 am Post subject: Israeli Military Policy Under Fire After Qana Attack |
| FORWARD (No URL)
Israeli Military Policy Under Fire After Qana Attack
Ori Nir | Fri. August 04, 2006
WASHINGTON — As Jerusalem defends itself against worldwide condemnation over a deadly air strike that killed dozens of Lebanese children, current and former Israeli officials acknowledge that the Israeli military has loosened the restrictions on targeting militants in populated areas.
After an Israeli air force raid Sunday on the Lebanese village of Qana left dozens of civilians dead, many of them children, human rights groups accused Israel of committing a “war crime.” Many critics — including Israeli ones — are questioning the military’s policy of bombing in densely populated Lebanese areas. As of earlier this week, more than 550 civilians had been killed in Lebanon during the current conflict, with Lebanese officials claiming that the civilian death toll has exceeded 750.
Following the Qana deaths, Israeli authors and intellectuals signed a petition calling for an immediate cease-fire and protesting the killing of civilians. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel called for an official commission of inquiry to investigate the military’s bombing policies in Lebanon.
One of Israel’s top political commentators, Nahum Barnea of Yediot Aharonot, also raised questions in his column Monday. “I am ashamed,” wrote Barnea, whose criticism reverberated in Israel this week. Barnea argued that just because he feels that the war is justified “does not grant me an exemption from torturing myself with questions.” The most piercing question, he wrote, “arose when I heard Defense Minister Amir Peretz boasting about how he has freed the army from limitations regarding the civilian population that lives alongside Hezbollah. One can understand the accidental killing of civilians, in the heat of battle. A sweeping order regarding the civilian population of South Lebanon and the Shi’ite neighborhoods of Beirut is rash, injudicious and will lead to disaster. We saw the results yesterday, with the bodies of women and children being brought out of the bombed house in Qana.”
Barnea was referring to several statements that Peretz, leader of the left-of-center Labor Party, made in the course of the past three weeks, saying that he had directed the Israeli military not to be deterred by Hezbollah’s use of civilians as “human shields.” Other Israeli officials also indicated that the military’s rules of engagement in the current fighting in Lebanon are more permissive than they have been in the past. Some said that Israel is attempting to “inflict pain” on Lebanon’s civilian population to put public pressure on Hezbollah to disarm.
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, a lieutenant general, was quoted as saying that for every building hit in Haifa by a Hezbollah rocket, Israel would hit 10 high-rise buildings in the Shi’ite residential neighborhoods of Southern Beirut. And Israeli air force pilots indicated that the process of vetting potential targets to minimize the chance of hitting civilians is less meticulous in the current bombings in Lebanon than it was in previous bombing campaigns.
“There are efforts, as always, to minimize collateral damage, but less so than when [Israel] bombs in Gaza,” said Amos Guiora. A lieutenant colonel (reserve), Guiora is the former commander of the Israeli military’s School of Military Law and currently a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. In this case, he said, rockets are launched into Israel by the thousands from a sovereign neighboring country, and therefore “the rules of the game have been significantly changed.”
In particular, what’s changed are the orders regarding the admissibility of striking buildings or other sites adjacent to residential neighborhoods, from which Hezbollah combatants are suspected to be operating. Hezbollah fighters, according to Israeli military reports and other data, launched rockets from sites adjacent to the building that was hit in Qana on Sunday. In addition, Hezbollah fighters appear to have been launching rockets next to the United Nations observation post in Hiam, in which four international observers were killed by an Israeli strike July 26.
Last week, a colonel, who is an Israeli air force squadron commander gave an unusual interview to Ha’aretz, authorized by the military, in which he laid out some of the bombing policies. Often, he said, one of the militants firing rockets is seen seeking refuge in a residential home in South Lebanon. Such a house, he said, “ought to be struck, even if a family lives in it.” Such a family, he said, has allowed combatants into its home, and “hence joined those who are fighting us.” The lives of Israeli civilians are more important to him than the lives of Lebanese civilians, the squadron commander said on condition of anonymity, a routine practice for Israeli military officers.
Asked about the air strikes that leveled the pro-Hezbollah Shi’ite neighborhood of al-Dahiya in southern Beirut, the senior officer said that the area was a legitimate target because it was inhabited by Hezbollah personnel and their families.
Some experts on humanitarian international law say that the policies described by the senior air force officer are being justified on a blatant misinterpretation of international law. At the same time, they add, international law is open to broad interpretation regarding the admissibility of striking civilians.
While intentionally targeting civilians or civilian property is forbidden, international law takes a more nuanced approach to the unintentional striking of civilians when pursuing military targets.
Targeting sites that are civilian in nature but used by combatants is permissible as long as such sites provide an “effective” contribution to the enemy’s military activities, and as long as their destruction or neutralization provides “a definite military advantage.” When targeting such sites, the impact of the attack on civilians must be carefully weighed against the military advantage that the attack serves. Attacks should not be undertaken if the civilian harm outweighs the military advantage, or if a similar military advantage could be secured with less civilian harm, experts say. Each attack on such a target is required to be weighed individually under these criteria — known in international law as the “proportionality” test. The term has been used frequently in the context of the current confrontation, but seldom in the appropriate context of what international law prescribes regarding civilian casualties.
Whether Israel’s policies generally pass the proportionality test is a matter of intense controversy.
Michael Walzer, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a leading authority on morality in warfare, told the Forward that Israel’s conduct is well within the confines of international law. “From a moral perspective, Israel has mostly been fighting legitimately,” Walzer said. If Israeli commanders ever face an international tribunal, he added, “the defense lawyers will have a good case,” mainly because Hezbollah uses civilians as human shields. In several recent articles, Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz has advanced similar arguments.
Human rights groups counter that Hezbollah’s conduct does not relieve Israel from the responsibility to spare civilians, even if they receive adequate warning to flee before their neighborhoods are struck. To argue the opposite “is a complete misunderstanding of international law and is morally bankrupt,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. In a press release issued Monday, the group described the Qana killings as “the latest product of an indiscriminate bombing campaign” in Lebanon, and said that the responsibility for the tragedy “rests squarely with the Israeli military.” The group’s statement argued that Israel had launched indiscriminate bombings that constitute war crimes.
Several groups on the liberal end of the Jewish communal spectrum, including Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, published a full-page advertisement Monday in The New York Times, demanding that all sides “stop the slaughter in Lebanon, Israel and the occupied territories” and that Israel immediately halt attacks on Lebanon, which are “utterly disproportionate to the initial provocation by Hezbollah.”
The left-leaning New York based Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring this week sent a letter to President Bush, calling for an immediate cease-fire. “Peace cannot be achieved by a war of attrition, which will only cause the death of more and more innocent men, women and children, and increased hatred on both sides,” the letter said.
For the most part, however, few if any of the most influential Jewish organizations are raising any moral objections to Israel’s military tactics. None of the major Jewish groups released statements of condolences, sympathy or regret before or after the Qana incident. In fact, three Jewish communal leaders, in recent conversations with reporters, said that given the large number of aerial strikes and artillery shellings in Lebanon, the number of civilian casualties was rather low.
On Monday, during a New York meeting with Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres, not one member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations asked the veteran Israeli politician about the carnage in Lebanon.
Members seemed to agree when Peres said that whereas some 10,000 civilians were killed in NATO’s 78-day air campaign in Kosovo in 1999, the Lebanese civilian death toll is in the low hundreds. (The number of deaths during the NATO campaign is belived to have been about 500, with Serbian sourcing claiming 1,200 to 5,000 dead.)
“I see 100% support and not an iota of decrease in support in the Jewish community for Israel’s conduct in Lebanon,” said Martin Raffel, associate executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. The council is a policy coordinating organization that brings together 13 national Jewish agencies and 123 local Jewish communities.
Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, a leading thinker on the Jewish and Israeli use of power, said that he couldn’t find flaws in Israel’s conduct. “If I have any criticism of Israel, it is that there was an underestimation of the risk” from Hezbollah, Greenberg said.
As extraordinarily painful and cruel a reality as it is, he added, “there was a need to inflict punishment on the host [Lebanese] population” to turn the population against Hezbollah. Although people in the Jewish community “feel anguish that Jews are killing civilians, they honestly don’t think that there is any serious alternative right now,” he said.
The distinctly dovish president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, said that although questions regarding the “appropriate policies to protect [Lebanese] civilians” are warranted, “people are overwhelmingly supportive of this war, across the board” and are confident that Israel’s leadership is acting within the requirements of international law.
“We are dealing with a government that is dovish, moderate, and with a defense minister who is a certified moderate,” Yoffie said. “We are confident that even if they did make mistakes, they will know how to deal with them and maintain a positive course.”
Fri. August 04, 2006 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 8:37 pm Post subject: Swedish Professor says Israel violated UN "blue line&qu |
| Swedish Professor says Israel violated UN "blue line" in Lebanon
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2006 11:57:23 +0300 From: "Israel Shamir"
Anders Strindberg is a consultant on Middle East politics working with
European government and law-enforcement agencies. He has also covered
Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories as a journalist since
the late 1990s, primarily for European publications
Hizbullah's attacks stem from Israeli incursions into Lebanon
By Anders Strindberg
Opinion from the August 01, 2006 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0801/p09s02-coop.html
NEW YORK - As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in
Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created
this crisis. "Israel" is defending itself. The underlying problem is
Arab extremism.
Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's capture of two
Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of "Israel's" silent
but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a
six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.
Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May
2000, "Israel" has violated the United Nations-monitored "blue line" on
an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's military
doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire
Katyusha rockets into "Israel" only in response to Israeli attacks on
Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has been the
pattern.
In the process of its violations, "Israel" has terrorized the general
population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous civilians.
This past February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd Yusuf Rahil was
killed by unprovoked Israeli cross-border fire as he tended his flock
in southern Lebanon. "Israel" has assassinated its enemies in the
streets of Lebanese cities and continues to occupy Lebanon's Shibaa
Farms area, while refusing to hand over the maps of mine fields that
continue to kill and cripple civilians in southern Lebanon more than
six years after the war supposedly ended. What peace did Hizbullah
shatter? Hizbullah's capture of the soldiers took place in the context
of this ongoing conflict, which in turn is fundamentally shaped by
realities in the Palestinian territories. To the vexation of "Israel"
and its allies, Hizbullah - easily the most popular political movement
in the Middle East - unflinchingly stands with the Palestinians.
Since June 25, when Palestinian fighters captured one Israeli soldier
and demanded a prisoner exchange, "Israel" has killed more than 140
Palestinians. Like the Lebanese situation, that flare-up was detached
from its wider context and was said to be "manufactured" by the enemies
of "Israel"; more nonsense proffered in order to distract from the
apparently unthinkable reality that it is the manner in which "Israel"
was created, and the ideological premises that have sustained it for
almost 60 years, that are the core of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.
Once the Arabs had rejected the UN's right to give away their land and
to force them to pay the price for European pogroms and the Holocaust,
the creation of "Israel" in 1948 was made possible only by ethnic
cleansing and annexation. This is historical fact and has been
documented by Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris. Yet "Israel"
continues to contend that it had nothing to do with the Palestinian
exodus, and consequently has no moral duty to offer redress. For six
decades the Palestinian refugees have been refused their right to
return home because they are of the wrong race. ""Israel" must remain a
Jewish state," is an almost sacral mantra across the Western political
spectrum. It means, in practice, that "Israel" is accorded the right to
be an ethnocracy at the expense of the refugees and their descendants,
now close to 5 million.
Is it not understandable that "Israel's" ethnic preoccupation
profoundly offends not only Palestinians, but many of their Arab
brethren? Yet rather than demanding that "Israel" acknowledge its
foundational wrongs as a first step toward equality and coexistence,
the Western world blithely insists that each and all must recognize
"Israel's" right to exist at the Palestinians' expense.
Western discourse seems unable to accommodate a serious, as opposed to
cosmetic concern for Palestinians' rights and liberties: The
Palestinians are the Indians who refuse to live on the reservation; the
Negroes who refuse to sit in the back of the bus.
By what moral right does anyone tell them to be realistic and get over
themselves? That it is too much of a hassle to right the wrongs
committed against them? That the front of the bus must remain
ethnically pure?
When they refuse to recognize their occupier and embrace their racial
inferiority, when desperation and frustration causes them to turn to
violence, and when neighbors and allies come to their aid - some for
reasons of power politics, others out of idealism - we are astonished
that they are all such fanatics and extremists.
The fundamental obstacle to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict is
that we have given up on asking what is right and wrong, instead asking
what is "practical" and "realistic." Yet reality is that "Israel" is a
profoundly racist state, the existence of which is buttressed by a
seemingly endless succession of punitive measures, assassinations, and
wars against its victims and their allies.
A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore, is one that
recognizes that the crux is not in this or that incident or policy, but
in "Israel's" foundational and persistent refusal to recognize the
humanity of its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas are
driven by a desire to "wipe out Jews," as is so often claimed, but by a
fundamental sense of injustice that they will not allow to be
forgotten.
These groups will continue to enjoy popular legitimacy because they
fulfill the need for someone - anyone - to stand up for Arab rights.
"Israel" cannot destroy this need by bombing power grids or rocket
ramps. If "Israel", like its former political ally South Africa, has
the capacity to come to terms with principles of democracy and human
rights and accept egalitarian multiracial coexistence within a single
state for Jews and Arabs, then the foundation for resentment and
resistance will have been removed. If "Israel" cannot bring itself to
do so, then it will continue to be the vortex of regional violence.
Anders Strindberg, formerly a visiting professor at Damascus
University, Syria, is a consultant on Middle East politics working with
European government and law-enforcement agencies. He has also covered
Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories as a journalist since
the late 1990s, primarily for European publications. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 1:56 am Post subject: AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon |
| http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh08162006.html
August 16, 2006
"Look What You've Done!"
AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon
By JOHN WALSH
"My fellow American," Howard Friedman, President of AIPAC, begins his letter of July 30 to friends and supporters of AIPAC, "Look what you've done"! After warning that "Israel is fighting a pivotal war for its life," by which he means Israel's wanton slaughter and all-out destruction in Lebanon, Freiedman condemns "the expected chorus of international condemnation of Israel's actions" and Europe's call for "a cease-fire immediately." Then he exults: "only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. . That nation is the United States of America--and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of America Jewry." (All emphases in the original here and below.) Here I must take issue with President Friedman since I bet that most Jewish Americans, in contrast to the AIPAC crowd, were horrified by the slaughter in Lebanon. In fact if anyone other than President Friedman wrote this, he would be accused of fabricating a Jewish plot and labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist and scurrilous anti-semite.)
"How do we do it"? President Friedman asks a little further on. The answer is "decades of long hard work which never ends." Not only is it hard work--but it's eternal. However, President Friedman is not content with generalities and gives us some of AIPAC's trade secrets. Here are two notables:
"AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship--so it's clear where they stand on the subject." (Would it not be great to see these "position papers"? I wonder how many candidates would release them? And what do the candidates get for all this effort? A pat on the back?)
"Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have come to rely on AIPACs memos. They are VERY busy people and they know that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis.. We present this information in concise form to elected officials. The information and analyses are impeccable--after all our reputation is at stake. This results in policy and legislation that make up Israel's lifeline." (Another way to read this is that the pea-brained hillbillies who make up most of the Congress can be led by the nose if the memos are simple enough. Testimony to this fact enters my mailbox, as I write, in the form of a must-read interview with Noam Chomsky, which details just how distorted the discussion of Israel and the war on Lebanon has become in the U.S.)
President Friedman's letter continues with more headliners: "Unfortunately, our work has just begun"! "Hizballah must be defeated." And finally, "The war is a diversion"!!!! This last section argues that the war in Lebanon is a "distraction," to "divert attention away from Iran's nuclear weapons program"! (In case you haven't noticed President Friedman loves exclamation points, which leads one to wonder whether a good dose of lithium might not be in order.) But this "analysis' is hopelessly confused since Israel started the war on Lebanon using a minor border skirmish as an excuse - as Chomsky points out in the interview alluded to above. It leaves one wondering about AIPAC's analyses. Are they "clear-eyed" as Friedman claims, or wild-eyed?
President Friedman closes with the exhortation: "Now is the time for us, American Jews, to stand up and tell our elected officials that they must demand Iran halt its pursuit of atomic arms." In other words, next stop Iran if AIPAC can swing it. And in that lies a great danger. The Bush administration is losing ever more of its base and only the neocon establishment and AIPAC remain securely in its camp. (Even some of the born-agains are deserting.) With the November elections coming, Rove and Bush desperately need AIPAC support, and so they may be even more susceptible than usual to its demands for going after Iran. Indeed this is a dangerous time.
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Aug 18, 2006 8:32 am; edited 1 time in total | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
