"Earnest Hypocrisy: The U.N., Lebanon, and Israeli Exceptionalism
Paradoxically, the harshest criticism of the U.N. comes not from those many 'developing nations' repeatedly screwed by that august body's failures to fulfill its own charter and mandates, but from within the two [sic] most profligate scofflaw nations, the United States and Israel. Considering their blind-eye approach to the myriad crimes commited by these twin rogues, who now can take seriously the U.N.'s demand that Syria quit Lebanon? -{lex}
Kurt Nimmo
March 12, 2005
If you were a Syrian, what would you think? Here�s the United Nations, specifically envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian, telling Bashar Assad to get out of Lebanon and be quick about it, or face �economic isolation,� as the Washington Post puts it. Roed-Larsen used UN. Resolution 1559 like a stick against Assad. �If he doesn�t deliver, there will be total political and economic isolation of his country. There is a steel-hard consensus in the international community,� warned another UN official.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the south, the outlaw state of Israel has violated literary dozens of UN resolutions (see this list). Israel has racked up violations of international law for raids on Gaza and the West Bank, raids against Syria, raids against Jordan, raids against Lebanon, raids against Iraq, raids against Tunisia, expulsions of Palestinians, annexation of Syria's Golan Heights, and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
You may remember Roed-Larsen’s comment last year about the “deterioration of law and order in Palestinian areas,” a comment deputy Israeli ambassador Arye Mekel agreed with. If you were a Palestinian, you might be angry with this European bureaucrat for taking the Palestinian Authority to task while Israelis settlers and soldiers murder Arab school children, bulldoze homes (with people still inside), and assassinate your leaders.
If you were a Syrian, you might think there is a double standard at work here. Terje Roed-Larsen has not threatened Ariel Sharon with “total political and economic isolation.” If you were Syrian, you might wonder why the hell some European white man is threatening your country. The last time the United Nations talked like this against Arabs, 500,000 Iraqi children died. If you were a Syrian, you might remember a little bit of history, for instance the fact Lebanon was at one time considered part of Syria—that is until the French arrived and started carving things up in their own interest and against the interests of the Syrians. If you were Syrian, you might realize that in fact most of the borders in the Middle East were contrived by white Europeans for their benefit and when the Arabs refused to pay along with this nonsense thousands of them were slaughtered. Winston Churchill made no bones about it: recalcitrant Arabs should be gassed. Some eighty years after Churchill said this, the United States used mustard gas against the people of Fallujah. For Arabs, nothing much has changed over the last century or so.
If you were Lebanese, no doubt you’d be afraid of the future. “Lebanon confronts nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush—whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq—there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war,” writes Robert Fisk. “Have we forgotten 150,000 dead? Have we forgotten the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes, will be drenched with blood–but the blood will be that of the Lebanese who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom upon them… in the absence of these ’sisterly’ Syrian soldiers, civil conflict might suddenly—mysteriously—return to Lebanon.”
This is precisely what the Bushcons and the Likudites in Israel want—a return to civil strife and ethnic conflict in Lebanon. As Nasser H. Aruri writes in the foreword to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “calculated to produce results deemed beneficial both to American strategic interests and to Israeli expansionist goals. The interests of the Reagan administration and Israel’s Likud government coalesced around three objectives: the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure in Lebanon, the redrawing of the political map in Lebanon, and the reduction of Syria to manageable proportions.” More than 20 years later, not much has changed, except the diminishment of radical Palestinian elements in Lebanon. “The 1982 ‘operation,’ as well as its predecessor, the ‘Litani Operation’ of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and Palestine,” writes Aruri. “In fact, that strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine ‘from the North Litani River up to Banias.’ In the following year, at the Paris peace conference, the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani River. The proposal emphasized the ‘vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources.’”
Juat about everybody who lives in the Middle East knows what the Zionists are all about—stealing land and water and reducing the Arabs—especially Muslim Arabs—into third class citizens in their own countries. As Hezbollah demonstrated in 2000, when they ran the IDF out of southern Lebanon, this will no longer be as simple as it once was and this is why the Zionists have included the Bushcons in the operation. France and the United States believe they can “moderate” Hezbollah and eventually convince it to disarm and demobilize its militias. It’s not going to happen so long as Israel has a military presence on the border and occupies Shebaa Farms and periodically attacks Lebanese villages and Beirut.
Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians are not stupid. They know the problem is not Hezbollah or even Hamas, but the Americans and the Israelis. “For 30 years, America has tolerated—even supported—Syria’s military presence in Lebanon. In 1976, both the Israelis and the Americans wanted Syrian troops in Lebanon—because they would be able to ‘control’ the 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon–but now Mr Bush’s real concern is Syria’s supposed support for the insurgency in Iraq,” writes Robert Fisk. “The irony is extraordinary: 140,000 American troops occupy Iraq—we shall leave the Israeli occupation forces in Palestinian lands out of this equation—while their President demands the withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from Lebanon. Democracy indeed!”
As almost any Syrian or Lebanese can tell you, democracy has nothing to do with it. The Arab and Muslim Middle East “with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel,” Oded Yinon wrote in the 1980s.
How things change. Both Hezbollah and the persistent resistance in Iraq pose serious threats to the Zionist plan for the Middle East. Bush may push a “Cedar revolution” in Lebanon—hoping for an engineered democracy that will eventually “mainstreamize” Hezbollah and flat line its radical appeal—but this will not happen, as between 500,000 and over a million Lebanese indicated earlier this week: Hezbollah represents resistance to Pax Americana and Pax Israelica. Backing Syria in a corner and threatening to bomb Iran will not change this. In fact, if the United States attacks Iran, this will catalyze Shia radicalism. As an example of how this works, consider how the French and US military headquarters were razed by Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, slaughtering more than 300 servicemen after US warships shelled Muslim areas of Lebanon in support of Amin Gemayel, a Falangist (i.e., fascist) Maronite Christian and Israeli sock puppet.
Israel’s Master Plan: Stealing Water from Lebanon, Land from Palestine
Kurt Nimmo
March 10, 2005
As an indicator of how things are going in the Middle East, simply look at the headlines: Syrian troops seen moving toward border and Israel Helps Build 105 Illegal Settlements. As to the former headline: “Lebanese officials said the pullback would be completed by March 23. Deputy Prime Minister Issam Fares said he believes the next phase, the full withdrawal from Lebanon, will be ’speedy’ —but he did not give a date,” and the latter: “Israeli governments have helped build and expand 105 illegal West Bank settlement outposts in a flagrant violation of official policy and promises to the United States, an official inquiry found Wednesday—confirming long-standing complaints by the Palestinians.”
It is simply amazing how quickly Syria responded to Bush’s demand it leave Lebanon. Now Israel can work in earnest in liquidating Hezbollah and once again invade Lebanon and control the catchment of the Litani River. “Almost half of the water currently used in Israel is captured, diverted or preempted from its neighbors,” writes Thomas R. Stauffer. Part of the Likudite Master Plan is to tap the Litani and divert it into Israel’s National Water Carrier system. “In fact, the occupation of the Golan Heights was a first step toward Israel securing the Litani by securing its eastern part by the proposed diversion works,” explains Stauffer. “In addition, in the conflict in 1967, Israel wanted more water than it could get from the war and there are reports that it then started preliminary engineering work.” (See ICE Case Studies: Litani River and Israel-Lebanon by Angela Joy Moss). Like a parasite—funded by the American taxpayer—Israel sucks the life blood out of its neighbors. Meanwhile, it is hoped the engineered “Cedar revolution” will tip the political scale once again in favor of Israel’s allies in Lebanon, the Christian Maronites, at the expense of the majority of the population, which is Muslim.
As for Israel supposedly going back on its promise not to expand outposts—in other words, rabid settlers running around claiming hilltops in Palestine and killing and terrorizing Palestinian civilians—did anybody in their right mind think they would do otherwise? Zionists have made their intentions known for decades and just about everybody—except the benighted American public—knows this is what they are all about. In order to understand what is happening—the wholesale although incremental theft of Palestinian land—take a look at this map. Here’s a map of the land Palestinians were promised in 1948 by the UN General Assembly. Contrast and compare these two maps and you get a pretty good idea what is going on—Israel plans to eventually steal all Palestinian land and “transfer” (a somewhat neutral word for ethnic cleansing) all Palestinians. Only an idiot would believe otherwise—or believe Israel wants to make peace with the Arabs and allow the Palestinians to create their own state.
March 09, 2005
What Ward Churchill Really Said
Hey, Bill O’Reilly, listen up—
or rather surf on over to Counterpunch
and read consortiumnews.com
Although I am plainly no pacifist, I have never advocated terrorist attacks on Wall Street, downtown Seattle, or anywhere else. To make it appear otherwise, [Dan Caplis and Craig Silverman in an op-ed piece in the Rocky Mountain News] have taken material out of context and turned it on its head. My comments in this regard, made to a small group of young anarchists gathered in a Seattle bookstore, went to the idea that they would not accomplish anything useful by marginalizing themselves and engaging in random acts of sabotage along the social periphery.
Drawing upon German theorist Rudi Dutschke’s concept of “a long march through the institutions,” I therefore proposed the alternative that they attempt to work from within the institutional setting, as I myself have done. The “weapons” I referred to were young people’s own consciousness and capacity to transmit it. Along the way, I also pointed out that as relatively privileged Euro-Americans, they were ideally situated to undertake such a project.
Of course, for Bill O’Reilly and the right-wing hit squad, what Churchill is proposing is far more dangerous and revolutionary than his essay commenting on nine eleven, albeit taken wildly out of context. All the more reason for right-wing goons on campus to work behind the scenes to get him fired and thus send a message—only the right-wing world view will be tolerated, anything left of center-right will be attacked and professors and educators with contrary opinions will be sent packing with their careers and lives in tatters. It is a peculiar viciousness and intolerance driving these people.
It should be noted that Rudi Dutschke, the most prominent spokesperson of the German student movement of the 1960s, was shot in the head in 1968 by Josef Bachmann, a young neo-Nazi. Dutschke sustained brain damage and succumbed to complications in 1979. His crime was advocating revolutionary change in society and believing the transformation of Western societies should go hand in hand with third world liberation movements and with democratization in Eastern European communist countries. So outraged were far right-wingers they killed him.
Ward Churchill has received numerous death threats for stating the obvious—a murderous foreign policy has consequences—although the right-wingers have yet attempted to kill him in the way they killed Rudi Dutschke; instead, they are attempting to ruin his career and make sure he does not dissuade black-clad anarchists from trashing banks and fast food restaurants.
Tell Bill O’Reilly the news.
No comments:
Post a Comment