Yesterday, brought ominous news regarding yet another aggressive Israeli projection of its military power in the Mideast. Since 1967, with but a few exceptions (Osirak being one), Israel has mainly satisfied itself by retaining dominance over its frontline neighbors and not attempting to meddle in affairs of more far-flung states. But with Bibi Netanyahu’s new policy of projecting Israeli power far outside Israel’s immediate sphere and threatening Iran with attack, we have an Israel ready and willing to step far outside its former comfort zone.
To show that Bibi’s aggressive, interventionist approach isn’t a fluke, UPI reports that Israel is negotiating with Greek Cyprus for placement of an Israeli air base on the island, ostensibly to protect the new Israeli-Cypriot joint gas exploration project:
Israel is already preparing to launch a major security operation to protect the offshore fields and the attendant facilities in its waters.
This will involve missile-armed patrol vessels, round-the-clock aerial surveillance by unmanned drones and other naval detachments, primarily to defend the energy zones against attack by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed force in neighboring Lebanon.
This field is in dispute with Lebanon, which also claims title. Turkey too disputes the area on behalf of Turkish Cyprus. This certainly is one reason for the Israeli move.
But an even more important one in the long-term, is Israel confronting Turkey with its power. It’s a rather naked move. A flagrant invasion of Turkey’s sphere of influence, which can only bring a Turkish response. The response will likely come within an area under Israel’s sphere of influence. Oh say, like Gaza. Someone with a cool head ought to start looking at this developing rivalry and see where it could lead (or end).
There is only one way to resolve territorial disputes of the nature of the one concerning the Cypriot gas field, negotiation. Israel, however, doesn’t believe it negotiation. It believes in naked projections of military strength. An Israeli base on Cyprus would be a forward projection of Israeli power in the same way that the U.S. base in Diego Garcia is our forward projection of power into the Mideast (currently threatening Iran, but previously used to bolster invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan).
It’s bad enough with the U.S. making a pretense of being the cop of the world and getting itself mired in places it should never be. But do we want Israel, with its history of wars and endless bloodshed, tangling not just with Palestinians or Arab militant groups like Hezbollah, but with full-fledged regional powers like Turkey? Let’s not forget that country’s age-old rivalry with Greece which has also led to centuries of historic conflict. Now Israel is playing footsie with the Greeks and becoming best friends with the current economic basket case of Europe. Greece is only too happy to oblige and take advantage of the power Israel has to offer.
Do we really want Israel playing with fire in this way? I fear this can only end badly.
Another related matter that concerns me is the economic bonanza that this new-found oil portends for Israel, one of the most economically striated nations in the world. The new gas and oil deals promise to make the Israeli elite even richer. It will bring untold billions to Israeli politicians and generals who will flock to consult for the new enterprises (as has Meir Dagan). One place this wealth will not go, is into the pockets of those who need it most inside Israel: the poor, the disenfranchised, etc. The Haredi and Israeli Palestinian poor will stay poor. There will be few, if any programs to share the wealth or provide benefits to those in need. After all, this is Bibi Netanyahu, a disciple of Milton Friedman, an economic Hobbesian. It’s dog-eat-dog in the Likud world. Just as long as Bibi and his party cronies are taken care of, little else matters.
In truth, this would likely happen whoever was in power. The only thing that would change is the names and faces of those benefitting. Labor and Kadima would be no better as anyone who knows about Ehud Barak’s wealth-producing consulting jobs while he was out of power, is aware. So for any who believe in the dreams of liberal Zionism and the Declaration of Independence, that Israel is a nation meant to realize a vision of brotherhood, tolerance and human dignity, the coming oil boom will frustrate you. But undoubtedly, if you’re a liberal Zionist, you’ll, as Tim Hardin wrote, “still look to find a reason to believe.”
Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has rejected allegations made by right-wing Israeli and American activists accusing the movement of involvement in illegal activities, Press TV reports.
The US and Israeli activists have recently stepped up their propaganda campaign against the resistance movement and its finances, accusing Hezbollah of being involved in illegal activities, including drug trafficking and money laundering.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahranot has recently claimed that Hezbollah is attempting to take control of Lebanon’s finance sector and banking system. This report was simultaneous with a high profile visit to Beirut by the US treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence David Cohen.
”The US Zionist lobby has a big role to play in whipping up the congress and the US government with the power that they have in the government to send these officials to rattle the cage of the central bank, to send a message to the Lebanese that you’re vulnerable,” said Franklin Lamb with the Americans concerned for ME Peace.
High ranking Republican congressmen have also accused Hezbollah of involvement in a full range of criminal activities in the US to raise money. US Congressman Peter King, who last year accused the American Muslim community of a growing radicalization, described the Hezbollah movement as a violent murder gang, saying that it represents a growing threat to US national security.
”All of a sudden there is focus on the criminal aspect of drug dealing, money laundering, without specific facts to terrorism. Remember it was terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It still is but that’s shopworn, that doesn’t have the credibility,” Lamb pointed out.
Hezbollah has, however, strongly denied any involvement in criminal activities, saying it is being targeted because of its stiff resistance against Israel and also because Tel Aviv failed to defeat the movement militarily in 2006.
Since that time Hezbollah appears to have grown both militarily and politically and is still seen by many as a legitimate resistance and liberating force.
The Lebanese army on Sunday arrested a group of Syrian armed men who had entered Lebanese territory via the border town of al-Qaa, seizing a car and a large cache of weapons.
In addition, the Syrian forces started bombing the tunnel which connects the Syrian town Jose with the region of al-Qaa in the Lebanese territory.
“The tunnel was used, facilitated by “Future” party, to the smuggling of arms and fighters to Syria,” NNA reported.
In the same issue, al-Binaa newspaper reported that “39 armed Syrians were arrested by the Lebanese army in al-Qaa region.
In parallel, the Daily Star Lebanese paper reported Monday that “around 13 French officers are being held by Syrian authorities in central Homs city.”
“It was not clear why the officers were in Syria, when they had arrived or whether they were part of a larger contingent in the city,” the paper informed.
Stating that the “French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said there was no confirmation of French armed forces being held in Syria,” the paper’s sources stressed that “Paris and Damascus were working to reach an agreement on what to do with the officers.”
Lebanese Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn said on Saturday that Iran was playing an important role in the region.
Before leaving Beirut’s airport for Tehran on an official visit, Ghosn said he is scheduled to exchange views with Iranian officials on expansion of mutual ties as well as cooperation between the two countries’ defense ministries. He praised Iran’s progress in different scientific, technological and industrial fields.
He added that Iran and Lebanon enjoy amicable and historical relations and Beirut favors reinforcement of mutual relations to serve the two nations.
The Lebanese defense minister said he is also to discuss with his Iranian counterpart Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi who invited him, the existing agreement between Iranian and Lebanese defense ministries and ways of implementing it.
Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah said his party was not involved in recent bombings that took place in India, Georgia, and Thailand earlier this month, while reiterating the party’s intention to avenge the killing of its leader Imad Mughniyeh four years ago.
“It is insulting for Hezbollah to avenge its great leader by killing ordinary Israelis, as for those who are our target, they know who they are and they are taking measures and I tell them to remain doing so for we shall avenge Imad Mughniyeh in an honorable way,” Nasrallah said.
Nasrallah was speaking during a televised speech Thursday evening to commemorate the martyrdom of three of the party’s top leaders, Ragheb Harb, Imad Mughniyeh, and Abbas al-Mousawi, at the hands of Israel. Nasrallah reiterated the continued arming of the resistance and repeated his call to pull out from public use personally owned arms.
Commenting on the Arab revolutions, Nasrallah criticized what he termed as “the interference of [Lebanon’s] March 14 and their sending of weapons and bolstering of fighting among the Syrian people,” reminding the rival political group of their objection to Hezbollah’s support of Bahraini protestors and material aid to resistance in Palestine via Egypt.
Nasrallah cautioned against discord in Egypt and pointed fingers at the US and Israel for fomenting it, saying that Israeli officials are living in a state of anxiety due to its dwindling power.
He also lamented that “Arab peoples and governments are not occupied with Palestine” while Palestinians, including prisoners on hunger strike, and Bahrainis, are left to their own devices.
In relation to Syria, Nasrallah said the regime has its shortcomings as acknowledged he says by its leadership but that “it has stood in the face of the US-Israeli project and supported resistance.” While the regime did not open up a front in Golan, none of its detractors, Nasrallah argued, has opened such a front or supported the resistance.
Nasrallah criticized the total refusal to engage with dialogue with the Syrian regime and opt for a political solution in Syria by the same people who call for negotiations with Israel and have engaged with it for decades. He leveled similar criticism against those who bar the supply of weapons to Israel while sending weapons to Syria so the “Syrians fight each other.”
Nasrallah wondered why there is “a Western-Israeli-Arab insistence to fight in Syria and topple the regime” suggesting it is cause for political reflection.
Lebanon’s security officials say a suspicious cargo containing huge amounts of US dollars, guns, special passports and credit cards have been seized upon arrival in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, from the US and Brazil.
The items, packed in a number of chests and delivered via airmail, were discovered at Beirut’s airport, the Lebanese security officials said.
The chests also contained a list of both well-known and ordinary Lebanese citizens including a figure related to Salafi extremist groups. The security officials have summoned a number of the individuals, whose names were on the list, arresting some of them.
Beirut has redoubled security surveillance across the country following remarks by some Lebanese factions as well as widespread rumors about the presence of al-Qaeda in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese defense minister earlier confirmed that members of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have entered Syria through Lebanon.
Over the past few months, reports have circulated that caches of weapons have been smuggled to armed gangs in Syria through the Lebanese border.
Beirut – A USAID initiative which is ostensibly geared toward rehabilitating schools and improving education in Lebanon is raising suspicions that it will act as little more than a cover for collecting intelligence.
On 20 December 2010, the Lebanese government under Saad Hariri and the US Ambassador to Lebanon, Maura Connelly, signed a memorandum of understanding between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Lebanon and the Lebanese education ministry. The memorandum was billed as a means of supporting the rehabilitation of public schools and enhance teachers’ skills as part of a project known as D-RASATI (“my studies” in Arabic), funded by a US$75 million grant over five years.
The stated aim of this project is to improve public education by addressing four areas: repairing and equipping schools, improving the qualifications of teachers in subjects taught in English, engaging Lebanese students in extracurricular activities, and motivating parents and the community to be more involved in the schools their children attend.
According to the memorandum, USAID reserves contractual power with the partner implementing the project, while selection of the latter is exclusively dependent on USAID. Those partners include the American University of Beirut, AMIDEAST, the Cooperative Housing Foundation, the International Orthodox Christian Charities, and the Hariri Foundation for Sustainable Human Development.
The formulas adopted in implementing the project, which the education ministry in the current government consented to, has raised suspicion among observers and educators.
Skeptics say that representatives from the ministry were absent from “talks” with teachers that preceded the training sessions, which are expected to take place soon. They also question how interviews conducted by “non-Lebanese foreign nationals whose affiliations [are not known]” were used.
Sources close to the project’s implementation claim that audio recordings with teachers include inquiries about issues unrelated to the goals of the project. One participant asked: “What does enhancing teachers’ skills and evaluating their need for educational training have to do for example with whether they are attached to their community or resentful of it, whether they like to travel and to what country, and if this person or that person is their relative?”
This participant later continued, saying: “We sensed an intelligence gathering approach that went beyond the text of the agreement and the instructions of the Education Minister Hassan Diab who assured us he did not agree to collecting this kind of information.”
This approach led many of the teachers to boycott the evaluation test conducted for those targeted by the training courses.
Training the teachers was not the only source of concern. So was the detailed “intelligence” report distributed to schools in order to determine their repair needs as well as what resources are necessary to provide extracurricular activities. Last year’s summer camps raised questions over the geographical distribution of participating public schools as there was a clear focus on Dahiyeh (the southern suburbs of Beirut) and South Lebanon.
A number of teachers active in union work went even further in their skepticism and analysis asking: “Who protects the individual and legal rights of teachers and guarantees that their personal data, which belongs to them, won’t be used for political as opposed to educational purposes? Did the education ministry outsource its authority to the private sector and allow a foreign country to run amok in public schools as they wished without consulting teachers or asking for the opinion of their representatives in associations and trade unions? And is education such a neutral issue in the first place so as to allow the US to interfere in the Lebanese educational system, transfer its technical expertise to teachers and participate in evaluating them when this role is supposed to be the responsibility of local educational bodies and watchdog agencies? Is this project part of a US diplomatic campaign to improve its image and promote its policies in the region especially now that USAID is not a charity that provides grants and assistance? What if one of the long-term goals of the project is to change the educational curriculum?”
The teachers are demanding that the project’s parameters should at least be well defined and its goals clear and transparent.
Many of these critics realize that strengthening public education requires a political decision. Neither USAID, nor any other project can achieve this goal. The Lebanese state needs to make this decision by using a strategy which includes political and sectarian contracting with teachers, ending government subsidies of free private schools, and developing a national curricula every five years.
The funds allocated, according to these observers, whether from the US or other sources, disappear in the process, especially since the implementing partners are for-profit organizations.
Al-Akhbar spoke to Diab and the Director General of Education, Fadi Yarak, who is also the head of the coordination committee – the primary comptroller in the education ministry – to inquire whether the implementing partner of the project is adhering to the laws, standards, and mechanisms of the ministry.
Diab asserts that these concerns are misplaced even though he heard conversations over the summer about collecting data. He says he gave strict instructions banning the use of any personal information outside the scope of the project. “Practically, that is how things are. No one is taking data of this kind as far as we know,” he said firmly.
The audio recordings and iris print technology rumored to have been used in interviews with teachers are, according to the minister, unconfirmed.
Diab is dismayed that some would think this project may lead to changing the educational curricula. According to Diab, the curricula are not even part of the text of the agreement. The curricula are set exclusively by the Center for Educational Research and Development.
The minister adds that “the project is implemented through a grant, not a loan, and there is a difference between the two.”
When asked about the teachers’ boycott of the language evaluation test, he answered: “I don’t know. There might be issues other than the data, such as the teachers’ fear of the test due to their lack of proficiency.”
Yarak confirms in his interview with Al-Akhbar that the training material for principals takes into consideration legal standards in the education ministry and its various bodies, especially the Faculty of Education at the Lebanese University and the Educational Center for Research and Development.
He adds that it is not the first time there has been cooperation with foreign parties to train teachers. The French and the British preceded the Americans and there were similar projects in coordination with them.
While the director general points out that the training targets 6,000 teachers, he reassures us that the evaluation tests are not related to the teachers’ employment status, that is, they will not affect their professional standing. It merely measures their level of competence to determine the number of training hours they need. That is why participation is mandatory and not by choice.
Yarak seems confident that the issue of data management will be under control as long as the planning is carried out by the education ministry and the implementation of the project is overseen by a monitoring committee. The committee is under the leadership of the education minister in addition to the director general, the head of the Educational Center for Research and Development, the director of the secretariat for the development of the educational sector, and the principal adviser to the education minister.
Intelligence Gathering in Public Schools
Pedagogical commentators have recently noticed many attempts to infiltrate Lebanese public schools through various extracurricular activities. Upon examining their goals, it becomes clear that the common denominator among these projects is to collect personal data about the students and their parents and community.
A civil society association organized an educational contest in the schools throughout South Lebanon. It was noticeable that it included detailed questions having to do with the nature of their parents’ work.
Critics also note the insistence of one well-established private university on promoting itself in the high schools of Nabatieh, a town in southern Lebanon, by providing public school students with tempting, though illogical, offers given their parents’ financial inability to send them to this university.
It is also noteworthy that an international organization distributed cameras to 20 students in south Lebanon asking them to take pictures of scenes that stand out in their milieu. On the surface, this project might seem educational, serving students and teachers alike but observers say, “there is an intelligence gathering background to it.”
Excerpts from: Gilmour, David. Lebanon, The Fractured Country. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. 1983, pages 174-176
“The following morning, at 11:30 a.m. on Friday 17 September, General Drori ordered the militiamen to stop their operation, but after a further meeting with Phalangist officers the Israelis agreed to let them remain in the camps until the following day. Hobeika was also given permission to use two battalions of fresh troops and in the afternoon another force of militiamen entered the camps where they began a new round of killing. The Israeli commander in Beirut, General Yaron, has since admitted that, in spite of the fact that Israeli officers had known for several hours that the massacres were taking place, the Phalangists were allowed to call up reinforcements and remain in the camps for a further thirty-six hours. The militiamen rampaged around Sabra and Shatila until Saturday morning killing indiscriminately: nurses were raped by the killer gangs and then shot, children were scalped, patients from two hospitals were dragged from their beds and knifed to death. The Phalangists left most of their victims where they killed them, in their homes or in the streets, but some of them borrowed Israeli bulldozers and tried to cover up their deeds by shovelling corpses into mass graves. Because some of the victims were taken away and never seen again, and because it was decided not to open up some of the graves, it will never be known how many people were butchered. But perhaps as many as 2,000 people were killed and not even Sharon can pretend that these were the ‘terrorists’ he was allegedly looking for.”
…
“On the morning of 18 September, Morris Draper, another of President Reagan’s envoys dispatched to Beirut, sent a message to Sharon alleging Israeli responsibility: ‘You must stop the massacres. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies. You ought to be ashamed. They situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area, and therefore responsible for that area.’ But the responsibility was greater than Draper suggested. On 15 September Israeli troops had surrounded Sabra and Shatila. They were never more than 300 yards away from the camps and sometimes as close as 50 yards. Moreover, Israeli soldiers were on the roof of the Kuwait embassy nearby and could see what was happening in both camps. There is a mass of evidence to show that the Israelis knew that a massacre was in progress by Thursday evening but did nothing to stop it until Saturday morning.” …
“There is further evidence which indicates the extent of Israel’s complicity in the massacre. The discovery in one of the camps of an Israeli sergeant’s identity tag does not prove that he actually took part in the killing but it is significant that the Israeli army did not allow him to appear before the Israeli Commission of Enquiry. More importantly, the Israelis were prepared to assist their Phalangist allies in a number of different ways: they lent bulldozers so that the killers could bury some of the dead; they fired flares throughout the night of 16 September–at a rate of two a minute according to one Israeli soldier — so that the killers could see what they were doing; worst of all, they prevented civilians from fleeing and forced those who tried back into the camps.”
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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