| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 6:38 pm Post subject: |
| tp://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3308579,00.html
Hi-tech firm boycotts Israel over 'war crimes'
Belgian hi-tech company specializing in development consulting notifies manager of Israeli company seeking cooperation that 'your country has conducted war crimes and is an apartheid regime'
Ehud Kenan
Following the recent war in Lebanon, Ynet has received several complaints from Israeli companies that have encountered refusal of companies from various countries to cooperate with Israelis because of the war.
Avner, an Israeli businessman specializing in product management and consulting approached a Belgian company in hopes of business cooperation. The company, U2U, refused to cooperate with the Israeli businessman because of what they called "Israel's war crimes and apartheid regime."
U2U manager Wim Yotrasprot wrote in a statement to Avner obtained by Ynet that "I appreciate your interest in my company, but after the devastating and inhumane war crimes Israel perpetrated in Lebanon, and because of the apartheid regime it rules on Palestine, U2U does not wish to tie itself with Israeli products."
'Europe also suffers from terrorism'
"I hope that the political situation in your country will radically change and will be based on peace and respect to non-Jewish cultures," he added. Despite the anger, Yotrasprot signed the letter with "best wishes."
Avner approached them once more, and said that the response was disrespectful and unprofessional and tried to appeal to Yotrasprot's logic. In a letter, Avner asked him not to believe everything he sees on television or reads in the newspapers. "Israel is a democracy surrounded by dictatorial states. Even Europe suffers from terrorism," Avner said.
"I told him that Israel is a technological hub and that many of the Microsoft products which he uses are developed here in Haifa," Avner added. Ynet was unable obtain a response from U2U. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 10:36 am Post subject: Fisk: Marwahin, 15 July 2006: The anatomy of a massacre |
| Marwahin, 15 July 2006: The anatomy of a massacre
A special report by Robert Fisk
In antiquity, Pliny wrote of the cliffs of Bayada. The chalk runs down to the Mediterranean in an almost Dover-like cascade of white rock, and the view from the top - just below the little Lebanese village of Chama'a - is breathtaking. To the south lies the United Nations headquarters and the Israeli frontier, to the north the city of Tyre, its long promentary, built by Alexander the Great, lunging out into the green-blue sea. A winding, poorly-made road runs down to the shore below Chama'a and for some reason - perhaps because he had caught sight of the Israeli warship off the coast - 58-year-old Ali Kemal Abdullah took a right turn above the Mediterranean on the morning of 15 July. In the open-topped pick-up behind him, Ali had packed 27 Lebanese refugees, most of them children. Twenty-three of them were to die within the next 15 minutes.
The tragedy of these poor young people and of their desperate attempts to survive their repeated machine-gunning from the air is as well-known in Lebanon as it is already forgotten abroad. War crimes are easy to talk about when they have been committed in Rwanda or Bosnia; less so in Lebanon, especially when the Israelis are involved. But all the evidence suggests that what happened on this blissfully lovely coastline two and a half months ago was a crime against humanity, one that is impossible to justify on any military grounds since the dead and wounded were fleeing their homes on the express orders of the Israelis themselves.
Mohamed Abdullah understands the reality of that terrible morning because his 52-year-old wife Zahra, his sons Hadi, aged six, and 15-year-old Wissam, and his daughters, Marwa, aged 10, and 13-year old Myrna, were in the pick-up. Zahra was to die. So was Hadi and the beautiful little girl Myrna whose photograph - with immensely intelligent, appealing eyes - now haunts the streets of Marwahin. Wissam, a vein in his leg cut open by an Israeli missile as he vainly tried to save Myrna's life, sits next to his father as he talks to me outside their Beirut house, its walls drenched in black cloth.
"From the day of the attack until now, lots of delegations have come to see us," Mohamed says. "They all talk and it is all for nothing. My problem is with a huge nation. Can the international community get me my rights? I am a weak person, unprotected. I am a 53-year-old man and I've been working as a soldier for 29 years, day and night, to be productive and to support a family that can serve society and that can be a force for good in this country. I was able to build a home in my village for my wife and children - with no help from anyone - and I did this in 2000, 23 years after I was driven out of Marwahin and I finished our new home this year." And here Mohamed Abdullah stops speaking and cries.
Marwahin is one of a string of villages opposite the Israeli border and, unlike many others further north, is inhabited by Sunni Muslim Lebanese, followers of the assassinated former prime minister Rafiq Hariri rather than the Shiite-dominated Hizbollah militia, which is supported and supplied by Syria and Iran. Most Sunnis blame Syria for Hariri's murder on 14 February last year.
While no friends of Israel, the Sunni community in Lebanon - especially the few thousand Sunnis of Marwahin who are so close to the frontier that they can see the red roofs of the nearest Jewish settlement - are no threat to Israel. For generations, they have intermarried - which is why most of the people in this tragedy hold the family name of al-Abdullah or Ghanem - and, had their parents been born a few hundred metres further south, they would - like the Sunni Muslim Palestinians who lived there until 1948 - have fled to the refugee camps of Lebanon when Israel was created.
Mohamed recalls with immense tiredness how his wife took his children south from Beirut to their family home in Marwahin on 9 July this year. The date is important because just three days later, Hizbollah members would cross the Israeli border, capture two Israeli soldiers and kill three others - five more were to die in a minefield later the same day - and Israel would respond with 34 days of air-strikes and bombardments that killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians. Hizbollah missiles would kill fewer than 200 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Just down the hill from Marwahin, on Israeli territory, stands a tall radio transmission tower and on the morning of 15 July, the Israelis used loudspeakers on the tower to order the villagers to flee their homes. Survivors describe how they visited two nearby UN posts to appeal for protection, one manned by four members of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organisation - set up after the 1948 war with Israel - and the other by Ghanaian soldiers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, the same army which, much expanded with French, Italian, Turkish and Chinese troops, is now supposed to police the latest ceasefire in southern Lebanon. Both the UNTSO men and the Ghanaians read the rule-book at the villagers of Marwahin. Ever since the Israelis attacked the UNIFIL barracks at Qana in 1996, slaughtering 106 Lebanese refugees - again, most of them children - the UN has been under orders not to allow civilians into their bases. The UN, it seems, can talk mightily of the need to protect the innocent, f but will do precious little to shield them in southern Lebanon.
Mohamed's four children had travelled south with their mother to buy furniture for their newly-built home; their father and his six other children in Beirut were to join them the following week.
"When the Israeli soldiers were taken, the airport closed down and all the roads became dangerous," Mohamed says. "But the mobile phones still worked and I had constant conversations with my wife. I asked her what was happening in the village. She said the Israelis were bombing in the fields around the village but not in the village itself. She had no car and anyway it was too dangerous to travel on the roads. On 13 and 14 July, we spoke six or seven times. She was asking about those of our children who were with me. You see, she had heard that Beirut had been bombed so we were worried about each other."
Mohamed's calvary began when he turned to the Arabia television station on the morning of the 15th. "I heard that the people of Marwahin had been ordered by the Israelis to leave their homes within two hours. I tried to call my wife and children but I couldn't get through. Then after half an hour, Zahra called me to say she was in the neighbouring village of Um Mtut and that people had gone to the UN to seek help and been turned away."
Mohamed insists - though other villagers do not agree with this - that while the UN were turning the civilians away, a van drove into Marwahin containing missiles. The driver was a member of Hizbollah, he says, and its registration number was 171364 (Lebanese registrations have no letters). If this is true, it clearly created a "crisis" - to use Mohamed al-Abdullah's word - in the village. Certainly, once the ceasefire came into place 32 days later, there was a damaged van beside the equally damaged village mosque with a missile standing next to it. Human rights investigators are unclear of the date of the van's arrival but seem certain that it was attacked by the Israelis - probably by an air-fired rocket - after Marwahin was evacuated.
In her last conversation with her husband, Zahra told Mohamed that the four children were having breakfast in a neighbour's house in Um Mtut. "I told her to stay with these people," Mohamed recalls. "I said that if all the civilians were together, they would be protected. My brother-in-law, Ali Kemal al-Abdullah, had a small pick-up and they could travel in this." First to leave Marwahin was a car driven by Ahmed Kassem who took his children with him and promised to telephone from Tyre if he reached the city safely. He called a couple of hours later to say the road was OK and that he had reached Tyre. "That's when Ali put his children and my children and his own grandchildren in the pick-up. There were 27 people, almost 20 of them children."
Ali Kemal drove north from Marwahin, away from the Israeli border, then west towards the sea. He must have seen the Israeli warship and the Israeli naval crew certainly saw Ali's pick-up. The Israelis had been firing at all vehicles on the roads of southern Lebanon for three days - they hit dozens of civilian cars as well as ambulances and never once explained their actions except to claim that they were shooting at "terrorists". At a corner of the road, where it descends to the sea, Ali Kemal suddenly realised his vehicle was overheating and he pulled to a halt. This was a dangerous place to break down. For seven minutes, he tried to restart the pick-up.
According to Mohamed's son Wissam, Ali - whose elderly mother Sabaha was sitting beside him in the front - turned to the children with the words: "Get out, all you children get out and the Israelis will realise we are civilians." The first two or three children had managed to climb out the back when the Israeli warship fired a shell that exploded in the cab of the pick-up, killing Ali and Sabaha instantly. "I had almost been able to jump from the vehicle -- my mother had told me to jump before the ship hit us," Wissam says. "But the pressure of the explosion blew me out when I had only one leg over the railing and I was wounded. There was blood everywhere."
Within a few seconds, Wissam says, an Israeli Apache helicopter arrived over the f vehicle, very low and hovering just above the children. "I saw Myrna still in the pick-up and she was crying and pleading for help. I went to get her and that's when the helicopter hit us. Its missile hit the back of the vehicle where all the children were and I couldn't hear anything because the blast had damaged my ears. Then the helicopter fired a rocket into the car behind the pick-up. But the pilot must have seen what he was doing. He could see we were mostly children. The pick-up didn't have a roof. All the children were crammed in the back and clearly visible."
Wissam talks slowly but without tears as he describes what happened next. "I lost sight of Myrna. I just couldn't see her any more for the dust flying around. Then the helicopter came back and started firing its guns at the children, at any of them who moved. I ran away behind a tel [a small hill] and lay there and pretended to be dead because I knew the pilot would kill me if I moved. Some of the children were in bits."
Wissam is correct about the mutilations. Hadi was burned to death in Zahra's arms. She died clutching his body to her. Two small girls - Fatmi and Zainab Ghanem - were blasted into such small body parts that they were buried together in the same grave after the war was over. Other children lay wounded by the initial shell burst and rocket explosions as the helicopter attacked them again. Only four survived, Wissam and his sister Marwa among them, hearing the sound of bullets as they "played dead" amid the corpses.
His father Mohamed heard on the radio that a pick-up had been attacked by the Israelis at Bayada, perhaps 10km from Marwahin. "When I heard that the driver was Ali Kemal al-Abdullah, I knew - I knew - that my children were on that truck," he says, "because my brother-in-law would not have left them behind. He would have taken them with him. I had another brother in Tyre and I called him. He had heard the same news and was waiting at the hospital. He said it was too dangerous to travel from Beirut to Tyre. He said that my family were only wounded. I said that if they were only wounded, I wanted to speak to them. I spoke to Marwa. She said Wissam was in the operating theatre. I asked to speak to the others. My brother just said: 'Later.'"
No one who has travelled the roads of southern Lebanon under Israeli air attack can underestimate the dangers. But Mohamed and his nephew Khalil decided to make the run to Tyre in the afternoon. "We just drove fast, all the way," Mohamed remembers. "I got to the Hiram hospital and I found Ali, my brother, waiting for me. I saw Marwa and I asked about her mother and Hadi and Myrna and she said: 'I saw them in the pick-up, sleeping. When the ship hit us, I was blown out of the vehicle. Afterwards, I saw Mummy and my brother sleeping.'" Marwa told Mohamed that she had run from the pick-up with her 19-year-old cousin Zeinab.
When Mohamed drove to the city hospital in Tyre in search of Zahra, Hadi and Myrna, his brother refused to travel with him. "At this point, I knew there was something wrong. So I went to the hospital on my own and I found my wife and children in the fridge. It was a horrible shock. To this day, I feel like I am dreaming. And I cannot believe what happened. No one came to ask me about Marwa or Wissam who lost a vein in his leg. It seems no one knows that this house has martyrs."
Before the ceasefire in southern Lebanon, Mohamed was called to say that the medical authorities in Tyre wished to bury the dead of Marwahin temporarily in a mass grave. He attended their burial and returned to his much-battered village on 15 August - just over a month after his wife and two children were killed and in time for their final interment on 24 August. He found his house partially destroyed in the Israeli bombardment along with the van and its Hizbollah rockets. "Every day is worse than the one before for me," Mohamed says.
And he blames the world. The UN for giving no protection to his family, Hizbollah's "vanity" in starting a war with a more powerful enemy and the Israelis for destroying the life of his family. "Is Israel in a state of war with children? We need an answer, a response to f this question. We ask for a trial for this Israeli pilot who killed the children. He is a war criminal because he killed innocents for no reason. And what has happened? The south has been destroyed. The people were massacred. The Israelis were back on the soil of my land. I could see them when we buried Zahra and Hadi and Myrna. How can I lose my children and then see the Israelis here? We are ignored by the government and treated with neglect by the media and the political parties - including the Hizbollah - who were the cause of what happened."
Almost all the "martyr" pictures of the dead of Marwahin contain a ghostly photograph of Rafiq Hariri, the mightest Sunni Muslim of them all, who was assassinated last year. The martyrs of Marwahin have become identified with a man who sought peace rather than war with Israel. But at the graveyard on the edge of the tobacco-growing village, there is no end to mourning. I found two old women sitting beside the graves, weeping and beating themselves and pulling at their hair. One of them was Ali Kemal's wife.
Adel Abdullah took me round the graves. His sister-in-law Mariam lies in one of them, her body still containing the unborn child she was carrying when she died. So are her five children, Ali, 14, Hamad, 12, Hussein, 10, Hassan, eight, and two-year-old Lama.
"This is Myrna," Adel says, patting his hand gently on the concrete surface of the little girl's still unadorned grave. "This is Zahra, her mother, whom we put just behind her. And here is Hadi." The villagers have written their first names in Arabic in the concrete. "There is Naame Ghanem and her two children. And this is the grave of both Fatmi and Zeinab because we could not tell which bits of them belonged together. That is why the 23 dead of Marwahin have only 22 graves."
On the dirt road to the cemetery on the windy little hill above the village, there still lies a face mask worn by the young men carrying the decomposing bodies to their final grave. And just to the left of the dead, clearly visible to the Israeli settlers in their homes across the border, the villagers have left the remains of Ali Kemal Abdullah's Daihatsu pick-up. It is punctured by a hundred shrapnel holes, bent and distorted and burned. The children in this vehicle had no chance, killed outright or smashed to pieces as they lay wounded afterwards.
"If it is right that these people should be martyred in this way, well fine," Adel says to me. "If not, why did this crime take place? Why can't a country - a single country, your country - say that Israel was responsible for a war crime? But no, you are silent." A woman, watching Adel's anger, was more eloquent. "The problem," she said, "is that these poor people belonged to a country called Lebanon and our lives are worth nothing to anyone else. If this had happened in Israel - if all these children were Israeli and the Hizbollah had killed them all with a helicopter - the US president would travel to the cemetery each year for a memorial service and there would be war crimes trials and the world would denounce this crime. But no president is going to come to Marwahin. There will be no trials."
Mohamed al-Abdullah weeps beside his wounded son in Beirut. "I consider this to have been a useless war and with these atrocious massacres it is innocent civilians who paid the price. Those who died are resting but we who are living are paying a price every day. That price is paid by the living who suffer. Why should I pay the price of something I didn't choose? I will say just one thing to you. God have mercy on Rafiq Hariri, a man of education and reconstruction. In God's name, I hope his children walk in his path. My wife loved Sheikh Rafiq so much. In this house, my wife's whole life changed after his assassination. Before, Zahra was not interested in politics but from the day his car was bombed, she listened to the news every day. Before bed, she wanted to hear any news. And she said to me once, 'I hope I don't die, so I will know who killed Rafiq Hariri'."
A UN investigation is still underway into Hariri's murder. An Israeli investigation is to start into the disastrous performance of its army during the war. The Hizbollah still claims it won a "divine victory" in July and August of this year. UNIFIL, which turned the refugees of Marwahin away on 15 July, stated that when they were removing the children's bodies, their soldiers came under fire. Human Rights Watch is still investigating the killings of civilians at Marwahin and other locations and wrote of them before the war ended. "The Israeli military," it said in its initial report, "did not follow its orders [to civilians] to evacuate with the creation of safe passage routes, and on a daily basis Israeli warplanes and helicopters struck civilians in cars who were trying to flee, many with white flags out the windows, a widely accepted sign of civilian status ... On some days, Israeli war planes hit dozens of civilian cars, showing a clear pattern of failing to distinguish between civilian and military objects." International law makes it clear that it is forbidden in any circumstances to carry out direct attacks against civilians and that to do so is a war crime. Human Rights Watch states that "war crimes" include "making the civilian population or individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities the object of attack".
Lama Abdullah was the youngest victim of the Marwahin 23. Ali Kemal's wife Sabaha was in her eighties. At least six of the children were between the ages of one and 10. The Israeli helicopter pilot's name is, of course, unknown.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1769991.ece | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 9:07 pm Post subject: U.N. Says Israel Blocked Investigators |
| From: BGJDAVID
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 11:37:47 EDT
Subject: U.N. Says Israel Blocked Investigators
Anytime the Israelis commit a crime that any other nation would be punished for, they seem to escape such punishment or criticism by offering the "mistake" excuse. After all, who would dare question or challenge the Israelis knowing that such challenge would earn them the "anti-Semitism" label? In this manner the Israelis are free to commit any crime imaginable knowing they would have this threat to impose to any such critic. No one dares speak of big brother unless in praise or on bended knees. It has worked for them on many instances such as the attack on the USS Liberty, the attack on Qana refugee camp in 1996, the recent attack that killed a family of seven picnicking on a Gaza beach, the almost daily air strikes killing hundreds of women and children in Gaza, and the recent attack on Qana two months ago, etc., etc., etc. The "mistake" excuse was successfully used in all these cases and the Israelis escaped any punishment or any criticsm. Here is the latest "mistake" where the investigators were denied full access. Funny how these Associated Press articles never seem to make it to our local media. Instead, the papers seem to only publish articles in praise of Israel. Our Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been publishing articles all week in praise of Israel's departure from Lebanon. The only problem with these articles is the fact that they are all lies. Israel continues their occupation of Lebanon while at the same time attempts to cover up their crimes. Why won't the media report such facts? Why won't the AJC publish this latest article? If it were Iran or Syria blocking any investigation, it would be headline news.
U.N. Says Israel Blocked Investigators
By NICK WADHAMS
.c The Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Israel refused to give a U.N.-appointed investigation access to the officials who may have been responsible for the bombing of an observation post that killed four unarmed peacekeepers at the height of the conflict with Hezbollah, the United Nations said Friday.
Israel said the bombing of the U.N. peacekeeping post along the Israeli-Lebanese border was a mistake that occurred at the ``operational level.'' The U.N. panel investigating the killings was not allowed to interview commanders at that level to determine what happened, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.
The statement was delivered shortly after the Board of Inquiry investigating the attack submitted a confidential report with its findings to the U.N. and to the four nations whose observers were killed - Austria, Canada, China and Finland. The report was not sent to Israel.
Dujarric's statement said it concluded that there was nothing else the United Nations could have done ``that would have changed the outcome.''
The four observers were killed by an Israeli precision-guided bomb that destroyed the bunker where they took shelter after their observation post near the town of Khiam came under heavy fire. U.N. officials in New York and Lebanon had repeatedly warned Israel that the observation post, built 30 years before, was under attack.
Because of Israel's refusal, the inquiry was ``unable to determine why the attacks on the U.N. position were not halted despite repeated demarches to the Israeli authorities from U.N. personnel, both in the field and at headquarters,'' Dujarric said.
Israel has blamed inaccurate maps for its mistake, and said the airplane that dropped the bomb thought it was targeting Hezbollah. Hezbollah was active in the area, with a post about 150 yards away.
Asked to comment on Dujarric's statement, the spokeswoman for Israel's U.N. mission, Anat Friedman, said: ``Israel has expressed its regret for the unfortunate event and has investigated the tragic incident.''
Friedman refused to comment on the U.N. claim that the investigators had not been allowed to interview some officials.
A U.N. official said Israel never sufficiently explained why it kept bombing the base.
``We do not have a satisfactory answer as to why those attempts failed,'' said the official, who spoke anonymously because the report was confidential. ``The Israelis are fully aware of our position on this incident.''
The official said there was nothing in the Board of Inquiry's findings to contradict U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's earlier claim that the attack was ``apparently deliberate.''
09/29/06 19:00 EDT | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:01 pm Post subject: Israel Almost Gone From South Lebanon |
| From: BGJDAVID
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 10:16:37 EDT
Subject: Israel Almost Gone From South Lebanon
Once again, all week, everyday, we've been forced to read about the wonderful move by the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon but as we see today, the facts are not as clear as the media make it to be. Israel hasn't made a full withdrawal from Lebanon, just like Israel never withdrew from Gaza, but the media will have us believe differntly. My local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution only publishes articles favorable to Israel. It would be nice, for once, if they would publish the truth. Here is the latest AP story that you won't see in the AJC.
Israel Almost Gone From South Lebanon
By HAMZA HENDAWI
.c The Associated Press
MARWAHEEN, Lebanon (AP) - The U.N. called Israel's pullout from nearly all of south Lebanon on Sunday ``significant progress.'' But sources of friction remained: Israel still holds the Lebanese part of a divided border village and its planes patrol Lebanon's airspace.
Both the Lebanese government and Hezbollah dismissed the withdrawal, which came more than six weeks after a cease-fire ended the 34-day conflict, as ``incomplete'' and demanded Israel stop what they called its violations of Lebanon's airspace, sea and land.
``What is required is a complete and comprehensive Israeli withdrawal and a halt to Israeli attacks on Lebanon,'' Information Minister Ghazi Aridi told The Associated Press. ``So far, there is no final solution. Israel's pullout today is incomplete.''
Senior Hezbollah official Sheik Hassan Ezzeddine warned the Islamic militant group would resume attacks against Israel if it breached the U.N. cease-fire, which went into effect Aug. 14.
``The enemy must bear the consequences of its continued air, sea and land violations in Lebanon,'' said Ezzeddine, the group's top political official in south Lebanon.
The Israeli army withdrew from the entire south except for the village of Ghajar, said a statement by the commander the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL.
``Significant progress has been achieved today,'' Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini of France said. ``I expect that they will leave this area in the course of the week, thus completing the withdrawal in line with the (U.N. Security Council) resolution 1701.''
The pre-dawn pullout put a formal end to a nearly three-month troop incursion into Lebanon that began after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others in a July 12 cross-border raid.
It clears the way for the full deployment of UNIFIL's 15,000 soldiers who will police the border with an equal number of Lebanese army troops.
Israel has been gradually withdrawing troops since the cease-fire went into effect, from a peak of 30,000 during the fighting. The Israeli naval blockade of Lebanon ended more than three weeks ago.
U.N. Force spokesman Alexander Ivanko, speaking on Lebanon's privately owned Christian TV station LBC, said a deal on Ghajar was expected next week. He did not elaborate.
But there were no scenes of jubilation Sunday similar to those that greeted the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation.
In the border village of Marwaheen, the most visible of the 10 vacated positions, the Israelis had held a hilltop position before pulling out early Sunday.
The villagers went about their business in what is perhaps a reflection of the weariness felt by many in south Lebanon after decades of almost continuous fighting with Israel.
It also could be attributed to the uncertainty over the future.
``You can never know whether they will be back again,'' cautioned Mohammed Musseileh, a 67-year-old farmer from Marwaheen, referring to the Israelis.
Witnesses said Israel began moving tanks and armored carriers out of pockets near the border after midnight. The roar of Israeli tanks could be heard on the Lebanese side as they moved across.
Israeli military officials said the last soldiers returned to Israel around 2:30 a.m. ahead of the onset of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, at sundown Sunday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity under military guidelines.
An armored column creaked across the border at the Israeli border community of Moshav Avivim, leaving tread marks in the soil and sending a large cloud of dust into the air.
Israeli spokeswoman Miri Eisin said Israel was ``now waiting for Lebanon to do its part under the truce.''
Israel wants Lebanon to keep Hezbollah out of the south and disarm it, but Beirut has indicated it would not actively seek Hezbollah's weapons. The militant group said it would disarm only when a strong central government was in place.
UNIFIL has said the question of disarming Hezbollah was best left for the Lebanese to tackle, but it would support the Lebanese army if it takes on the task.
Both the U.N. and the Lebanese government consider Israeli overflights as violations of the cease-fire, but the Israeli officials said Sunday there were no plans to stop them.
Ivanko, the UNIFIL spokesman, said the issue of the overflights was raised several times with the Israeli side, which has been asked to halt them.
Another source of tension in Lebanon is the disputed Israeli-held Chebaa Farms area near the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Resolution 1701 had directed the U.N. secretary-general to come up with a proposal to delineate the borders in the area within a now-elapsed 30 days.
After Israel abandoned its hilltop position in Marwaheen Sunday, some villagers saw a chance to make a little money. A group of men in a pickup truck grabbed some discarded tires. Another villager arrived, and later carried home a roll of electrical cables.
Ghanian peacekeepers in a white U.N. armored personnel carrier photographed the site. Two Lebanese military intelligence officers in plainclothes also surveyed the area before Hezbollah officials arrived in two vehicles, one of which was an ambulance marked as gift from the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.
They blocked the narrow road leading up to the former Israeli position, preventing reporters and villagers from reaching the spot.
Saleh Diyab Mohammed was among those who came to the hill after the Israelis were gone. He planted a Lebanese flag atop his half-finished, two-story house which was apparently used by Israelis soldiers.
``Now, I feel pure and proud,'' he said. ``I feel free again.''
Associated Press writers Matti Friedman in Moshav Zarit, Israel, and Hussein Dakroub in Beirut, Lebanon, contributed to this report.
10/01/06 16:52 EDT | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 7:59 am Post subject: |
| Forwarded:
Here is an angry righteous American Jew attacking "Nazi Tactics by Israel and America in the Phony War on Terror." Published by Information Clearing House. The author is Joel Fischer Professor University of Hawai'i School of Social Work Honolulu, HI
Ed Corrigan
Nazi Tactics by Israel and America in the Phony War On Terror
By Joel Fischer
10/02/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- As a Jew who witnessed the loss of 6,000,000 of my fellow Jews, most likely including members of my own extended family who were still in Europe, in the brutal Nazi slaughter of the Holocaust, I believe I know Nazi tactics when I see them. Because of this deeply personal history, I am sickened by the Nazi-like tactics being used by the Israelis in Gaza and Lebanon. These tactics are fully supported by the Bush administration as legitimate attempts at "self defense" against the alleged incursions by Palestinian and Hezbollah guerillas. This collusion between the US and the Israelis is so similar to the Axis Powers of World War II that I believe they constitute a new "Axis OF Powers" for the 21st Century. This Axis links Israel, the most militaristic country in the Middle East, with the United States, the most militaristic country in the world, in a quest to dominate, intimidate and develop their hegemony over other countries.
So, what are these Nazi-like tactics being used by the new Axis of Powers?
TERROR BOMBINGS; CONDUCTING A BRUTAL WAR AGAINST CIVILIANS.
The "shock and awe" bombing strategy used by the US and Israel are simply another name for the brutal bombings of civilian populations used by the Nazis in World War II. The current horrific wars against innocent men, women and children are geared toward intimidation, terror and fear among the civilian population in a depraved attempt to get them to pressure their own regime to submit, abdicate or surrender. The Axis even goes so far as to deliberately and brutally target infrastructure such as power plants and even supply routes bringing food and medicine to civilians, in an effort to make life indescribably more horrible for innocent civilians. In fact, Amnesty International has accused Israel of war crimes stating that Israel broke international law by deliberately destroying LEBANON'S (not Hezbollah's) civilian infrastructure! These are the war strategies the US used in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel is using in Palestine and Lebanon. Tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine by these Nazi-like tactics by Israel and America.
The US and Israel don't stop with terror bombings. Invading other countries illegally, they then continue to intimidate the civilian populations by illegal and unethical searches of peoples' homes, dragging men and sometimes women into the street hooded and trussed up like animals. Nothing can be more humiliating to these people then these intrusive home invasions at all hours of the night where civilians are trussed up and thrown out into the street in full view of the neighbors as a warning to any one who might even express an opinion about the illegal occupation of foreign troops in their own country.
The US-Israeli war against civilians has produced deaths and humiliation but not submission. In fact, the stupidity of this Nazi strategy in World War II and its results in HARDENING opposition, not WEAKENING IT, seems lost on the leaders of the Axis of Powers.
As I write this, news is reported that the Israelis fired missiles into a village killing 15 civilians, mainly women and children, while another missile was fired at a CONVOY OF CIVILIANS FLEEING THE VIOLENCE, killing seven and wounding 22! Are these not exactly the same actions that the Nazis carried out against civilian targets?
TRUMPED UP EXCUSES FOR INVASIONS
Afghanistan "harbored terrorists." Iraq has "weapons of mass destruction" and "threatened the US." Palestinians elected the "wrong government" and also may have kidnapped one Israeli soldier. Hezbollah ? BUT NOT LEBANON- allegedly kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. In all cases, including those where the reason for invasion was shown to be lies, the results were the deaths of thousands of innocent people, most sadly because of PRETEXTS by the US and Israeli governments.
Because of American propaganda, a little known fact is that Hezbollah is not even considered to be a terrorist organization by most of the world! Indeed, only the US and its puppet governments of Israel, Canada and Britain consider Hezbollah as a terrorist organization! In fact, Hezbollah and Hamas have exchanged prisoners many times with Israel who now has decided to use the Hamas and Hezbollah "kidnappings" as their latest pretext to invade and slaughter their neighbors.
Israel and the US have violated not only the United Nations Charter, but numerous UN resolutions in their murderous wars of hegemony and imperialism. Thus, the Axis of Powers becomes the real terrorists in the Middle East, not the Palestinian, Iraq, Afghan and Lebanese forces who really are engaging in legitimate self defense against the invaders/occupying forces.
Now compare the pretexts used by the Axis of Powers with those used by the Nazis in World War II. Fake border incidents. Falsified cases of discrimination against Germans in the countries targeted for invasion. The need for "LIVINGSPACE." Aggressor nations always develop huge propaganda machines to try to justify their actions. And when one lie is exposed ?there WERE no weapons of mass destruction- another is concocted to take its place, e.g., the need to bring "democracy" to other nations. Yet, how hypocritical is it that the US invaders are allies of many other anti-democratic nations, in that very same Middle East region, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt? How even more hypocritical is it that Israel, with US support, in their quest to "democratize," invade two of the only states in the Middle East with actual democracies, Palestine and Lebanon? There is no end to the lies and hypocrisy when Nazi tactics are employed by aggressor nations.
In fact, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article in the August 21 issue of "The New Yorker," that confirms, based on information leaked from current and former Bush administration officials, that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had nothing to do with the kidnappings of two Israeli soldiers. The invasion was planned by US and Israeli officials as preparation and a trial run for an invasion of Iran in 2007! Hersh wrote that "...according to a former senior intelligence official, the Israeli plan for Lebanon was the 'mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.'" George Bush never denied the substance of this article, calling it only, "wild speculation!"
A new book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq," (Stephen Kinzer; 2006) provides the clearest possible evidence that "regime change" has been a strategy of American foreign policy for at least 110 years. The phony excuses and US government lies may change with the situation, but the strategy stays the same.
DEHUMANIZATION OF THE ENEMY
As the Nazis viewed Jews, Slav, Gypsies and virtually all other nationalities as inferior to their "master race" so that their soldiers would not experience guilt over their genocidal slaughters, so do the Israelis and Bush administration actually view Muslims as inferior. The Axis sees "the other," the "enemy," as inferior, so that deaths of tens of thousands of "the other" seems justified while deaths on "our" side ?or kidnappings of a few in this case- are viewed by the Axis of Powers as horrendous and unforgivable. This dehumanization occurs officially and unofficially. It occurs officially, e.g., when Bush responds to a question about how many Iraqis have been killed by casually replying "oh, about 30,000," as though he were counting the cattle on his ranch. (As of August 2006, there are between 45,000 and 50,000 Iraqi dead according to US estimates!) It occurs unofficially, e.g., when troops on the ground dehumanize their enemy by calling them "towel heads" in the same way the US military in Vietnam called the Vietnamese "gooks." Even the media are co-opted in this dehumanization process as witness the daily reports of total American deaths, but virtually no reports of the overall death tolls among "the enemy."
Use of terms by US and Israeli propagandists like "Muslim Terrorists," "Muslim Extremists," and the latest demeaning term by Bush, "Muslim Fascists," is an attempt to taint all of Islamic religion and culture. Bush knows that the vast majority of his constituency in the US only hears the word "Muslim." Contrast that with the number of times we hear terms like "Christian Crusaders," "Christian or Jewish Extremists," "Christian or Jewish Neo-Nazis." These epithets are strictly off limits in the US, no matter how accurate they may be in depicting our government. The anti-Muslim insults are all part of the dehumanization process against people who are not only NOT terrorists or extremists, but defending their countries against illegal invasion and occupation by the Christian/Jewish Axis of Power.
Even more telling of this dehumanization is that the ratio of "enemy" killed to Americans and Israelis killed or kidnapped approaches hundreds to one. This is reminiscent of the same strategy used by the Nazis in WWII: slaughter of tens to hundreds of civilians when the Resistance killed even one German. Sadly, the US-Israeli ratio of our dead to their dead even exceeds the kill ratio of the Nazis! Can there be any clearer evidence of the view that "they," the "enemy," are seen as less worthy of life and dignity than "us?"
UNETHICAL AND ILLEGAL ENTRIES, SEARCHES AND DETENTIONS; USE OF TORTURE
There seems to be little disagreement, even from many US sources, that the Axis has violated international law and basic human decency by its violent repression of civilian populations. Both the US and Israel have deemed it their right to break in to any home in occupied territory that they wish in the search for "the enemy." Television news displays almost nightly present the images of Iraqi civilians screaming and crying in protest and desperation as occupation troops break into their homes, search any where they want, and then place hoods over the men, tie their hands behind their backs and roughly shove them to their knees. TO THEIR KNEES!
The US and Israel also hold THOUSANDS of prisoners from the lands they have invaded and occupied with basic human rights denied to many if not most of those prisoners. Even the puppet government of Britain has called for the release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, hundreds of whom have been held incommunicado FOR YEARS, with no contacts with family or legal representatives allowed. Meanwhile, the media have uncovered reports of secret prisons around the world where CIA victims are spirited to and never heard from again.
The visual reports from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq show the widespread use of torture there, and many international organizations ?from the United Nations to the Red Cross to Amnesty International- have provided evidence and protested the widespread use of torture by Americans and their allies, approved AS POLICY by the Bush administration!
All of these tactics are EXACTLY the same as the ones used by the Nazis in WWII. Are these prisons, those that are known and the many that are secret- not American concentration camps?
************
Of course, I want Israel to survive and flourish as a state, but alongside the equally flourishing Palestinian and Lebanese states whose autonomy and actual statehood Israel continues to deny, financially, militarily, and economically. As an American and as a Jew, my heart is broken; I cringe in disbelief and horror at the terror my own people have spread.
Terror bombing, illegal invasion of other countries using trumped up excuses, dehumanization of the enemy as inferior, widespread use of torture; these are exactly the same tactics the Nazis used. But these tactics will NEVER produce either the peace or victory the Axis of Powers claim they want. Remember WWII. The Nazis lost!
Joel Fischer <jfischer@hawaii.edu> Professor University of Hawai'i School of Social Work Honolulu, HI
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 10:25 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/03/141259
Beirut Bar Association Demands Israel Be Tried For Crimes
In Lebanon, the Beirut Bar Association is demanding that Israel be tried for violating international law during its offensive on Lebanon. On Monday the bar association met with investigators from the UN Human Rights-Council. Meanwhile Lebanese President Emile Lahoud called on Israel to stop occupying the town of Ghajar in southern Lebanon. Lahoud said many issues remain unresolved.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud: "The national Lebanese army will raise the flag along the Blue Line, but there are other issues to be resolved such as the Ghajar border area issue, and they promised us to find a solution to the disputed Shebaa Farms after the cessation of the Israeli aggression, which is the origin of all problems. At the same time they (Israelis) did not hand over mines maps, and they told us that this war is all because of the captured Israeli soldiers, but nobody is mentioning them now. We want Lebanese detainees in Israeli jails too." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 3:39 pm Post subject: What Tony Blair didn't say |
| Subject: What Tony Blair didn't say
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 06:14:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Stop the War Coalition" <office@stopwar.org.uk>
STOP THE WAR COALITION
NEWSLETTER No. 2006/39
04 October 2006
Email office@stopwar.org.uk
Telephone 020 7278 6694
Web: www.stopwar.org.uk
IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
1) WHAT TONY BLAIR DIDN'T SAY
2) A DAY TO REMEMBER: 23 SEPTEMBER 2006
3) LEBANON: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
4) LEBANON AND GAZA: EYEWITNESS REPORTS
5) BLOCKADE TRIDENT: 365 FASLANE
6) TROOPS HOME NOW: BRIZE NORTON DEMONSTRATION
7) FREE BABAR AHMAD
8) A PYRAMID OF CHILDREN'S SHOES
9) TIME TO GO T-SHIRTS
****************************************
1) WHAT TONY BLAIR DIDN'T SAY
On 27 September 2006, a war criminal addressed the Labour Party
Conference in Manchester. He has been compliant in the deaths of tens of
thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. His refusal to call for an immediate
ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza sanctioned Israel's barbaric attacks, which
destroyed much of the infrastructure of those countries, killed nearly
1500 people -- one third of them children -- drove 250,000 people from
their homes and scattered one million deadly cluster bombs across
southern Lebanon, which every day are killing and maiming civilians.
The war criminal's speech was acclaimed by nearly all the mainstream
media as "brilliant" (BBC), "electrifying" (Telegraph) and "majestic"
(Guardian).
HERE ARE 10 THINGS THAT TONY BLAIR DIDN'T SAY IN WHAT THE INDEPENDENT
CALLED "THE SPEECH OF THE CENTURY":
* The majority of Iraqis want the immediate withdrawal of US troops
from their country, saying the departure "would make them feel safer and
decrease violence."
* In Iraq, one attack on US forces takes place on average, every 15
minutes. The majority of Iraqis approve of attacks on US forces.
* Reports to the US and British governments show that the Iraq war has
acted as a "recruiting sergeant" for extremists and increased the
threat of terrorism.
* The security situation in Iraq is so out of control that over 240,000
Iraqis have fled their homes in the past six months and registered as
refugees.
* Only 20 percent of Americans "have confidence" in George Bush's Iraq
policies.
* The Iraq war is currently costing US taxpayers around $2bn (£1.07bn)
a week.
* The United Nations says over 6,600 Iraqis were killed in the months
of July and August, September brought the highest level of civilian
casualties since the war in 2003 and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says
Iraq is on the brink of all-out civil war.
* British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are six times more likely to
be killed in combat than soldiers in Iraq. Only 31% of British people
support the war in Afghanistan.
* According to senior military sources, Britain's armed forces are
"arguably losing or potentially losing" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
* Only 31% of British people support the war in Afghanistan.
THE SOURCES FOR ALL OF THE ABOVE STATEMENTS ARE LISTED HERE:
http://tinyurl.com/jjqjs
****************************************
2) A DAY TO REMEMBER: 23 SEPTEMBER 2006
While the newspapers showered Tony Blair with praise for a speech of
breathtaking dishonesty and deception (see http://tinyurl.com/gklmw, if
you can stomach it), they gave hardly any coverage to the event which
brought up to 50,000 protestors from across Britain to Manchester on the
eve of the Labour conference, calling for an end to the Bush/Blair wars
and opposing the replacement of Trident nuclear weapons, the cost of
which is now predicted to be £75 billion.
The broadcast media was much better, with good reports on Sky News and
BBC News and repeated radio reports through the day. Unfortunately,
most of them gave the size of the march as 10,000 -- the first figure
given out by the police, who by the end of the day had raised their
estimate to 30 000.
Only on the internet will you find a full record of this memorable day
of protest that filled the streets of central Manchester and surrounded
the G-Mex Centre, where the Labour conference was held. FOR A SELECTION
OF REPORTS, PICTURES AND VIDEOS, INCLUDING FILM OF ALL THE MAIN
SPEAKERS AT THE TIME TO GO RALLY, SEE: http://tinyurl.com/pp7vn
****************************************
3) LEBANON: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
The last Israeli soldier left Lebanon this week. This followed the
three week war in August, when Israel -- using the capture of two of its
soldiers as an excuse -- was given the green light by George Bush and
Tony Blair to unleash a long planned onslaught on Lebanon, which ended in
terrible death and devastation for Lebanon but without Israel achieving
any of its objectives.
Effectively Israel was defeated for the first time in its history by
the resistance of Hezbollah fighters, who were supported by the
overwhelming majority of Lebanese people. This defeat has opened up new
prospects for the anti-war movement internationally. Trade unionists,
campaigners and anti-war activists now have a new chance to deepen their links,
co-ordinate action and to redouble their efforts to end the imperialist
policies of the US and its allies in the Arab region.
An International Solidarity Conference in Beirut on 24-26 November has
been called by the Cairo Conference in association with the broad based
Samidoun relief organisation in the Lebanon. The Stop the War Coalition
is supporting the conference on and believes that all anti-war
movements around the world should make sure that they encourage the greatest
number of activists to attend this crucial conference.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO GO TO THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY CONFERENCE IN
BEIRUT ON 24-26 NOVEMBER, CONTACT THE STOP THE WAR OFFICE: EMAIL
office@stopwar.org.uk
****************************************
4) LEBANON AND GAZA: EYEWITNESS REPORTS
Some of the best reporting from Lebanon and Gaza in recent months has
been through the eyewitness accounts of freelance journalists and
photographers. A slideshow and talk by photographer Guy Smallman and reporter
Penny Quinton will take place at the National Union of Journalists head
office on Monday 9 October at 6.30pm. The meeting is organised by
Media Workers Against the War and all are welcome. To view Guy Smallman's
pictures, go to: http://tinyurl.com/l23to
EYEWITNESSES IN LEBANON AND GAZA
MONDAY 9 OCTOBER AT 6.30PM
TALK AND SLIDESHOW with:
Guy Smallman, photographer
Penny Quinton, reporter
NUJ, HEADLAND HOUSE
308-312 GRAYS INN ROAD
LONDON WC1
More information: 07801 789 297 or email mwaw@btinternet.com
****************************************
5) BLOCKADE TRIDENT: FASLANE 365
From October 2006, there will be a year-long continuous peaceful
blockade at Faslane in Scotland, the base where Britain's nuclear weapons are
deployed. The blockade is particularly timely because Tony Blair is
hoping to push through a replacement for the Trident nuclear missiles --
at a cost now predicted to be up to £75 billion -- before he leaves
office within the next year. (See http://tinyurl.com/nyab2 for details of
Faslane 365.)
Groups and organisations from Scotland, England and Wales, and beyond
will shut down the base for at least one 48-hour period each during the
year. November 6/7 are the days when Stop the War will blockade the
base. If you would like to be part of the Stop the War protest in Faslane
on those days, email office@stopwar.org.uk with your contact details
for further information.
****************************************
6) TROOPS HOME NOW: BRIZE NORTON DEMONSTRATION
RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire is the main transport base for sending
troops in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. In August this year it was
used by US planes taking munitions to the Israeli Defense Force to bomb
Lebanon. A national TROOPS HOME NOW demonstration at Brize Norton been
called on Saturday 2 December. It will have a simple message:
• Stop using British bases to support the occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
• Bring the British troops home now.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, GO TO http://tinyurl.com/kp2u2
****************************************
7) FREE BABAR AHMAD
Babar Ahmad deserves the support of everyone in the anti-war movement.
He is threatened with being sent to the US to face trumped up terrorism
charges under New Labour’s disgraceful treaty with the United States,
which allows British citizens to be extradited to the US without the
right to challenge the evidence against them in court. Babar's case is
another example of Tony Blair's slavish support for George Bush's "war on
terror", which has produced tyrannical abuses of our civil rights. If
the extradition of Babar to the US goes ahead, he could face
incarceration in the Guantanamo prison.
A crucial debate will be heard in parliament in October. Two amendments
will be proposed to the extradition treaty which, if passed, will
ensure that anyone facing extradition like Babar will have the chance to see
and challenge U.S. evidence in a British court.
The FREE BABAR AHMAD campaign is asking for maximum pressure to be put
on MPs to get these amendments passed. If just 50 Labour MPs support
the amendments, they are likely to succeed.
For full details of the Babar Ahmad case, which has repercussions which
could effect any of us, go the FREE BABAR AHMAD website, where you will
also find details of how you can lobby your local MP to support the
crucial amendments to the extradition bill: http://tinyurl.com/f4st3
****************************************
8) A PYRAMID OF SHOES
At Stop the War's CEASEFIRE NOW demonstration on August 5, we asked
people to bring children's shoes to lay at the Cenotaph in Whitehall to
signify the high proportion of fatalities among young children resulting
from Israel's barbaric attacks on Lebanon's civilian areas, then taking
place. The response was extraordinary and very moving and after the
demonstration Stop the War collected a huge number of shoes.
We have now given the shoes collected at the CEASEFIRE NOW
demonstration to Handicap International UK, which is organising the 2006 PYRAMID OF
SHOES in Hyde Park on Saturday 14 October, to support the international
campaign against cluster bombs. The main focus of the event is the
construction of a PYRAMID OF SHOES, each shoe representing a life or limb
lost to a cluster bomb.
The Pyramid of Shoes event has added significance for Stop the War,
given the many protests that we organised against Israel's bombardment of
Lebanon. One of Israel's innumerable war crimes was the carpet bombing
of southern Lebanon with one million cluster bomblets, which it is
predicted will kill and maim hundreds of civilians in the months, or even
years, to come.
Members of the public are asked to participate in the Pyramid of Shoes
event in Hyde Park on 14 October by bringing a pair of shoes to show
their support for victims and populations under threat of cluster bombs
worldwide.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CLUSTER BOMBS IN LEBANON AND THE WORK OF
HANDICAP INTERNATIONAL UK, GO TO: http://tinyurl.com/symtv
****************************************
9) TIME TO GO T-SHIRTS
One of the most striking features of the TIME TO GO demonstration on 23
September were the t-shirts with the TIME TO GO logo which were worn by
hundreds of protestors. They were especially designed for the
demonstration in a limited edition by the renowned artist David Gentleman. There
are a few of these t-shirts still available. £7 short sleeve. £8 long
sleeve. To buy telephone: 020 7278 6694
--
To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank e-mail to
stwc-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 8:17 am Post subject: Fisk: The Age of Terror - a landmark report |
| The Age of Terror - a landmark report
Robert Fisk
The Independent
October 8, 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1814843.ece
With chaos stretching from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, we have never lived in a more dangerous time. Over the next 15 pages and 7,000 words, our man in the Middle East looks back over a lifetime of covering war and death, and lays out a bleak future for all of us - one that even those living in the comfort of the Home Counties cannot escape
A few days after Lebanon's latest war came to an end, I went through many of the reporter's notebooks I have used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some contained the names of dead colleagues, others the individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds and Christians and Jews. One, dated 1991, is even splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil that came raining down on us from the skies over the Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to happen on 11 September 2001.
And sure enough, in one notebook, part of a transcript of an interview I gave in Toronto in the late 1990s, I see myself trying to discourage the Middle East optimism of my host. "There is an explosion coming in the Middle East," I tell him. What was this explosion I was talking about? I find myself writing almost the same thing a couple of years later in The Independent - I refer to "the explosion to come" without locating it in the Middle East at all. What was I talking about? And then, most disturbingly, I re-run parts of a film series I made with the late Michael Dutfield for Channel 4 and Discovery in 1993. Called From Beirut to Bosnia, it was billed as an attempt to record "Muslims growing anger towards the West."
In one sequence, I walk into a destroyed mosque in a Bosnian village called Cela. And I hear my voice on the soundtrack, saying: "When I see things like this, I think of the place I work, the Middle East... I wonder what the Muslim world has in store for us... Maybe I should end each of my reports with the words: 'Watch out!' " And when I checked back to my post-production notes, I find the dates of all our film sequences listed. I had walked into that Bosnian mosque, watched by Serb policemen, on 11 September 1993. My warning was exactly eight years too early.
I don't like journalists who, in middle age, start to pontificate morbidly about the wickedness of a world that should be full of love, or who rummage through old notebooks in search of pessimism. So I own up at once. Surely we don't have to be weighed down by the baggage of history, always looking backwards and holding up billboards with the "The End of the World is Nigh" written in black for readers too bored to look at the fine print. Yet when I sit on my seafront balcony today, I am waiting for the next explosion to come.
Beirut is a good place to reflect on the tragedy through which the Middle East is now inexorably moving. After all, the city has suffered so many horrors these past 31 years, it seems haunted by the mass graves that lie across the region, from Afghanistan to Iraq to "Palestine" and to Lebanon itself. And I look across the waters and see a German warship cruising past my home, part of Nato's contribution to stop gun-running into Lebanon under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. And then, I ask myself what the Germans could possibly be doing when no guns have ever been run to the Hizbollah guerrilla army from the sea. The weapons came through Syria, and Syria has a land frontier with the country and is to the north and east of Lebanon, not on the other side of the Mediterranean.
And then when I call on my landlord to discuss this latest, hopeless demonstration of Western power, he turns to me in some anger and says, "Yes, why is the German navy cruising off my home?" And I see his point. For we Westerners are now spreading ourselves across the entire Muslim world. In one form or another, "we" - "us", the West - are now in Khazakstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Lebanon. We are now trapped across this vast area of suffering, fiercely angry people, militarily far more deeply entrenched and entrapped than the 12th-century crusaders who faced defeat at the battle of Hittin, our massive forces fighting armies of Islamists, suicide bombers, warlords, drug barons, and militias. And losing. The latest UN army in Lebanon, with its French and Italian troops, is moving in ever greater numbers to the south, young men and women who have already been threatened by al-Qa'ida and who will, in three of four months, be hit by al-Qa'ida. Which is one reason why the French have been pallisading themselves into their barracks in southern Lebanon. There is no shortage of suicide bombers here, although it will be the Sunni -- not the Hizbollah-Shiite variety -- which will strike at the UN.
When will the bombers arrive? After further massacres in Iraq? After the Israelis cross the border again? After Israel - or the US - bombs Iran's nuclear facilities in the coming months? After someone in the northern city of Tripoli, perhaps, or in the Palestinian camps outside Sidon, decides he has seen too many Western soldiers trampling the lands of southern Lebanon, too many German warships off the coast, or heard too many mendacious statements of optimism from George W Bush or Tony Blair or Condoleezza Rice. "There will be no 'new' Middle East, Miss Rice," a new Hizbollah poster says south of Sidon. And the Hizbollah is right. The entire region is sinking deeper into bloodshed and all the time, over and over again, Bush and Blair tell us it is all getting much better, that we can all be heartened by the spread of non-existent democracies, that the dawn is rising on Condi's "new" Middle East. Are they really hoping that they can distort the mirror of the world's reality with their words? There is a kind of new dawn rising in the lands from the old Indian empire to the tides of the Mediterranean. The only trouble is that it is blood red.
It is as if the Bushes and Blairs do not live on this planet any more. As my colleague Patrick Cockburn wrote recently, the enraging thing about Blair's constant optimism is that, to prove it all a pack of lies, a journalist has to have his throat cut amid the anarchy which Blair says does not exist. The Americans cannot protect themselves in Iraq, let alone the Iraqis, and the British have twice nearly been defeated in battles with the Taliban, and the Israeli army - counting it as part of the "West" for a moment -- were soundly thrashed when they crossed the border to fight the Hizbollah, losing 40 men in 36 hours. Yet still Blair delayed a ceasefire in Lebanon. And still - be certain of this - when the fire strikes us again, in London or New York or wherever, Blair and Bush will say that the attack has nothing to do with the Middle East, that Britain's enemies hate "our values" or our "way of life".
I once mourned the lack of titans in the modern world, the Roosevelts and the Churchills, blood-drenched though their century was. Blair and Bush, posing as wartime leaders, threatening the midget Hitlers around them, appear to have gone through a kind of "stasis", a psychological inability to grasp what they do not want to hear or what they do not want to be true. And they have lost the thread of history.
In the past, we - the "West" - could have post-war adventures abroad and feel safe at home. No North Korean tried to blow himself up on the London Tube in the 1950s. No Viet Cong ever arrived in Washington to assault the United States. We fought in Kenya and Malaya and Palestine and Suez and Yemen, but we felt safe in Gloucestershire. Perhaps the change came with the Algerian War of Independence when the bombers attacked in Paris and Lyons, or perhaps it came later when the IRA arrived to bomb London.
But it is a fact that "we" cannot take our armies and warships and tanks and helicopter gunships and para battalions for foreign wars and expect to be unhurt at home. This is the inescapable logic of history that Bush and Blair will not face, will not acknowledge, will not believe - will not even let us believe. All across the Middle East, we are locked in battle in our preposterous "war on terror" because "the world changed forever" on 11 September, even though I have said many times that we should not allow 19 murderers to change our world. So we live in a darker world of phone-taps and "terror plots" and underground CIA prisoners whose interrogators set about victims in secret, tearing to pieces the Geneva Conventions so painfully constructed after the Second World War.
And in a world betrayed. Remember all those promises we made to the Arabs about creating a wonderful new functioning democracy in Iraq whose example would be followed by other Middle East states? And remember our promise to honour the fledgling democracy of Lebanon, the famous "Cedars Revolution" - a title invented by the US State Department, so the Lebanese should have been suspicious - which brought the retreat of the Syrian army. Lebanon was then held up to be a future model for the Arab world. But once the Hizbollah crossed the frontier and seized two Israeli soldiers, killing three others on 12 July, we stood back and watched the Lebanese suffer. "If there is one thing this last war has convinced me of," a young Lebanese woman put it to me this month, "it is that the Lebanese are on their own. I can never trust a foreign promise again."
And this is true. For the direct result of the disastrous Israeli campaign has been to turn the Hizbollah into heroes of the Arab - indeed the Muslim - world, to break apart the fragile political stability established by the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, and to have Hizbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, declare a "divine victory" and demand a "national unity" government which, if it comes about, will be pro-Syrian. The language now being used in Lebanon by the country's political leaders is approaching the incendiary, lethal grammar of pre-civil war Lebanon.
Samir Geagea, the Christian ex-militia commander, brought out tens of thousands of supporters to jeer at Nasrallah. "They demand a strong state but how can a strong state be built with a statelet in its midst?" Geagea demanded to know after the Hizbollah suddenly announced that it has no intention of handing over its weapons. Indeed, Nasrallah is now boasting that he still has 20,000 missiles in southern Lebanon, a claim which led the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, to abuse Nasrallah as a creature of Syria - there is speculation over the depth of his relationship with Damascus but his arms certainly come from Iran - and to say to him: "Sayed Nasrallah, rest your mind, I will not reach an agreement with you. When you separate yourself from the Syrian leadership, I will possibly hold a dialogue with you." Thus two more paper-thin links - between Lebanon's Druze community and the Christians and the larger population of Shiite Muslims - have been broken. And that is how civil wars start.
Had Bush - indeed Blair -- denounced Israel's claim that it held the Lebanese government responsible for the kidnapping and killing of its soldiers, and demanded an immediate ceasefire, then the disaster that is destroying Lebanon's democracy would not have happened. But no, Bush and Blair let the bloodshed go on and postponed hopes of a ceasefire for the Lebanese upon whom they had lavished so much praise a year ago. Just last week, the Lebanese recovered the bodies of five more children under the rubble of the Sidon Vocational Training Centre in Tyre. Ali Alawiah identified his children Aya, Zeinab and Hussein and his nephews Battoul and Abbas. All would have been alive if even Blair and Margaret Beckett had demanded a ceasefire. But they are dead. And Blair and Beckett and Bush should have this on their conscience.
The fact they don't speaks sorrowfully of our double standard of morality. Almost all Lebanon's 1,300 dead - which comes close to half the total of the World Trade Centre murders - were civilians. But we don't care for them as we do our own "kith and kin". This is the same sickness that pervades our policies in Iraq where we never counted the number of civilians killed, only the tally of our precious soldiers who died there.
How did we come to be infected by this virus of negligence and betrayal? Does it really go back to the Crusades or the ramblings of Spanish Christians of the 15th century - whose portrayals of the Prophet Mohamed were infinitely more obscene than Denmark's third-rate cartoonist - or to the vicious anti-Muslim ravings of long-forgotten Popes who seem to obsess the present incumbent of the Vatican? I am still uncertain what Benedict meant by his quotation of the old man of Byzantium - while I am equally suspicious of his almost equally insulting remarks at Auschwitz where he blamed Nazi Germany's cruelty on a mere "gang of criminals". But then again, this is a Pope - anti-divorce, anti-homosexual and, once, anti-aircraft - who has signally failed to follow John Paul II's devotions on the need for the seed of Abraham to acknowledge the love they should show to each other.
This failure to see the Other as the same as "us" is now evident across the Middle East. Some months ago, I received letters originally written to his family by a young Marine officer in Iraq who was trying - eloquently, I have to add - to explain how frustrating his work with Iraqis had become. "There is something culturally childish in their understanding of Western governance and management that will require immeasurable education and probably several generations to overcome if they find it of any interest," he wrote. "Our understanding of their tribal governance and its relationship to formal civil management is equally naïve and charges our frustration... The reality is that they cannot, culturally, comprehend our altruism or believe our stated intentions... Liberation will compete with invasion as our legacy but locally we are ideologically irrelevant... I share the American fascination with action and it has consistently betrayed us in our foreign policy."
The reality in Iraq is summed up by the same American Marine officer's description of the building of the Ramadi glass factory, a story that shows just how vacuous all the stories of our "success" there are. "The Division has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a glass factory. It does not work. It will take millions of dollars to rehabilitate and modernise. There are supposed to be 2,500 Iraqis employed there but they have nothing to do and no more than 100 arrive on any given day to sit in their offices as new computers and furniture are delivered with our compliments... It is like walking through a fictional business that physically exists. It may be Kafka's revenge. Most rooms are empty but are still preserved as they had been under a layer of dust. Some areas hold a man at a desk in a stark room too large for him. It is like Pompeii being slowly reoccupied, as if nothing had happened. I stood on a tall mound of broken glass outside. Shards of window panes shattered in the process of manufacturing them. The windows of the city were poured and cut here once... This glass was made from sand, desert made invisible until exposed by reflection. The bright sunlight makes little impression on the pile due to a dull coating of dust but the fragments fracture further and slide beneath my feet with the sound of ruin. Walking on windows and unable to see the ground." Could there be a more Conradian description of the failure of the American empire in Iraq?
And does it not echo a remark that TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - made of Iraq in the 1920s: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly... Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work may not be as good as, perhaps, you think."
A different kind of alienation, of course, is reflected in our dispute with Iran. "We" think that its government wants to make nuclear weapons - in six months, according to the Israelis; in 10 years, according to some nuclear analysts. But no one asks if "we" didn't help to cause this "nuclear" crisis. For it was the Shah who commenced Iran's nuclear power programme in 1973 and Western companies were shoulder-hopping each other in their desire to sell him nuclear reactors and enrichment technology. Siemens, for example, started to build the Bushehr reactor. And the Shah was regularly interviewed on Western television stations where he said that he didn't see why Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons when America and the Soviets had them. And we had no objection to the ambitions of "our" Policeman of the Gulf.
And when Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution engulfed Iran, what did he do? He called the nuclear programme "the work of the devil" and closed it down. It was only when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran the following year and began showering Iran with missiles and chemical weapons - an invasion supported by "us" - that the clerical regime decided they may have to use nuclear weapons against Iraq and reopened the complex. In other words, it was the West which supported Iran's original nuclear programme and it was closed by the chief divine of George Bush's "axis of evil" and then reopened when the West stood behind Saddam (in the days when he was "our strongman" rather than our caged prisoner in a dying state).
The greater irony, of course, is that if we were really concerned about the spread of nuclear technology among Muslim states, we would be condemning Pakistan, most of whose cities are in a state of almost Iraqi anarchy and whose jolly dictator now says he was threatened with being "bombed back to the Stone Age" by the Americans if he didn't sign up to the "war on terror". Now it happens that Pakistan is infinitely more violent than Iran and it also happens that it was a close Pakistani friend of the Pakistani President- General Pervez Musharraf - a certain scientist called Abdul Qadeer Khan - who actually gave solid centrifuge components to Iran. But all that has been taken out of the story. And so they will remain out of the narrative because Pakistan already has a bomb and may use it if someone decided to create a new Stone Age in that former corner of the British empire.
But all this raises a more complex question. Are we really going to carry on arguing for years - for generation after generation of crisis - over who has or doesn't have nuclear technology or the capacity to build a bomb? Are "we" forever going to decide who may have a bomb on the basis of his obedience to us - Mr Musharraf now being a loyal Pakistani shah - or his religion or how many turbans are worn by ministers in the government. Are we still going to be doing this in 2007 or 2107 or 3006?
What I suspect lies behind much of our hypocrisy in the Middle East is that Muslims have not lost their faith and we have. It's not just that religion governs their lives, it is the fact that they have kept the faith - and that is why we try to hide that we have lost it by talking about Islam's "difficulty with secularism". We are the good liberals who wish to bestow the pleasures of our Enlightenment upon the rest of the world, although, to the Muslim nations, this sounds more like our desire to invade them with different cultures and traditions and - in some cases - different religions.
And Muslims have learnt to remember. I still recall an Iraqi friend, shaking his head at my naivety when I asked if there was not any cup of generosity to be bestowed on the West for ridding Iraqis of Saddam's presence. "You supported him," he replied. "You supported him when he invaded Iran and we died in our tens of thousands. Then, after the invasion of Kuwait, you imposed sanctions that killed tens of thousands of our children. And now you reduce Iraq to anarchy. And you want us to be grateful?"
And I recalled seeing a train load of gassed Iranian soldiers on the way to Tehran, coughing up mucus and blood into stained handkerchiefs and coughing up the gas too because I suddenly smelled a kind of dirty perfume and walked down the train opening all the windows. I saw their vast wobbling blisters upon which ever-smaller blisters would form, one on top of the other. And where did this filthy stuff come from, this real weapon of mass destruction Saddam was using? Components came from Germany and from the US. No wonder US Lieutenant Rick Francona noted indifferently in a report to the Pentagon that the Iraqis had drenched Fao in gas when he visited the battlefield during the war. So do we expect the Iranians to be grateful that we eventually toppled Saddam?
Needless to say, the division between Shias and Sunnis - especially in Iraq - can reach stages of cruelty not seen since the European Protestant-Catholic wars; nor, in this context, should we forget the conflict we are still trying to control in Northern Ireland. Islam as a society, rather than a religion, does have to face the "West"; it must find, in the words of that fine former Iranian president Mohamad Khatami, a "civil society". And it is outrageous that Muslims have not condemned the slaughter in Darfur or, indeed, in Iraq and, one might add, on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war where one and a half million Muslims killed each other over almost eight years. Self-criticism is not in great supply across the Muslim world where, of course, our spirited Western political conflicts and elections sometimes look like self-flagellation.
As for our desire to award the Muslim Middle East with "our" democratic systems, it's not just in Lebanon that we have proved to be much less enthusiastic about its existence in the Arab world. The former US ambassador to Iraq - once he realised the Shiites would join the Sunni resistance if they did not have elections, for democracy was originally not going to be America's gift there - accepted a dominant role for Muslim clerics in the government, thus ensuring discrimination against women in marriage, divorce and inheritance.
When Daniel Fried, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs visited Paris last year, he lectured European and Arab diplomats on what he called "the US-European imperative to support democratic reform and democratic reformers in the Middle East" - forgetting, it seems, that just such a man, Khatami, existed in Iran but had been snubbed by the US. His failure as a genuinely elected president produced his somewhat cracked successor. Fried, however, insisted that bringing democracy to the Middle East "is not for us a question of political theory, but of central strategic importance", something that clearly didn't matter less than a year later in Lebanon and certainly not when the Palestinians participated in genuine elections, of which more later.
Fried took the risky step of quoting the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville to back his claim that democracy, far from being a fragile flower, was "robust, and its applicability is potentially universal". The former French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was invited to reply to respond to Fried's words and he cynically spoke of "people who have historical experience, who have seen how past experiences turned out", the subtext of which was: "You Americans have no sense of history." Védrine spoke of meeting with Madeleine Albright when she was the US Foreign Secretary. "I told her we had no problem regarding the objective of democracy, but I asked whether it was a process, or a religious conversion, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus." And he quoted the Mexican writer, Octavio Pas: "Democracy is not like Nescafé, you don't just add water." For historical reasons, Védrine told Fried, "Because of colonialism, the Middle East is the region of the world where external intervention is most at risk of being rejected."
And when it is imposed, as America says it would like to do in Damascus, what will happen? A nice, flourishing electoral process to put Syrians in power or another descent into Iraqi-style horrors with a Sunni-Muslim regime in place in Damascus?
And so to "Palestine" - the inverted commas are more important than ever today - and its own act of democracy. Of course, the Palestinians elected the wrong people, Hamas, and had to suffer for it. Democratic Israel would not accept the results of Palestine's democratic elections and the Europeans joined with America in placing sanctions against the newly elected government unless it recognised Israel and all agreements signed with Israel since the Camp David accords of the 1970s. Even when Ariel Sharon was staging his withdrawal of 8,500 settlers from Gaza last year, he was shifting 12,000 more settlers into the West Bank, and George W Bush had effectively accepted this illegality by talking of the "realities" of the Jewish settlements still being enlarged there. And that was the end of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 upon which the "peace process" was supposed to be based - Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, in return for the security of all states in the area.
One of the few honourable American statesmen to grasp what this portends is ex-President Jimmy Carter, who wrote after the Palestinian elections in May this year that "innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the US government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life... The additional restraints imposed on the new government are a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will yield to the economic pressure." Oh, for the years of the Carter administration...
And now we have the wall - or the "fence" as too many journalists gutlessly call it. The Palestinians went to the International Court in the Hague to have it declared illegal because much of its course runs through their land. The court said it was illegal. And Israel ignored the court's decision and, once more, the US supported Israel. Here was another lesson for the Palestinians. They went peacefully - without violence or "terrorism" - to our Western institutions to get justice. And we were powerless to help them because Israel rejected this symbol of Western freedoms.
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister whose Lebanese bombardment was such a catastrophe, still says that the wall is only temporary, as if it might be shifted back to the original frontiers of Israel. But if it is only temporary, it can also be moved forward to take in more Jewish settlements on Arab land, colonies which, it must be noted, are illegal under international law. Olmert says he wants to draw "permanent borders" unilaterally - which is against the spirit of Camp David which Hamas is now supposed to abide by.
And how does US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice respond to this? Well, try this for wriggle room. "I wouldn't on the face of it just say absolutely we don't think there's any value in what the Israelis are talking about." And if the US does recognise - which it will - unilaterally fixed borders of the kind proposed by Olmert, it will sanction the permanent annexation of up to 10 per cent of the Arab territory seized in 1967, contrary to all previous US policy and to the International Court. All this, of course, is part of the new flouting of international laws which the US - and increasingly Israel - now regards as its right since the world "changed forever" on 11 September, 2001.
Remarkably, however, the US still believes that it is increasingly loathed in the Arab world not because of its policies but because its policies are not being presented fairly. It's not a political problem, it's a public-relations problem. Curiously, that is what Israel thought when accused of killing too many Lebanese during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. What we do is right. We're just not selling it right. Hence, the appointment of Karen Hughes as US "Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy". Her line is straight to the point. "I try to portray the facts in the best light for our country," she said after her appointment. "Because I believe we're a wonderful country and that we are doing things across the world."
The columnist Roger Cohen placed her problem in a nutshell. The problem are the facts. And they include the fact that, in the 65-year period between 1941 and 2006, the US has been at war in some form or another for all but 14 of them. And people around the world have got tired of this. They got tired of America's insatiable need for an enemy - and suspicious of all the talk of democracy, freedom and morality in which every war was cast. They stopped buying the US narrative. Hughes says that the vision followed by bin Laden's followers "is a mission of destruction and death; ours a message of life and opportunity." Well, yes. "If only it were that simple," Cohen wrote.
At that Paris meeting with Fried, Védrine won almost all the arguments, not that Fried realised it. Védrine pleaded with the Americans to exercise caution in the Middle East. "We don't know how things are going to turn out in Afghanistan, Iraq or Egypt," he said presciently. "This is a high-risk process, like transporting nitroglycerine. You talk about an alliance; if there is an alliance, it must not be an ideological alliance, but an alliance of surgeons, of professionals, of chemists specialised in explosive substances. If we set out to do this, it will take 20 or 30 years, far longer than the second Bush administration."
But the US Marines and the 82 Airborne are not surgeons or chemists. They are losing control of lands they thought they had conquered or "liberated". Iraq is already out of control. So is much of Afghanistan. Palestine looks set to go the same way and Lebanon is in danger of freefall. A series of letters in The New York Times in April this year suggested that ordinary US citizens grasp the "democratic" argument better than their leaders. "Democracy cannot be easily imposed on people who are not prepared to accept it," one wrote. "Democracy cannot be exported," wrote another. "Changing a political culture happens only if the people embrace it. Iraqi society is too traumatised by the history of Saddam Hussein and the war to do more than survive both at this point." Spot on.
It may well be that journalists in the "West" should feel a burden of guilt for much that has happened because they have, with their gullibility, helped to sell US actions much more effectively than Karen Hughes. Their constant references to a "fence" instead of a wall, to "settlements" or "neighbourhoods" instead of colonies, their description of the West Bank as "disputed" rather than occupied, has a bred a kind of slackness in reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just as it did in Iraq when so many reporters from the great Western newspapers and TV stations used US ambassador Bremer's laughable description of the ferocious insurgents as "dead-enders" or "remnants" - the same phrase still being used by our colleagues in Kabul in reference to a distinctly resurgent Taliban which is being helped - despite General Musharraf's denials - by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI.
Much worse, however, is the failure to enquire into the real policies of governments. Why, for example, was there no front-page treatment of this year's Herzliya conference, Israel's most important policy-making jamboree? Most of the important figures in the Israeli government - they had yet to be elected - were in attendance. The conference was the place where Ehud Olmert first suggested handing over slices of the West Bank: "The choice between allowing Jews to live in all parts of the land of Israel" - the "land of Israel" in this context included the West Bank - "and living in a state with a Jewish majority mandate giving up part of the land of Israel. We cannot continue to control parts of the territories where most of the Palestinians live."
However, most speakers agreed that the Palestinians would be given a state on whatever is left after the huge settlements had been included behind the wall. Benjamin Netanyahu even suggested the wall should be moved deeper into the West Bank. But the implications were obvious. A Palestinian state will be allowed, but it will not have a capital in east Jerusalem nor any connection between Gaza and the bits of the West Bank that are handed over. So there will be no peace, and the words "Palestinian" and "terrorist" will, again, be inextricably linked by Israel and the US.
There were articles in the Israeli press about Herzliya, including one by Sergio Della Pergola in which he warned of the "menace" to Israel of Palestinian birth rates and advised that "if the demographic tie doesn't come in 2010, it will come in 2020." Earlier conferences have discussed the possible need for the revoking of the citizenship rights of some Israeli Arabs. Already this year, Haaretz has reported an opinion poll in which 68 per cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab - 26 per cent would agree to do so - and 46 per cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to allow an Arab to visit their home. The inclination toward segregation rose as the income level of the respondents dropped - as might be expected - and there was no poll of Palestinian opinion, though the Palestinians might be able to point out that tens of thousands of Israelis already do live on their land in the huge colonies across the West Bank, most of which will remain, illegally, in Israeli hands.
All these details are available in the Arab press - and of course, the Israeli press, but are largely absent from our own. Why? Even when Norman Finkelstein wrote a damning academic report on the way Israel's High Court of Justice "proved" the wall - deemed illegal by the Hague -- was legal, it was virtually ignored in the West. So, for that matter, was the US academics' report on the power of the Israeli lobby, until the usual taunts of "anti-Semitism" forced the American mainstream to write about it, albeit in a shifty, frightened way.
There are so many other examples of our fear of Middle Eastern truth. Our soft handling of Hosni Mubarak's increasingly autocratic regime in Egypt is typical. So is reporting of Algeria now that British governments are prepared to deport refugees home on the grounds that they no longer face arrest and torture. But arrest and torture continue in Algeria. Its recent amnesty poll effectively immunises all members of the security services involved in torture and makes it a crime to oppose the amnesty.
Is this really the best that we journalists can do? Save for the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, there are still no truly investigative correspondents in the US press. But challenging authority should not be that difficult. No one is being asked to end the straightforward reporting of Arab tyrannies. We are still invited to ask - and should ask - why the Muslim world has produced so many dictatorships, most of them supported by "us". But there are too many dark corners into which we will not look. Where, for example, are the CIA's secret torture prisons? I know two reporters who are aware of the locations. But they are silent, no doubt in the interests of "national security".
This reluctance to confront unpleasant truths diminishes the reader or viewer for whom Middle East reporting in the US media is almost incomprehensible to anyone who does not know the region. It also has its trickle-down effects even in theatres, universities and schools in America. The case of the play about Rachel Corrie - the young US activist twice run over by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes - taken off the New York stage was one of the more deplorable of these. I was also surprised in the Bronx to find that Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale - was forced to cancel a college meeting with two Palestinian lecturers when parents objected to the absence of an Israeli on the panel. The fact that Israeli speakers were to be invited later made no difference. The school's principal later announced that the meeting would "not be appropriate given the sensitivity and complexity of the issue". Complex problems are supposed to be explained. But this could not be explained because, well, it was too complex and - the truth - would upset the usual Israeli lobbyists.
So there we go again. Freedom of speech is a precious commodity but just how precious I found out for myself when I addressed the American University of Beirut after receiving an honorary degree there this summer. I made my usual points about the Bush administration and the growing dangers of the Middle East only to find that a US diplomat in Beirut was condemning me in front of Lebanese friends for being allowed to criticise the Bush administration in a college which receives US government money.
And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling the world that things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without "birth pangs" when the midwife is killing the baby.
It's always been my view that the people of this part of the Earth would like some of our democracy. They would like a few packets of human rights off our supermarket shelves. They want freedom. But they want another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this we do not intend to give them. Which is why our Middle East presence is heading into further darkness. Which is why I sit on my balcony and wonder where the next explosion is going to be. For, be sure, it will happen. Bin Laden doesn't matter any more, alive or dead. Because, like nuclear scientists, he has invented the bomb. You can arrest all of the world's nuclear scientists but the bomb has been made. Bin Laden created al-Qa'ida amid the matchwood of the Middle East. It exists. His presence is no longer necessary.
And all around these lands are a legion of young men preparing to strike again, at us, at our symbols, at our history. And yes, maybe I should end all my reports with the words: Watch out!
Robert Fisk's book 'The Great War for Civilisation' is published by Fourth Estate at £9.99. His speaking tour runs until 12 October, visit www.seminars.ie for details.
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Four "Must watch" videos for all Americans stumbling in on this site and not very aware of the causes of Terrorism against Americans & "The West" worldwide.
Robert Fisk, "the Conquest of the Middle East" part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OBZUgJGO0E
Robert Fisk, "the Conquest of the Middle East" part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J37qh_8oUHc&mode=related&search=
Robert Fisk, "the Conquest of the Middle East" part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kR7PledVQg&mode=related&search=
Robert Fisk, "the Conquest of the Middle East" part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJWKJZfVQjE&mode=related&search=
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Israeli war criminal use of US made cluster bombs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPxdXZX2jVs
No surprise why the US has a terror problem because of its relentless support for the rogue state of Israel:
SCANDAL: 9/11 Commissioners Bowed to Pressure to Suppress Main Motive for the 9/11 Attacks:
http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/09/reviews-of-without-precedent-inside.html
US Support for Israel PRIMARY MOTIVATION for tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and and 9/11:
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 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 11:37 pm Post subject: Muslims again ordered to leave the United States, next attac |
| don't know how credible the following is, but it is still concerning if only some of it is:
Taliban, Ramadan , Afghanistan
Muslims again ordered to leave the United States, next attack imminent
By Paul L. Williams
& Jeffrey Epstein, America 's Truth Forum
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Urgent news from Peshawar . The head of the Islamabad-based Al-Quds Media Center has received a message from a senior Taliban leader who calls upon all Muslims living in the United States to leave the country as soon as possible "because God's punishment will fall upon America in the month of Ramadan."
Jamal Ismail, a senior journalist at Al-Quds, received the call Thursday from Mulla Masoom Afghani. "Afghani said he was speaking from somewhere in the Kandahar province," Ismail said. "He read the message in Arabic, which I recorded. In it he advised Muslim residents of America to get out to escape harm because the United States could face big attacks in the month of Ramadan."
This is the second notice for Muslims to leave America . The first was issued to Hamid Mir, the only journalist to interview Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the wake of 9/11. Mir received the warning from Abu Dawood, the newly appointed commander of the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan , who said:
Final preparations have been made for the American Hiroshima, a major attack on the U. S.
Muslims living in the United States should leave the country without further warning.
The attack will be commandeered by Adnan el Shukrijumah ("Jaffer Tayyer" or "Jafer the Pilot"), a naturalized American citizen, who was raised in Brooklyn and educated in southern Florida .
The al Qaeda operatives who will launch this attack are awaiting final orders. They remain in place in cities throughout the country. Many are masquerading as Christians and have adopted Christian names.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban will also launch a major strike (known as the "Badar offensive" against the coalition forces in Afghanistan during the holy month of Ramadan.
Mir interviewed Dawood on September 1 at the tomb of Sultan Mehmud Ghaznawi in Ghazni, about 120 kilometers south of Kabul . Dawood and the al Qaeda leaders who accompanied him were clean-shaven and dressed as Western reporters. The al Qaeda commandeer had contacted Mir by cell-phone to arrange the meeting. The contents of the encounter are as follows:
Q: How did you have my local mobile number?
A: We watched you on Geo TV walking in the mountains near Kabul with British troops. You were embedded with our enemies. We were sure that you are staying in one of the few hotels or guest houses in Kabul . We were looking for you in Serena and Intercontinental hotels, but then some Taliban friends informed us that they had your phone number and you might visit them in Zabul [an Afghani province]. We got your number from Commander [Muhsen] Khayber. [Khayber was responsible for a homicide bombing in Casablanca that killed 32 people]. Don't worry about that. We will not make any harm to you. We just want to warn you that you better don't take any rides in the tanks and humvis of the Western Forces; they are not safe for any journalist in Afghanistan .
Q: Thanks for your concern; can I know your name?
A: Yes my name is Abu Dawood, if you remember, we have already met in Kunar two years ago, but at that time I had a long beard, now I have a small one. You were there in the mountains, close to Asadaabad [a small village in the Kunar province of eastern Afghanistan ] and you met some Al Qaeda fighters. I was among them.
Q: OK. I just want to say that I am a journalist, I have to speak to both sides of a conflict, for getting an objective view and that is why I was traveling with the British troops; now I am sitting with you and that is my real job. I have interviewed Osama bin Laden as well as Condoleezza Rice, General Pervez Musharraf and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan . I hope you will appreciate my objective approach?
A: You have claimed to be objective, but you and your TV channel have always given much time to the propaganda of our enemies. Anyhow, it was our moral responsibility to warn you that you better try to avoid traveling with the British, American, Canadian, French, Spanish and Italian troops in Afghanistan, we will target all of them, we don't want that people like you suffer by our attacks, it is not good for you, and at least you should not be killed with the enemies of Islam. I am sure, brother Khayber have informed you that the Taliban will launch a big operation against the Crusader Forces, in the holy month of Ramadan; don't come to Afghanistan in Ramadan. You will see a lot of fadaee amalyat ["suicide bombings"] in coming days, Kabul will become a graveyard of NATO and ISAF.
Q: Yes Khayber told me about the "Badar operation" in Ramadan. I think you are an Afghani but you are not a Talib, are you a member of Al Qaeda?
A: You are right. But we are with the Taliban, just helping them, fighting under their command. Every Al Qaeda fighter can become a Talib, but every Talib cannot become Al Qaeda.
Q: So where is Sheikh Osama bin Laden?
A: I don't know exactly, but he is still in command of Al Qaeda, and he is in contact with his Mujaheddin all over the world.
Q: Why there was no new video statement from him, in last two years?
A: Because the CIA can feed his fresh picture to the computers fitted on their Predator planes, and these planes can get him, like Nek Muhammad or Akbar Bugti. But he has released many audio messages this year. Listen to him carefully. Don't underestimate his warnings. America is playing with the security of Muslims all over the world, now it is our turn again. Our brothers are ready to attack inside America . We will breach their security again. There is no timeframe for our attack inside America ; we can do it any time.
Q: What do you mean by another attack in America ?
A: Yes a bigger attack than September 11th 2001. Brother Adnan [el Shukrijumah] will lead that attack, Inshallah.
Q:Who is Adnan?
A: He is our old friend. The last time, I met him in early 2004, in Khost. He came to Khost from the North Waziristan . He met his leaders and friends in Khost. He is very well known in Al Qaeda. He is an American and a friend of Muhammad Atta, who led 9/11 attacks five years ago. We call him "Jaffer al Tayyar" ["Jafer the Pilot"]; he is very brave and intelligent. Bush is aware that brother Adnan has smuggled deadly materials inside America from the Mexican border. Bush is silent about him, because he doesn't want to panic his people. Sheikh Osama bin Laden has completed his cycle of warnings. You know, he is man of his words, he is not a politician; he always does what he says. If he said it many times that Americans will see new attacks, they will definitely see new attacks. He is a real Mujahid. Americans will not win this war, which they have started against Muslims. Americans are the biggest supporters of the biggest terrorist in the world, which is Israel . You have witnessed the brutality of the Israelis in the recent 34-day war against Lebanese civilians. 9/11 was a revenge of Palestinian children, killed by the US-made weapons, supplied to Israel . The next attack on America would be a revenge of Lebanese children killed by US-made cluster bombs. Bush and Blair are the Crusaders, and Muslim leaders, like Musharraf and [Afghani President Hamid] Karzai are their collaborators, we will teach a lesson to all of them. We are also not happy with some religious parties in Pakistan and Egypt , they got votes in the name of Mujaheddin, and then, they collaborated with Musharraf and [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak. Now look at all of them, Musharraf and Karzai don't trust each other, the CIA and ISI don't trust each other, all the hypocrites and enemies of Mujaheddin are suspecting each other; this help to us is coming from Heavens. Allah is with us.
Q: But if you attack inside America again, then Muslims living in America will face lot of problems, why would you like to create new problems for your brothers and sisters?
A: Muslims should leave America . We cannot stop our attack just because of the American Muslims; they must realize that American forces are killing innocent Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq ; we have the right to respond back, in the same manner, in the enemy's homeland. The American Muslims are like a human shield for our enemy; they must leave New York and Washington .
Q: But your fighters are also using the American Muslims as their shield, if there are no Muslims in America , then there would be no Al Qaeda, may be the Americans would feel safer?
A: No, not at all. We have a different plan for the next attack. You will see. Americans will hardly find out any Muslim names, after the next attack. Most of our brothers are living in Western countries, with Jewish and Christian names, with passports of Western countries. This time, someone with the name of Muhammad Atta will not attack inside America , it would be some David, Richard or Peter.
Q: So you will not attack America , until Muslims are there?
A: I am not saying that, I am saying that Muslims must leave America , but we can attack America anytime. Our cycle of warnings has been completed, now we have fresh edicts from some prominent Muslim scholars to destroy our enemy, this is our defending of Jihad; the enemy has entered in our homes and we have the right to enter in their homes, they are killing us, we will kill them.
Ramadan represents the ninth month of the Islamic year, the month in which the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. According to Muslim tradition, the actual revelation occurred on the night between the 26th and 27th days of the month. On this "Night of Determination," Allah determines the fate of the world for the coming year.
Long time investigative journalist, Paul L. Williams is the author of such best-selling books as The Dunces of Doomsday, The Al Qaeda Connection , Osama's Revenge: The Next 9/11. He has been the subject of a PBS documentary and the subject of programs on the Discovery and History channels. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.
Jeffrey M. Epstein is the founder and President of America's Truth Forum, which hosted the first-ever and critically acclaimed symposium on the threat of radical Islamist terrorism. Mr. Epstein has been featured on Fox & Friends and has appeared on numerous local and national television and radio talk shows.
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