Obama’s visit to Israel and Jordan has brought joy to no one but the Israelis. The US president practically swore an oath of fealty to Israel, speaking not just as a friend and faithful ally, not as a head of state, but as a humble subordinate.
He waxed lyrical on Israel as a land of dreams, then advised the Palestinians to ignore the settlements being built on their land and issued stern warnings to Syria, Iran and Hizbullah.
So eager was Obama to court the Israelis that he suddenly started calling Netanyahu — the very man who supported his rival, Mitt Romney, in the elections — “Bibi”. Tensions between the US president and the Israeli prime minister seemed to evaporate as Obama wandered from one Biblical reference to another while praising Israel for its “shining future”.
Dressed in the colours of the Israeli flag, a blue tie over a white shirt, Obama spared the Israelis no compliment, saying that it was his honour to visit them on Israel’s 65th “independence day”.
“It is good to be in this land,” Obama said in Hebrew, before applauding Israel for being the land of kibbutz that made the desert bloom. His rhetoric was reminiscent of that of a century ago, when the promise of a “land without a people for a people without a land,” launched decades of Palestinian suffering.
Obama didn’t neglect to remind his listeners that he had introduced Passover as a White House celebration.
“After enjoying Seders [Passover] with family and friends in Chicago and on the campaign trail, I’m proud that I’ve now brought this tradition into the White House. I did so because I wanted my daughters to experience the Haggadah and the story at the centre of Passover that makes this time of year so powerful.”
After mentioning the long history of the Jewish people and their years in exile, the sad memories of the Jewish holocaust, Obama showered the Israelis with praise for their many successes.
Then, he lashed out at Iran. Iran’s nuclear programme, he said, is “not simply a challenge for Israel. It is a danger to the entire world, including the United States. A nuclear-armed Iran would raise the risk of nuclear terrorism. It would undermine the non-proliferation regime,” he stated.
Reiterating US commitment to Israeli security, Obama made a pledge: “The security of the Jewish people in Israel is so important. It cannot be taken for granted. But make no mistake. Those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist, they might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere.”
The Israeli website Walla! pointed out that in his speech, the US president mentioned the word “Israel” 82 times and the word “Palestinian” only 21 times.
Obama also visited the tombs of Herzl and Rabin, then the Yad Vashaem Holocaust Memorial. But he declined to visit the tomb of Yasser Arafat. And he refused to meet the daughter of one of the political prisoners held in Israel’s detention camps.
The whole thing seemed as if the US president was telling the Palestinians and Arabs, “This is the land of the Jews; so go look for your land elsewhere!”
Now the writing is on the wall. Those who had taken the US president for a moderate should take note.
March 30, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Obama, Palestine, Syria, United States, Yasser Arafat, Zionism |
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Ankara – In the ugly panorama that is the contemporary Middle East a light hardly flickers on the horizon. Iraq has been destroyed as a unitary Arab state and jihadis unleashed in Syria are burning out another room in the Arab house. Lebanon has again been brought to the brink of implosion through the intrigues of outside governments and local proxies incapable of putting the interests of their country ahead of their sectarian and power intrigues. The Palestinians are divided between those who live under the authority of one man who has bound himself to Israel and the US and two others who have bound themselves to Egypt and Qatar. Fitna – the spreading of division and sowing of hatred amongst Muslims – is being fanned across the region by governments brazen enough to call themselves Muslim. Whether in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, Shiism is the enemy. Ceaselessly stirring this pot from the outside are governments that feast on division in the Arab world.
There are those who loathe Bashar so much that they are willing to commit or tolerate any crime in the name of getting rid of him, including the deliberate bombings of civilians, one taking the lives of a leading Sunni Muslim scholar and 48 other worshippers in a Damascus mosque only recently and another killing 100 people, amongst them children waiting for their school bus. A country Gamal abd al Nasir once described as the ‘beating heart of Arabism’ is being destroyed. Its enemies have their hands inside the body and they intend to rip the heart out. The cooperative at work on this venture includes the US, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the local and foreign-born jihadis who are their tools whether they realize it or not.
That the Syrian system needs changing goes without saying. In Syria possibly no-one understands this better than the much reviled Bashar al Assad. He could go tomorrow but that would solve nothing because the system would stay the same; for those who hate him, someone worse might take his place. Bashar has made serious mistakes, including the adoption of free market policies which have enriched the merchant class while further impoverishing the peasantry, who are now said to be many of the foot soldiers of the armed groups, but Syria is an easier place than it was under his father. The abolition of the Baath as the central pillar of state and society and the multi-party elections held last year were a start to political reforms. The elections were not perfect but if anyone is looking for perfection in the Middle East, they should look somewhere else. These are threads that could have been teased out if the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’ had any serious interest in the best interests of the Syrian people. A process of national dialogue has begun in Damascus but this has been ignored, too, because these ‘friends’ want nothing less than the destruction of a government which is a strategic ally of Iran and Hezbollah and forms with them the ‘resistance axis’ to US-Israeli hegemony.
The achievements of this axis need to be set against the record of collaboration of those Arab governments who are now bent on destroying it. Iran and Syria have been solid in their support for the Palestinians, hosting resistance movements and working together to provide Hamas with the weapons it needed to defend Gaza. No weapons came from the direction of Saudi Arabia or Qatar. It was Hezbollah, the non-state partner in this alliance, that finally drove Israel from occupied southern Lebanon after nearly two decades of struggle involving not just the bravery of part-time soldiers but the mastery of electronic warfare, enabling Hezbollah to penetrate Israeli communications, including drone surveillance, as was made clear when Hasan Nasrallah produced intercepted film showing that an Israeli drone had been shadowing Rafiq Hariri for three months and was overhead when he was assassinated in February, 2005. When Israel tried to take revenge in 2006 it was humiliated. Hezbollah stood firm, destroyed its supposedly invincible Merkava tanks, disabled one of its warships in a missile attack and prevented its ground forces from advancing north of the Litani river. At the time, it might be remembered, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia vilified Hasan Nasrallah for bringing on this war, as they saw it.
It was Hezbollah which scored another triumph by breaking Israel’s spy network in Lebanon, now in the public eye because of the revelations that an Australian-born Mossad agent, Ben Zygier, had provided it with the names of two of its agents. The official Israeli version of the Zygier affair is that he handed over this information with the ultimate intention of setting up the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah. However, as the case is regarded as one of the most serious threats to national security in Israel’s history, much more might be involved than the collapse of a spy network. It is hard to imagine any agent who was not in fact a double agent doing what Zygier is reported to have done. What other information he might have passed on is a matter of conjecture but Israel’s nervousness about this affair could be a sign that far darker secrets are involved than the exposure of two spies.
Both Iran and Syria have been targeted with economic sanctions because of their disobedience. Iran has been threatened with military attack ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now that the attempt to destroy the government in Damascus through armed proxies has clearly failed, if more than two years of trying qualifies as failure, the US is sending out signals that it is prepared to intervene directly despite the regional and global risks. The collapse of the Syrian National Council last year has now been followed by the disintegration of the Syrian National Coalition, with ‘president’ Mu’adh al Khatib resigning and the chief of its military wing refusing to recognize the authority of new ‘prime minister’ Ghassan al Hitto. Riad al Assad, the displaced former commander of the self-styled Free Syrian Army, has just been carried back across the border into Turkey with only one leg, the other having been blown off by a roadside car bomb. Some sources say it was only a foot but either way he is out of action for a long time to come. As the leading armed groups do not recognize the authority of Mr Assad or the squabbling coalition of which the FSA is supposed to be the military arm, his absence from the scene is not going to make a great deal of difference.
For Muadh al Khatib to be given the Syria seat at the recent summit of the Arab League in Doha is farcical in more than one respect. Al Khatib is no longer even a member of the group Qatar is trying to set up as an alternative government. The group itself is in a state of complete collapse, with al Khatib walking out and other members rejecting the appointment of Hitto, a Syrian-born American who has not visited the country of his birth for decades. That Al Khatib should demand that his ragged, motley crew be given Syria’s seat at the UN goes beyond preposterous. The government of Syria sits in Damascus, not Doha, and Bashar al Assad is still its president, not the former imam of the Umayyad mosque. Compounding this theatre of the absurd, it was the ruler of Qatar who directed that Al Khatib be given the Syrian seat at the Doha summit, underlining the degree to which the Arab League has become no more than an instrument of this gentleman’s drive for regional dominance. That King Abdullah should have stayed away from Doha is a sign of the deepening rivalry between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, especially over how to manage Syria. The determination of the ruler of Qatar to persevere with this chaotic bunch of exiles is the measure of his determination to destroy the government in Damascus.
On the ground the armed groups are taking a beating at the hands of the Syrian army but like an irresponsible trainer sending a punched-out boxer out from his corner for the next round, their outside sponsors are pouring arms into Syria to keep them on their feet. The tactics of these groups include bombings aimed at civilians that in other circumstances their backers would not hesitate to call terrorism but steadfastly refused to call terrorism when Syrians are the victims and their proxies are the perpetrators. Al Khatib’s dissatisfaction with his ramshackle coalition was possibly brought to a head by the assassination in Damascus of Sheikh Muhammad Said Ramadan al Bouti, a former colleague and a man he greatly admired. Al Bouti and close to 50 other worshippers were murdered in the Iman mosque by a suicide bomber. Two days earlier an armed group had loaded CL 17 chlorine – an ingredient normally used in swimming pool cleaner – into the warhead of a small missile and fired it at a Syrian army checkpoint, killing 26 people. Soldiers were among the dead and the army was there to look after the survivors, so the claims of activists that ‘the regime’ was responsible had even less traction than usual. Having warned of direct intervention in Syria should chemical weapons be used, the US had little to say now that such a weapon had been used, not by the Syrian army, but by the ‘rebels’ it has been supporting.
Hezbollah, Syria and Iran’s record of resistance has to be compared with the long Saudi and Qatari record of collaboration with the US and Israel. Having deserted Damascus in its hour of need, what does Khalid Mishaal think he is going to get from the ruler of Qatar besides money and somewhere to stay? What is Ismail Haniyeh expecting from Muhammad Morsi, who began his presidency by blocking off the tunnels into Gaza and confirmed where he intends to take Egypt with his letter calling Shimon Peres ‘my dear friend’? Is it forgotten already, apart from his record in violence and destruction going back to 1948, that it was Peres who authorized the attack on southern Lebanon in 1996 which took the lives of more than 100 people sheltering inside the UN compound in Qana? If the friend of my enemy is my enemy, where does that leave Haniyeh, Misha’al and Abbas?
The beneficiaries of intervention in Iraq, Libya and Syria are outside and regional governments who have combined forces to reshape the Middle East in their own interests. As Ibrahim al Amin has remarked (‘Partitioning Syria at the Doha summit’, Al Akhbar English, March 25, 2013), they are fighting a global war against Syria in the name of bringing the people freedom and justice. In truth, western governments only intervene in their own interests and the people always end up being sliced and diced on the chopping board of their grand designs. There has been no exception to this rule. Civilization, liberation, freedom, democracy, the rights of the people and the responsibility to protect are the unctuous phrases that have rolled off the lips of western prime ministers, foreign ministers and presidents for two centuries. This is the rhetorical buildup to a self-assigned ‘duty’ to intervene: the only real difference between intervention in the 19th century and intervention in the 21st lies in the vastly increased killing power of western governments and the development of weapons that would have been regarded as science fiction until only recently.
As they always get away with it, there is no reason for them to stop. Iraq was a terrible crime but while the UN Security Council or the International Criminal Court points the finger at Robert Mugabe, Umar al Bashir or Saif al Islam al Gaddafi it never points the finger at western politicians whose crimes are infinitely greater. Slobodan Milosevic was a rare exception but even his crimes do not measure up to what George Bush and Tony Blair authorized in Iraq in and after 2003 – not to speak of the horrors that Bush senior, Clinton and Blair authorized through the decade of sanctions which followed the attack of 1991. Because they are protected by a world system which is highly selective about who it punishes, the politicians who follow them feel free to repeat the experience. They know that whoever suffers, whoever is bombed, whoever has to look at the faces of dead parents, children, aunts, grandfathers and neighbors being dug out of the rubble of bombed cities and towns, it is not going to be them. William Hague is perfectly comfortable in his desire to give more weapons to the ‘rebels’ because he knows that the calamitous consequences of decisions he takes are never going to bounce back on his own doorstep.
It is obvious but needs to be said anyway that the first priority of people across the Middle East should be solidarity rising above ethnic and religious divisions. No problem can be solved without it and certainly not the core issue of Palestine. In his recent Edward Said memorial lecture, Noam Chomsky drew attention to what is going on while the world’s attention is diverted by the ‘Arab spring.’ In 1967 the Jordan Valley had a Palestinian population of 300, 000. The policy of ‘purification’ pursued by the Israeli government has now reduced that population to 60,000. On a smaller scale the same policy has had the same results in Hebron and elsewhere in the occupied territories. There is nothing accidental or incidental about this. Netanyahu is no more than faithful to the racist policies set in motion by Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. Continuing without letup for 65 years these policies are neither forgettable nor forgivable.
It is not surprising that Israel’s strongest supporters always have been similar colonial settler states. There are no exact parallels but the Zionist settlers in Palestine and the American colonists both turned on the mother state while setting out to crush the native people. Thomas Paine had much to say about the American ‘war of independence’ that is relevant to Palestine. First of all, it was an ‘independence war’ being fought on land long since inhabited by another people. The colonists wanted to be independent of the mother country, which planted them in this foreign soil in the expectation that they would maintain it as part of the king’s domains. A loyal colony was what the British also sought in Palestine but the American settlers and later the Zionists had other ideas. The war between Britain and the American colonists was brutal, generating deep hatreds on both sides, just as the Zionist war against the British did in Palestine.
Paine was writing of settler feelings towards the savagery of the mother country but the words equally apply to the people who were the victims of double colonialism in North America or, nearly two centuries later, in Palestine:
‘Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain and still hoping for the best are still apt to call out come, come, we shall be friends against for all this. But examine the passions and feelings of mankind; bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honor and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land. If you cannot do all these then you are only deceiving yourself, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity. Your future connections with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honor, will be forced and unnatural and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first. But if you say you can still pass the violations over, then I ask hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or child by their hands and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover; and whatever may be your rank or title in life you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.’
Paine was a democrat within the limitations of his time. He was writing for the settlers and had no thought of admitting the indigenous people of North America to representation in the colonies. Except for the passage of almost 250 years Paine might be a Zionist today, but the two and a half centuries make all the difference. Israel was an anomaly from the beginning, a colonial state arising at the tail end of colonialism. It would be no more possible to imagine Thomas Paine supporting an America in which native and Afro-Americans did not have the vote now than it would be to imagine him supporting a situation where a people not only did not have the right to vote but had been denied the right to live on the land where they or their forebears had been born.
In today’s world Paine could not support an Israel built on blatantly racist and discriminatory lines. Everything he says in the passage quoted above applies to Israel. The wounds it has inflicted have gone deep and far from making any attempt to heal them Israel has endlessly inflicted new wounds. The state of Israel – to be differentiated from those pockets of its citizens who oppose its brutal mindset – is not interested in any kind of genuine settlement with the Palestinians. It is not interested in them as a people. It is not interested in their stories of suffering. It is not interested in its own guilt because it is blind to its own guilt. It has no humility and would scoff at the idea of penance for crimes it refuses to admit it has committed, like the worst recidivist offender hauled before a court. It is interested in the Palestinians only as a problem to be solved and the solution is for them somehow to disappear or to be made to disappear. Hence the ‘purification’ in the Jordan Valley and the daylight oppression of the Palestinians in Hebron and the racist demographic war being waged in East Jerusalem. These are crimes against humanity.
If we substitute Israel and the Oslo process for the reconciliation proffered by the British monarch the result is the same: the policy, wrote Thomas Paine, is there ‘in order that he may accomplish by craft and subtlety in the long run what he cannot do by force and violence in the short one’. His conclusion that ‘reconciliation and ruin are nearly related’ sums up the consequences for the Palestinians of the Venus fly trap known as the ‘peace process.’ Violence works but ‘peace’ has a deadly potency of its own: whatever the means employed, the Zionist aim of reducing the Palestinians to dust that will eventually be whirled away by history has not changed in 100 years.
By themselves, however bravely they have resisted, the Palestinians have never had the power to fend off the forces arrayed against them. This has been true from the time Britain implanted the Zionist project in Palestine until the present day. Britain and the US were not just any countries but the two most powerful states of their time and with their support both Zionist success and Palestinian failure were assured. Never have the Palestinians been able to draw on anything like such sources of strength despite the immense potential in their own backyard. Israel’s dominance as a regional power is still sustained by the US while being continually replenished by Arab weakness: Arab weakness is built on chronic Arab disunity, now being promoted in sectarian form by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. As long as there is no way out of this trap the Palestinians will remain stuck in their trap.
Sectarianism is a powerful weapon but would be useless if people were not susceptible to it. A people divided are doomed to be dominated. George Antonius prefaced The Arab Awakening with a quote from Ibrahim Yaziji: ‘Arise Arabs and awake!’ That was in 1938. An Arab awakening did follow and while it would be tempting to say the Arab world has gone back to sleep, in reality what is happening is far worse than sleep. A fire is raging and it is hard to see how and when it will be put out.
– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
March 28, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Arab League, Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Middle East, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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Hezbollah condemned on Friday the stances announced by US President Brarack Obama during his visit to the Zionist entity, stressing that this position proves the rightfulness of the resistance path.
“Obama’s visit to the occupied Palestinian territories… assures the continuous and full American commitment to support the Zionist entity and its offensive and criminal policies, especially regarding the right of Palestine, its people and the people of the region,” Hezbollah said in a statement released by it Media Relations office.
“It was clear, according to Obama’s remarks, that the US President doesn’t respect the Islamic and the Arab governments, as he turns away from the simplest and legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”
“He (Obama) also goes further in voicing full commitment to the Zionist project in the Palestine, through imposing conditions on Arabs to accept the enemy’s entity as a pure Jewish state in the region”, the statement added.
Hezbollah slammed the US President, saying he “speaks like an employee of the Zionist entity (Israel) and not the highest-ranking official in the administration of the independent state that is the United States.
“And the speech of Obama would not be consummated except if the US leader attacks the resistance through urging the world to brand Hezbollah a terrorist organization”.
The party said it was not surprised by Obama’s speech “which have gotten to be repetition to the choir of the hostile and boring stances of the US”.
However, Hezbollah denounced the US stances “which are adopting the Zionist projects, something that makes Washington an accomplice in the crimes committed by the Israeli enemy.”
“All these stances assure again that betting on negotiations and compromises is fruitless, therefore the rightfulness of the resistance choice becomes deep-rooted,” the statement concluded.
March 23, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Lebanon, Middle East, Obama, Palestine, United States, Zionism, Zionist entity |
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As Bulgaria claims to have found new evidence linking Hezbollah to the deadly attack on Israeli tourists last July, Israel, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands have continued to pressure the European Union to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization and impose sanctions on the resistance group.
Placing Hezbollah on the terror list requires unanimity among the EU’s 27 member states.
France and Italy have so far opposed sanctions, but Israel says they may be convinced to put some senior Hezbollah officials on the terror list.
“If we get that we’ll consider it an achievement,” said a senior Foreign Ministry official, cited in Haaretz Monday.
Lebanese Kataeb Party leader Amin Gemayel said Monday that the accusation by the Bulgarian government was evidence that Hezbollah could not be seen as “neutral.”
The Bulgarian opposition accused the government in early February of prematurely accusing Hezbollah before the investigation had been concluded.
Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Sergei Stanishev had said that Bulgaria was acting under US and Israeli pressure and had entered “into a political game in an irresponsible manner, without calculating the consequences.”
Hezbollah’s Naim Kassem, the group’s number two, slammed the “international campaign of intimidation waged by Israel against Hezbollah” three weeks ago, saying it is “ever improving its equipment and training” and that “these charges will change nothing.”
The Bulgarian government had released a report concluding that three Hezbollah members were behind the July attack that killed five Israeli tourists, based on evidence including a computer printer in Beirut, DNA traces on a SIM card and telephone calls from the bombers to Hezbollah officials.
The Bulgarian government said they had well-grounded reasons to suspect that the three attackers were Lebanese with foreign passports and forged drivers licenses from Canada and Australia.
With the help of foreign intelligence agents, drivers licenses were shown to have been printed on a printer in Lebanon, according to the Bulgarian report.
The US government have in the past convinced some color laser printer manufacturers to encode every page printed with identifying information, but not all printers do so.
Two of the attackers were said to have returned to Lebanon after the attack, while one of attackers died unintentionally during the bombing.
Two Israelis had allegedly confronted the unintentional suicide bomber while he was trying to put his booby-trapped backpack into the bus’ cargo hold. The bomb was said to have exploded prematurely because of the “shaking.”
The investigation’s allegations regarding the role of Lebanon and Hezbollah in the bombing remain unclear and disputed.
Aware of the traceability of mobile phones and internet communications, Hezbollah currently operates within a highly secure landline network to avoid tracking.
The debate on the usefulness and reliability of telephone calls or found SIM cards as evidence in criminal investigations has been ongoing in Lebanon, particularly since evidence of telephone calls linking certain individuals to the Hariri assassination in 2005 was leaked as part of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
The evidence is considered especially unreliable in Lebanon, given Israel’s known tampering in telephone networks in Lebanon, with the capability of forging SIM cards and tampering with collected data on the networks.
The International Telecommunications Union in 2010 passed three resolutions against Israel for “piracy and attacks against fixed and cellular telephone networks in Lebanon.”
The resolutions determined that “Lebanon’s telecommunication facilities have been and are still being subjected to piracy, interference and interruption, and sedition by Israel against Lebanon’s fixed and cellular telephone networks.”
Israel has not yet halted their activities or provided Lebanon with reparations for the damages incurred so far.
February 18, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Bulgaria, Bulgarian Socialist Party, European Union, Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Sergei Stanishev, United States |
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Harper Government Sides with US and Israel Against Lebanon
In response to hotly contested claims that Hezbollah was responsible for bombing Israeli citizens in Bulgaria last July, immigration minister Jason Kenney called the Lebanese group a “vile anti-Semitic terrorist organization” and urged the European Union to “follow Canada’s lead in listing Hezbollah as a proscribed and illegal terrorist organization.”
Kenney’s comment last week is part of a concerted campaign against a group the Los Angeles Times has called “Lebanon’s largest political party and most potent armed force.” Stephen Harper blamed Hezbollah for Israel’s summer 2006 invasion, Israel’s fifth, of Lebanon, which left 1,100 (mostly civilian) Lebanese dead and much of the country’s infrastructure destroyed. The month after Hezbollah successfully held off the Israeli invasion, foreign minister Peter MacKay said: “Lebanon is being held hostage by Hezbollah. There can be no doubt about that. Hezbollah is a cancer on Lebanon, which is destroying stability and democracy within its boundaries.” For his part, public safety minister Stockwell Day claimed the “stated intent of Hezbollah is to annihilate Jewish people.” (Despite Day and Kenney’s claims, Hezbollah was created in response to Israel’s 1982-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon and its pronouncements suggest it is largely concerned with Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.)
Almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media, the Conservatives’ demonization of Hezbollah gathered steam when Daniel Bellemare, a Canadian official, took charge of the international investigation into the February 2005 assassination of five-time Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. In November 2007 Bellemare, deputy attorney general and special advisor to the deputy minister of justice until October 2007, was appointed commissioner of the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC) into the bombing that killed Hariri and two dozen others. Concurrently, he was named prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which was set to continue the UNIIIC’s work beginning in March 2009.
Both the internal and international investigations into Hariri’s killing were far from conclusive. Initially, Syrian security officers were implicated in the killings and in the post assassination upheaval Syrian troops were driven from the country. Four Lebanese generals were also incarcerated for four years in the killings but they were released when the evidence against them was dismissed.
In 2010 the Netherlands-based STL began to point its finger at Hezbollah and in August 2011 four members of the Party of God were formally charged in the Hariri killings. But before the charges came down the international investigation was discredited in the eyes of many. A July 2011 survey of 800 Lebanese, sponsored by leading Arabic-language daily As-Safir, found that 60 percent of the country believed the international probe was politicized. The poll also found widespread distrust of Bellemare, who was accused of being pro-Israel and anti-Hezbollah. He also had suspiciously close relations with US officials.
Just after Bellemare issued the indictments against four individuals with ties to Hezbollah Lebanese daily Al Akbar published a detailed article on the Canadian titled “UN Tribunal: A Prosecutor’s ‘Tunnel Vision’” (translated by its English edition). “An example of this bias appears in paragraph 59 of the indictment, where Bellemare states that ‘all four accused are supporters of Hezbollah, which is a political and military organization in Lebanon. In the past, the military wing of Hezbollah has been implicated in terrorist acts.’ Bellemare does not offer a reference supporting his assertion that Hezbollah was involved in terrorism, and, so far, no international judicial body has issued a decision describing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. In fact, there is no international consensus surrounding Hezbollah’s ‘terrorism’ status, and the UN does not recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Several countries, including the US, Israel, and Canada have officially labeled the group as a terrorist organization — though, notably, the European Union has not. Bellemare seemingly chose to include his personal political opinion and perhaps the views of some of his colleagues in an international indictment.”
Many Lebanese believe the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had a hand in Hariri’s death yet Bellemare refused to say if he interviewed any Israeli suspects. A TV station linked to Hezbollah, Al Manar, claimed Bellemare “lost credibility” for his “politicized tribunal” because he was unwilling to investigate Israel’s possible implication in the killings. The “Israeli enemy is ‘innocent’ and will remain so in the eyes of the international community and the STL Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare.”
The most damning evidence against Bellemare came from the US State Department. A series of US diplomatic cables, released by Wikileaks, suggest he worked closely with the US embassy in Beirut. On one occasion Bellemare asked US officials for information on Syria and for help in convincing the British to assist an investigation committee. The former deputy attorney general also requested two temporary FBI investigators be paid by the US. An October 2008 cable from the ambassador in Beirut to Washington read: “Bellemare showed a good understanding of the problems [for the US] associated with complying … but his frustration was nonetheless evident: ‘You are the key player [he said]. If the US doesn’t help me, who will?’” The US embassy gave Bellemare “an ‘excellence’ preliminary assessment for his effort and determination, and we urge Washington to exert every effort to respond to the investigation committee’s request related to the information and support.”
Hezbollah claimed the Wikileaks cables confirmed that the US manipulated the probe. “The information leaked on meetings between the prosecutor and the US ambassador confirms what we have always said — that the US administration is using the court and the investigation committee as a tool to target the resistance [to Israel, i.e. Hezbollah],” noted Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah in December 2010.
In January 2011 the Lebanese government collapsed when 10 cabinet ministers and one presidential appointee withdrew over then Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s refusal to reject the STL. At the start of 2011 many feared that the STL’s expected indictment of Hezbollah members could re-ignite the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975-1990. This didn’t bother Washington. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in favour of the STL and announced $10 million in added funding for the floundering tribunal. The US ambassador in Lebanon Maura Connelly said “the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is an irrevocable, international judicial process; its work is not a matter of politics but of law.” Even President Obama chimed in, saying the STL’s first indictment could end an “era of impunity” and that it was “a significant and emotional time for the Lebanese people.”
In the first 10 weeks of 2011 Foreign Affairs released three statements that dealt with the STL. On January 13 the ministry complained about the dissolution of Lebanon’s government over the matter. “These resignations are an attempt to subvert a safe and secure Lebanon and cannot be tolerated. Hezbollah’s actions in bringing down the government are a clear attempt to undermine the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Canada believes that the work of the Special Tribunal should go forward so that justice can be served.” A follow-up statement explained: “We urge the future Lebanese government to continue to support and cooperate with the Tribunal and to continue to uphold its obligations under UN Security Council resolutions on Lebanon.” In March 2011 the Conservatives gave a further $1 million contribution to the STL. “Canada has been a strong supporter of the Tribunal, having already contributed $3.7 million to the voluntarily funded Tribunal since 2007,” explained foreign minister Cannon.
An August 2011 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report, detailed in Montréal daily La Presse, found that “many Lebanese consider the work of the STL an inquest led by Canadians.” At the time more than 20 Canadians were involved in the Tribunal’s work and last March another Canadian replaced Bellemare. According to CSIS, this country’s association with the highly divisive tribunal increased the likelihood of Canadians being targeted.
The Conservatives latest salvo against Hezbollah is another reminder that the Harper government has sided with the US and Israel against most Lebanese.
Yves Engler’s latest book is The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s foreign policy
February 15, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Canada, Daniel Bellemare, Hezbollah, Israel, Jason Kenney, Lebanon, Mossad, Zionism |
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Argentina’s top diplomat slammed Israel Wednesday for interfering in its judicial process over the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish charities building in Buenos Aires.
Last month, Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner announced an agreement with Iran to create an independent “truth commission” to investigate the bombing of the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), and said it would clear the way for Iranian suspects to be questioned by an Argentine judge.
The move was blasted by Israel and members of Argentina’s 300,000-strong Jewish community, the largest in Latin America.
“Israel has no right to ask for explanations. We are a sovereign state,” Argentinean Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said on the first day of testimony about the “truth commission” to his country’s Congress.
He added that cooperation with Iran would “bring them closer to the truth”, and in an apparent snide at Israel’s dubious history said that Argentina was not in the habit of carrying out extrajudicial punishment.
“Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told me that we cannot sign an agreement with Iran. So maybe he wants us to kidnap the suspects or put a bomb below the car of one of them.”
Timerman announced that suspects flagged by INTERPOL would be interrogated by Argentine judges, and under Argentine law.
There are five Iranians wanted by the international police group over the Argentina bombing, including current Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi.
Iran has offered mixed responses to the revelation that top officials might be questioned, denying a report about it that had surfaced earlier this week.
However, on Wednesday, Timmerman told the Senate committee that “the Iranian foreign minister said he is going to implement all the points that were agreed on in our memorandum of understanding, and that the accused will be questioned.”
Argentine Jude Rodolfo Canicoba Corral and prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the lead investigator, would go to Tehran to take the Iranians’ testimony.
Washington has cast doubt that any solution will emerge from the deal.
Israel has repeatedly accused Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the 1994 bombing, which killed 85 people and wounded 30, and another attack on the Israeli embassy in Beunos Aires two years before.
Hezbollah and Iran have repeatedly denied involvement in both.
On the 11th anniversary of the embassy bombing, Israel’s foreign ministry released a statement saying: “The mystery has been resolved, and it is now clear to Israel that Hezbollah, through its overseas agents under the command of Imad Moghniyeh, was the organization responsible for the deadly attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires,”
“Moreover, Israel has also been told recently that Hezbollah and Iran were involved in the July 1994 attack on the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA).”
A recently declassified communique from the US embassy in Beirut two months after the Buenos Aires reiterates the US’s intention to discredit Hezbollah.
February 14, 2013
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | Argentina, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel |
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The US and Israel are using the accusations leveled against Hezbollah in the 2012 Burgas bus bombing to pressure the EU into including the resistance group on its terrorist list. But the Bulgarian opposition is crying foul.
Israeli and US pressure on Bulgarian authorities to formally accuse Hezbollah as the organization behind the 18 June 2012 bus bombing in the city of Burgas – in which six people, including five Israelis, were killed – has not been entirely successful.
They have succeeded in pressuring the Bulgarian investigators probing the bombing to link the attack to Hezbollah. This has been done in such a way as to strike a compromise between the hardline stances of Israel and the US, and the cautious position of European countries, who do not see it in their interest to up the ante against Hezbollah at this juncture.
Bulgarian Minister of Interior Tsvetan Tsvetanov announced Tuesday, 5 February 2013, that two people believed to have been connected to Hezbollah were involved in the Burgas bombing.
Speaking after a special meeting of the country’s Consultative Council on National Security to discuss the investigation’s findings, Tsvetanov said the pair were part of a group of three who carried out the attack. The two had traveled on Australian and Canadian passports, and lived in Lebanon since 2006 and 2010, respectively.
The minister went on to say that “there is data showing the financing and connection between Hezbollah and the two suspects,” and that investigators had “a well-founded assumption that they belonged to the military wing of Hezbollah.”
The wording of his remarks was significant. It could foil longstanding Israeli and US efforts to pressure the EU to designate Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organization, as opposed to merely its “military wing.”
Tsvetanov also said that the Lebanese authorities had been asked for assistance in the probe.
From Lebanon to Bulgaria, the Opposition Reacts
The announcement was quickly challenged by Sergei Stanishev, leader of Bulgaria’s parliamentary opposition and the head of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, who charged that finger-pointing against Hezbollah was unfounded and politically motivated.
“It is obvious that Bulgaria’s government has chosen a political approach and is only repeating the interpretation alleged by Israel on the very next day following the attack, when the investigation had not even started,” he said, as quoted by the Sofia News Agency.
“The investigation is currently underway, and there is no way one can be talking about decisive evidence regarding the direct perpetrators, much less regarding the organization that is behind this tragic event,” Stanishev added.
The Agency quoted sources at the Bulgarian foreign ministry as saying that security had been stepped up at the country’s embassy in Beirut as a precaution against possible attacks.
The Bulgarian opposition’s skepticism over the Hezbollah accusation has made no impression on the Lebanese opposition. Members of the March 14 coalition seized on the news, and some predicted it would lead to the downfall of Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government, of which Hezbollah is a member.
Senior sources in the Future Movement told Al-Akhbar that it had already been agreed that Mikati would step down once a new election law is in place, “but now we have been unexpectedly given the Bulgarian accusation.”
The sources said Future Movement MPs discussed the issue at a meeting Tuesday, but decided not to discuss the Bulgarian charge against Hezbollah in the media for the time being.
Nevertheless, a prominent Future Movement MP remarked to Al-Akhbar: “How can a partnership be established in this country on the basis of terrorism?” He added that in demanding that the government quit, “we are not speaking from a position of hostility or score-settling,” but “out of concern for the country and its interests.”
Sources close to the prime minister denied that the government had any intention of stepping down in the wake of the Bulgarian minister’s announcement. The source attributed the suggestion to “the wishful thinking of the March 14 camp.”
In his public reaction to the announcement, Mikati reiterated Lebanon’s readiness to cooperate with the Bulgarian authorities “to shed light on the circumstances” of the incident, while stressing its condemnation of all such attacks in any European or Arab country.
Lebanese official sources said Beirut had been informed earlier that four members of Hezbollah would be accused of complicity in the bombing. It also knew in advance that the Bulgarians would draw a distinction between Hezbollah’s military wing and Hezbollah itself in order to avoid its placement on the EU terrorist list.
Yet no Lebanese officials were informed of the suspects’ identities, the sources said. The only request for assistance received from Bulgarian investigators by Lebanese judicial authorities was a request to search for an individual’s fingerprints in Lebanese records.
While Hezbollah remained silent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to seize on the news to demand that the EU designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization and not distinguish between its military and political wings.
In a statement released by his office, Netanyahu thanked the Bulgarian government for its “thorough and professional investigation” and elaborated on how Iran and Hezbollah were “orchestrating a worldwide campaign of terror,” as well as supporting “the murderous Assad regime in Syria.”
The Israeli prime minister’s words were parroted almost verbatim by US President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, who urged EU states to ”take proactive action to uncover Hezbollah’s infrastructure and disrupt the group’s financing schemes and operational networks.”
The EU itself seemed less eager than the US and Israel to put Hezbollah on its terrorism list. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton merely took note of the results of the Bulgarian probe and stressed the need to “reflect on the consequences.” She said that “the EU and member states will discuss the appropriate response based on all elements identified by the investigators.”
Israeli media had reported in advance of the Bulgarian announcement that Israel’s contribution to the probe had enabled investigators to link the Burgas bombing to Hezbollah. Israeli reports over the past two months had anticipated that Hezbollah and Iran – Hezbollah as an organization and the Iranian state – would be accused of funding and implementing the attack.
February 6, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel | Bulgaria, Bulgarian Socialist Party, Burgas, Hezbollah, Israel, Sergei Stanishev, Tsvetan Tsvetanov |
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Hezbollah denounced on Thursday the Israeli strike which targeted a scientific research center in Syria a day earlier, saying the raid aimed to negate Damascus’ role in the path of resistance.
In a statement released by Hezbollah Media Relations, the party considered the strike as a “savage attack that carries out the Zionist entity’s policy which aims at preventing any Arab and Muslim state from developing its technological and military capabilities.”
“As Hezbollah firmly condemns the new Zionist attack against Syria, it sees that the assault blatantly uncovers the reality of what’s coming on in Syria since two years ago.”
The party noted that the strike “discloses the criminal attempts aimed at negating Syria’s role in the resistance path, in a bid to pass the chapters of the conspiracy against Damascus and our Arab and Muslim people.”
Hezbollah urged the international community along the Arab and Muslim countries to condemn the attack, but said “we were used to the silence of this community,” in front of such attacks, “especially when the Zionist entity is the attacker.”
“As Hezbollah voices solidarity with Syria, its leadership, army and people, it stresses the importance of realizing the gravity that Syria is being targeted,” the statement said.
The party also considered the raid “an opportunity for some sides to review their stances and adopt the dialogue as the only solution to stop the bloodshed” in Syria.
… Dr. Ali Mohamad, editor-in-chief of the Syria Tribune news website, believes the fears of chemical weapons was a pretext to destroy Syria’s military research centers and ensure that Damascus is unable to produce arms for its military or regional allies.
Syrians know that “this is not at all about chemical weapons,” Dr. Mohamad told RT. “It’s about stopping the Syrian scientists’ military research projects.”
“It finally makes sense because the rebels or as they like to call themselves the revolutionaries, they have been attacking air defense bases near Damascus for the past seven months,” Dr. Mohamad said. “They’ve managed to attack the S-200 base and over four other surface-to-air missile bases. Now this followed by an airstrike from Israel. So it all adds up, it makes sense. It only shows that Israel has a great interest in the instability in Syria and that it is being helped by groups of armed rebels in Syria.”
“Military research centers are responsible for developing weapons, in particular land-to-land long range missiles,” and Israel wants to stop this research process, Dr. Mohamed explained. “Of course Israel will claim that this is connected to a chemical weapons arsenal, but this is of course not true because nobody stores chemical weapons in a research center.”
“Let’s remember that the Syrian official who was responsible for all military research projects has been assassinated in Damascus by the rebels,” he said. “Let’s also remember that the person who orchestrated the Syrian long-range missile project colonel Dawoud Rajiha was also assassinated in Damascus. This is about stopping the Syrian scientific military research projects and is about breaking the link that will help [Israel] overcome the Lebanese resistance and the Palestinian resistance.”
Syria will likely retaliate, but not in the form of a direct attack on Israel. Instead, Damascus will seek to arm Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance, Dr. Mohamed said.
January 31, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Al-Manar, Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria, Zionism |
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Hezbollah’ Secretary General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah told his cadres in a private gathering that the Islamist group “has changed” and that the group’s ultimate priority is to “protect Lebanon”, a source reported to Al-Akhbar.
“Hezbollah has changed and its priorities have changed based on circumstances,” Nasrallah said.
“There was a time when we used to see Lebanon as a colonial construct that was part of the Ummah,” he added. “That was in our early days, and the country was going through a civil war. All parties were calling for a nation that fit their liking.”
“Today conditions have changed. We believe that this country is our country, and that the flag of the cedar is our flag that we need to protect, too. At this stage, our priority is to protect the state in Lebanon and to build it.”
The remarks appear to fly in the face of accusations by Hezbollah’s opponents that the group is a proxy of Iran, functioning as a “state within a state.”
“What I am telling you isn’t mere rhetoric. We are convinced of this and must work to apply it,” Nasrallah said at the close of his remarks.
Hezbollah launched into the Lebanese political scene during Israel’s brutal invasion of Beirut in 1982 as a hodgepodge of Islamist groups supported by Iran.
In 1985, the groups coalesced under a single party with a manifesto that declared its loyalty to be to the Islamic Ummah, and Iran’s supreme leader rulings to be a source of the group’s bylaws.
The 1985 manifesto also mentions “the obliteration of Israel” as one of its primary goals.
This is not the first time Hezbollah rescinds Ummah-related sections of the manifesto. In 2010, an updated group charter identified Lebanon as the party’s “homeland and the homeland of our fathers and ancestors.”
“We want Lebanon to be sovereign, free, independent, strong and capable … it should be mentioned that one of the most important conditions for the establishment of a home of this type is having a fair state, a state which is capable and strong, as well as a political system that truly represents the will of the people and their aspirations for justice, freedom and security, stability and well-being and dignity,” the charter went on to say.
January 26, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | al-Akhbar, Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Nasrallah, Ummah |
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Lebanon is incredible – an intoxicating blend of natural beauty, rebellious spirit, pious clarity, tolerance, wild night life and unbelievable hummus. I landed in Beirut four days ago. The purpose of my visit wasn’t all that clear. I knew that a talk and a musical performance were scheduled by Almayadeen TV, but I never expected such a spiritually transforming experience.
It was my second visit to the country. 30 years ago I crossed the Lebanese border along with an IDF convoy escorted by tanks and armed vehicles. Then I was an occupier, this time I came with only my saxophone and a desire to share my thoughts and deliver some beauty.
But it didn’t take me a couple of hours to realise that Lebanon is much more than just humus, shisha, the sea and some captivating rural scenery. Early on Friday we left Beirut for the south. Our first stop was Mleeta – a Hezbollah front line outpost and a symbol of Lebanese defiance. Mleeta is located on top of a mountain, surrounded by the South Lebanese Massif which, until 2000, was controlled by the Israelis. From Mleeta, the Lebanese Mujahedeen launched daily attacks against the Israeli invader and gave the Israelis a true taste of their own medicine. Now Mleeta is a Jihadi tourist resort, there to tell the story of the heroic Hezbollah, those brave paramilitaries that confounded the ‘best army in the world’. The truth is, though armed only with light weapons, they were well supplied with Shia, spiritual ammunition.
Mleeta provides an overview of three decades of Islamic resistance in Lebanon and, in exhibiting all that the fleeing IDF soldiers have left behind, it proudly demonstrates the reality of Israeli cowardice. Mleeta is a symbol of confidence – confidence that the IDF is gone, never to return. Because when, in the summer of 2006 Hezbollah routed the IDF, it also demolished their confidence forever. The Jewish state was taught a lesson it would never forget – their phantasmic expansionist dream had come to an end.
But Mleeta was just a beginning. South Lebanon is dripping with defiance – every village, house and person is an emblem of Shia’s heroic resistance with the villages bedecked with Hezbollah posters featuring Leader Hasan Nasrallah and the many martyrs who taught the IDF those very necessary lessons.
Like Mleeta, Khiam the notorious Detention Centre is also a monument to Israeli brutality. Khiam is where Israel detained and tortured its political opponents, in some cases, for as long as 14 years. My visit there reminded me of a devastating memory, which on occasion, I share with my audience. It concerns Ansar, an Israeli concentration camp located in South Lebanon. It was back in 1984, on a piece of flat land in the middle of the camp, I noticed a dozen concrete boxes with small metal doors, they looked like dog kennels being only about 80 cm high, 100 cm long and probably about 80cm wide. When I pointed out to the commanding officer that these concrete construction weren’t suitable for dogs, he told me not to worry: no one would even think of putting dogs in them. “Put a Palestinian in one of those for 24 hours,” he laughed, “And he’ll come out singing the Hatikvah.” They were solitary confinement units for Palestinian prisoners. That was it. Then and there, I realised that Israel was not my country.
In Khiam this week I saw the exact same Israeli torture facility where the Israelis would shove their political opponents into tiny metal boxes, lock them in for days and then occasionally hit the top with a heavy stone. This time I took a picture.
But someone in Israel must have felt some shame at what Israel was leaving behind in Lebanon. In 2006 the IDF attempted to erase all trace of the detention centre at Khiam. In a desperate attempt to hide Israeli brutality, Israel sent in its engineering squads to blow up the cells and all remaining evidence of torture. But that clumsy effort to conceal the true reality of Israeli inhumanity achieved only the complete opposite. It now only affirms that Israel has, indeed, a lot to conceal.
The journey to occupied Palestine’s Border is over the most beautiful, wild and rural terrain. But then, suddenly, we were there, faced with the Jewish ghetto walls, guarded by cameras, army posts and barbed wire. Israel clearly doesn’t even try to convince its neighbours that it belongs in the region. It looks different, it smells different, it sounds different – it is in fact, just one extended Jewish European shtetl that has matured into a neurotic, psychotic and murderous collective fuelled by PRE traumatic stress. In that regard, the Israelis indeed have great deal to keep under wraps.
Inspired by Lyotard’s “Heidegger and the Jews” and my visit to the south, I decided, in my talk in Beirut, to speak about ‘History as a form of concealment.’ Instead of telling us ‘what really happened’, I argued that history is there to hide our shame, to repress that which we cannot even utter. It is, in effect, there to make us forget. Jewish history, for instance, is there to suppress Jewish shame, to disguise that which Jews prefer to hide from themselves. Jewish history is an attempt to talk about the past while avoiding the horrendous and embarrassing fact that Jews, throughout their history, have been bringing on themselves one Shoa after the other.
But concealment wasn’t invented by the Jews. The Brits also find it hard to cope with their past chain of murderous imperial genocides. This may explain why they entrusted the writing of Churchill’s biography to Jewish Zionist Sir Martin Gilbert, and why their historians have dedicated a whole floor of the Imperial War Museum to the Nazi Holocaust. As if Brits do not have enough shoas and suffering inflicted on others to remember. One of those British-inflicted shoas is obviously the Palestinian Nakba. Britain should own up to this disaster and perhaps find a little room for it also in its Imperial Museums. And like Britain, the Israelis have yet to acknowledge their own role in the original sin of 1948.
Looking at the state of the refugee camps in Lebanon, it became very clear to me that the Lebanese also might engage in some soul searching. For 65 years Palestinian refugees have lived in Lebanon and in other Arab countries in unbearable conditions and have suffered terrible discrimination. Palestinian refuge camps in Lebanon are nothing short of hell on earth. Palestinians cannot be naturalized. They are banned from certain professions and jobs such as medicine and law. In some ways, their situation is worse even than their brothers’ in Gaza or The West Bank, because for them there is not even any prospect of hope or change.
Those endless solidarity discussions about ‘One State’, ‘Two States’ or ‘BDS’ have zero significance or impact on their lives or their livelihoods. These displaced and dispossessed people need immediate change in their political status, but, being excluded from the political process, they lack the wherewithal to bring such change about. Not able to travel, their voice is hardly heard within the Western solidarity discourse and the International Palestinian solidarity movement is hardly engaged, or even concerned with their tragedy. Even that most absolute of rights, the right to return to their land has been compromised by the BDS in Ramallah and other prominent Palestinian leaders.
On my last day in Beirut I visited Sabra and Shatilla. I saw the mass graveyards, I saw the poverty, I saw the piles of rubbish in the streets, the outcome of the complete absence of even the most elementary municipal services. I have been traveling around the world for many years but this is, without doubt, one of the saddest sights I have seen. But, in those camps, I also saw some of the kindest people on this planet. People who against all odds, in spite of being crushed, humiliated and tortured for more than six decades, still look forward, still live their lives. They raise their kids and care about their education. They greet you in the warmest possible manner and, no sooner have you approached their shop, they have invited you for coffee. Surely, their suffering must be our primary concern.
January 8, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Beirut, Hezbollah, Imperial War Museum, Israel, Khiam, Lebanon, Mleeta, Palestine, Zionism |
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The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution urging the European Union and its member states to designate Hezbollah a ‘terrorist group’.
The resolution, approved on Wednesday, urges the European Union member states to also impose sanctions on Hezbollah, the Times of Israel news website reported.
Based on the resolution, which was co-sponsored by 85 House representatives, Hezbollah would be prevented from employing the territories belonging to the European Union for fundraising, recruitment and training.
On July 24, 2012, the European Union flatly rejected an Israeli call to blacklist Hezbollah as a “terrorist group”, because it regards Hezbollah as an active political party in Lebanon and there is not enough evidence to warrant listing the Lebanese group a ‘terror group’ as the United States does.
European countries argue that their relations with Lebanon, where Hezbollah provides extensive social services and its political wing holds government power, would be damaged by the designation. Among the 27 European Union member states, only the UK and the Netherlands are in favor of the designation, which would freeze the group’s Europe-held financial assets.
January 4, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Al-Manar, European Union, Hezbollah, Lebanon, United States, United States House of Representatives |
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Reading the text of a bill that was recently signed into law by US President Barack Obama would instill fear in the hearts of ordinary Americans. Apparently, barbarians coming from distant lands are at work. They are gathering at the US-Mexico border, cutting fences and ready to wreak havoc on an otherwise serene American landscape.
Never mind that crazed, armed to the teeth, homegrown American terrorists are killing children and terrorizing whole cities. It is the Iranian menace that we are meant to fear according to the new law. When compounded with the other imagined threats of Hezbollah and Hamas, all with sinister agendas, then the time is right for Americans to return to their homes, bolt their doors and squat in shelters awaiting further instructions, for evidently, “The Iranians are coming.”
It is as comical as it is untrue. But “The Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act”, which as of December 28th is an official US law, is not meant to be amusing. It is riddled with half-truths, but mostly complete and utter lies.
Yes, Iran’s influence in Latin America is on the rise. However, by US standards, the expanding diplomatic ties, extending trade routes and such are considered a threat to be ‘countered’ or per Forbes magazine’s endless wisdom, ‘confronted.’
Language in politics can be very dangerous as it can misconstrue reality, turning fictitious scenarios into ‘facts’. Despite its faltering economy, the US continues to experience a sharp growth in its think tank industry – men and women whose sole purpose are to invent and push political agendas, which oftentimes belong to some foreign entity; in this case it is Israel. Ian Barman, Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council reflected that sentiment exactly in a recent article in Forbes.
Only in the past year, “policymakers in Washington have woken up to a new (Iranian) threat to U.S. security”, he wrote, citing an alleged Iranian assassination plot in Washington. According to Barman, that was the wake-up call leading to a “deeply worrisome” reality. In a moment of supposed level-headedness, he writes: “exactly how significant this threat is represents the subject of a new study released in late November by the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee. That report, entitled ‘A Line In The Sand’, documents the sinister synergies that have been created in recent years between Iran and Hezbollah on the one hand, and radical regional regimes and actors-from Venezuela to Mexican drug cartels-on the other.”
But according to Agence France Press, reporting on the new law on December 29th, “Washington has repeatedly stated it is closely monitoring Tehran’s activities in Latin America, though senior State Department and intelligence officials have indicated there is no apparent indication of illicit activities by Iran.”
Indeed, on the issue of Iran’s influence in Latin America there are two contradicting narratives. One that merely acknowledges Iranians growing diplomatic outreach in Latin America since 2005 and another that speaks of massive conspiracies involving Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, drug cartels, and yes, even underground music piracy groups. The alleged conspiracy is not only far-fetched, it is purposely fabricated to further punish Iran, on behalf of Israel, for its nuclear energy program. The panic over Iran’s ‘infiltration’ of the US ‘neighborhood’ in Latin America, didn’t start a year ago (as alleged by Barman) but rather coincided with old Israeli-Western propaganda which pained Iran as a country ruled by religious fiends whose main hobby is to assemble bombs and threaten western civilization. When pro-Israeli think tank ‘experts’ began floating a scenario of ‘what if Iran and Hezbollah join forces with Mexico’s Los Zetas drug cartel’ a few years ago, the idea seemed too absurd to compel a rational response. Now it is actually written into the new bill turned law as if a matter of fact. (Sec. 2, Findings 12)
The bill doesn’t only lack reason, proper references and is dotted with a strange amalgam of politically-inspired accusations, it also relies on wholesale allegations of little, if any plausible foundation whatsoever: “Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies with a presence in Latin America have raised revenues through illicit activities, including drug and arms trafficking, counterfeiting, money laundering, forging travel documents, pirating software and music and providing haven and assistance to other terrorists transiting the region.” (Sec 2, Findings 8)
Of course, since the whole exercise is fueled by Israeli anxiety, Hamas also had to somehow be pulled in, if not indicted through the same inexplicable reasoning: “The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration concluded in 2008 that almost one-half of the foreign terrorist organizations in the world are linked to narcotics trade and trafficking, including Hezbollah and Hamas.” (Sec. 2, Findings 10)
US author and journalist, Belen Fernandez has been looking into this matter for years. In all of her writings on the topic she seemed to trace the very thread that unites the invented upheaval over Iran’s supposed takeover of the ‘Western Hemisphere.’ In an article entitled: “Distorting Iranian-Latin American Relations”, nearly two years ago, she wrote: “Iranian ‘penetration’ in Latin America has in recent years become a pet issue of Israeli Foreign Ministry officials and American neoconservative pundits, many of whom take offense at the perceived failure of the U.S. government to adequately appreciate the security threat posed by, for example, the inauguration of a weekly flight from Caracas to Tehran with a stop in Damascus.”
The issue for Israel and its US conduits is entirely political. Iran is indeed expanding its political and diplomatic outreach, but entirely through legal and official means, something that the US has failed to do since The Monroe Doctrine gave the US exclusive hegemony over Latin America starting in December 1823. But much has changed since then, especially in the last two decades when the US swung towards disastrous Middle East foreign policies, much to the pleasure of Israel. The suffering endured by Arabs and Muslims was the needed break for some Latin American countries to challenge US policies in their respective countries. This period was the era in which powerhouses like Brazil rose and popular governments took the helm. US policies in Latin America are not failing because of Iranians ‘sinister’ plans, but because of something entirely different.
Demeaning Latin America as a hapless region waiting for US saviors and pinning US political stocks on Iran might serve immediate Israeli purposes, but it will certainly contribute to the growing political delusion that permeates Washington. Alas, there are little indications that Washington politicians are anywhere near waking up from Israel’s overbearing spell. Just examine the author of the anti-Iran bill: Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina’s 3rd District. He is a ‘freshman’, but has massive ambitions. He joined the Congress in 2011 and quickly learned the ropes. He knows that in order to succeed on Capitol Hill, one must win favor with the pro-Israeli lobby. He sponsored the bill on January 3, just a few days before the Iranian President went on a major diplomatic tour in Latin America to expand his country’s international relations. That alone was unacceptable, for Latin America has long been designated as the US ‘backyard’, per the belittling perception of US mainstream media. The trip ignited the ire of Israel, which both media and officials considered a travesty at a time that Tel Aviv was tirelessly working to isolate Iran. The bill was clearly a coordinated move, as its language indicates textbook Israeli hasbara.
Duncan might have been a novice, but he is quickly catching up. On May 20th, he proudly posted a statement on his House of Representative page that sharply censures his own president’s remarks on Israel, while fully supporting the political stances of the leader of another country, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He decried Obama’s siding with the “Hamas-led government”, thus “undermined(ing) Israel’s position in the negotiation process.”
“President Obama’s statement that Israel should retreat to its impossible to defend 1967 borders breaks a promise to one of our strongest allies, threatens Israel’s security, and jeopardizes the future of democracy in the region,” he wrote. Of course, Duncan wholeheartedly agreed with Netanyahu’s right-wing policies. “(The Israeli) Prime Minister understands the hard reality of Israel’s precarious security situation and daily threats of terrorism. I agree with the Israeli Prime Minister that President Obama’s position is simply unrealistic.” He concluded with a very telling statement: “As a Christian, I ask Americans to continue lifting up the people of Israel with prayers for safety and the hope for a lasting peace.”
This strange attitude towards politics and American national security is the real threat, not Iranian embassies and water purification projects in some Latin American countries. But considering the rising religious zealotry, shrewd Israeli lobby and the numerous think tanks of catered wisdom, there is little space for pragmatic politics or sensible approach to anything that concerns Israel. Thus, Obama enacted the bill into law and funds have been secured to evaluate Iran’s growing ‘threats’ in ‘America’s backyard’ so that proper measures are taken to counter the frightening possibilities.
What Duncan doesn’t know however, is that Latin America is no longer hostage, neither to the whims of Washington, nor to his South Carolina’s 3rd District. And that the ‘Western Hemisphere’ is no longer defined by the confines of US foreign policies, which seem to be narrowing each year to meet Israeli expectations and not those of America.
January 2, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | American Foreign Policy Council, Forbes, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Latin America, Obama, United States, Venezuela, Zionism |
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Aletho News
Aletho News 