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News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 740, July 19, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
Wadih el Hage, a top assistant to Osama bin Laden who is serving a life sentence for his role in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, visited Hatton Garden in the lead-up to 9/11 to raise funds for Al Qaeda by smuggling tanzanite gems from Tanzania. The Sunday Express reported that Al Qaeda financial front men associated with the Islamic charity, Mercy International Relief Agency, used Irish bank accounts to transfer money to Warsaw. The transactions were ultimately traced to a bank associated with Russian-Israeli mafia chief Semion Mogilevich, who was linked to the Marc Rich Benex-Bank of New York scandal. A senior FBI agent said, "Mogilevich is into more bullshit than you can shake a stick at." Some of the funds transfers, picked up by National Security Agency and British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepts, were likely used to fund part of the 9-11 attacks. -- Wayne Madsen, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil [Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2006] p. 167.
Contents: Number 740
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 743/July 30, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 742/July 26, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 741/July 23, 2006
Back Issues #703 - 705/ #710 - 713
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Wednesday, 19 July 2006 -
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1. WESTERN DIPLOMACY SUPPORTS ISRAEL'S WAR OF AGGRESSION
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News & Analysis: Middle East
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/isra-j19_prn.shtml
By Chris Marsden and Barry Grey
On Tuesday, the seventh day of Israel's air war on Lebanon, with some 250 civilians killed and much of the country's infrastructure destroyed, President George Bush issued yet another threat against Syria.
Declaring that Syria was "trying to get back into Lebanon," he warned against any attempt to invite Syrian forces back into the devastated country little more than a year after Syrian troops were forced to leave as a result of a campaign orchestrated by the United States and France.
Bush's statement was typical of the cynical and thuggish declarations coming from both Washington and Tel Aviv--all of which go unchallenged by the European powers and the Western media.
Bush charged Syria with meddling in the affairs of a country that is being reduced to rubble by bombs, missiles, ships and warplanes supplied by the US to its closest Middle East ally. And as he painted Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as the aggressors, he continued to oppose any cessation of Israel's bombing of civilian targets throughout a defenceless Lebanon--a violation of international law that defines its perpetrators as war criminals.
Bush's comments crowned a day of much vaunted diplomatic initiatives by the major powers and their cat's paw, the United Nations, to resolve the Lebanese conflict along lines dictated by the United States and Israel. For its part, Israel made clear that it would accept nothing that cut across its current drive to destroy Hezbollah and transform Lebanon into a tool of Israeli policy, or its ability to launch future attacks against any and all forces or states that resist its imperialist designs.
The "international peacekeeping force" proposed jointly by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan is advanced in order to police such a victor's peace. Its stated mission is to oversee the removal of any Hezbollah presence from the southern areas bordering Israel.
At the same time, the international force proposed by Annan and Blair would directly serve the interests of the major imperialist powers. It would provide Washington with an opportunity to establish a permanent military presence, working directly with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones said, "We're open to the possibility of that force being necessary." Other US spokesmen, however, discounted the proposal.
The European powers welcomed the proposal, seeing it as a potential means of mitigating Washington's dominant position in the Middle East. Russian President Vladimir Putin was among the first to pledge support for the force, along with the European Union. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin backed a deployment, while French President Jacques Chirac said he believed "some means of coercion" might be needed to enforce the UN resolution calling for the disarming of Hezbollah.
But even such a UN-run police force is deemed by Israeli Prime Minister Edhud Olmert to be an unacceptable limitation on Israel's freedom of action. Military violence is the preferred method of both the American and Israeli ruling elites.
Israel will, moreover, be satisfied only with the complete subjugation of Lebanon and its reduction to an impotent client regime. As the Israeli daily Haaretz pointed out, the creation of a security zone in the south is considered insufficient by the Israeli Defence Forces as it would "not... prevent Hezbollah from deploying long-range rockets and missiles further north in Lebanon."
Bush and Olmert insist that no ceasefire is possible until Israel has achieved its basic military objectives. In her discussions with UN representatives, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni insisted on the same conditions.
On this question Tel Aviv is knocking on an open door. UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said, after meeting with Livni in Jerusalem, "I think both parties agreed that it is necessary to have a political framework in order to reach, eventually, a cease-fire."
The resolution issued by leaders of the Group of Eight at their summit in St Petersburg Sunday fully accepted Israel's presentation of the conflict, blaming the outbreak of hostilities in Lebanon on Hezbollah and in Gaza on Hamas. It stopped short only of specifically identifying Syria and Iran, though this was the clear implication of the resolution and the specific intention of Washington and London.
Russian President Putin has since let it be known that this omission was a concession to Moscow. Yesterday Bush remedied this failing with his accusations against Syria.
Israel welcomed the G8 resolution as a legitimization of its attack on Lebanon. Livni stated, "Israel concurs with the position of the international community, which places responsibility for the conflict on extremist elements. Israel and the international community share a common problem--the presence of extremist terrorists."
As far as the Olmert government is concerned, the realization of a Greater Israel, including the permanent annexation of most of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, demands the crushing of all resistance by the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Of necessity, it requires military action against Syria and ultimately Iran. Since the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq, Iran is Israel's only serious contender as a regional power.
The Bush administration has accused Damascus and Tehran of masterminding the actions of Hezbollah and Hamas at a time when it is pushing for international sanctions against Iran and meeting resistance from Russia and China. It sees Israeli aggression against Gaza and Lebanon as a means of furthering its own geo-strategic agenda in the Middle East.
An editorial in the July 18 Jerusalem Post, which supports the most hawkish elements within the Olmert government, stressed the unity of purpose between Israel and the US. It was entitled "Bush's Brilliant Thought."
After hailing the G8 resolution for "mentioning Hizbullah and Hamas by name and Iran and Syria by implication," it praised Bush and Blair for being "more explicit" in identifying "the 'root cause' of the problem, namely Iran and Syria."
It drew attention, in particular, to Bush's statement, "[T]here seems to be a consensus growing that in order for us to have the peace we want... we must deal with... two nation states that are very much involved with stopping the advance of peace, and that would be Iran, and that would be Syria."
The Post commented, "It has been the case for decades, but it is finally dawning on the world, that there are not two conflicts--the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Islamist-Western conflict--but one. As John Gibson, a commentator for Fox News, put it, 'When the Iranians get nukes this ruckus we're witnessing today will look like a walk in the park... It seems like a war between Israel and some terror groups. It's really a war by Iran on us.'"
The editorial concluded: "As of Sunday, [Israel Defence Forces] sources stated that Israel had eliminated about 25 percent of Hizbullah's missile capacity. Defense Minister Amir Peretz has said that Israel requires another week or two to finish the job...
"If Israel succeeds in destroying Hizbullah, it will have done the world, not only ourselves, a great favour. Bush and Blair, and perhaps other leaders, seem to understand this, and that the broader task of free nations is to confront Hizbullah's sponsors in Damascus and Teheran."
Even as Israeli bombs and missiles continue to rain on Beirut and other cities and towns in Lebanon, the US is working for a new resolution in the UN Security Council that will provide a legal fig leaf not only for intensified attacks on Hezbollah, but also for future military actions against Syria and Iran.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
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2. UNITED STATES TO ISRAEL: YOU HAVE ONE MORE WEEK TO BLAST HEZBOLLAH
Bush 'gave green light' for limited attack, say Israeli and UK sources
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THE GUARDIAN
International News
Wednesday July 19, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1823817,00.html
Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall and Patrick Wintour
The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources.
The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels.
"It's clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week," a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.
US strategy in allowing Israel this freedom for a limited period has several objectives, one of which is delivering a slap to Iran and Syria, who Washington claims are directing Hizbullah and Hamas militants from behind the scenes.
George Bush last night said that he suspected Syria was trying to reassert its influence in Lebanon. Speaking in Washington, he said: "It's in our interest for Syria to stay out of Lebanon and for this government in Lebanon to succeed and survive. The root cause of the problem is Hizbullah and that problem needs to be addressed."
Tony Blair yesterday swung behind the US position that Israel need not end the bombing until Hizbullah hands over captured prisoners and ends its rocket attacks. During a Commons statement, he resisted backbench demands that he call for a ceasefire.
Echoing the US position, he told MPs: "Of course we all want violence to stop and stop immediately, but we recognise the only realistic way to achieve such a ceasefire is to address the underlying reasons why this violence has broken out."
He also indicated it might take many months to agree the terms of a UN stabilisation force on the Lebanese border.
After Mr Blair spoke, British officials privately acknowledged the US had given Israel a green light to continue bombing Lebanon until it believes Hizbullah's infrastructure has been destroyed.
Washington's hands-off approach was underlined yesterday when it was confirmed that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is delaying a visit to the region until she has met a special UN team. She is expected in the region on Friday, according to Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN.
The US is publicly denying any role in setting a timeframe for Israeli strikes. When asked whether the US was holding back diplomatically, Tony Snow, the White House's press spokesman, said yesterday: "No, no; the insinuation there is that there is active military planning, collaboration or collusion, between the United States and Israel - and there isn't ... the US has been in the lead of the diplomatic efforts, issuing repeated calls for restrain,t but at the same time putting together an international consensus. You've got to remember who was responsible for this: Hizbullah ... It would be misleading to say the United States hasn't been engaged. We've been deeply engaged."
Steven Cook, a specialist in US-Middle East policy at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, said: "It's abundantly clear [that US policy is] to give the Israelis the opportunity to strike a blow at Hizbullah ...
"They have global reach, and prior to 9/11 they killed more Americans than any other group. But the Israelis are overplaying their hand."
Israel is already laying the ground for negotiations. "We are beginning a diplomatic process alongside the military operation that will continue," said Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, yesterday. "The diplomatic process is not meant to shorten the window of time of the army's operation, but rather is meant to be an extension of it and to prevent a need for future military operations," she added.
Moshe Kaplinsky, Israel's deputy army chief, said the offensive could end within a few weeks, adding that Israel needed time to complete "clear goals". Israeli officials said fighting could begin to wind down after the weekend, if Hizbullah stops firing rockets.
A peace formula is also beginning to emerge: it includes an understanding on a future prisoner exchange, a deployment of the Lebanese army up to the Israeli border, a Hizbullah pullback, and the beefing up of an international monitoring force. For the first time, Ms Livni suggested Israel might accept such a force on a temporary basis.
There were signs of differences of emphasis between the Foreign Office and Downing Street over the conflict.
Kim Howells, a Foreign Office minister, explicitly called for the US to rein in Israel. "I very much hope the Americans will be putting pressure on the Israelis to stop as quickly as possible." he told the BBC. "We understand the pressure the Israeli government is under, but we call on them to look very carefully at the pressure ordinary people are under in southern Lebanon and other parts of Lebanon too ... We want to stop this as quickly as possible".
Israeli airstrikes killed 31 yesterday, including a family of nine in Aitaroun. More than 230 civilians in Lebanon have been killed in the past week.
An Israeli man was killed by a Hizbullah rocket in Nahariya in northern Israel, bringing the total of Israeli civilian deaths to 13. The army said 50 missiles were fired yesterday at northern Israel, injuring at least 14 people.
Flashpoints
* 31 Lebanese killed in Israeli air raids. Nine members of one family were killed and four wounded in a strike on their house in the village of Aitaroun. Five were killed in other strikes in the south and two in the Bekaa Valley. An attack on a Lebanese army barracks east of Beirut killed 11 soldiers and wounded 30. A truck carrying medical supplies was hit and its driver killed on the Beirut-Damascus highway. Hizbullah says one of its fighters was killed.
* One man killed as he was walking to a bomb shelter in Nahariya, northern Israel. The army said Hizbullah fired 50 missiles, hitting the port and railway depot at Haifa, as well as the towns of Safed, Acre and Kiryat Shmona.
* Hundreds evacuated from Beirut in helicopters and boats. HMS Gloucester arrives to start evacuation of Britons. The Orient Queen, a cruise ship capable of carrying 750, sets out from Cyprus, escorted by a US destroyer.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
*****
THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
A Resource for Countering Myth, Distortion and Spin from the Israeli Media War Machine
E-mail: info@electronicIntifada.net
Web: http://www.electronicIntifada.net
- Wednesday, July 19, 2006 -
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BUT NOT EXACTLY THE ONE SHIMON PERES HAD IN MIND
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Omar Barghouti, Electronic Lebanon
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5096.shtml
Six long, bloodstained days have passed since Israel launched its barbaric attack on Lebanon without succeeding in exacting a significant military toll on the resistance itself. Six days are exactly what it took Israel to deal a crushing and humiliating military defeat to the largely inferior armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967, and to subsequently occupy the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula. How the "Middle East" has changed in the past 4 decades! Indeed, thanks to the Lebanese resistance, and to an extent its Palestinian counterpart, this volatile zone is undergoing radical transformation from a region where Arab regimes -- and societies, more or less -- have largely internalized defeat and US-Israeli hegemony as fate to one that is palpably rebuilding its confidence in the future and its hope for an era of justice and peace, without colonial and racist oppression.
This is certainly not the "New Middle East" that had been on the agenda before the current Palestinian intifada broke out. Shimon Peres, the current Israeli deputy prime minister and one of the few remaining historic Zionist leaders, often spoke during the heyday of the Oslo "peace process" between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of his vision for a new Middle East, where Israel and its Arab "neighbors" would live in harmony, peace and common prosperity. For the uninitiated in Zionist talk, this translates into an official Arab capitulation to Israel's hegemony over the Middle East, opening up lucrative Arab markets to its advanced economy and to its insatiable desire for becoming a regional empire. Conspicuously missing from Peres's grand plan was a just solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict which, according to international law, would entail ending Israel's occupation and colonization of the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territories occupied in 1967; recognizing the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands, from which they were ethnically cleansed to establish Israel on the ruins of their society; and ending Israel's system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens, who are denied any semblance of equality in a state that not only discriminates against them in the provision of basic services and recognition of fundamental rights, but precludes them from its very self-definition as well.
After six days of Israel's aggression against Lebanon -- ostensibly to free two of its soldiers captured by Hizbullah in a stunningly sophisticated military operation at the Lebanese-Israeli border -- and its deliberate, gradual massacre of innocent Lebanese civilians as a tactic to erode Hizbullah's public support, the Lebanese resistance has not only persevered but has also dealt Israel some unexpectedly harsh blows that have already succeeded in lastingly changing the face of the Middle East. While the West chose to ignore the plight of Arab civilians who have fallen victim to these latest Israeli war crimes, the Arab world did not miss the blunt felling of several other "victims," illusions and myths that have hitherto been perceived by many as facts of life.
The first of those victims is Israel's "deterrence." Israel explicitly admitted that its deliberate use of overwhelming -- or "disproportionate," in the West's sanitized language -- force was aimed at recovering its "damaged deterrence." Its patent means for achieving this end is through indiscriminate killing and gratuitous devastation, both intended to reinforce Israel's image in the collective "Arab mind" as an invincible, unrivaled power in the region, and, crucially, as a "mad dog" that knows no rational bounds to the exercise of brute force to achieve its objectives, as Moshe Dayan once advocated. From this perspective, instilling despair and utter fear becomes Israel's weapon of choice in psychological warfare, the tools of which it has mastered for decades. Accordingly, hope among the oppressed must be crushed at any price lest it leads to upheaval and open defiance to the oppressive order. What Hizbullah did in six days, coming at the heels of six years of open Palestinian defiance in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), is nothing less than tearing down that "iron wall" of Arab hopelessness, thereby further undermining the foundations of Israel's deterrent capability.
Another casualty of Israel's double-aggression on Gaza and Lebanon is the official West's claim to moral consistency, decency, or even respect for international law. Western governments have, by and large, openly or bashfully supported Israel's invasion of Gaza and its ruthless bombardment of Lebanon as a form of "self-defence," overlooking the standard definition of this notion and the limits set on it in international legal conventions. European submission to, or voluntary adoption of, the US doctrine that only Israel is entitled to the right to "defend" itself in this conflict betrays Europe's collusion in reinforcing a key pillar in the US empire's world view: might makes right, and international law can take a hike. As an editorial in the Guardian today rightly states, "Not calling clearly for a truce at once could suggest [Europe's] complicity with what Israel is doing and the US is tacitly backing: using overwhelming force to defeat or cripple Hizbullah, whatever the consequences for Lebanon or the region."
Furthermore, by expressing a nauseatingly unbalanced concern over loss of Israeli lives -- military and civilian -- while comparatively devaluing loss of life among Arab civilians in Lebanon and Gaza to little more than a nuisance that may potentially blemish Israel's otherwise bright image, Western officials and most of the sheepish, corporate-controlled mainstream media in the West have betrayed a level of naked racism that many had thought extinct in these beacons of democracy and enlightenment. Reflecting this phenomenon, a recent New York Times editorial, for instance, describes Israel's atrocities in Lebanon as "far-reaching military responses" that are "legally and morally justified."
Of course this hardly comes as a surprise to anyone closely monitoring Western political and cultural discourse about the Arab world, as expressed by officials, pundits and media editorials. Still, the unmitigated disregard for the sanctity of human life in the "global south" in general, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Rwanda, Palestine or Lebanon, in comparison with Western -- including Israeli -- lives, is a disturbing reminder that racism, far from being an ugly memory of the colonial West's past, is live and kicking and abundantly present in its corridors of power, singularly affecting its decision making vs. the Middle East. At the core of this resilient bigotry is a common view -- not always overtly articulated -- of non-whites as merely relative humans, lacking some of the basic attributes associated with "full" humans, i.e. whites. The essentially equal worth of all human life, irrespective of ethnicity, color, gender or faith, has again become among many Western elites a matter of opinion.
The latest fatality in Israel's war of aggression is the Arab-Israeli "peace process." The Arab League's Secretary General, Mr. Amr Moussa, has officially announced its death in a press conference held right after the emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday. Again, this is not news to any observer of this process of deception, which was carefully designed to legitimize Israel's control over parts of the occupied Palestinian territory and its denial of some of the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine, as well as to dictate Israel's terms for "peace," namely unqualified Arab submission to its injustice.
Given all the real and virtual victims of Israel's ongoing trashing of international law and mockery of the so-called international political system, purportedly headed by the UN, Arab civil society ought to struggle to further spread the reach and depth of the growing, progressive movement advocating a boycott of Israel, similar to that applied to apartheid South Africa. Ultimately, only such a morally sound, non-violent form of resistance can produce sustainable and practical pressures that can hold Israel to account and therefore give just peace a chance.
Israel embarked on its latest bloody adventure hoping to change the rules of the game. People of conscience everywhere can indeed hand it brand new "rules of the game": turning it into a pariah state until it fully complies with its obligations under international law and starts treating its victims as equal humans who deserve full human and political rights, most crucial of which is their unassailable right to live in freedom and dignity.
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian analyst.
Copyright 2000-2006 ElectronicIntifada.net
*****
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4. 'LEBANON CRISIS AN INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY'
The Israeli-Hezbollah conflict threatens
to drag Syria, Iran and the US into a regional war
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ALJAZEERA
News: Arab World
Tuesday 18 July 2006
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D259C343-ED88-4C43-B839-BCEFBED61924.htm
by Firas Al-Atraqchi
As'ad AbuKhalil, author of Bin Laden, Islam, and America's New 'War on Terrorism' as well as The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power, believes the recent violence is a symptom of an international conspiracy under way to enforce UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of militia groups in Lebanon - a reference to Hezbollah.
A professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, and visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, AbuKhalil just returned from Lebanon. He is the webmaster of the Angry Arab News Service, http://angryarab.blogspot.com.
Aljazeera.net: Israel says its assault on Lebanon is in self-defence against Hezbollah's Katyusha rocket attacks and the capture of two of its soldiers.
Hezbollah says southern Lebanon has long been an area of conflict with Israel occupying Lebanese land and that it wants indirect negotiations to secure the release of its prisoners in Israeli jails. How did the situation deteriorate so rapidly and so violently?
As'ad AbuKhalil: This particular conflict, and Israel's act of aggression on Lebanon, did not take place in a vacuum, and Israel did not act in some spontaneous fashion.
Hezbollah did not surprise Israel with the capture of the two Israeli occupation soldiers. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has repeatedly warned that if Israel does not release its Lebanese prisoners, he will be compelled to take Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips.
And Israel has not been sitting idly by since its partial withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. It has not only continued to occupy parts of South Lebanon, but also has been violating Lebanese sovereignty, by air, sea, and land.
Israel has also been kidnapping innocent Lebanese citizens: fishermen and shepherds. And one fisherman from Tyre - my hometown - is still missing, and at least one shepherd was killed last year.
Furthermore, Israel has adamantly refused to give to Lebanon a map of the more than 400,000 land mines that it left behind in South Lebanon, and which continue to kill Lebanese children in the region.
The recent crisis, as the article in the Washington Post by Robin Wright pointed out yesterday, is an international/regional conspiracy to implement United Nations Security Council resolution 1559.
The groundwork for this aggression began with the work of Rafiq al-Hariri [the slain former Lebanese prime minister] in 2004, when he worked with the US and France to pass that resolution in the Security Council.
The plan has the full support of Israel and client Arab regimes of the US: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. But it will not work, and Hezbollah will not lay down its arms.
If the Lebanese government, led by the Hariri camp, thinks that it can now convince Hezbollah to lay down its arms and to trust the Lebanese Army - which has been sitting idly over the last week - to take care of Lebanon's defence, it is wildly mistaken.
What are Israel's goals? What are Hezbollah's goals?
I think that Israel often acts in revenge. The Zionist movement is a vengeful movement; it always has been.
It wants not only to implement UNSC 1559 to disarm Hezbollah, but it also wants, as it did in 1982, to pave the way for the installation of American puppets as rulers of Lebanon. These plans never work: All grand plans for Lebanon strike the rocks of deep sectarian divisions in the country.
I think that Hezbollah started by wanting to achieve a prisoner exchange with Israel, and probably to ease the pressures on Palestine.
But now, they mostly and primarily want to retain possession of their weapons, and they have in that at least the overwhelming support of the Shia in Lebanon, the single largest sect in the country.
Dozens of civilians have been killed on both sides but there has been little movement in the international community. Is there a feeling that mediation or efforts to bring about a ceasefire will be fruitless?
The silence of the so-called international community, which has been under the control and in the service of the US government since the end of the Cold War, has been most painful for those in Lebanon who have been told in the last two years that the international community cares about Lebanon and its people. Now people know better.
I do believe that the same racist impulse that considers Israeli lives worth more than Arab lives is at play here. I have no doubt that the lives of Arabs never meant much for the descendants of colonial powers in the region.
And it is important that we don't allow Israeli propaganda to present an image of symmetry between the two sides: There is no symmetry between the two sides in this conflict.
Not only in terms of Israeli military superiority, but also in terms of massive killings by Israel of largely innocent civilians.
Do the Lebanese blame Hezbollah or Israel for this crisis?
I think that all Lebanese blame Israel for the killing and for the aggression. But the Saudi clients in Lebanon are trying to exploit the events to build up resentment against Hezbollah.
In Lebanon, there never are unified opinions on anything, and certainly the sectarian divisions do not amount to a unified stance behind Hezbollah. There are many Lebanese who don't support the ideology of Hezbollah but who also believe that the party is now single-handedly defending Lebanon against savage Israeli aggression.
John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, implicated Iran and Syria as being at least partially to blame for supporting Hezbollah...
It is ironic to speak of John Bolton - the same person who was honoured a few months ago by the Hariri ruling coalition in Lebanon.
Yes, Hezbollah receives the support of Iran and Syria, just as the Hariri coalition receives the support of US, France, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and possibly Israel indirectly.
Will Israel attack Syria or Iran next? Could this become an all-out regional war? Could this draw the US into the conflict?
It seems that Israel will avoid attacking Iran and Syria at this stage. With the Israeli war on Palestine still proceeding unabated, the Israelis may not find a need.
The US/EU/UN will deal with both countries, on behalf of Israel, through pressures and punitive measures.
But, if Syria and Iran come under attack, then all bets are off in the region, and US plans in Iraq will face more challenges and more subversion.
Iran has indirectly facilitated the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Syria has recently been co-operating with the US occupation in Iraq.
If attacked, both countries can easily make things worse for the US, and that explains the reluctance of the US in endorsing attacks on Iran or Syria.
With Iraq on the verge of civil war, how will the Lebanon crisis affect the region?
It depends on what happens. If Israel is permitted to continue in the aggression, Syria and Iran may feel threatened, and that may unleash their forces in Iraq against the US.
Under such circumstances, American troubles in the region will only increase. But no matter what happens, this carnage will have affects thoughout the Middle East.
Let us remember that the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon unleashed seismic changes and movements in the region, including the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Those who think that when the dust settles, all will go back to normal, are people who have not read the contemporary history of the Middle East.
In the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this Israeli aggression will go down as a watershed; it will have an impact on the course of the conflict and also on the stability of the very regimes that the US spends money and weapons to prop up.
As the main power-broker in the Middle East, what role can the US play to end the violence?
You have to be either ignorant or foolish or both to consider the US interested in ending the current conflict. The US has clearly endorsed an unconditional Israeli aggression on Lebanon and Palestine. The US will leave it to Israel to decide not only the manner of killing of Arabs, but even to determine the number of Arabs that Israel wishes to kill.
Some Arab countries have criticised Hezbollah and its backers for the recent crisis but Iran and some fighters in Iraq have firmly stood by Hezbollah. Could we see a more extensive Shia-Sunni conflict on the sidelines of an Arab-Israeli war?
Yes, the Saudis have now officially endorsed a Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East. And this plan has the support of the US and Israel. This can easily, however, affect stability of several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. So trying to manipulate the Sunni-Shia divide is like playing with fire. We saw the fruits of American sectarian manipulation in Iraq.
How likely is the Lebanese government to survive the crisis?
The Hariri element of the ruling coalition will come out weaker as a result of this crisis. That seems certain. They will either be seen as incompetent, or as secret partners of the American/Israeli/Saudi plan for Lebanon.
But even at the humanitarian level, the Lebanese government has failed miserably in meeting the basic demands of the refugees.
In recent months, there was a general feeling that Lebanon had bounced back with major economic drive and a tourism boost. How do Lebanese look at their long-term prospects now that much of what they rebuilt has been destroyed?
The Lebanese have been through a lot - the people of south Lebanon have been through scores of savage Israeli invasions and campaigns of aggression. Not only are the people known for resilience, but their ability to reconstruct and resume normal life - as much as possible - has become well known.
But the funds needed for reconstruction will come at a high price: It will be like Hariri's accruement of foreign debt which further eroded the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon.
Copyright 2003-2006 Aljazeera.net
*****
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5. NEOCONS RISE FROM MIDEAST ASHES
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TOM PAINE.COM
Feature Story
July 17, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/17/neocons_rise_from_mideast_ashes.php
Robert Dreyfuss
Israel's reckless, high-stakes decision to launch simultaneous wars against both Hamas and Hezbollah last week is a critical, perhaps world-shattering event. It cannot be seen merely in its local context, that is, as an act by the unilateralist regime in Jerusalem to crush the armed wings of two Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Nor can it be seen merely in its regional context, that is, as an effort to raise the stakes in the struggle against Syria, Iran and rejectionist factions in occupied Iraq. Rather, Israel's actions must be seen, first and foremost, in the context of global politics.
The key question: Is the Israeli offensive designed as a calculated effort to catapult the hard-right, neoconservative ideologues back to power in Washington?
The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 21st century's Pearl Harbor, allowed Vice President Dick Cheney--along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, John Bolton, et al.--to steer President George W. Bush and the U.S. government toward a global war, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the endless "war on terrorism" and the militarization of American foreign policy. Since then, and especially as the adventure in Iraq bogged down, the less adventurous realists in the American foreign policy establishment have begun to eclipse the previously hegemonic neoconservatives. For the past year or so, the Pollyannas amid the chattering classes have told us that the neoconservatives' moment has passed, and that the adults are back in control in the nation's capital. What they forgot--and what Israel's criminal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon have reminded us--is that the neoconservative war party is global, not domestic. Outflanked, temporarily, in the United States, the neocons are now flexing their muscle outside the United States in a way that can give them added new leverage at home.
Let's analyze the current crisis, piece by piece.
First, Israel's actions in no way can be seen as a legitimate response to the small-scale attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, what Israel has done has used the pretext of those pin-prick attacks--a couple of border raids and a handful of errant rockets--to launch a strategic attack whose goals are to crush Hamas and the remaining institutions of Palestinian self-rule and decapitate and destroy Hezbollah politically and militarily in Lebanon.
Second, it's clear that Israel would never have launched this war without having made the calculation that it would win the support of the United States. The rest of the world is solidly aligned against Israel's outrageously disproportionate attacks, but none of that matters. No diplomatic mission from the feeble United Nations, no angry statements from the Arab League, no fulminations from Western Europe will deter Israel. As long as Israel has the support of the United States, it will forge ahead relentlessly. So far, in a shocking display of craven capitulation to the Israeli fait accompli, President Bush has repeatedly endorsed Israel's aggression. But Israel is clearly counting on more than just Bush's support for its actions in Gaza and Lebanon. More broadly, Israel is seeking to shift the balance in the Bush administration back in favor of the neocons, the hawks, and their radical "New American Century" comrades.
Third, by invading and bombing Lebanon and acting brutally to crush the Palestinian Authority, Israel has created a unified field theory of the Middle East's crises, uniting the escalating world showdown with Iran, the unraveling civil war in Iraq, the crisis over Syria's role in Lebanon, and the Arab-Israeli conflict itself into one big tangle. To be sure, all of those conflicts were always linked. But now they are as one. And in each case, the United States now faces a huge dilemma.
A sane U.S. policy would (1) exert backbreaking pressure on Israel to halt its attacks; (2) open a dialogue with Iran and Syria about containing Hezbollah and Hamas; (3) take drastic steps to stop the Iraqi civil war by making across-the-board concessions to Iraq's Sunnis and forcing the Shiites to swallow it, while starting a phased U.S. withdrawal; and (4) getting the White House directly involved in the Israel-Palestine peace process as if their lives depended on it.
But Israel, and its neoconservative allies, are counting on none of that to happen. Instead, they've gambled that in each case President Bush will fall back under the spell of Dick Cheney and the neocons, and do precisely the opposite: continue to give Israel the green light, throw rhetorical bombs at Damascus and Teheran, escalate the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, and take Israel's side in its wall-building, settlement-defending, no-talks-with-Hamas unilateralism.
Make no mistake: Until last week, before Israel went to war, the neoconservatives were losing across the board. They watched in horror as the war in Iraq faltered, and they were appalled by President Bush's Condi-led opening to Iran. Indeed, to many it seemed as if the entire post-9/11 project to remake the Middle East and build American hegemony on that cornerstone was in jeopardy.
Speaking at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Frederick Kagan warned that the United States is in "danger of losing everything" because the war in Iraq is not being pursued aggressively enough. "All of this success can and will be undone ... if we do not get the security situation [in Iraq] under control, and fast," he said, accurately enough. Now that Israel is at war, they have the chance once again to go on the offensive, against Iran, in Iraq, against Syria, and against the mythical Terrorist International that they warn about so regularly. You can imagine what Cheney and his allies are whispering to the president: Be resolute, be strong--and bring 'em on!
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.
Copyright 2006 TomPaine.com (A Project of The Institute for America's Future)
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COUNTERPUNCH
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- Monday, July 17, 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
"The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel"
6. ATROCITIES IN THE PROMISED LAND
_________________________________________________________________________
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON, former CIA analyst
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison07172006.html
Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.
But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.
A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.
The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. "This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral," wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel's arrogance.
We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.
A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.
A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer's brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.
A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)
Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in "moral collapse."
Michel Warschawski writes of an "Israeli madness" and "insane brutality," a "putrefaction" of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a "gang of hoodlums," he says, a state "that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive."
As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity.
*****
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'Crime is a leading benificiary of globalisation'
_________________________________________________________________________
LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
July 2006
http://mondediplo.com/2006/07/18clearstream
By Ibrahim Warde
The belief of the US and British governments that they could seize dirty money thought to be financing terrorism has merely diverted scarce police resources from the pursuit of criminal money laundering.
The Clearstream scandal, which is currently roiling the French political establishment, exposes two aspects of financial globalisation: the promise of transparency and the potential for money laundering. Indeed, the very name of the Luxembourg-based clearing house suggests both transparency and a cleansing flow.
It was originally assumed that the information revolution and omniscient, self-regulating markets would provide their own defence mechanisms. But huge black holes soon appeared in a world in which "the language is coded, the uninitiated excluded and the rules seldom written and communicable"(1).
Senator John Kerry, in his 1998 book The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security, wrote: "The opening of borders to international commerce and the information highway have benefited terrorists every bit as much as they have helped legitimate businesspeople and criminals"(2). In 2005 Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, observed that illicit activities were not limited to the margins of the international economy and that crime (the most lucrative business) has been a leading beneficiary of globalisation. Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, arm sales, drug dealing, counterfeiting, piracy, human trafficking, tax evasion and money laundering have all exploded(3).
In a system based on speed, efficiency and anonymity, shadowy operators have an advantage over political and judicial authorities, especially considering the ground lost by national regulators to the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) or the Basle Committee.
The rules of the game are now largely determined by the world's most powerful nations, especially the United States, in cooperation with little-known private companies such as Clearstream, of which its former boss, Andre Lussi, said: "Banks have customers and our customers are the banks. We are the notaries public of the world"(4).
In 2004 Lussi was indicted in Luxembourg for money laundering, manipulation of financial statements, fake accounting, financial fraud and tax evasion. The Clearstream affair testifies to the potential for dissimulation and manipulation among those new notaries.
The role of anti-money laundering measures was to fight such dysfunctions. Money laundering integrates funds derived from criminal activities into the legitimate financial system: it cleans dirty money. According to some sources, it goes back to the 1920s (when the gangster Al Capone bought laundromats to help disguise the criminal origin of his hard cash). But the idea, just like as the war against it, is of more recent vintage. The media began to mention it at the time of Watergate (1972-74), which revealed how the Nixon administration had adeptly hidden the origin and destination of funds. The phrase first appeared in legal proceedings only in 1982.
In 1986 the US became the first country to criminalise money laundering, as part of the escalating war on drugs. The idea was that, since profit motivates drug dealers, going after the money would damage the drug trade. The money trail also promised to yield useful clues and unmask vast conspiracies. None of the "three stages of money laundering" -- placement (the introduction of funds into the financial system), layering (multiple conversions and movements designed to confuse the money trail) and integration (when the funds re-enter the legitimate economy) -- is illegal in itself. But it is illegal to combine them to hide the criminal origin of funds.
The 'crime of the 1990s'
Money laundering was the "crime of the 1990s" and throughout that decade money laundering laws and regulations grew exponentially. Beyond drug dealing, the range of crimes covered expanded to include almost 200 offences, among them racketeering, theft, trafficking in human organs and endangered species, and, of course, terrorism. In parallel, the US effort against dirty money was internationalised through the FATF, created by the G7 in Paris.
As it expanded, the anti-money laundering apparatus was criticised: the supply of illegal drugs had steadily increased while the amounts of dirty money seized by the government were negligible. In 2001 Paul O'Neill, the Bush administration's first Treasury Secretary, noted that there was little to show for the $700m a year spent by the government on money laundering: over 15 years there had been only one substantial catch. Although the apparatus gave law enforcement agencies plenty of opportunities to go after smalltime dealers, major drug lords, who could afford to skirt the rules and use the services of the best lawyers, remained elusive.
The Spanish investigating judge, Baltasar Garzon, said that judges felt like mammoths chasing leopards in their battle against major financial criminals: "By the time the mammoth reaches his hideout, the leopard is already far away, laughing"(5).
The 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania led to more concentration on dirty money. It was said that Osama bin Laden had a $300m war chest; and a cottage industry developed in which self-proclaimed "experts" purported to reveal the whereabouts of that fortune. In reality, Saudi Arabia had seized Bin Laden's wealth in 1994, and his assets in Sudan were confiscated in 1996 when he was forced to leave(6). Terrorist financing was the result of permanent fundraising within Islamist networks(7).
In the late 1990s the Clinton administration attempted without success to introduce "know your customer" rules which would have forced banks (already bound to disclose suspicious transactions) to scrutinise their clients. It also undertook, in conjunction with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, to crack down on tax havens.
As soon as he became president in 2001, George Bush scuttled that initiative and took steps to diminish the anti-money laundering regime until the 9/11 attacks resulted in a major policy U-turn. With the zeal of new converts, those who had been intent on dismantling financial controls presided over an unprecedented expansion of the anti-money laundering apparatus.
The war on terror began with finance when Bush announced "a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network" on 24 September 2001. The president and top officials kept repeating that money was the oxygen of terror and that acts of terror could not be conducted without an important financial infrastructure(8).
The USA Patriot Act ("uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism"), passed in October 2001, had a major anti-money laundering component. That month, at an extraordinary meeting in Washington, the FATF, which the administration had spurned until then, saw its prerogatives officially expanded from money laundering to terrorist financing.
The two activities became interchangeable. A new acronym, AML-CFT ("anti-money laundering -- combating the financing of terrorism"), was instantly and uncritically adopted, joining two fundamentally different issues. Money laundering is based on crime-for-money; it involves large sums and transforms illegally obtained cash into seemingly legitimate funds. Terrorist financing, by contrast, is a political phenomenon, involving relatively small amounts, and, at least since 9/11, the financing happens outside international banking channels.
Terrorist financing is more like money soiling than laundering, since small sums of clean money (not illegally obtained) are used to fund acts of terror(9). None of the post-11 September attacks has cost more than $20,000. The London attacks of 7 July 2005 cost less than $1,000(10); their "terrorist financier" was one of the suicide bombers who made a living as a substitute teacher. In Iraq, more than half of US casualties have been the result of cheap roadside improvised explosive devices.
Scorecard logic
Yet the financial terrain, vast and little understood, offers political advantages. In the days after 9/11 swift action was not immediately possible against Afghanistan, which harboured Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. No contingency plans existed and military action took weeks(11). Bush was attracted to financial strikes because freezing accounts was the one seemingly bold action the US could take immediately. An added advantage was that the financial front was conducive to what he called a scorecard logic. He gave the order to "seize some assets, and quickly".
The Treasury general counsel, David Aufhauser, later described the subsequent frantic weekend search: "It was almost comical. We just listed out as many of the usual suspects as we could and said, let's go freeze some of their assets"(12).
Such financial strikes have since become routine. Not surprisingly, they have done little to dent terrorism(13). Easy and often innocent victims were targeted, such as the Somali remittance group Al-Barakaat. The first 100-day progress report of the war on terror set the tone: "The US and its allies have been winning the war on the financial front" and "denying terrorists access to funds is a very real success in the war on terrorism"(14).
In reality, shifting resources from money laundering to terrorist financing caused terrible mismatches. Those trained to spot global financial crime, and Spanish-speaking specialists in the Latin American drug trade, found themselves chasing Islamic terrorists, leaving the business of money laundering unattended.
Translated by the author
Ibrahim Warde is adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of law and diplomacy, Tufts University, Massachusetts, and author of 'The Price of Fear: the Truth behind the Financial War on Terror' (IB Tauris, London, 2006)
(1) Denis Robert and Ernest Backes, Revelations, Les Arenes, Paris 2001.
(2) Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997.
(3) Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Doubleday, New York, 2005.
(4) Denis Robert, La boite noire, Les Arenes, Paris, 2002.
(5) Denis Robert and Ernest Backes, op cit.
(6) Jonathan Randal, Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2004.
(7) See The 9/11 Commission Report, Thomas H Kean, chair, and Lee H Hamilton, vice chair, authorised edition, WW Norton, New York, 2004; John Roth, Douglas Greenburg and Serena Wille, Monograph on Terrorist Financing, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Staff Report to the Commission, 2004.
(8) "President Freezes Terrorists' Assets," remarks by the President, Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill and Secretary of State Powell, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 24 September 2001.
(9) See Ibrahim Warde, "Clean money, just a little soiled", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, November 2001.
(10) Ibrahim Warde, The Price of Fear: The Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror, IB Tauris, London. 2006.
(11) Bob Woodward, Bush at War, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2002.
(12) Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2004.
(13) Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, Random House, New York, 2003.
(14) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news
Copyright 1997-2006 Le Monde diplomatique. All rights reserved.
*****
_________________________________________________________________________
8. MADMEN AND LEMMINGS STOKE MIDDLE EAST CONFLAGRATION
_________________________________________________________________________
ONLINE JOURNAL
Commentary
July 18, 2006
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1005.shtml
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
As the Israel-led rampage in the Middle East worsens by the day, the giddy complicity of the Bush administration, its elite allies, and Arab functionaries becomes more evident. The neocons really think they can bomb and mass-murder their road map into a reality, and seem to be rushing to finish the job (before they lose some of their political power in the fall).
There is clearly no urgency to stop the killing. Witness the brain-diseased Bush yapping and joking about a pork dinner as the Middle East blew up. Witness Bush, just days later, his mouth full of buttered bread, exchanging expletive-laced non-sequitors with Tony Blair.
A widening escalation to take out Iran and Syria appears to be the end game, a deliberate plan, perhaps shared across Washington. For those who remain in deep denial, leading congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and even allegedly antiwar Russ Feingold, have issued statements uniformly and stridently pro-Israel, full of the same disinformation and bilious rhetoric as that coming out of Tel Aviv. Such is the power of AIPAC.
What form will this new and bloody "road map" take if Arab regimes beholden to, or cowed by, the US and Israel, or complicit with them, do nothing? These are the "moneyed Muslims" that Noam Chomsky waxes about. (Some would call them other names, among them "traitors".) More importantly, with an open Pandora's Box, and the fingers of criminals at the nuclear buttons, what will go wrong?
The analysis being provided by Electronic Intifada, the blow-by-blow front line dispatches of Dahr Jamail, and the blistering analysis of Angry Arab News Service have continued to point the way to nightmarish truths.
As the Angry Arab News Service notes:
"At moments like this, the reality of the regimes is exposed. At a moment like this, you realize that ultimately there are no qualitative differences between Middle East regimes. I mean, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are not different from Syria and Iran. They all care about one thing, and one thing only: their own survival. What have Iran and Syria done to the Lebanese in this crisis? What have they done to the Palestinians? I mean aside from vapid speeches and silly Friday sermons? Sermons don't serve to protect civilians from Israel terrorism."
"This is an ideological measuring device. Watch their words. Those who speak about Israeli aggression in Lebanon or Palestine and use terms like 'disproportionate,' 'cycle of violence,' 'restraint,' 'overreaction,' 'excessive,' or those who call to 'resume the peace process' are merely providing political cover and legitimacy for Israeli terrorism in Lebanon."
"Notice that Hariri Inc. politicians are very careful about their rhetoric during those times. They strictly refrain from criticizing the US. And as Walid Jumblat has consistently made it clear: they disagree with Israel on the magnitude of aggression, and not on the aggression itself. Just as Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the collaboration of Lebanese Forces; Israel has the tacit support of House of Saud's clients in Lebanon (and the Nation magazine, let us not forget) during this aggression."
A final note for Americans who frequently require Hollywood movie analogies to understand this outbreak of terror: you are watching a Martin Scorsese gangster murder orgy, with Israel playing the violent sidekick Joe Pesci role. Only this Joe Pesci is wielding WMD.
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- AFIB No. 739, July 16, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
What of this vaunted peace process? What has it achieved and why, if indeed it was a peace process, has the miserable conditions of the Palestinians and the loss of life become so much worse than before the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993? And why is it, as the New York Times noted on November 5, that "the Palestinian landscape is now decorated with the ruins of projects that were predicated on peaceful integration"? And what does it mean to speak of peace if Israeli troops and settlements are still present in such large numbers? Again, according to RISOT [Report on Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Territories], 110,000 Jews lived in illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank before Oslo; the number has since increased to 195,000, a figure that doesn't include those Jews--more than 150,000--who have taken up residence in Arab East Jerusalem. Has the world been deluded or has the rhetoric of "peace" been in essence a gigantic fraud? -- Edward W. Said, "Palestinians Under Siege," in The New Intifada: Resisting Israeli Apartheid, ed. Roane Carey [London: Verso, 2001] p. 29.
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- Saturday, 15 July 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
1. ISRAELI ATTACK ON LEBANON THREATENS
TO ENGULF ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST IN WAR
_________________________________________________________________________
News & Analysis: Middle East
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/mide-j15.shtml
Statement of the Editorial Board
The Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, with bombings and missile strikes and the imposition of an air and sea blockade, has brought the Middle East to the brink of all-out war. The attack on Lebanon, fully endorsed by the Bush administration, coincides with Israel's ongoing assault on the Palestinian population of Gaza, 1.5 million people who are enduring the fourth week of a siege, with electricity cut off and food supplies running low.
The Olmert government in Israel has seized on two incidents involving the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, first in Gaza on June 25, and then on Wednesday on the Lebanese border, as pretexts for an enormous military operation that was clearly prepared long in advance. It remains to be seen how far the Israeli offensive will go--to Beirut, or even to Damascus--but it is clearly aimed at accomplishing strategic objectives that have no relationship to the incidents that supposedly provoked it.
No one can seriously suggest that bombing Lebanese towns and villages, imposing a naval blockade and attempting to assassinate Sheik Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, are methods likely to win the freedom of the captured Israeli soldiers. The two soldiers taken by Hezbollah are far more likely to die as a result, killed either by their captors or by Israeli bombs.
Likewise in Gaza, the indiscriminate killing of dozens of Palestinians with bombs, shells and air-to-ground missiles will do nothing to win the release of Galid Shalit, the private seized by Islamic militants in their raid across the Gaza border into southern Israel.
There is a long history of Israel using such events as the excuse for carrying out military actions that have a far broader strategic purpose--going back to 1978, when a full-scale invasion of Lebanon was launched using the shooting of the Israeli ambassador to Britain by Palestinian militants as a pretext. Only much later did it emerge that the invasion had been long planned, awaiting only the proper incident to provide a suitable official justification.
The same pattern is repeated in Gaza and Lebanon today. The Israeli regime has made no secret of its desire to smash up the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. The economic blockade imposed in January, after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, has been escalated into a full-scale military blockade of Gaza, where Hamas has its main political support.
In Lebanon, the goal of Israel is, at a minimum, the physical destruction of Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic movement which dominates the southern third of the country. A full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon by Israeli ground forces is more than likely. Israeli Defense Minister Peretz said, "If the government of Lebanon fails to deploy its forces, as is expected of a sovereign government, we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel." In other words, if the Lebanese army does not suppress Hezbollah--and no one expects it too--then the Israeli army will do so.
US military intervention in Lebanon is also likely. US media reports Friday suggested that the initial planning for such an intervention was well advanced, with 2,200 Marines to be deployed as a helicopter-borne force that would land near Beirut on the pretext of protecting the 25,000 American citizens now trapped in Lebanon by the Israeli blockade.
Separate or joint US and Israeli air strikes against Syria and Iran, and even a ground invasion of Syria, are also possible. Certainly the main focus of the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media has been to blame Syria and Iran for the crisis, claiming that those regimes were pulling the strings in Hezbollah.
The US media has suggested that Hezbollah's kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers was specifically ordered by Tehran in retaliation for the referral of Iran to the UN Security Council earlier this week, in the ongoing dispute over its nuclear research program. The Bush administration has likewise blamed Syria for the ongoing insurgency in Iraq's Anbar province, since supplies and recruits have come across the Syrian border.
The US invasion and occupation of Iraq have produced a holocaust for the Iraqi people: a mounting slaughter in which tens of thousands have been killed, by sectarian gangs and militia, by car bombs and other terrorist acts, and by bombs, shells, missile attacks, indiscriminate shooting or outright murder on the part of the American occupiers.
Last week it was reported that 1,595 bodies had been brought to the Baghdad morgue during June, the largest monthly death toll yet in the escalating civil strife. The US military death toll is well over 2,500. Combined with the death toll for US soldiers in Afghanistan, Bush will soon be responsible for the destruction of more American lives than the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
The Bush administration will not retreat from Iraq and cannot maintain the status quo, as the country slides deeper into civil war and popular opposition to the war mounts among the American people. A sizeable section of the US ruling elite, frustrated by the quagmire in Iraq, believes that the only hope of military success lies in "expanding the problem," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has put it. They believe that Iran is using its growing influence on the Iraqi Shiite parties and militias to undermine US control of the puppet regime established in Baghdad, and that a military confrontation with Tehran is inevitable.
The Wall Street Journal is the semi-official voice of these layers, and it published an editorial Friday, entitled "States of Terror," which openly advocated military action against both Syria and Iran. The editorial declared, "There will be no resolution in Lebanon and Gaza until the regimes in Syria and Iran believe they will pay a price..."
Criticizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her pro forma appeal that "all sides must act with restraint," the Journal said, "The White House has cited Syria and Iran as the culprits behind this week's events, but more forceful words and action are called for."
The mushrooming crisis in the Middle East is a predictable consequence of the massive military intervention by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the increasingly aggressive and reckless policy of American imperialism throughout the region. This includes the carte blanche given by the Bush administration to Israel to use its US-financed and US-built war machine against its neighbors and against the persecuted and oppressed Palestinian people.
The policy of United States and Israel is based on a never-ending cycle of war. The Bush administration rests its entire foreign policy on the belief that American military power and high-tech weaponry can solve every problem. The Zionist project is similarly predicated on unrestrained use of force against the Palestinians and other targets, such as Hezbollah. Both policies have proven to be disastrous for the people of the region, including the Jewish population of Israel.
As a US client state, Israel has long been dependent on a vast flow of economic and military aid from Washington. For the last decade, it has sought to exploit the unchallenged international supremacy of the United States, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, to reject any negotiations for a territorial settlement with the Palestinians and instead impose its dictates unilaterally on the Palestinian Authority.
This was the content of the Sharon government's withdrawal last year from Gaza, closing down a handful of unviable settlements in order to draw an international border with 1.5 million Palestinians on the other side, insuring a Jewish majority in Israel and the remaining occupied territories for at least another decade.
Similar concerns are driving the Olmert government's policy of wall-building and resettlement on the West Bank. While planning to abandon a handful of Zionist settlements, Olmert's government is drawing the new border unilaterally to give the best land to the Israelis, including all of Jerusalem, while the Palestinians are relegated to a rump state on barely 60 percent of the occupied territory.
In the last few days, the American media has been filled with denunciations of Hamas and Hezbollah, portraying them as terrorist organizations and fitting targets for a massive escalation of military force. But in the final analysis, the real target of the United States and Israel is not this or that organization, but the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East. They aim to destroy the will to struggle of the tens of millions of people who have never accepted the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinian people, and who will never accept the US conquest of Iraq and the establishment of a neo-colonial stooge regime in Baghdad.
There is a profound sense in which the policies of the United States and Israel appear counterproductive and self-defeating. The Bush administration played a major role in creating the current Lebanese government, and the forced withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon has been touted as one of its few foreign policy successes in the Middle East. Yet the Israeli attacks threaten to undermine and discredit the regime in Beirut, which is compelled to stand by impotently while Lebanese citizens are slaughtered, now in the dozens, soon perhaps in the hundreds and thousands.
Similarly, it might appear irrational that an administration which has been unable to subjugate Iraq (population 26 million), would attack Syria (population 18 million) and even Iran (population 75 million). But such attacks are the logical outcome of the imperialist perspective that it is possible for American imperialism to impose its will on the Middle East, and obtain control of the region's vast oil resources, through sheer force of arms.
In reality, the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq has proven a strategic disaster for American imperialism. It has aroused the population of the entire region, and literally billions of people throughout the world, dispelling illusions that the United States could be identified with democracy, freedom or opposition to colonialism.
It is now 58 years since the state of Israel was established, and 39 years since the Six-Day War which expanded Zionist control of Palestinian territory to include the West Bank and Gaza. These six decades have been an unending chain of violence--war, repression, terrorism, assassination, the expulsion of populations. Now a new and even more terrible war threatens.
The first premise of any solution to the crisis of the Middle East is the removal of American imperialism from the region. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party demand the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and an end to Washington's military and financial sponsorship of Israeli domination over the Palestinian people.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
GUSH SHALOM
The Israeli Peace Bloc
POB 3322
Tel-Aviv 61033
Web: http://www.gush-shalom.org/
E-mail: info@gush-shalom.org
- Saturday, 15 July 2006 -
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By senior analyst Uri Avnery
THE REAL aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government.
That was the aim of Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It failed. But Sharon and his pupils in the military and political leadership have never really given up on it.
As in 1982, the present operation, too, was planned and is being carried out in full coordination with the US.
As then, there is no doubt that it is coordinated with a part of the Lebanese elite.
That's the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda.
ON THE eve of the 1982 invasion, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Ariel Sharon that, before starting it, it was necessary to have a "clear provocation", which would be accepted by the world.
The provocation indeed took place -- exactly at the appropriate time -- when Abu-Nidal's terror gang tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. This had no connection with Lebanon, and even less with the PLO (the enemy of Abu-Nidal), but it served its purpose.
This time, the necessary provocation has been provided by the capture of the two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah. Everyone knows that they cannot be freed except through an exchange of prisoners. But the huge military campaign that has been ready to go for months was sold to the Israeli and international public as a rescue operation.
(Strangely enough, the very same thing happened two weeks earlier in the Gaza Strip. Hamas and its partners captured a soldier, which provided the excuse for a massive operation that had been prepared for a long time and whose aim is to destroy the Palestinian government.)
THE DECLARED aim of the Lebanon operation is to push Hizbullah away from the border, so as to make it impossible for them to capture more soldiers and to launch rockets at Israeli towns. The invasion of the Gaza strip is also officially aimed at getting Ashkelon and Sderot out of the range of the Qassams.
That resembles the 1982 "Operation Peace for Gallilee". Then, the public and the Knesset were told that the aim of the war was to "push the Katyushas 40 km away from the border".
That was a deliberate lie. For 11 months before the war, not a single Katyusha rocket (nor a single shot) had been fired over the border. From the beginning, the aim of the operation was to reach Beirut and install a Quisling dictator. As I have recounted more than once, Sharon himself told me so nine months before the war, and I duly published it at the time, with his consen (but unattributed).
Of course, the present operation also has several secondary aims, which do not include the freeing of the prisoners. Everybody understands that that cannot be achieved by military means. But it is probably possible to destroy some of the thousands of missiles that Hizbullah has accumulated over the years. For this end, the army chiefs are ready to endanger the inhabitants of the Israeli towns that are exposed to the rockets. They believe that that is worthwhile, like an exchange of chess figures.
Another secondary aim is to rehabilitate the "deterrent power" of the army. That is a codeword for the restoration of the army's injured pride that has suffered a severe blow from the daring military actions of Hamas in the south and Hizbullah in the north.
OFFICIALLY, THE Israeli government demands that the Government of Lebanon disarm Hizbullah and remove it from the border region.
That is clearly impossible under the present Lebanese regime, a delicate fabric of ethno-religious communities. The slightest shock can bring the whole structure crashing down and throw the state into total anarchy -- especially after the Americans succeeded in driving out the Syrian army, the only element that has for years provided some stability.
The idea of installing a Quisling in Lebanon is nothing new. In 1955, David Ben-Gurion proposed taking a "Christian officer" and installing him as dictator. Moshe Sharet showed that this idea was based on complete ignorance of Lebanese affairs and torpedoed it. But 27 years later, Ariel Sharon tried to put it into effect nevertheless. Bashir Gemayel was indeed installed as president, only to be murdered soon afterwards. His brother, Amin, succeeded him and signed a peace agreement with Israel, but was driven out of office. (The same brother is now publicly supporting the Israeli operation.)
The calculation now is that if the Israeli Air Force rains heavy enough blows on the Lebanese population --paralysing the sea- and airports, destroying the infrastructure, bombarding residential neighborhoods, cutting the Beirut-Damascus highroad etc. -- the public will get furious with Hizbullah and pressure the Lebanese government into fulfilling Israel's demands. Since the present government cannot even dream of doing so, a dictatorship will be set up with Israel's support.
That is the military logic. I have my doubts. It can be assumed that most Lebanese will react as any other people on earth would: with fury and hatred towards the invader. That happened in 1982, when the Shiites in the south of Lebanon, until then as docile as a doormat, stood up against the Israeli occupiers and created the Hizbullah, which has become the strongest force in the country. If the Lebanese elite now becomes tainted as collaborators with Israel, it will be swept off the map.(By the way, have the Qassams and Katyushas caused the Israeli population to exert pressure on our government to give up? Quite the contrary.)
The American policy is full of contradictions. President Bush wants "regime change" in the Middle East, but the present Lebanese regime has only recently been set up by under American pressure. In the meantime, Bush has succeeded only in breaking up Iraq and causing a civil war (as foretold here). He may get the same in Lebanon, if he does not stop the Israeli army in time. Moreover, a devastating blow against Hizbullah may arouse fury not only in Iran, but also among the Shiites in Iraq, on whose support all of Bush's plans for a pro-American regime are built.
So what's the answer? Not by accident, Hizbullah has carried out its soldier-snatching raid at a time when the Palestinians are crying out for succor. The Palestinian cause is popular all over the Arab word. By showing that they are a friend in need, when all other Arabs are failing dismally, Hizbullah hopes to increase its popularity. If an Israeli-Palestinian agreement had been achieved by now, Hizbullah would be no more than a local Lebanese phenomenon, irrelevant to our situation.
LESS THAN three months after its formation, the Olmert-Peretz government has succeeded in plunging Israel into a two-front war, whose aims are unrealistic and whose results cannot be foreseen.
If Olmert hopes to be seen as Mister Macho-Macho, a Sharon #2, he will be disappointed. The same goes for the desperate attempts of Peretz to be taken seriously as an imposing Mister Security. Everybody understands that this campaign -- both in Gaza and in Lebanon -- has been planned by the army and dictated by the army. The man who makes the decisions in Israel now is Dan Halutz. It is no accident that the job in Lebanon has been turned over to the Air Force.
The public is not enthusiastic about the war. It is resigned to it, in stoic fatalism, because it is being told that there is no alternative. And indeed, who can be against it? Who does not want to liberate the "kidnapped soldiers"? Who does not want to remove the Katyushas and rehabilitate deterrence? No politician dares to criticize the operation (except the Arab MKs, who are ignored by the Jewish public). In the media, the generals reign supreme, and not only those in uniform. There is almost no former general who is not being invited by the media to comment, explain and justify, all speaking in one voice.
(As an illustration: Israel's most popular TV channel invited me to an interview about the war, after hearing that I had taken part in an anti-war demonstration. I was quite surprised. But not for long -- an hour before the broadcast, an apologetic talk-show host called and said that there had been a terrible mistake -- they really meant to invite Professor Shlomo Avineri, a former Director General of the Foreign Office who can be counted on to justify any act of the government, whatever it may be, in lofty academic language.)
"Inter arma silent Musae" -- when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent. Or, rather: when the guns roar, the brain ceases to function.
AND JUST a small thought: when the State of Israel was founded in the middle of a cruel war, a poster was plastered on the walls: "All the country -- a front! All the people -- an army!"
58 Years have passed, and the same slogan is still as valid as it was then. What does that say about generations of statesmen and generals?
Copyright 2006 Uri Avnery
*****
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With Israel's missiles raining down on their streets,
the Lebanese remain defiant in the face of sustained attack
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SUNDAY HERALD
International News
16 July 2006
http://www.sundayherald.com/56818
By Lucy Fielder in Beirut
The moment the Lebanese hoped they would never have to see again has arrived. "It is a war now," says Grazulita Miro, a hairdresser sitting outside the open but deserted Salon Tony in the eastern Beirut suburb of Achrafieh. "After four days of this Israeli bombing, what else should we call it?"
It's Saturday morning, and the sense of relief in Beirut is palpable after a night free of raids. But it is short-lived. A population glued to the radio or TV, when the rationed power comes on, soon learns that the bombing has spread east and north. Then the bombing starts in the southern suburb of Haret Hreik, then at Beirut's port -- a stone's throw from crowds of waiting escapees at Charles Helou bus station.
In the early evening an Israeli rocket hits the lighthouse on the capital's fabled sea-front. The destruction, or what the international community terms "excessive force", has come to Beirut proper.
The death toll has reached 99 in four days of bombing: all but three were civilians. The Lebanese are glued to televisions showing the carnage. In Saturday's bloodiest attack, 20 people were killed when an Israeli missile incinerated their van. Fifteen were children.
Panic has been mounting for days, but as cars clog the roads to the mountains and foreigners prepare to evacuate the city, Fatima Makki heads the opposite way: south.
"Most people are still here," she says. "They believe that even just by being here, they're sending a message to Israel: 'We're staying.'"
Makki, a 32-year-old teacher, is travelling south to check that her mother is unharmed, as she refused to leave her home in the mainly Shi'ite area. Makki doesn't stop her flow of anger as another bomb explodes nearby, loud and terrifyingly close. "Everyone goes out on the streets 10 minutes after a bomb to take a look," she says. "I don't know if it's religion that makes us strong, but we trust in God, we trust the resistance, and whatever decision [Hezbollah leader] Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah makes."
Israel's systematic destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and economy, still being painstakingly rebuilt after the last war, started early on Thursday morning. Repair work on the ruined airport road bridge began half an hour later at 5am, according to foreman Abu Hassan from the Hezbollah-run local municipality.
"Where's the world?" Hassan asks, balancing on a fallen stretch of tarmac and twisted metal. "Where are the Arabs? To hell with the Arab leaders -- it's up to us now to serve Lebanon, to get our prisoners back. That's why we're all with Hezbollah till the end."
A man the workers identify as a local Hezbollah official pulls up, wheels screeching. "I want this bridge up by the end of the day," he roars. There's a pause, then chuckles and high-fives all round.
At the Sahel Hospital across the road from the bombed bridge, nurse Nada Najdeh says they received two dead and 20 injured on Thursday night when the bombing started. When a rocket hit just 30 metres away, the windows shattered. "We all went down to the operation rooms in the basement and the children were crying. It was very hard for them," she says. "Who would do this? If you bomb the bridge, you're also bombing the hospital next to it."
Nobody blamed Hezbollah, Najdeh says. "We all spoke with one word. We were steadfast."
Past a row of destroyed shops and a pavement of broken glass, Ahmad Abu Alaa has kept his car park and refreshment kiosk open. A giant hand appears to have crumpled the neighbouring Airport Bridge Bakery kiosk, and a jagged strip of corrugated iron skewers the glass-fronted fridge.
Alla has six children; the youngest is 10. "The kids were scared but we explained everything," he says. "'These are Israeli planes, they don't like us, we have to trust in God.' We all read the Koran together for the sake of the little ones." He pauses and smiles. "And the grown-ups as well."
On nearby Ghobeiry Square, air- conditioning engineer Mohammad Qumati stands on the edge of a crater, the wave of his arm taking in a black plume of smoke from the airport fuel tanks bleeding across the summer sky. "All this is nothing, compared to our dignity," he says. Youths pull up on motorbikes and stand at the edge, taking photos with their mobile phones.
Not only Shi'ites support Hezbollah's seizure of the soldiers. Many others are glad to see an Arab movement standing up to Israel after the international community dithered in the wake of massive raids on Gaza.
A young man sitting on Beirut's corniche, a Sunni who doesn't usually support Hezbollah, says he's behind them this time. "I'm just glad someone's doing something, achieving something, about Israel's killing of Palestinians," he says. "Nobody else will."
After months of growing clamour within Lebanon and elsewhere for Hezbollah's disarmament -- or in the new terminology, finding a "national defence strategy" -- Hezbollah has brought the fight with Israel home to all Lebanese. Only last weekend, the main concern for many middle-class Beirutis was whether to sunbathe in Beirut or head to the now inaccessible private beach resorts in Jiyyeh, just south of Beirut.
The whole country is smaller than Wales, but it sometimes feels as though there are two Lebanons. The capital, the mountains and the north are populated by a mix of sects dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslims. And then there's the mainly Shi'ite south, beginning at Beirut's now battered suburbs. It was the south that Israel occupied -- parts of it for 22 years -- until pulling out in 2000 after losses to Hezbollah's guerrillas became too high.
A Lebanese friend inadvertently summed it up a few weeks ago when she mused aloud: "Half the time I forget the south was occupied."
Amal Saad-Ghoreyeb, a politics professor at the Lebanese American University and author of a book on Hezbollah, says the south has often seemed separate: "Shi'ite communities don't support Hezbollah just because they are Shi'ite. Because they have borne the brunt of Israel's attacks it's only natural they should be more radical."
The same is true today, but this onslaught affects everyone more than any Israeli attack since the 15-year civil war ended in 1990. The city awoke on Thursday to scores of casualties in the south and news that Israeli jets had bombed the runways of the country's only international airport. A surreal sense of panic mounted along with the civilian death toll. Streams of 4x4s clogged the mountain roads north and east to the Syrian border. By Saturday, the exodus is more widespread. Long queues form at petrol stations; shoppers stock up on bottled water, candles and canned food.
It was dawn on Thursday when the loud whine of an Israeli jet first shook Beirutis from their sleep. An explosion shattered the night air, a mile or so away but brought near by the city's silence. For an hour or two jets rumbled and circled, the bombs crashed and thudded in the nearby southern suburbs, frantic calls were made to relatives in the besieged Shi'ite areas. The sound barrier rented above us with a terrifying boom, not once, but many times. Then the missiles were launched from the battleship, fierce and sudden without the warning hum of a jet. Three were killed in those raids, and three main bridges were ruined. All escape routes have since been cut. Israel has destroyed the port, bridges and roads north and east to Syria.
On Friday night, besieged Beirut is a silent shadow of its usually vibrant self. Intermittent bombing punctures the air in central Beirut as the sun goes down, driving the remaining stragglers home. Streets are dark and silent but for the rumble of electricity generators and the occasional car tearing home to safety. In the central suburb of Ras el-Nabeh, a grocer tidies his shelves by the light of three candles. Nasrallah is giving a defiant speech, which blares from battery-powered radios.
Nearby Monot Street, the usually pumping main bar strip, takes 30 seconds to drive down instead of half an hour of jams and cursing the nightclubs' valet parking. No youths swig from bottles outside the off licence; no beats thud from behind the shuttered doors. "It feels like 5am and it's not even 11pm", says Roody, the DJ in Torino's cafe bar in nearby Gemmayze, jerking his head towards the subdued huddle at the bar. It seems an age since the only battle most young Lebanese cared about was between Italy and France in al-Mondiale.
At Ramlet el-Baida, at the end of Beirut's fabled seafront promenade, an impromptu celebration has just broken up, a few lingering middle-aged men say. Far out in the darkness is a stricken Israeli battleship, hit by Hezbollah's rockets and betrayed only when it sends up the occasional flare.
"It burned for about 10 minutes before they put it out," plumber Mohammed Munzir says jubilantly. He gestures to a snack bar over the road. "We were watching Nasrallah's speech, and as he said they'd hit the ship, we rushed outside to have a look and saw the rockets strike it, two of them. We were all shouting and clapping."
On cue, a car hurtles past packed with bellowing youths holding up the victory sign and the yellow Hezbollah flag.
Nobody in the Shi'ite southern suburbs denies that Hezbollah started the latest round by seizing soldiers on Wednesday morning, but to them, it's just the latest battle. The Islamic resistance struck a military target of a military enemy that's holding Lebanese prisoners in its jails and occupying the Shebaa farms, which the UN has ruled are on Israeli-occupied Syrian land, but which Lebanon claims as its own.
"We've learned not to count on the outside world to support us, because they will never do it," Makki says. "But it's a shame on us to live with Israeli aggression. For us, the war never ended."
Copyright 2006 Newsquest (Sunday Herald) Limited. All rights reserved.
*****
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4. FUNDING MMA, PUNISHING HAMAS
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ZNET
Asia
July 16, 2006
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=10575
by Farooq Sulehria
While the European Union and the United States have arrogantly denied the Hamas government any funding, they have been generously funding the coalition of fundamentalist parties ruling Pakistan's North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) for the past four years.
The Mutahida Majlis e Amal (United Action Council or MMA) is Pakistan's version of the Taliban. A coalition of six fundamentalist parties, its two major constituents are Jamiat Ulema Islam and Jamaat Islami. While Jamiat Ulema Islam has been patronising terrorist outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Jamaat Islami played a pivotal role in the anti-Soviet Afghan 'Jihad' in the 1980s and later in the Kashmiri 'Jihad' in the 1990s. Owing to its role as a recruiting agency for the Afghan 'Jihad,' Jamaat Islami has close relations with al-Qaida. Jamiat Ulema Islam, on the other hand, had distanced itself from the Afghan 'Jihad,' but later played an active role in Afghanistan since the Taliban were a product of madrassas (seminaries) run by Jamiat Ulema Islam.
In Pakistan's 2002 parliamentary elections, the MMA received 15 percent of the votes nationally, an electoral 'surprise' that rang alarm bells across the world. It was the MMA's fierce opposition to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that paid them electoral dividends, particularly in Pakistan's third largest province, NWFP. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the MMA chief and head of Jamiat Ulema Islam, once made headlines when he issued a fatwa legitimising the killing of any American sighted in Pakistan. In its election campaign, the MMA also promised to liberate the nation and economy from the IMF and the World