AP/Chicago Tribune, July 17, 2006 ISRAELI WAR CRIMES IN LEBANON: - FAILURE OF AMERICAN MIDDLE-EAST POLICY: ---------------------------------------------- Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a supporter (one of very few good and reasonable Jews) of unilateral withdrawal, said the Gaza September 2005 pullout was done only with the stick and no carrots and should have been accomanied by aid to Palestinians, Gaza is still under Israeli occupation, constant incursions, see & air control, border crossing still controlled by israel. Hezzbolla and Hamas had choice, Hezbola's actions are not fully justified, but Israel's 100 times out of proportion retaliation is nothing but a war crime and they will not achieve their goals, not in the long or short run, Israel has the right to defand itself, but so do other nations, Israel will not defeat Hezzbolla, not even in the long run, this is the war with Lebanon now, as a whole and everything else is a pure lie. Israel will loose this war, especially morally, they already destroyed the nature, they bombed oil infrastructures and over 20 000 tons of heavy black oil spilled into waters, destroyed nature and wild-life, fish and destroyed beautiful beaches for many years to come, clearly, Israelis are no longer people of God but bunch of terrorists who have no regard for civilian life, for nature (thus for God) who retaliate with unimaginable disproportion. ------------------------------------------------------ The escalation in the region is not in the interest of the U.S. It strengthens anti-Americanism worldwide and fuels radicalism in the Arab and Muslim world. It also reverses hard-earned gains in the region, such as fledgling democracies in Palestine and Lebanon. The U.S. does not have to abandon Israel to defend its other interests in the region. All it has to do is use its enormous leverage to ensure that Israel's policies are moderate and prudent and safeguard both Israeli and American interests. The crisis in the Middle East is rapidly reaching dangerous proportions. Unless a heavy dose of sanity is injected into the region's affairs immediately, it is likely to escalate into a wider conflict that will make Iraq look like a picnic. The only player perhaps capable of playing this role is the U.S. The U.S. has the most to lose if things get out of hand. Its key interests in the region--oil, Israel and liberalism--are all in jeopardy. Oil is already at a record high, closing at $77.03 Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, due to fears of disruption in case of a wider war. Israel has never been more insecure. Its two biggest enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are effectively in control in the north and south and are shooting rockets at Israel. The oil should be no more than 60$, the republicans will decrease the price of oil before the election, to make it seem they did the 'miracle'. U.S. attempts to promote democracy and liberalism in the region had made both Hamas and Hezbollah legitimate political forces. Now its own ally, Israel, has undermined Palestinian democracy with its military campaign in Gaza, and by attacking Lebanon it is strengthening support for Hezbollah. Israel easily could have engaged in a prisoner exchange with Hamas and Hezbollah, as it has done several times in the past, and the matter would have ended there. But Israel's overwhelming response to the capture of its soldiers, at a time when Iraq is on the brink of a civil war and the Iranian nuclear crisis is at its zenith, is undermining all the key pillars of American national interests in the region. However, I do not blame Israel for this crisis. It is doing what it thinks it must to pursue its security and its interests. I am wondering whether the U.S. is doing everything it should to defend its interests. All players in the region are pursuing self-interest. The ability of Hamas and Hezbollah to attack the invincible military of Israel and score successes, killing and capturing soldiers and shooting rockets, must have sent a chill down Israel's spine. It is reacting with overwhelming force out of fear. Israel's future depends on its military power, and it thinks that by punishing Palestinians and Lebanese civilians it can restore that fear and deter future attacks. Hezbollah, under pressure from within Lebanon and the international community to demilitarize, has once again succeeded in presenting itself as the only defense that Lebanon has against Israel. Israel's brutal, criminal killing of dozens of Lebanese civilians and bombing of Beirut will merely increase support for Hezbollah. Iran, thanks to America's foolhardy adventure in Iraq, is rapidly emerging as a regional power. It is protecting itself from America's pressure on the nuclear issue by creating a dangerous diversion. Meanwhile, Muslims across the world are watching a nuclear power supported, armed and funded by the U.S. bombard and kill dozens of civilians, destroy the economy and infrastructure of Palestine and Lebanon, kidnap dozens of elected Palestinian leaders, bomb their homes, and all the U.S. does is provide political cover for Israel in the UN Security Council and on the world stage. Al Qaeda must be running out of enrollment forms. The escalation in the region is not in the interest of the U.S. It strengthens anti-Americanism worldwide and fuels radicalism in the Arab and Muslim world. It also reverses hard-earned gains in the region, such as fledgling democracies in Palestine and Lebanon. The U.S. does not have to abandon Israel to defend its other interests in the region. All it has to do is use its enormous leverage to ensure that Israel's policies are moderate and prudent and safeguard both Israeli and American interests. ---------- Muqtedar Khan is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Credits: L.J. / Khan is non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Trauma of war is scarring Lebanese children Scheherezade Faramarzi, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. St. Louis Post - Dispatch. St. Louis, Mo, Jul 30, 2006. SHARON & OLMERT ARE NOTHING BUT PURE WAR CRIMINALS WHO SHOULD GET THE DEATH PENALTY, PUBLIC HANGING WOULD BE APPROPRIATE !!! THE ISRAELI CRIMES IN LEBANON (Over 1300 dead, 95% civilians) --------------------------------------------------------------- A third of Lebanese killed in Israeli attacks against Hezbollah guerrillas are children, the U.N. humanitarian chief said. Experts warn the conflict is taking a heavy psychological toll on survivors, as well. "You can't run away from the sound of bombs," said Nadine Maalouf, a child psychologist who has been working with traumatized children. Lebanese are no strangers to violence, having suffered through the 1975-90 civil war and Israel's 1982 invasion. But parents who lived through those conflicts had hoped to shield their children. Instead, they have found themselves helpless in the face of relentless Israeli airstrikes on guerrilla positions in Beirut and southern Lebanon that have flattened entire neighborhoods. "There was a plane that made a pffff sound," 11-year-old Noor el- Hoda Sherri said, recalling her terror during the bombardment of her Haret Hreik neighborhood, which destroyed her apartment building. "My heart was hurting. It was pounding very fast," she said, squeezing her chest. "I was thinking, 'This is it, we are going to die. This is our destiny.' I said, 'God will now punish me for all the things I did wrong.'" Ali Kalash, 14, said that when an Israeli missile hit Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV studios in Haret Hreik on July 13, he and a dozen friends -- anticipating more attacks -- scribbled their names on a water tank near their homes "so that we can recognize our homes when the war is over." His family's apartment building was destroyed in the strike, and they sought refuge in the same underground shelter as Noor el-Holda and her family. "I was thinking we're all going to die and we'd never come back," Ali said. U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland estimated that a third of the hundreds of people killed in Lebanon were children. UNICEF spokeswoman Susan Lagana said Friday that Egeland's figure was based on numbers compiled by UNICEF. "There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children then armed men," Egeland said Friday at U.N. headquarters in New York. "It has to stop." Variety of symptoms: At least 443 people -- most of them civilians -- have been confirmed killed in Lebanon since fighting broke out after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a July 12 cross-border raid. On Thursday, Lebanon's health minister put the number at as many as 600 civilians. Fifty-two Israelis have been killed in the fighting, including 19 civilians who died in a Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel. Three were children -- two boys, ages 4 and 8, from the town of Nazareth, and a 15-year-old girl from the village of Mughar. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have been displaced, fleeing to shelters in schools, parks and underground parking lots. It will be years before homes can be rebuilt, and the children will probably have to move to unfamiliar neighborhoods -- deepening their trauma, Maalouf said. That's when the children will miss "their point of reference" -- their friends, their favorite play spots, the store where they bought ice cream, she said. Her clients have shown a variety of symptoms, ranging from depression and hypertension to withdrawal. Many parents say their children have become aggressive or unruly. And they relive their horrifying experiences in dreams or in drawings. Is `moral equivalency' really so wrong ? (No equilibrium for Israelis) -------------------------------------------- Henry Siegman. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif, Jun 18, 2006. Israel: A June 18 article on the Mideast conflict stated that a father and his six children were killed in a June 9 Israeli artillery strike on a Gaza beach. A man, his wife and five children in their family died. The article also said that Palestinian civilians have been killed "virtually every day" since Israel's disengagement from Gaza. Statistics from B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, show that Palestinian civilians have been killed on fewer than half the days since the disengagement last year. THE DEATH OF an entire Palestinian family -- a father and his six children -- on a Gaza beach earlier this month, followed just a few days later by an Israeli missile strike that killed nine more Palestinian civilians, has reopened the controversy about whether there is really much difference between Palestinian terrorism and Israel's military retaliations. Writing in Israel's Maariv, columnist Dan Margalit argues that "even if an Israeli shell killed them, there was no intention to kill peaceful civilians on a beach in Gaza. On the other hand, the Kassam [rockets] fired at Sderot is an ongoing, systematic and conscious effort at the premeditated killing of [Israeli] civilians." He concludes that "only a world lacking integrity and full of conspiracies ignores the decisive difference in intentions between the two sides." The last time this controversy flared was following the release of Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich." The movie was criticized for its "moral equivalence," allegedly equating Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliations. Much in the spirit of Margalit's angry comment, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic argued at the time that the equation is false because "the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective." The distinction might have had greater merit if Israeli strikes held out any prospect of ending, or even reducing, Palestinian terrorism. In fact, they have the opposite effect. Ofer Shelah writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that even those in the Israeli Defense Forces responsible for this policy now admit that in the early days of the Palestinian intifada, retaliatory strikes contributed to the continuation of the conflict and the great outbreak of terrorism starting in mid-2001. The IDF's notion that "what doesn't work by force will work with more force" has proved its bankruptcy. The vast disproportion between Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli "mistakes" and Israeli casualties from Palestinian terrorist assaults also brings into question the distinction between the two. It suggests that the killing of Palestinian civilians is, at the very least, more a matter of Israeli indifference than a mistake. Israelis kill palestinian civilians like flies. They have to kill em on daily bases to get their 'fix'. Not a single Israeli has been killed by a Kassam rocket since Israel's disengagement from Gaza last year, although during this period Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis. (According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis). More important, judgments about the morality of Israeli military strikes that kill innocents cannot be made without reference to the political context within which the violence occurs. Even when Israeli attacks are carried out with care to avoid harm to civilians, "collateral damage," in which innocent Palestinians are killed or maimed, only can be justified if Israel also is engaged in a serious and realistic attempt to reach a negotiated solution. But since the Labor Party was voted out of office in 2000, Israel's policy has been to refuse to consider concessions that would have to be made in negotiations with the Palestinians. Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateralism, embraced by his successor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, was never intended as a bridge to a renewal of the peace process but as a strategy for its avoidance. It is a policy that the Labor Party, despite occasional campaign rhetoric, has largely supported. In the opinion of most Israeli security experts, terrorism cannot be defeated unless Israel offers Palestinians a credible political prospect for achieving viable statehood. Without such a political prospect -- which for all practical purposes has been eliminated by the conditions imposed by war criminal Olmert for a renewal of peace talks and by continuing Israeli settlement expansion deep into the West Bank -- Israeli retaliations degenerate into vengeance and have no claim to greater moral justification than Palestinian terrorism. Palestinians insist that, like the Israelis, their objective is not to kill innocent civilians but to end a crushing occupation that is now in its 40th year. Killing civilians is seen by some of them - - immorally and stupidly -- as a means to that end. BUT THEY are not alone in this. Some in the Jewish community in Palestine also resorted to this means when they were engaged in their own struggle for national independence and statehood. The Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that morphed into the Likud, first targeted Arab civilians in October 1937. In his history of Israel's War of Independence, "Righteous Victims," Benny Morris writes that the Irgun "introduced a new dimension to the conflict" when "for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centers, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed." Morris writes that in 1937, "this 'innovation' soon found Arab imitators." Of course, the killing of innocents was utterly immoral when Jews resorted to it during their struggle for independence, and it is just as utterly immoral when Palestinians resort to it now. When accounting for the different stages in which the Jewish and Palestinian national struggles find themselves, their moral (or immoral) equivalence could not be more precise. No serious person can believe that Israel -- with one of the world's most powerful military establishments -- is at risk of being undone and eliminatedd by Hamas or by any other terrorist group. With or without Hamas' recognition, Israel's existence is not in doubt. In a recent interview in Haaretz, Efraim Halevy, who served as head of the Mossad from 1998 to 2002 and as national security advisor to Sharon, ridiculed the notion that a terrorist group could endanger Israel's existence. Furthermore, if Israel were to enter into a negotiation with Palestinians that actually recognized Palestinian national rights and the pre-1967 borders, I believe -- based on extensive conversations with the players in the region -- that Hamas would agree to minor and reciprocal border adjustments. Skeptics must be reminded that of all the various strategies resorted to by Israel over the years to end its conflict with the Palestinians, none of which has come even close to achieving that goal, the one it has never tried is returning to pre-1967 borders as the starting point for reciprocal adjustments. The overarching moral issue for Israel is whether the additional territory it seeks to hold is worth the inevitable cost in Palestinian and Israeli lives. The question for Israelis is whether the shattering of an entire people, in the West Bank and "liberated" Gaza, and the Palestinian and Israeli lives yet to be extinguished as a new intifada is triggered by the IDF's determination to convince Palestinians that they are a defeated people, is a price they are prepared to continue to pay for their government's unilateralist fixation. Credit: HENRY SIEGMAN is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and a visiting professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. L.J. KNOWS STUFF ON MISSLE EAST, NOBODY ELSE DOES !!! www.rferl.org.org/featuresarticle/2006/08/75772799-bb3f-4626-8d15-3a360bb6a817.html Lebaon Cease fire takes effect, casualties on both sides WHY WAS IT SO HARD FOR ISRAEL TO STOP THE ATTACKS AT LEAST ONE DAY BEFORE, CEASE FIRE HAS BEEN SIGNED MANY DAYS AGO, THAT WAS TOTALLY UNWARRANTED AND UNCALLED FOR, FROM START TO END = THOSE WERE WAR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY !!!