Sheikh Nasrallah: To Arabs, He is the New Nasser. To the West, He is the new Bin Laden

Sheikh Nasrallah: To Arabs, He is the New Nasser. To the West, He is the new Bin Laden

  by

Giles Whittel

Sheik Hassan NasrallahQuote:

"... it has made him the new face of jihadism, with an appeal transcending border and sectarian divides.

With stunning swiftness, Sheikh Nasrallah has eclipsed even Osama bin Laden as the West’s most potent enemy in the War on Terror. "
-Giles Whittel

Read here full article

Three times in the past three weeks Israeli jets have flattened buildings where they hoped that Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the unchallenged leader of Hezbollah, was hiding.

Three times they missed him, and three times he appeared on his own TV channel soon afterwards to mock them.

Where is Sheikh Nasrallah now?

On Thursday a Kuwaiti newspaper put him in Damascus. Last night Iran denied that he was hiding in its Embassy in Beirut — but offered refuge should he want it.

This is the man now hailed by Arabs from Syria to Egypt as the new Nasser.

He is also the terrorist whom Israel must kill to claim victory in southern Lebanon. And, for all the rumours, he is believed to have stayed in Beirut throughout this war, racing between hiding places in unmarked family saloon cars as the Israeli air force tries to catch up.

The survival of Sheikh Nasrallah is already remarkable.

Even more so is the West’s sudden obsession with his leadership — not just of Hezbollah but also, for all practical purposes, of Lebanon and of an upsurge of pan-Arab solidarity potentially more powerful than any since the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

His support on the Arab street will not of itself rebuild Lebanon or destroy Israel, which remains a key Hezbollah goal.

But it has made him the new face of jihadism, with an appeal transcending border and sectarian divides. This is why, with stunning swiftness, Sheikh Nasrallah has eclipsed even Osama bin Laden as the West’s most potent enemy in the War on Terror.

“Nasser 1956 — Nasrallah 2006” declare the posters on the streets of Cairo. No al- Qaeda figurehead was ever so honoured. “Oh beloved Nasrallah, strike Tel Aviv,” chant protesters in Bahrain, home of the US 5th Fleet.

And his latest televised threat is to do just that, with long-range missiles he has not needed to deploy so far.

To Israel, the story of Sheikh Nasrallah is one of toxic extremism and remorseless killing.

To his followers, it is of patient planning and heroic defiance. Until this month his greatest triumph, in their eyes, was Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon six years ago.

But by taking on the full might of the Israeli Defence Forces in a war of his own timing — and then holding it at bay — he surpassed himself.

On Wednesday troops from the IDF’s elite Golani brigade entered the village of Bint Jbeil in southeastern Lebanon after Israeli artillery had pounded it for days. They had expected resistance, but not the furious Hezbollah ambush that pinned them down for six hours and left 13 Israeli soldiers dead.

Sheikh Nasrallah had staged a victory rally in this remote stronghold in 2000. Now he crowed on his own al-Manar satellite news channel: “We will fight in Bint Jbeil . . . and we will fight in every village, town, position and post.”

What has set him apart from other Arab leaders is his ability to make good promises.

That, in turn, is the result of systematic stockpiling of weapons from Syria and Iran and his transformation of the military wing of Hezbollah into the world’s most lethal guerrilla army.

Under Sheikh Nasrallah field commanders are promoted strictly on merit and their fighters are trained as specialists, among them snipers who proved their worth this week. Israel’s losses at Bint Jbeil were the IDF’s worst in a single day for 20 years.

Such resistance has electrified not just the Arab world but also Lebanese voters of all stripes.

A new poll shows that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians, 80 per cent of Druze and 89 per cent of Sunnis support Hezbollah, even though it remains Shia to its core.

Small wonder that Ayman al-Zawahri, the al-Qaeda second-in-command, felt the need this week to cross the sectarian divide and jump on the Hezbollah bandwagon in a tape broadcast on al-Jazeera; or that a Lebanese minister said of Sheikh Nasrallah: “We wonder who can rein him in now.”

As in combat, so in the propaganda war. Even Sheikh Nasrallah’s mortal enemies concede that he has a charisma and instinct for public relations that most Arab leaders lack.

He also grasps the importance of television, and personally supervised his al-Manar channel’s defences against Israeli attack.

That attack came within hours of Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers on July 12. F16 jets destroyed the channel’s five-storey headquarters, then returned to strafe the rubble in case anyone had been working in the basement. Two minutes later al-Manar was back on the air. It has not stopped broadcasting since.

Aides to Sheikh Nasrallah say that he considered this war inevitable.

It is no exaggeration to say that he spent 14 years preparing. The process started in 1992 when Israeli helicopter gunships destroyed a motorcade carrying Abbas Mussawi, then the Hezbollah leader and a close mentor to Sheikh Nasrallah. Aged 32, Sheikh Nasrallah took over.

He launched root-and-branch reforms that were to propel Hezbollah from the status of Iranian-backed extremist splinter group to state within a state.
That summer Hezbollah politicians took part in Lebanese parliamentary elections for the first time. A welfare programme was launched to cement Hezbollah’s hold on the impoverished villages of the south.

The expansion of its military wing began. And Sheikh Nasrallah ordered the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29.

Profile

Born in 1960, the eldest of nine children, he has said that he was “a dull, studious child”. If so, it was the dullness of cold steel. Singled out for his diligence, he was sent as a teenager from Tyre to a Shia college in Iraq.

He was expelled from there, only to be immersed deeper in Shia fundamentalism in Iran, where the 1979 revolution inspired him to join Hezbollah at its founding three years later. Its explicit aim: to drive Israel back to its pre-1967 borders.

As leader he has brooked no dissent. Two years after striking Argentina’s Israeli Embassy he cemented his reputation for ruthlessness by hitting Buenos Aires again. This time a massive car bomb killed 85 people and injured 250 in the Jewish district.

He could inspire fear — but also sympathy. In 1997 his eldest son, Hari, was killed aged 18 fighting Israeli troops in the south. Sheikh Nasrallah was due to address a group of students in Beirut. “Now I can look other parents who have lost children in the eye,” he began, then delivered his prepared speech.

Labelled a terrorist in both Washington and Whitehall, he has nonetheless shown unerring political instincts.

Anticipating Hezbollah’s vulnerability as a mere proxy for Syria and Iran, he has steadily broadened its power base within Lebanon, setting up the Lebanese Resistance Battalions with both Christians and Druze and seeking funds from the Lebanese diaspora as well as Tehran and Damascus.

He claims to receive more funds from émigrés than from either state sponsor.

In 2000 Sheikh Nasrallah was photographed with the world’s top diplomat, Kofi Annan.

The following year he condemned the Taleban after the 9/11 attacks.

He criticised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for beheading foreigners in Iraq and appeared to side with the “Cedar Revolution” against Syria in Beirut that followed the murder of Rafik Hariri, the Prime Minister.

Yet, in practice, Sheikh Nasrallah had sacrificed none of his support: Bashar Assad, the Syrian President, is said to revere him as a godfather.

Three weeks ago President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia felt free to side with Washington in denouncing Sheikh Nasrallah’s provocation of Israel.

They are now distancing themselves from the US, while their citizens flock to Sheikh Nasrallah’s banner.

A Cairo street-sweeper told the Eyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm: “Uncle Ahmed [Sheikh Nasrallah] has awakened the dead man inside me! May God make him triumphant!”

Israel cannot live with him on its northern border but, even if it manages to kill him, his supporters will claim that his stand has already echoed the meaning of his name: Victory of God.

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WHO is Arming ISRAEL to Bomb Lebanon and Gaza?

WHO is Arming ISRAEL to Bomb Lebanon and Gaza?

 

Other Breaking News US Planes Sending Weapons and Bombs to Israel Via UK Prestwick Airport Two US planes carrying "bunker-buster" bombs landed and refuelled at Prestwick in UK en route to Israel last weekend without giving proper notice to the British government. The bombs, which are capable of penetrating concrete, were for use by the Israeli air force to kill Hezbollah leaders sheltering in hardened bunkers. The two widely expected US army flights carrying weapons to Tel Aviv airport would be touching down at Prestwick today and tomorrow. This week's discovery that the bombs had passed through the country without proper notification provoked accusations by Mrs Beckett that Washington had broken agreements on the transporting of weapons. In a highly unusual rebuke she said: "I have already let the US know that this is an issue that appears to be seriously at fault." However, opposition leaders accused the government of gesture politics by complaining about the incident yet refusing to block more such flights. Prestwick is a regular stop-off for US military planes. The CIA is said to have used it for the "rendition" of terror suspects over a number of years. Read here for more

by

Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung
(William D. Hartung is author of "Tangled Web 2005: A Profile of the Missile Defense and Space Weapons Lobbies" and a senior research fellow at the New School, where Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate. Both are Foreign Policy In Focus scholars.)

Read here full article in Foreign Policy in Focus

Much has been made in the U.S. media of the Syrian- and Iranian-origin weaponry used by Hezbollah in the escalating violence in Israel and Lebanon.

There has been NO parallel discussion of the origin of Israel's weaponry, the vast bulk of which is from the United States.

The United States is the primary source of Israel's far superior arsenal.

For more than 30 years, Israel had been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance and since 1985 Jerusalem has received about $3 billion in military and economic aid each year from Washington. U.S. aid accounts for more than 20% of Israel's total defense budget.

Over the past decade, the United States has transferred more than $17 billion in military aid to this country of just under 7 million people.

Israel is one of the United States' largest arms importers.

Between 1996 and 2005 (the last year for which full data is available), Israel took delivery of $10.19 billion in U.S. weaponry and military equipment, including more than $8.58 billion through the Foreign Military Sales program, and another $1.61 billion in Direct Commercial Sales

During the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, Israel received $10.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing—the Pentagon's biggest military aid program—and $6.3 billion in U.S. arms deliveries.

The aid figure is larger than the arms transfer figure because it includes financing for major arms agreements for which the equipment has yet to be fully delivered. The most prominent of these deals is a $4.5 billion sale of 102 Lockheed Martin F-16s to Israel.

Given the billions of dollars of aid it provides to Israel every year and the central role of U.S.-supplied weaponry in the Israeli arsenal, the United States has considerable leverage that it could use to promote a cease fire in the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah before more Israeli and Lebanese civilians are killed and displaced.

President Bush needs to go beyond vague calls for “restraint” to demands for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, bringing in other key actors in the region, including Iran and Syria.

Click here for the full World Policy Institute report.

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Al-Qaeda's al-Zawahiri Warns:"We Will Attack Everywhere".

Al-Qaeda's al-Zawahiri Warns:"We Will Attack Everywhere".

  Quote:

"The entire world is an open battlefield for us and since they are attacking us everywhere, we will attack everywhere."
- Ayman al-Zawahiri

Read here article from Aljazeera

In a taped message broadcast on Aljazeera, Ayman al-Zawahiri said al-Qaeda would not stand by while "these [Israeli] shells burn our brothers" in Lebanon and Gaza.

He called on Muslims to join forces and fight what he called the "Zionist-crusader war" against Muslim nations.

"Oh Muslims everywhere, I call on you to fight and become martyrs in the war against the Zionists and the crusaders," the Egyptian born former doctor said.

"The war with Israel does not depend on ceasefires... It is a jihad for God's sake and will last until religion prevails ... from Spain to Iraq," al-Zawahiri said.

"The entire world is an open battlefield for us and since they are attacking us everywhere, we will attack everywhere."

The deputy to Osama bin Laden wore a grey robe and white turban during the statement. A picture of the World Trade Centre on fire was on the wall behind him along with pictures of two fighters.

"The shells and rockets ripping apart Muslim bodies in Gaza and Lebanon are not only Israeli, but are supplied by all the countries of the crusader coalition. Therefore, every participant in the crime will pay the price," al-Zawahiri said.

He also suggested that the world cared more about Israelis than Palestinians.

"The 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel's prisons do not move anything while three Israeli prisoners have shaken the world," he said.

The statement was the first from al-Qaeda to comment on Israel's offensive in Lebanon which began after the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid by Hezbollah.

Israel also attacked Gaza after Palestinian fighters killed two Israeli soldiers and captured another on June 25.

Al-Zawahiri has evaded capture since US-led forces brought down the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 following the September 2001 attacks on the US.

The message was the tenth released by Zawahiri this year.

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World Leaders, Except US, CONDEMN Israel for Killing UN Observers

World Leaders, Except US, CONDEMN Israel for Killing UN Observers

  Read here full article

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel only expressed "regret".

Governments worldwide reacted with shock and issued angry demands for an explanation on Wednesday after an Israeli air strike killed four United Nations observers in southern Lebanon.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was in Rome for an international crisis conference seeking an end to bloodshed in Lebanon, suggested that the attack had been deliberate.

“I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently ‘deliberate’ targeting by Israeli ‘defence’ forces of a UN observer post in southern Lebanon,” Mr Annan said.

He described the strike as a ‘coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked UN post.’

Ministers attending the Rome talks observed a minute’s silence for the four UN observers.

Foreign ministers of China, Japan, South Korea and the 10-nation ASEAN said on Wednesday that the strike appeared to be deliberate.

Lebanese police said the four UN observers were killed late on Tuesday in the Israeli bombing of their two-storey post in the south Lebanon border town of Khiam.

Former comrades of the observers scrabbled through the rubble with bare hands and improvised shovels to remove three of the corpses because they could not get a bulldozer in, a Lebanese security source said. Israel ceased its bombardment during the recovery operation.

The dead were from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, a Lebanese security source said. The UN has not confirmed the nationalities but China said it had lost one observer.

Austria and Finland both said that they had troops at the base but were unable to confirm if they were among the dead. Canada was yet to comment.

The attack took place ‘despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that UN positions would be spared Israeli fire,” Mr Annan said.

Mr Olmert telephoned Mr Annan and expressed ‘deep regrets’ over the killings, assuring him that he would order a comprehensive inquiry.

But the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, told the BBC that Mr Annan’s criticism was ‘premature.’

Beijing strongly condemned the attack and summoned Israel’s ambassador to demand an apology.

“China is deeply shocked and strongly condemns this,” foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said. “China demands that all sides in the confrontation, especially Israel, take measures to ensure safety of UN peacekeepers.”

Finnish President Tarja Halonen demanded an investigation by Israel, saying: “Nothing can justify Israel’s attack on a UN observer base.”

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik told her Israeli counterpart Tsipi Livni by telephone of her ‘indignation’ at the incident, saying a strike on a UN post was ‘totally unacceptable.’

Israel’s ambassador to Vienna Dan Azhbel was summoned by Ms Plassnik for an ‘immediate clarification’ on what had happened.

In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office said the incident was ‘deeply regrettable.’

“We send our condolences to the families of those killed and the UN as a whole,” a spokesman said.

The Finnish presidency of the European Union voiced ‘shock’ about the deaths and demanded an immediate inquiry.

In Brussels, the European Commission lamented the attack but was more measured in comments.

“I express our regret at this incident, this very tragic incident. But we cannot speculate until we know all the facts,” a commission spokesman said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office expressed ‘deep regret’ but applauded Israel’s swift reaction in ordering an enquiry.

“We expect Israel to respect and observe the special legal status and inviolability of the UN missions,” a Berlin spokesman said.

French President Jacques Chirac issued a condemnation.

“In hitting (UNIFIL), where French soldiers are also serving, it is the international community’s peacekeeping force which is hit. We can only condemn this action, which demonstrates more than ever the urgency of stopping the violence,” Mr Chirac told Le Monde newspaper.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Sallukh condemned the attack as barbaric and ‘premeditated’ aggression.

“This aggression shows once again that Israel makes no distinction between a woman, a child, a hospital or a UN post whose mission is to assure security and peace, violated by the Jewish state,” he said in a statement.

The minister said Israel ‘does not believe in the principles of the United Nations which works for peace and the solving of conflicts without resorting to violence.’—-AFP

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Sec. General Kofi Annan Says Israel DELIBERATELY ATTACK UN Observation Post in Lebanon

Sec. General Kofi Annan Says Israel DELIBERATELY ATTACK UN Observation Post in Lebanon

  Read here full report from AP

The UN secretary general Kofi Annan says an Israeli attack on a UN observation post was "apparently deliberate".

Four unarmed UN military observers were killed in the Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon.

Mr Annan later called for participants at a Mideast conference to push for an immediate ceasefire to end fighting between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas.

Since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants began two weeks ago, there had been several dozen incidents of firing close to UN peacekeepers and observers, including direct hits on nine positions, some of them repeatedly, a UN official said.

As a result of these Israeli attacks, 12 UN personnel have been killed or injured, the official said.

Last night's Israeli bomb made a direct hit on the building and shelter of the observer post in the town of Khiam, near the eastern end of the border with Israel, said Milos Struger, spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon known as Unifil.

Four unarmed military observers were in a bunker and the bunker collapsed as a result of the bombing, the UN official said.

Rescue workers were trying to clear the rubble, but Israeli firing " continued even during the rescue operation", Struger said.

Annan said two UN military observers were killed with two more feared dead. Later, the UN official confirmed that a third body was recovered from the rubble.

The victims included observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, UN and Lebanese military officials said.

Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing said he was saddened by the news and that it showed "we should try harder to call on the parties to be restrained and to be calm and restore the peace process of the Middle East immediately".

China's official Xinhua News Agency identified the Chinese victim as Du Zhaoyu.

It was not immediately known which of the others were confirmed dead.

Annan said the "co-ordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked UN post at Khiam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by prime minister Ehud Olmert that UN positions would be spared Israeli fire."

Furthermore, he said, General Alain Pelligrini, the UN force commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout yesterday "stressing the need to protect that particular UN position from attack".

As reports of the attack emerged, Annan rushed out of a hotel in Rome following a dinner with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Lebanese prime minister Fuad Saniora.

"I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN observer post in southern Lebanon," Annan said in a statement later.

"I call on the government of Israel to conduct a full investigation into this very disturbing incident and demand that any further attack on UN positions and personnel must stop."

The UN Security Council is expected to receive a briefing on the bombing today.

Since Israel launched a massive military offensive against Lebanon and Hezbollah guerillas on July 12, a Nigerian civilian employee working with Unifil and his wife had been killed in the crossfire in the southern port city of Tyre.

Five Unifil soldiers and one military observer had also been wounded, Struger said. They included four Ghanaians injured by artillery fire on Monday and a peacekeeper shot through the back on July 23.

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Its Time for Americans to Stand AGAINST Israel

Its Time for Americans to Stand AGAINST Israel

  by
Matt Hutaff

Quote:

"..I grow tired of Israel, whose various deceptions and exploits have graced my writings for years.

Has it made a difference? Doubtful.

If you aren't already disgusted by Israel's actions, NOTHING I say or do here today will make much difference.

Our elected representatives continue to do everything in their power to protect a nation that undermines us every step of the way.

David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, once said, "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"

As you watch the tragedy continue to unfold, ask yourself the same question. Why should we accept Israel's theft of Palestinian and Lebanese land?

And why should we rationalize any American deaths that come as a result?

It's time to stand AGAINST Israel.

If you look on the events of today as a human being, you cannot see otherwise."
-Matt Hutaff

Read here full article in The Simon

Last month the Toronto Sun published an editorial entitled "It's time to stand with Israel."

Repeated indemnification of Palestine and its supporters aside, it's mainly notable for the title, which insinuates the world is somehow "against" Israel.

It's a funny thing when one considers the current political climate surrounding the rogue nation.

After all, Israel has launched two wars in less than 30 days, one against the Palestinians, the other against Lebanon.

Throughout their aggression, which has seen destruction in the tens of millions of dollars (to say nothing of the incalculable human cost that continues to rise), the Western world has done everything it can to LEGITIMIZE said violence.

American politicians loudly proclaim that we stand united behind Israel while magazines such as Time paint the Middle East as a curiosity.

"Why do they fight?" they ask while ignoring the patently obvious answers:

...They're (Israelis) on someone else's land. And they want more of it.

I grow tired of Israel, whose various deceptions and exploits have graced my writings for years.

Has it made a difference?

Doubtful; our elected representatives continue to do everything in their power to protect a nation that undermines us every step of the way.

When Israeli spies steal coveted secrets there is no execution, only jail time or a quiet deportation.

When Israeli agents attempt to goad us into war with Egypt (see the Lavon Affair or the attack on the USS Liberty) the murdered go unavenged and the investigation is buried.

When Israel steals land from others we look the other way.

When they make plans to murder Hamas leadership then shell a Palestinian beach to create a conflict for invasion, we shrug.

And when Israeli soldiers are captured in Lebanon, their act of retaliation is to level infrastructure that is still recovering from 20 years of Israeli occupation.

And we look on and sigh, as if we are not the genesis of all this violence.

We might even reassure ourselves that Israel has the right to defend itself by sending the nation another couple billion dollars.

Before you assuage that guilt, however, consider the following:

The invasion of Gaza to neuter Hamas was planned long before Gilat Shalit "disappeared." According to Ha'aretz, "the detention of Hamas parliamentarians ... had been planned several weeks ago and received approval from [Attorney General Menachem] Mazuz."

Bear in mind also that Hamas was established by Israel as an opposition party to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, so this is simply a means of robbing indigenous Palestinians of a democratically-elected voice.

Israel planned its invasion of Lebanon BEFORE Hezbollah captured its two troops. Asia Times reports that the troops "were ambushed on Lebanon's side of the border with Israel. Hezbollah, which commands the Lebanese south, immediately seized on their crossing." Israel used their own invasion as justification for... an invasion.

The disproportionate level of the attacks is staggering.

Savaging all of southern Lebanon over two soldiers is akin to Mexico destroying the Golden Gate Bridge because two border-crossers died at the hands of a Southern California gang.

Did the IDF really think that leveling airports, bridges and roads would hamper the continued movement of their captured troops?

Israel opposes international peacekeeping forces yet encourages that children write messages of hate on the missiles that will kill their Lebanese counterparts.

In the end this will all have been a manufactured conflict to draw Iran, Syria and ultimately the United States into a war with each other.

Even though the vast majority of Americans oppose another battlefield in the Middle East, the Bush administration's unwavering support of Israel means it will fight its ally's fight should Iran or Syria naturally choose to defend themselves.

It gives Bush his war with Iran and it gives Israel its chance to destabilize the region further without worrying about the body count.

After all, it won't be Israeli kids dying.

I could keep going with Israeli acts of treachery and violence but I've reached a saturation point.

If you aren't already disgusted by Israel's actions, nothing I say or do here today will make much difference.

If you've reached a saturation point, too, however, make a stand.

Voice your disapproval at the voting booth this year and force any proponents of Israel from Congress.

Demand the AIPAC trial continue (it's been halted several times).

Educate yourself and your peers on how ensconced we are with this tiny Mediterranean country.

David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, once said,

"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"

As you watch the tragedy continue to unfold, ask yourself the same question.

Why should we accept Israel's theft of Palestinian and Lebanese land?

And why should we rationalize any American deaths that come as a result?

Perhaps the author of "It's time to stand with Israel" has changed opinions in the wake of eight Canadian deaths in Lebanon.

Maybe the Toronto Sun will push for retribution, for justice. Maybe Canada will adopt the Israeli plan of attack and destroy Tel Aviv's business district. After all, a handful of Canadian citizens apparently merit that level of retaliation.

Regardless, it's time to stand against Israel.

If you look on the events of today as a human being, you cannot see otherwise.

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The Degraded BBC: Blatant Bias Reporting of Israel's Regional War

The Degraded BBC: Blatant Bias Reporting of Israel's Regional War

 

Other Related News What Triggered the Regional War? It all started on July 12, when Israel troops were ambushed ON LEBANON'S SIDE of the border with Israel. Hezbollah, which commands the Lebanese south, immediately seized on their crossing. They arrested two Israeli soldiers. Israeli soldiers CROSSED OVER to the Lebanon side of the border. The Israeli soldiers were NOT kidnapped from the Israeli side of the border as was the perception given in the pro-Israel western media for the massive destruction of Lebanon by Israeli forces. Read here for more

by

Jonathan Cook
(Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book Blood and Religion is published by Pluto Press)

Quote:

"..The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it.

The journalists' working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives.

As I regularly flicked to the BBC's coverage all afternoon, I found almost no mention of those dead in Lebanon.

They had become "non-beings," irrelevant in the calculations not only of our world leaders but of our major broadcasters.

That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed.

The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.

As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army – is likely to become inevitable.

There is NO excuse for this asymmetry of coverage.

This is not journalism; it's reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.

So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you."
- Jonathan Cook

Read here Jonathan Cook's article "Israelis are dying, it must be an escalation"

Here we go again – another "serious escalation" has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences throughout Sunday.

So what prompted the BBC's judgment that the crisis was ESCALATING once more?

You can be sure:

it had NOTHING to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country's south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or significance in this confrontation.

NOR, is it the Lebanese roads and bridges being pounded into dust,

NOR the petrol stations and oil refineries going up in smoke,

NOR, the phone networks and TV stations being obliterated,

NORthe water and electricity supplies being cut off.

The rapid transformation of a modern vibrant country like Lebanon into the same category of open-air prison as Gaza is not an escalation in the BBC's view.

No, the BBC proffered a first, hesitant "escalation" on Thursday night when Hezbollah had the audacity to fire a handful of rockets at Haifa in response to the growing Lebanese death toll.

The worst damage the Katyushas inflicted was one gouging a chunk of earth out of the hillside overlooking the port.

But the BBC felt confident to declare the escalation had turned "serious" on Sunday when Hezbollah not only fired more rockets at Haifa but one killed a group of eight railway workers in a station depot.

Now that Israeli civilians as well as Lebanese civilians are dying – even if in far smaller numbers – the BBC's battalions of journalists in northern Israel finally have something to report on.

So BBC World's broadcast at 9 a.m GMT (noon Israel/Lebanon time) hardly veered out of Haifa or Jerusalem.

After the presenter's headline declaration that the Hezbollah strike on Haifa was a "serious escalation,":

the news segued into a lengthy and sympathetic interview with an Israeli police spokesman in Haifa by Wyre Davies;

followed by another lazy interview, lasting the better part of five minutes, with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem;

followed by Ben Brown in Beirut interviewing a British holidaymaker about her night of horror in her hotel.


And in those 15 minutes that was about as close as we got to hearing what the Lebanese had been enduring from a night and morning of Israeli aerial strikes on Beirut and the country's south.

If there was any mention of the suffering of Lebanese civilians – and doubtless the BBC will tell me there was – the reference was so fleeting that I missed it.

And if I missed it, then so did most BBC World viewers.

The true nature of the "serious escalation" was soon apparent – or at least it was if one watched Arab TV channels.

They showed an urban wasteland of rubble and dust in the suburbs of Beirut and Tyre that was shockingly reminiscent of New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

They cut intermittently to local hospitals filled with Lebanese children, their faces a rash of bloody pockmarks from the spray of Israeli shrapnel.

More terrible images of children burnt and lying in pools of blood arrived in my e-mail inbox from Lebanese bloggers.

But in the BBC's lexicon, escalation has nothing to do with the enormous destruction Israel can unleash on Lebanon, only the occasional, smaller-scale blow Hezbollah scores against Israel.

Switching from the Arab channels back to the BBC for their 11 a.m. broadcast in the hope of finding the same images of devastation in Tyre and Beirut, I stumbled on yet another timid interview with Israel's ubiquitous spokesman Mark Regev.

It was followed by two headlines: Nine dead in Israel after a "barrage" of attacks on Haifa, and foreign governments prepare to evacuate their nationals out of the region.

At noon, James Reynolds as good as gave the game away: the Hezbollah strike on Haifa, he said, proved that the rockets are "no longer just an irritant."

Now it was clear why a "serious escalation" had begun: Israel was actually being harmed by Hezbollah's rockets rather than just irritated.

Until then the harm had been mainly inflicted on Lebanese civilians, so NO escalation was taking place.

As I regularly flicked to the BBC's coverage all afternoon, I found almost no mention of those dead in Lebanon.

They had become "non-beings," irrelevant in the calculations not only of our world leaders but of our major broadcasters.

It wasn't till the 7 p.m. news that I saw meaningful images from Lebanon, as Gavin Hewitt followed a fire crew trying to put out an enormous oil refinery blaze in Tyre.

Although we saw some of the suffering of the Lebanese population, the anchor felt obliged to preface the scenes from Lebanon with the statement that they were Israeli "retaliation" for the Haifa attack, even though Israel had been launching such strikes for four days before the lethal rocket strike on Haifa.

In the same broadcast, an Israeli cabinet minister, Shaul Mofaz, was given air time to make the claim that parts of the rockets that landed in Haifa were Syrian-made.

Allegations by the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, widely shown on Arab TV that Israel had been using phosphorus incendiary bombs – illegal under international law – received NO coverage at all.

On the 8 p.m. news, one of the headlines was a menacing quote from Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, that "Haifa is just the beginning."

Mike Wooldridge in the Jerusalem studio made great play of the quote, taken from a broadcast Nasrallah had made several hours earlier.

The BBC may have lifted the sentence from the Israeli media because they missed out the important conditional context inserted by Nasrallah – it was only the "beginning" of what Hezbollah could do if Israel continued its attacks.

They could have found this out even from the Israeli media if they had taken the care to look more closely: "As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue the confrontation without limits and without red lines," Nasrallah was quoted as saying by the daily Ha'aretz newspaper.

In other words, Nasrallah was warning that Hezbollah would give back as good as it gets – a standard piece of rhetoric from a military leader in times of confrontation.

The BBC is NO worse than CNN, Sky and, of course, Fox News.

It is possibly far better, which is reason enough why we should be outraged that this is the best international broadcast coverage we are likely to get of the conflict.

The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it.

The journalists' working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives.

A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention.

The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.

That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed.

The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.

There is NO excuse for this asymmetry of coverage.

BBC reporters are in Lebanon just as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can to those in Israel.

But they don't – and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.

My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel's military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of e-mails – some defensive, others angry – from a few of the reporters I named.

All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not "campaigning" journalists after all, they are "professionals" doing a job.

But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do – and the nature of the professionalism they so prize.

I am sure the BBC's Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.

Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa.

That nonevent was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening.

Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border?

These images from Lebanon exist, because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.

Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC's view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must "retaliate" to protect its citizens, how it must "punish" Hezbollah

This is NOT journalism; it's reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.

Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hezbollah has no choice faced with Israel's military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to "pressure" Israel to negotiate?

Would the BBC bother to show prerecorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not.

Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear – or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside – is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.

These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC – and the institutional biases that are the result.

They know that:

the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak;

the charge of anti-Semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC's reputation;

the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators;

to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.

This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives – in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon.

As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army – is likely to become inevitable.

So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say:

"..you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you."

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Israel's Regional War: America Is Being Set Up For Wider War in Middle East

Israel's Regional War: America Is Being Set Up For Wider War in Middle East

  by

Paul Craig Roberts


Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions

The old adage, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" does NOT apply to Americans, who have shown that they can be endlessly fooled.

Neoconservatives deceived Americans into an illegal attack and debilitating war in Iraq. American neoconservatives are closely allied with Israel's Likud Party.

In the past, some neocons lost their security clearances because of "mishandling" of classified information.

According to Insight magazine:

"...the Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel.

Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security clearance from dozens of Americans, mostly Jews, who either lived, worked, or have relatives in Israel."

Despite questions of dual loyalties, neocons hold high positions in the Bush regime.

Ten years ago these architects of American foreign and military policy spelled out how they would use deception to achieve "important Israeli strategic objectives" in the Middle East.

1. First, they would focus "on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." This would open the door for Israel to provoke attacks from Hezbollah.
   
2. The attacks would let Israel gain American sympathy and permit Israel to seize the strategic initiative by "engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."

Today, this neoconservative plan is unfolding before our eyes.

Israel has used the capture of two of its soldiers in Lebanon as an excuse for an all-out air and naval bombardment against Lebanese civilian targets.

However, a number of commentators have pointed out that such a massive attack requires weeks if not months of preparation that could not be done overnight in response to the capture of the soldiers.

Regardless, in the first two days of the Israeli military attack on Lebanon more than a hundred civilians, including Canadians, have been killed by Israeli bombs (gifts from U.S. taxpayers).

The Beirut International Airport has been repeatedly bombed, as have residential neighborhoods, roads, bridges, ports, and power stations.

Soldiers are a legitimate military target. Civilians, civilian neighborhoods, tourists, and international airports are not.

Under the Nuremberg standard used to sentence Nazi war criminals to death, the Israeli government is clearly guilty of war crimes.

Meanwhile, the Israelis are committing identical war crimes in Gaza.

Again Israel's excuse is the capture of an Israeli soldier.

However, the distinguished Israeli professor Ran HaCohen said that the Israeli army "had been demanding a massive attack on Gaza long BEFORE the Israeli soldier was kidnapped."

By blocking UN Security Council action against Israel for its massacre of civilians in Gaza, the Bush regime has made itself complicit in these monstrous war crimes.

Just as Germans who supported Hitler were deemed to be complicit in his war crimes, Americans who support Bush are complicit in Bush's war crimes.

Hezbollah is NOT the Lebanese government.

It does not rule Lebanon.

Hezbollah is the militia organization founded in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah defeated the Israeli army and drove out the Israeli invaders six years ago.

According to the BBC, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that the two Israeli soldiers "were captured to pressure Israel to release the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its jails," especially the women and children.

The BBC also notes that although Hezbollah operates "from Lebanese territory and the militant group has two ministers in the Lebanese government, the central government is almost powerless to influence the militant group." (Note that the BBC applies the loaded word "militant" to Hezbollah but not to Israel.)

Hezbollah, reports the BBC, "is also very popular in Lebanon and highly respected for its political activities, social services, and its military record against Israel."

The prime minister of Lebanon, who was installed with President Bush's approval when Syria, under Bush's pressure, recently withdrew its troops from Lebanon, has twice appealed to Bush to pressure Israel to stop its criminal attacks.

Our great moral, democratic, Christian leader has twice rebuffed the appeal from the legal representative of the Lebanese people.

Instead, Bush is willingly going along with the 1996 neocon script. Bush is laying the blame on Syria and Iran, exactly as the neocon script calls for him to do.

When Bush demands that Syria "stop Hezbollah attacks," he forgets that he was the one who forced Syria out of Lebanon (to enable Israel to attack Lebanon).

If Americans were attentive, they would be ashamed to witness "their" president acting as an Israeli propagandist.

Fox "News," CNN, and the rest of the Bush propaganda ministry are echoing the lie that innocent Israel is under attack from the "terrorist states" of Syria and Iran through their surrogate, Hezbollah.

Americans, who are sick of the Iraq occupation and want the troops home, are being fooled again and set up for wider war in the Middle East.

Evangelical "Christians" are part of the propaganda show.

Three thousand of them, under the lead of the Rev. John C. Hagee, are heading to Washington for a "Washington/Israel summit" to demand, needlessly, that the neocon Bush regime show "stronger support for Israel."

It is difficult to see how Bush could show any stronger support without using the U.S. military to assist Israel in its attacks, which is, of course, what the "Christian" Rev. Hagee intends when he declares:

"There's a new Hitler in the Middle East [he doesn't mean Bush or Olmert].

The only wa y he will be stopped will be by a preemptive military strike in Iran."

Present at Rev. Hagee's "Washington/Israel Summit" will be Israel's former Minister of Defense, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, Republican Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and Gary Bauer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committeen(AIPAC) , the most powerful lobby in Washington, expressed its thanks to Rev. Hagee for demonstrating "the depth and breadth of American support" for Israel.

Recently, AIPAC has been under investigation as a suspected nest for Israeli spies.

David Brog, former chief of staff for Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, has gone to work for Rev. Hagee.

Brog, who is Jewish, says he works for Hagee's evangelical enterprise because "we're bringing into a pro-Israel camp millions of Christians who love Israel and giving them a political voice. Israel's enemies are our enemies, and this group instinctively understands that."

Brog goes on to say that Hagee's evangelicals understand that they are not supposed to talk about Jesus, only about saving Israel:

"Christians who work with Jews in supporting Israel realize how sensitive we are in talking about Jesus. They realize it will interfere with what they are trying to do."

Gentle reader, is this an admission that evangelicals have set aside Jesus for war?

• Do these bloody-minded evangelicals really believe they will be wafted to Heaven for helping Israel involve the U.S. in more war?
  
• Have evangelicals forgotten that "an eye for an eye" is Old Testament? "Turn the other cheek" is New Testament.

On July 14, Reuters reported that ALONE among Christians, the "Vatican condemns Israel for attacks on Lebanon."

Whose delusion is the greatest :

- the evangelical "rapture" delusion,

- the neocon delusion about American power,

- or the Zionist delusion?

The three together mean disaster for America, Israel, and the world.

One of the great evangelical/Zionist/neocon MYTHS is that "tiny Israel" armed with 200 nuclear weapons is threatened by Muslim Middle Eastern countries.

In actual fact, Egypt and Pakistan, which have the bulk of the Middle Eastern Muslim population, are ruled by American puppets.

Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the oil emirates are totally dependent on U.S. protection and, thereby, are also under the American thumb.

Iran is Persian, not Arab, and has NO common borders with Israel.

Hezbollah was created when Israel tried to seize Lebanon in 1982.

Hamas is a Palestinian response to the atrocities Palestinians have suffered for a half century at Israel's hands.

Israel's land-stealing policy is the source of Middle Eastern instability.

America is hated because American money and weapons are what enable Israel to steal Palestine from Palestinians.

As numerous Middle East experts have pointed out, what is decried as "Arab terrorism against Israel" is, in fact, the only tactic Muslims have for calling the world's attention to the plight of the Palestinians, about which Americans are generally ignorant.

It is absurd for Bush to condemn Syria for not behaving as an American puppet and for not fighting Israel's battles by taking on Hezbollah.

Syria and Iran (and Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion) are the only Middle Eastern countries independent of American control. It is far beyond the boundaries of reason and morality to expect these two remaining independent countries to give up their independence in order to enable Israel to steal Palestine and southern Lebanon.

It is the refusal of Syria and Iran (and Saddam Hussein's Iraq) to stand with Israel against Palestine that has made them targets for American attack.

Neocons have total control of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush regime, and they have morphed our strategic interests into Israel's.

As the neoconservative architects of Bush's wars revealed in 1996, their concern lies with Israeli strategic objectives.

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Israel's Regional War: The Cost of Israel's Aggressive Action

Israel's Regional War: The Cost of Israel's Aggressive Action

  by
Henry Siegman
(Henry Siegman is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and former head of the American Jewish Congress)

Read here full article

Israel's aggressive actions may cause it greater problems.

IN LEBANON, as in Gaza, it is not Israel's right to protect its civilian population from terrorist aggression that is at issue. It is the way Israel goes about exercising that right.

Despite bitter lessons from the past, Israel's political and military leaders remain addicted to the notion that, whatever they have a right to do, they have a right to overdo, to the point where they lose what international support they had when they began their retaliatory measures.

Israel's response to the terrorist assault in Gaza and the outrageous and unprovoked Hezbollah assault across its northern border in Lebanon, far from providing protection to its citizens, may well further undermine their security by destabilising the wider region.

On the surface, the situations in Gaza and in Lebanon may seem similar, but there are important differences. No matter how one judges the rights and wrongs of the recent Hamas assaults and Israeli reprisals, in Gaza the fundamental spark is Israel's occupation, which has now lasted nearly 40 years.

Israel's leaders continue to suffer from the delusion they can defeat violent Palestinian resistance to that occupation without offering the Palestinians a credible, non-violent political path to statehood, promised in various international agreements.

Following the precedent set by Ariel Sharon with his unilateral disengagement from Gaza, his successor as Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, believes that if Israel dodges the bullet of a bilateral peace negotiation with the Palestinians — something it has done so far by claiming "there is no Palestinian partner for peace" — it will be able to create, unilaterally, a rump Palestinian state that will leave in Israeli hands large chunks of Palestinian territory and make a mockery of Palestinian national aspirations.

Despite the massive imbalance of forces, the Palestinians will never abide such an outcome. In 1988 and in 1993, as part of the Oslo agreement, they recognised Israel's legitimacy in 78 per cent of what used to be the Palestine mandate, leaving themselves with 22 per cent, less than half the territory assigned to them by the United Nations in 1947.

No Palestinian leader, now or in the future, will agree to further Israeli land grabs to accommodate settlements established in violation of international agreements and international law, whose illegality even the utterly one-sided Bush Administration has had to concede.

On this territorial issue, as on that of Israel's efforts to deny Palestinians the right to site the capital of their prospective state in East Jerusalem, there is no daylight between any of the Palestinian parties. President Mahmoud Abbas would be no less unyielding on these issues in a negotiation with Israel than would Hamas.

On the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, if Hamas wishes to enable the international community, and particularly European countries, to end sanctions that have so brutally punished the Palestinians, it must at least be prepared to say that, even if it is now unwilling to pronounce on Israel's legitimacy — given Israel's continued violation of previous agreements and its ongoing theft of Palestinian land for its settlements — the elimination of the state of Israel is not Hamas' goal.

Its goal is a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas must understand that Palestinian violence to punish Israelis is self-defeating. The new Hamas regime will achieve nothing if it is not prepared to offer Israel a non-violent political path to security within its pre-1967 borders.

Hamas cannot have it both ways: it cannot demand recognition by the international community as the legitimate Government of the Palestinian Authority if it is not willing to enforce law and order. It must be willing to suppress the various militias and end their illegal activities. Otherwise, its proposals for a hudna (truce) with Israel remain meaningless.

Similarly, the Lebanese Government cannot allow the uninhibited operation of Hezbollah's militia and its freedom to violate international borders at will and still maintain its own legitimacy.

That said, Israel will quickly lose what international support it had for opposing Hezbollah's terrorism if it continues its assaults in Lebanon without regard to the consequences, not only for Lebanon and for the wider region, but for its own long-term security as well.

Indeed, the point of Hezbollah's aggression is the expectation that Israel would act in ways that will only deepen its isolation. Nothing is likely to achieve the goal of Israel's enemies more effectively than disproportionate measures that even its friends cannot support.

Hezbollah's naked aggression against Israel has nothing to do with the Palestinian cause. The two are linked only in the following sense: Hezbollah would not have attacked Israel if it could not have invoked Israel's assaults on Gaza's civilian population as its pretext.

As long as Israel's policies allow this conflict to fester, it remains vulnerable to the depredations of radical groups that will exploit the Palestinian tragedy for their own ends.

On this territorial issue, as on that of Israel's efforts to deny Palestinians the right to site the capital of their prospective state in East Jerusalem, there is no daylight between any of the Palestinian parties.

President Mahmoud Abbas would be no less unyielding on these issues in a negotiation with Israel than would Hamas.

On the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, if Hamas wishes to enable the international community, and particularly European countries, to end sanctions that have so brutally punished the Palestinians, it must at least be prepared to say that, even if it is now unwilling to pronounce on Israel's legitimacy — given Israel's continued violation of previous agreements and its ongoing theft of Palestinian land for its settlements — the elimination of the state of Israel is not Hamas' goal.

Its goal is a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas must understand that Palestinian violence to punish Israelis is self-defeating. The new Hamas regime will achieve nothing if it is not prepared to offer Israel a non-violent political path to security within its pre-1967 borders.

Hamas cannot have it both ways: it cannot demand recognition by the international community as the legitimate Government of the Palestinian Authority if it is not willing to enforce law and order. It must be willing to suppress the various militias and end their illegal activities. Otherwise, its proposals for a hudna (truce) with Israel remain meaningless.

Similarly, the Lebanese Government cannot allow the uninhibited operation of Hezbollah's militia and its freedom to violate international borders at will and still maintain its own legitimacy.

That said, Israel will quickly lose what international support it had for opposing Hezbollah's terrorism if it continues its assaults in Lebanon without regard to the consequences, not only for Lebanon and for the wider region, but for its own long-term security as well.

Indeed, the point of Hezbollah's aggression is the expectation that Israel would act in ways that will only deepen its isolation.

Nothing is likely to achieve the goal of Israel's enemies more effectively than disproportionate measures that even its friends cannot support.

Hezbollah's naked aggression against Israel has nothing to do with the Palestinian cause. The two are linked only in the following sense: Hezbollah would not have attacked Israel if it could not have invoked Israel's assaults on Gaza's civilian population as its pretext.

As long as Israel's policies allow this conflict to fester, it remains vulnerable to the depredations of radical groups that will exploit the Palestinian tragedy for their own ends.

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Israel's Regional War: Why Ehud Olmert Showed His Big Fists At His Arab Neighbors

Israel's Regional War: Why Ehud Olmert Showed His Big Fists At His Arab Neighbors

  Read here full article in Times OnLine (UK)

Neighbours are more likely to exchange blows than gossip over the garden fence, according to a new survey.

The phenomenon, known in Britain as “garden rage”, has taken a more extreme form in the Middle East.

Three months ago a new occupant, Ehud Olmert, moved into the official home of Israel’s prime minister promising to be a model resident who would bring peace to a rowdy area. Instead, rockets, shells and air strikes rain down on surrounding back yards.

The rise of Israel’s 61-year-old leader has been meteoric.

An uncharismatic technocrat thrust to prominence after Ariel Sharon’s stroke in January, Olmert went on to win the general election with a plan to withdraw unilaterally from parts of the West Bank and usher in regional security.

His honeymoon ended when a young Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian militants three weeks ago.

Rather than planning for peace, Olmert is waging war on two fronts, in Gaza and Lebanon, in an effort to bring Israel’s enemies to their knees.

The West has looked on in dismay as the stakes ratchet up and hostilities take on a momentum of their own.

In a land of generals-turned-politicians, one explanation is that Olmert is over- compensating for his lack of military experience and trying to prove his credentials.

He may NOT have the medals of former prime ministers such as Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Sharon — the last of Israel’s warrior leaders — but he is not alone.

Amir Peretz, his defence minister, and Tzipi Livni, his foreign minister, have NONE either.

“Clearly, if Olmert and Peretz do not come out looking strong, their tenure is going to be short,” said Gerald Steinberg of Bar-llan University.

A senior Israeli journalist, otherwise critical of Olmert, disagreed: “His actions are not because he has to prove himself. He is just taking decisions he believes are right at this time.”

Others point to a telling pattern of misjudgments during his tenure as mayor of Jerusalem from 1993-2003.

The worst cited example was his secret approval of the opening of a Herodian tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City, leading to riots in which more than 160 Palestinians and 14 Israelis died.

Despite portraying himself as a football fanatic and an avid runner who gave up cigar smoking in his first act as prime minister, Olmert has been unable to shake off his image as a fat-cat lawyer tainted by sleaze.

In 1997 he was indicted in a political finance scandal involving Jerusalem businessmen, organised crime and corrupt legislators, but was later acquitted.

In February this year an inquiry was announced into the 1999 sale and lease-back of his Jerusalem house in allegedly questionable circumstances.
Tom Segev, a historian and columnist, has described him as “arrogant, cold, cunning and unpleasant”.

Another writer takes a more balanced view: “His background is not impressive and he was never popular in the Likud party, but he is making an effort. During interviews he used to explode with rage in the first 30 seconds, but now he’s behaving in a more civilised way. He comes over as very nice, articulate, shrewd and only sometimes aggressive. He’s a very clever guy.”

Olmert’s worst critics are his own family, where he counts himself “in a minority of one”.

His wife Aliza, a left-wing playwright and artist whom he met at college, has been at odds with his right-wing politics for much of their 35-year marriage. His recent move to the centre ground persuaded her to vote for him for the first time this year, albeit with “a certain hesitation”.

Her husband was at his most insufferable as mayor of Jerusalem, she confessed recently, when he played a role in expanding Jewish settlements and confiscating Palestinian land. It was their “worst time as a couple” and she found it difficult “to listen to his nationalistic speeches”.

As an artist she has exhibited all over the world and her recent work featured broken eggshells. A standard joke is that her husband tried to walk on them while mollifying his five children, who lean towards their mother’s dovish views.

As mayor, Olmert withdrew funding from an annual gay pride parade, to the displeasure of his daughter Danna, a lesbian who lives openly with a girlfriend in Tel Aviv and is active in Machsom Watch, a group monitoring Palestinian human rights.

Then there are Olmert’s pacifist sons. Shaul, who lives in New York, signed a petition when he was a sergeant in the Israeli army refusing to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Olmert’s younger son Ariel avoided his military service and lives in Paris.

In the run-up to the general election in March, the mutiny in Olmert’s household was a gift to opponents, who accused the future guardian of Israel’s safety of harbouring a brood of peaceniks. “There is a complex dialogue between my children and me,” he responded.

“There are a lot of disagreements and anger, but they have influenced me and I am proud of it. I would like to believe that I have also influenced them.”

He was born in 1945 near Binyamina in the final years of British rule in Palestine.

His father Mordechai, a pioneer of Israel’s land settlement, grew up in the Chinese city of Harbin, where Olmert’s grandfather had settled after fleeing Russia after the first world war.

"When he died at the age of 88, he spoke his last words in Chinese,” Olmert recalled.

Like his parents, Olmert was an ideological child of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Alliance of Revisionist Zionists and the Irgun militia, intent on establishing the Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan.

The teenage Olmert was a member of Beitar, a militaristic youth movement, and saw his parents discriminated against for their support of Herut, the party that eventually became Likud.

Injured while serving in the Israeli Defence Forces as a combat infantry officer, he completed his military service as a journalist on the force’s magazine BaMahane. This demeaning soft option had an unforeseen benefit: during the Yom Kippur war he joined General Sharon’s headquarters as a military correspondent. The connection was to pay huge dividends.

With a law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Olmert opened a successful law partnership in Jerusalem, providing the springboard for his election in 1973 as the youngest member of the Knesset, aged 28. He was impetuous and wrong, he admitted, in opposing withdrawal from land in Sinai captured in the Six Day war and voting against the Camp David peace accords in 1978.

As a rising — but colourless — politician, he was given several portfolios, including health, communications and finance, eventually becoming deputy prime minister in 2003.

As Sharon’s right-hand man he was a useful sounding board. Deputising for a Sharon stricken with flu, he was the first to float the idea of unilateral disengagement from Palestinian land.

Withdrawal went against his once hawkish views, but he believed it was the only response to the changing demographics of a growing Palestinian population that might eventually outvote Israelis. “The day that they do that is the day we lose everything,” he said.

Olmert just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When Sharon announced last year that he was leaving Likud to form a new party, Kadima, to implement his unilateral plans, Olmert was one of the first to join him.

When Sharon collapsed with a stroke on January 4, Olmert became acting prime minister and then prime minister at the head of a coalition government with Labour on April 14.

Luck continued to run his way. The victory of Hamas, the Islamic militant movement, in the Palestinian elections played into his hands by improving Israel’s standing abroad.

It allowed Olmert to proclaim that since he could not negotiate with terrorists, Israel was obliged to continue with his disengagement strategy.

That is still his avowed intention, although after his assaults on Gaza and Lebanon all bets are off.

“Do not meet troubles halfway,” a Jewish proverb goes.

Olmert has opted to go all the way, setting goals that may prove to be unattainable.

If he succeeds he will be a hero.

Failure would invite swift censure in a country that judges its leaders by results, not by good intentions.

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Israel Crosses the Line

Israel Crosses the Line

 

Other Breaking News Beirut airport ablaze after bombardment by Israeli forces LEBANON is all but isolated by air, sea and land today as Israeli jets pound Hezbollah strongholds in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Middle East is on the verge of all-out war with Israeli air strikes and shelling killing 60 Lebanese civilians while up to 120 Hezbollah rockets hit northern Israel killing two and wounding up to 100 Read here for more

by

Justin Raimondo
(Justin Raimondo is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard .He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Quote:

"...This is an intolerable act of war against the whole civilized community, and for the United States government to not only stand by but implicitly condone it is unforgivable.

The "war on terrorism" apparently requires enabling Israeli state terrorism.

Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, explain how we got into this mess, but they don't give us any answers about how to get out.

How do we avoid getting dragged by our Israeli "allies" into World War IV?

The short answer: Stop appeasing Israel – and start looking out for American interests.

The Mearsheimer-Walt thesis – that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked (kidnapped, if you will) by what they refer to as "the Lobby" – has so far been confirmed by the events of the past few days."
- Justin Raimondo

Read here full article in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) on extent of US Military Aid and Subsidy from American tax-payers for Israel's weapons to destroy neighboring countries: The WRMEA conservatively estimates cumulative TOTAL DIRECT U.S. AID to Israel at US $107.961 billion. US MILITARY AID to ISRAEL: US $6.794 Billion.

Read here full article by Justin Raimondo

The Israeli offensive against Iran – until now, purely polemical – morphed into military action the moment the IDF crossed the border into Lebanon and took on Hezbollah.

As our regular readers know, this turn of events was predicted in this space three months ago:

"War with Iran will probably not begin with a frontal assault by the U.S. and/or Israel on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons facilities, or even a skirmish along the Iraq-Iran border. Look to Lebanon and Syria for the first battlegrounds of this developing regional war.

The Israelis know perfectly well that Iran's nuclear ambitions, if they ever materialize, are not an immediate threat: their real concern is their volatile northern border, where their deadly enemies – Hezbollah – are an effective obstacle to Israeli influence.

The Israelis are also looking to exploit growing opportunities to make trouble in Syria, where the restive Kurds are their reliable allies, and the brittleness of the Ba'athist dictatorship is an invitation to regime change."

The suggestion, by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their now famous "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," that the Iraq war was fought for Israel's sake, and against our own interests in the region, was received in many quarters with outright horror, and not only from the Amen Corner. Noam Chomsky and Stephen Zunes both objected to this thesis of an Israel-centric foreign policy: Israel, they insist, is the "junior partner" of the American hegemon, and is only acting at the behest and under the de facto control of its masters in Washington.

The war's aftermath, however, tells a different story.

Examined in light of Israel's postwar actions – the unilateral "withdrawal" from Gaza, the absorption of more territory and the building of more settlements on the West Bank, the war against Hamas, and now the re-invasion of Lebanon – the chief (and only) beneficiary of the new regional balance of power is clear enough.

The American invasion and occupation of the Mesopotamian heartland has empowered the Israelis as never before – and now they are on the offensive, carving out a greatly expanded sphere of influence extending into Kurdistan as well as Lebanon, bringing closer to fulfillment the old Zionist vision of an empire stretching "from the Nile to the Euphrates."

The U.S., on the other hand, has considerably reduced leverage in the region. Our troops in Iraq are exposed, vulnerable to the Iranians – and stalemated by the Iraqi insurgency, which shows troubling signs of extending into Shi'ite areas. As the Israelis advance, with American support, Sunni and Shi'ite factions in Iraq – including those in the governing Shi'ite coalition – are radicalized, and turn their fire on the Americans.

Yet the U.S. is still shilling for the Israelis, blaming Syria and Iran for acts that occurred well outside the purview of the mullahs and the increasingly isolated regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, in the UN, we are bringing the issue of Iran's nuclear power program to the Security Council, pressing for a confrontation that can only end in $200-per-barrel oil.

In 1996, a group of pro-Israeli Americans – including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser – prepared a policy statement for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that proposed a strategy of regime change as the only solution for Israel's growing encirclement and isolation.

The main problem, they averred in "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was Syria, and the troublesome border with Lebanon:
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."

But this could occur only if Iraq was taken out first:

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."

With Saddam out of the way, the second phase of the "Clean Break" scenario is unfolding before our eyes.

And the propaganda war is going just as well as the military aspect of the campaign: the Israelis are no fools.

They realize they can't proceed without the tacit complicity of the U.S. and the Europeans, who must be made to look the other way as the IDF commits war crimes on the ground.

Under the pretext of avenging the "kidnapping" of one of their soldiers – and, more recently, two more – they have unleashed a military assault planned well in advance of the allegedly precipitating incidents.
This is surely one of the most threadbare excuses for a war ever uttered.

One wonders how Israel's spokesmen can say it with a straight face. Soldiers in wartime are captured, not "kidnapped."

If Hezbollah has "kidnapped" those two Israeli soldiers, then how do we describe the jailing of thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children, on the basis of their alleged sympathy for Hamas – now the democratically elected government of Palestine?

In any case, it appears, according to this report, that Hezbollah has some Israeli competition when it comes to the business of kidnapping.

The Bush administration is formally committed to the "road map," which entails the creation of a Palestinian state.

Yet the Israelis have done everything possible to undermine Bush's plan, including obstructing elections. The American response has been appeasement: as Israeli gunboats make short work of Gaza beach-goers, Washington's response is to demand the unconditional release of captured Israeli soldiers.

There is an undertone of disapproval, as Condoleezza Rice urges "restraint" by all parties and the president worries that the Lebanese government will be destabilized, yet none of this is allowed to deflect U.S. policymakers from their craven course of kowtowing to the Israelis while they spend our money and earn us plenty more enemies among the world's billion-plus Muslims.

Israel's fifth column in America has been enormously successful in "spinning" the latest news from the Middle East.

Instead of reporting that Israel is invading Lebanon, the "mainstream" media avers that Israel has "entered" Lebanon – as casually as one would enter a room in one's own house.

The first few paragraphs of many news stories describe the latest attacks on Israeli targets and accounts of the damage done, while, five paragraphs down, we finally get word that 55 civilians have been killed by the latest Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon.

The Mearsheimer-Walt thesis – that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked (kidnapped, if you will) by what they refer to as "the Lobby" – has so far been confirmed by the events of the past few days.

The United States is giving what appears to be unconditional support to phase two of the "Clean Break" plan, targeting Syria and Iran, albeit while cautioning the Israelis on Lebanon.

The Israelis, outraged by what they regard as foot-dragging in Washington, are forcing Uncle Sam's hand. If we won't fire the first shots of World War IV, then they are perfectly willing to do so – confident that we'll follow them blindly into the maelstrom.

Whether the Bush administration will go all the way with the Israelis on this one, is, however, in some doubt.

The alleged triumph of the Republican "realists" over the neoconservatives, supposedly symbolized by the ascension of Condi Rice, is counteracted by the Democrats' complete subservience to the Lobby.

Already Hillary Clinton is denouncing the administration for "appeasing" Iran, and the sudden reappearance of the neocons in Democratic Party circles is indicative of what is going on here.

Foreign policy is merely a reflection of domestic political pressures – which, in this case, surely do not represent either the views or the interests of the American people.

Mearsheimer and Walt explain how we got into this mess, but they don't give us any answers about how to get out. How do we avoid getting dragged by our Israeli "allies" into World War IV?

The short answer: stop appeasing Israel – and start looking out for American interests.

The Amen Corner makes no such distinction, but clearly there is one, the most obvious being that we (unlike the Israelis) have no interest fomenting a wider war – especially while our troops are stuck in the middle of it all, lined up like sitting ducks and increasingly on the defensive.

The U.S. must unequivocally condemn the invasion of Lebanon and call for the unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Lebanese soil.

Furthermore, the naval and aerial blockade of Lebanon must end: thousands of tourists and others are pouring into Syria, where they may not be safe for very much longer.

This is an intolerable act of war against the whole civilized community, and for the United States government to not only stand by but implicitly condone it is unforgivable. The "war on terrorism" apparently requires enabling Israeli state terrorism.

The regional conflict widely predicted as one of the more horrific consequences of the Iraq invasion is now breaking out. The only rational response is to get out of the way before we are drawn in. Like a summer fire in the American West, if it isn't contained, the flames of the rapidly spreading conflict will soon be licking at our door.

And we are bound to be choking, sooner rather than later, on the economic fallout – another factor that could embolden the Democrats to keep up their effort to outflank the GOP on the war question from the right.

As both parties fall into lockstep behind the Lobby, and American power and prestige are once again harnessed to Israeli interests, there is little hope that Congress will step into the breach and stop our headlong plunge into World War IV.

Nor do any of the likely presidential candidates seem willing to take on the War Party when the question of war and peace is put in terms of Israel's interests – or, as the Lobby would have it, the Jewish state's continued survival.

Here is a war they can sell by confronting critics with a simple question: What are you, some kind of anti-Semite?

Years of relentless propaganda, countless smear campaigns, and a prodigious expenditure of money and human resources led us to this moment: the War Party is launching what amounts to its final offensive, an all-out attack on whatever bastions of human decency and common sense remain in this hideously war-crazed post-9/11 world.

Come what may, we at Antiwar.com will stand at our posts, pouring hot molten editorials down on the enemy – and giving you the best, most accurate reporting on events in the Middle East anywhere on the Internet, or anywhere else, for that matter.

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