[Cody Dawg]

Great point.

[Monique]

Originally Posted by Troll

UN Resolution 446 - "once more that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem"

"Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East."

UN Resolution 465 - "Affirming once more that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem"

These were passed at the Security Council of which the US is a veto-holding power!

Then there's UN Resolution 484 and countless GA resolutions like 3326, 1397, 181 etc. - go and read them. They recognise Israel as the occupying power of the West Bank and Gaza under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Then go and read the International Court of Justice's decision on the separation barrier where they confirm that Israel is an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

And before you start accusing me of anti-semitism again, why not visit "Jews Against the Occupation" and learn some more. http://www.jatonyc.org/

Did the Palestinians never learned to read, like the Geneva convention. And when they go and murder people do they follow the Geneva convention??

[Troll]

Originally Posted by Cody Dawg

I'll stop laughing at everything you say when you answer the question as to why you deliberately misquoted Bush about Syria and Israel?

I answered you already. I did not misquote him. You just don't know how to read. Which is not my fault. Anyone who read what I'd wrote and thought I meant that Bush blamed Israel, would be as thick as ... well evidently as thick as you since you're the only one who misread what I wrote and misunderstood the point.

But go on, keep wasting bandwidth with your senseless posts. If there's one thing I learned from Zimphire, it's that the ignore button is a very useful tool against people who have no interest in driving a conversation forward.

[Cody Dawg]

Give me the link where Bush said that "Israel started (or stopped) this sh^t," will you?

Thanks.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Which is precisely why the UN has sacrificed the moral authority it had in its early post-WWII founding days in order to simply be a forum.

I think you're missing the point. In terms of international relations theory, a state is a state when a sufficient number of other states recognise it as such. For your point that a Palestinian state exists in the West Bank already, to be a valid point, you would need to show that a preponderance of states recognise the West Bank as a Palestinian state. What the UN resolutions do is record states' attitude to the territories. If the UN wasn't there, states would simply say the same things that are in the resolutions individually. That is, none of them, not even Israel itself, recognise that a Palestinian state exist in Israel.

Furthermore, if you adopt other definitions of what a state is, you arrive at the same conclusion. The West Bank has no real government. It does not control its own borders, it has no army, it is not the sole authority when it comes to crime enforcement, it has no real judiciary.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Troll

But go on, keep wasting bandwidth with your senseless posts. If there's one thing I learned from Zimphire, it's that the ignore button is a very useful tool against people who have no interest in driving a conversation forward.

So you put yourself on ignore Troll?

You haven't drove anything forward. You are stuck on the same tired old lies you've been saying since you came here.

The same ones that have been debunked over and over again in here.

But that doesn't stop you from repeating them.

People don't put people on ignore for such reasons. The only reason people put others on ignore is because they hit a nerve.

You aren't fooling anyone.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Cody Dawg

Give me the link where Bush said that "Israel started (or stopped) this sh^t," will you?

Thanks.

You wont get a link, and you wont get him admitting he was wrong.

Back when he chastised anyone that said the UN was involved with the Oil for Food scandal, then it came out they were, he never apologized for being wrong or acting the ass.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by Monique

Did the Palestinians never learned to read, like the Geneva convention. And when they go and murder people do they follow the Geneva convention??

"The Palestinians" don't murder people. Certain groups of Palestinians murder people.

And the answer is that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to most of the cases you're trying to apply them to. Because terrorism is not an act of war; it's a criminal act. If you insist on applying them to a situation that they aren't meant to apply to, then you will get ridiculous outcomes. But hey, I have no problem admitting that terrorists don't respect the law. That doesn't make the West Bank a state, which, if you pay attention, is the point we were discussing when I referenced the Geneva Conventions.

Finally, the fact that terrorist groups commit crimes, doesn't make it okay for states that seek the moral high ground to behave in the same way. If Israel doesn't want to be condemned in the same way that Hamas or Hezbollah is, then it needs to behave better than they do. Targetting civilians is what Hamas and Hezbollah are condemned for doing.

[Kevin]

When using terrorists tactics in war, or to start war it is indeed an act of war.

Troll, you want your side to have it's cake and eat it too.

Too bad.

[Cody Dawg]

He probably likes cookies.

Trollhouse chocolate chip cookies.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by Cody Dawg

Give me the link where Bush said that "Israel started (or stopped) this sh^t," will you?

He didn't say that and I never said he said that. You misread what I wrote and the more you harp on about it, the more you point out your error to us.

All I said is that he used the word "sh!t". Learn how to read quotes, Cody. The only word I put in quotes was the word "sh!t". I've already explained this to you in detail. I don't think anyone is dumb enough to think I meant that Bush asked Israel to stop ... but then again, I thought everyone knew how to read quotation marks!

[Monique]

This is so sad that the Palestinians terrorists feel they are above the law. Let's guess what they are not and they are taught a lesson right now. I am so glad Israel decided at last to show that you attack us all the time now is the time you will have to pay for your crimes.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by Monique

I am so glad Israel decided at last to show that you attack us all the time now is the time you will have to pay for your crimes.

Do you honestly believe that all of the people that are dying are terrorists? A 4 day old baby was killed yesterday in Beirut. Christians have been killed.

Do you not think it's possible that maybe people that are dying in Lebanon are no more guilty of terrorism than the people dying in Haifa?

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Monique

This is so sad that the Palestinians terrorists feel they are above the law.

It's even sadder when people like Troll think they are as well

[itai195]

Originally Posted by Troll

And the answer is that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to most of the cases you're trying to apply them to. Because terrorism is not an act of war; it's a criminal act.

Are you seriously arguing that Hezbollah are merely criminals? That conducting border raids, killing and kidnapping soldiers, firing military-grade rockets into a neighboring country, etc are not acts of war?

[Troll]

Originally Posted by itai195

Are you seriously arguing that Hezbollah are merely criminals? That conducting border raids, killing and kidnapping soldiers, firing military-grade rockets into a neighboring country, etc are not acts of war?

No, I said that the rules of war don't apply to MOST of them. Of course they apply to situations where combatants take on combatants in a war. But in that situation, it's not automatically a given that Hezbollah are committing war crimes. They may well have played by the rules of war. As I said earlier in the thread, look at the incident that started this - it was an encounter between two military forces.

But let's assume Hezbollah did commit war crimes, then I have no problem punishing those who committed war crimes. What I'm complaining about is either side punishing the CIVILIANS on the other side. The Geneva Conventions don't say that if Corporal Jones commits a war crime, then you can kill his family, do they? Monique's argument that Palestinian terrorists don't respect the law, therefore Israel doesn't have to is utter crap. If Israel wants international sympathy and wants to claim the moral high ground, then it needs to comply with a higher standard than that the terrorists and war criminals comply with. That means that you cannot punish civilians on the other side for the war crimes or acts of terrorism committed against you.

You might think that makes the odds impossible for Israel but I don't think that's the case. I don't mind that Israel attacks Hezbollah targets like their headquarters in Beirut as long as they minimise civilian casualties. Israel has enough legitimate military targets. I think they are being quite reckless at the moment in Lebanon. And in Gaza, they didn't have to cut off the electricity and water. They chose to collectively punish the civilian population. Israel believes that by killing civilians, it will make them snap out of their hypnotic state and stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. That sort of behaviour is unacceptable for exactly the same reason as Hamas making Israeli civilians pay for the acts of their elected government is unacceptable.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Troll

But let's assume Hezbollah did commit war crimes,

If you were being honest, you wouldn't have to assume.

Your argument isn't one built on honesty. But deceit.

[Sky Captain]

By cutting the power, Israel is also denying hiz-BLOW-allah these resources also.
It's not about punishing civillians. That civillians are suffereing because of hiz-blow-allah's actions.
Hiz-blow-allah are also hiding amongst the civilian populace. They use this to their advantage as dead civillians rally for their cause.
Hiz-blow-allah are purposely targeting civillian centers in hopes of killing Israelis. And if a few Muslims in Israel are killed in the process, they died for the "cause".

[jamil5454]

Originally Posted by Sky Captain

By cutting the power, Israel is also denying hiz-BLOW-allah these resources also.
It's not about punishing civillians. That civillians are suffereing because of hiz-blow-allah's actions.
Hiz-blow-allah are also hiding amongst the civilian populace. They use this to their advantage as dead civillians rally for their cause.
Hiz-blow-allah are purposely targeting civillian centers in hopes of killing Israelis. And if a few Muslims in Israel are killed in the process, they died for the "cause".

A few are understandable. But 95% is not. Hell, you're safer being part of Hezbollah than just a civilian in Lebanon.

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by Troll

I think you're missing the point. In terms of international relations theory, a state is a state when a sufficient number of other states recognise it as such. For your point that a Palestinian state exists in the West Bank already, to be a valid point, you would need to show that a preponderance of states recognise the West Bank as a Palestinian state. What the UN resolutions do is record states' attitude to the territories. If the UN wasn't there, states would simply say the same things that are in the resolutions individually. That is, none of them, not even Israel itself, recognise that a Palestinian state exist in Israel.

Furthermore, if you adopt other definitions of what a state is, you arrive at the same conclusion. The West Bank has no real government. It does not control its own borders, it has no army, it is not the sole authority when it comes to crime enforcement, it has no real judiciary.

The fact that the UN recognizes a Palestininan ambassador doesn't indicate that a preponderance of the world recognize them?

They have a government. They have land in Gaza. They govern (poorly.) They are a state. In all but name, if you insist on that - I contend that they refuse to declare it because they prefer the victimhood of "occupation" - after all, they've refused to establish a state in 1937(peel), 1947( UN181), 2000(camp david), 2001(roadmap), and 2004(roadmap).

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by vmarks

The fact that the UN recognizes a Palestininan ambassador doesn't indicate that a preponderance of the world recognize them?

They have a government. They have land in Gaza. They govern (poorly.) They are a state. In all but name, if you insist on that - I contend that they refuse to declare it because they prefer the victimhood of "occupation" - after all, they've refused to establish a state in 1937(peel), 1947( UN181), 2000(camp david), 2001(roadmap), and 2004(roadmap).

Like I said, they want their cake and eat it too.

And so do their supporters AKA apologists.

[kvm_mkdb]

Originally Posted by jamil5454

A few are understandable. But 95% is not. Hell, you're safer being part of Hezbollah than just a civilian in Lebanon.

Weird, huh? Even weirder is how badly Hezbollah aims: they're supposed to be targeting civilians, and yet 50% of their kills are soldiers in active duty. 

[Troll]

Originally Posted by vmarks

The fact that the UN recognizes a Palestininan ambassador doesn't indicate that a preponderance of the world recognize them?

They have a government. They have land in Gaza. They govern (poorly.) They are a state. In all but name, if you insist on that - I contend that they refuse to declare it because they prefer the victimhood of "occupation" - after all, they've refused to establish a state in 1937(peel), 1947( UN181), 2000(camp david), 2001(roadmap), and 2004(roadmap).

Palestine does not have an ambassador to the UN! The Palestinians have an OBSERVER MISSION to the UN and the observer mission has an ambassador. Just as the IUCN has an ambassador of its observer mission and yet no one would argue that this means that the IUCN is recognised as a state!

They do not have a government. They have an Administrating body. There is a massive difference. The Palestinians "declaring" a state woudn't change anything. Loads of people all over the planet have declared states and that doesn't mean that poof, a state comes into existence. Until other countries recognise that there is a Palestinian state, there isn't one. To date, no one, not even Israel or the United States have recognised a Palestinian state in the West Bank. The only pronouncements any states have ever made are to explicitly state that Israel is in occupation of those territories.

[Taliesin]

Originally Posted by Cody Dawg

Give me the link where Bush said that "Israel started (or stopped) this sh^t," will you?

Thanks.

You completely misread Troll's post. He didn't say or even suggested that Bush claimed that Israel started, he only quoted Bush's famous style of simplifing "sh!t" to sum up what's going on.

Taliesin

[vmarks]

In October 1995, the U.N. convenes a Special Commemorative Meeting on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations. In resolution 49/12 B of 24 May 1995, the Preparatory Committee and the General Assembly decided that the same arrangements extended to member states with regard to participation in the commemoration will be extended to Palestine in its capacity as observer (in addition to Switzerland and the Holy See). As a result, for the duration of the Special Commemorative Meeting, Palestine is treated as a member state. President Arafat attends the meeting and addresses the General Assembly during its first session before the Foreign Ministers of member states who spoke in that session.

On 7 July 1998, the U.N. General Assembly upgrades the representation of Palestine at the U.N. A resolution entitled "Participation of Palestine in the Work of the United Nations" is adopted by a vote of 124 in favor, 4 against, and 10 abstentions.

On 28 September 1998, Palestine participates, for the first time, in the General Debate of the U.N. General Assembly. President Arafat addresses the plenary during the opening segment of the 53rd session of the GA on behalf of Palestine.

Sounds an awful lot like recognition. The differences are functionally none. The 'Permanent Observer' has an Ambassador who gets treated as the representative of a member state.

Which is exactly the same as the difference between Hamas as the elected administrative body over Gaza and a Palestinian state in Gaza governed by an elected Hamas. None at all.

[Nicko]

Originally Posted by Troll

Palestine does not have an ambassador to the UN! The Palestinians have an OBSERVER MISSION to the UN and the observer mission has an ambassador. Just as the IUCN has an ambassador of its observer mission and yet no one would argue that this means that the IUCN is recognised as a state!

They do not have a government. They have an Administrating body. There is a massive difference. The Palestinians "declaring" a state woudn't change anything. Loads of people all over the planet have declared states and that doesn't mean that poof, a state comes into existence. Until other countries recognise that there is a Palestinian state, there isn't one. To date, no one, not even Israel or the United States have recognised a Palestinian state in the West Bank. The only pronouncements any states have ever made are to explicitly state that Israel is in occupation of those territories.

Kind of like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland

[Taliesin]

Originally Posted by Monique

What intifad in 1987??

It was that big civilian uprising among the palestinians that surprised the US, Israel, even the PLO and forced the Muslim Brotherhood's palestinian wing to form a resistance-group called "Hamas". The uprising-movement got organised through independent grassroot-movements, palestinians started to demonstrate, to hurl stones, to atatck israeli soldiers and settlers with their bare hands, stones, and knifes, they started a boycott of Israel by not paying taxes to Israel, with which Israel financed the occupation of the palestinians, they threw away their identity-cards, that were given to them by Israel, they organized a general strike...

Eventually Israel threw down the first intifada, but it lasted for years, and Israel had to use disproportional force and terror (collective punishments, water-restrictions, curfews, house demolitions, agriculture destruction, mass-imprisonments, torture, "bone-breaking"-policy against children and youths that were caught throwing stones...) to break the uprising.

In the shadow of the civilian unrest, whose direction got taken over by PLO a month after it started, the Hamas got founded by the muslim-brotherhood-wing of Palestine, starting to conduct reprisal/retaliation/revenge/terror attacks against israeli civilians.

But eventhough the intifada eventually was defeated it showed to the international community, that the palestinians were indeed a nation without a state, ready to fight for their cause and to lay down their lifes for their future, rights and freedom.

Originally Posted by Monique

They have the choice to give up on this stupid idea that Palestine belongs to them because it is called now Israel.

The palestinians have already given up their maximalist goal of getting all of Israel back for the palestinians, and they did so long ago, even the PLO eventually followed the palestinians to a compromise, and I'm sure Hamas in Palestine will eventually do the same, too: The palestinians have accepted to follow international law and recognize Israel within the pre-67-borders+West-Jerusalem and want to establish a souvereign palestinian state in the whole of Westbank, Gaza with East-Jerusalem as its capital.

Israel though didn't want to accept international law as it sees itself as the right "owner" of the Westbank, and doesn't like to view itself as an illegal occupier, but at the same time doesn't want to give citizenship to the palestinians... and that is the basis of the conflict.

Originally Posted by Monique

They are probably too lazy to do something out of their lives and they prefer to steal properties out of the Jews like the Nazis did.

Now that is interesting, what property have they stolen from jews? Nothing at all, it's Israel that was constantly stealing property for the last six decades. Good, they gave back some of the stolen property, like the Sinai and major parts of Gaza, but all the while trying to steal more from the Westbank.
Just to remind you only 7% of the land of Israel was actually bought, the rest was conquered, and since then Israel used discriminating laws and its occupation-system to steal more and more land and water.

Originally Posted by Monique

The only reason why Israel did what they did in 1968 was because they were attacked reapeatdly by Palestinians terrorists.

What did Israel do in 1968? And what did the palestinians do in 1968?

Originally Posted by Monique

When you blow up buses filled with innocent people that is not guerilla that is being a coward and a terrorists and you should be shot.

Indeed, it's terrorism, a warcrime, and a religious sin to murder innocents by blowing them up in a bus, but what do you mean with: you should be shot? They already shot themselves, they were after all suicide-bombers.

Originally Posted by Monique

In Munich when they murdered the atheletes for no good reason than to be destructives (by the way they were not soldiers and they were tied up); I guess you have the pictures of those murderers on your walls and admired them so much.

No, the PLO-fighters didn't plan and excute the hostage-taking for destructive-reasons, they did it in true guerillia-style in order to press free their camarades from Israel's prisons, but the hostage-taking went badly wrong after the german police decided to storm, and the PLO-fighters decided to kill their hostages.

Ultimately the responsibility for the deaths of the israeli athlethes is of course on the side of the PLO and their fighters, but to claim that the eventual bad and evil outcome of the hostage-taking was the wished outcome would be ignorant.

As to your personal attacks, please grow up.

Taliesin

[Nicko]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Sounds an awful lot like recognition. The differences are functionally none. The 'Permanent Observer' has an Ambassador who gets treated as the representative of a member state.

Which is exactly the same as the difference between Hamas as the elected administrative body over Gaza and a Palestinian state in Gaza governed by an elected Hamas. None at all.

Wishful thinking. The fact is, the west bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem are internationally recognized by everyone as being occupied by Israel.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Nicko

Wishful thinking. The fact is, the west bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem are internationally recognized by everyone as being occupied by Israel.

Everyone?

[Troll]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Sounds an awful lot like recognition. The differences are functionally none. The 'Permanent Observer' has an Ambassador who gets treated as the representative of a member state.

No, the differences between observer missions and states are HUGE. Observer missions are there only to observe and occassionally participate in debate. They do not vote and there are a number of other areas where their rights are limited. If being an observer mission at the UN with an ambassador were the requirement for being a state, then a number of NGOs would be states. Statehood has nothing to do with having an observer mission at the UN.

[Cody Dawg]

Troll

"The Palestinians" don't murder people. Certain groups of Palestinians murder people.

Yes, that's right, and guess what? Those "certain murdering Palestinians" are not dealt with by the rest of the Palestinian population or their leaders and/or government...they don't care...therefore they are equally liable as the "murdering Palestinians."

[Kevin]

I would say murdering someone, and supporting those that murder someone is just as bad.

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by Troll

No, the differences between observer missions and states are HUGE. Observer missions are there only to observe and occassionally participate in debate. They do not vote and there are a number of other areas where their rights are limited. If being an observer mission at the UN with an ambassador were the requirement for being a state, then a number of NGOs would be states. Statehood has nothing to do with having an observer mission at the UN.

And for most Observer missions that might be true- except that Palestine's Observer mission gets treated with special abilities that make it closer to that of member states, and I cited examples of that.

The definition of a state is not what the UN says in any case. It is when a nation declares statehood, has a government, and has land and people to govern.

Palestine is a de facto state in Gaza, and they don't want it because they've never wanted a state less than all of Israel- it spoils the victimhood of 'occupation.'

The UN, as usual continues to search for a moral compass. The UN can't condemn terror because the Arab member states won't agree on a definition to condemn. And Kofi goes and hangs out with his best friend forever, Nasrallah.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=302456

[Cody Dawg]

Kofi Annan is a criminal just like his son.

The U.N. is a sham.

[red rocket]

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As the  tv networks give  unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion  across its borders without retaliation. 

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car.  Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.  

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32. 

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above,  it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza  Rice nor John Bolton who is  the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one. 

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them.  Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory.  So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials,  Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously --  Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike --  to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice. 

http://www.counterpunch.org/Cockburn07212006.html

[eklipse]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Palestine is a de facto state in Gaza, and they don't want it because they've never wanted a state less than all of Israel- it spoils the victimhood of 'occupation.'

You think the Palestinians (~10 million people) should declare themselves a state in the Gaza Strip (~360 square kilometers of land)?

[Shaddim]

Originally Posted by Troll

Do you honestly believe that all of the people that are dying are terrorists? A 4 day old baby was killed yesterday in Beirut. Christians have been killed.

Do you not think it's possible that maybe people that are dying in Lebanon are no more guilty of terrorism than the people dying in Haifa?

Then those people need to leave the war zone. I know I wouldn't stick around if there was shelling, especially if I had children.

[Shaddim]

Originally Posted by Troll

Palestine does not have an ambassador to the UN! The Palestinians have an OBSERVER MISSION to the UN and the observer mission has an ambassador. Just as the IUCN has an ambassador of its observer mission and yet no one would argue that this means that the IUCN is recognised as a state!

They do not have a government. They have an Administrating body. There is a massive difference. The Palestinians "declaring" a state woudn't change anything. Loads of people all over the planet have declared states and that doesn't mean that poof, a state comes into existence. Until other countries recognise that there is a Palestinian state, there isn't one. To date, no one, not even Israel or the United States have recognised a Palestinian state in the West Bank. The only pronouncements any states have ever made are to explicitly state that Israel is in occupation of those territories.

No, Israel OWNS those territories, and has tried for decades to organize talks to setup a Palestinian state... of course, that's not good enough for the Palestinians, they want Israel destroyed, bathe in Jewish blood, etc..

[Cody Dawg]

Israel needs a huge fortified wall around the entire country with a 1 to 5-mile barrier in between it and the exterior boundary and they should protect it in any and every way possible.

What the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East needs to realize is that Israel isn't going away.

In fact, a lot of Israelis that I know are now packing up to go home to help their country.

Israel!

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by red rocket

http://www.counterpunch.org/Cockburn07212006.html

your signature says "question everything" - so I will. This Cockburn article is full of fictions just waiting to be exposed.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know


The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Nonsense. History is supposed to stop in its tracks because showing history would reveal that HizbAllah and Hamas have a history of bombing Sderot and Qiryat Arba all while claiming they are in a ceasefire.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

These deaths don't happen in a vacuum. Israel doesn't fire up the helicopters or jets, wasting tens of thousands of dollars on fuel, and then fire missiles, also worth thousands of dollars, just to waste the money. There are targets who have organized, conspired, funded attacks on Israeli citizens, and these attacks cannot, must not, go unanswered.

The UN does not defend Israel. Israel's allies do not defend Israel. Israel must then defend itself, and if the people responsible for attacking Israel place civilians in danger, then that is on their shoulders.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Israel says nothing of the sort. It apologizes for civilian deaths, pays reparations to family members, and it investigates soldiers and convicts them.

I can wait forever for Palestinians to apologize for suicide bombings. I can wait forever for reparations (which courts have sentenced them to pay), and I can wait forever for them to investigate and convict the bad actors and conspirators.

Why won't Cockburn hold Palestinians responsible for the violence and death they've done, the roadblock to peace that they have been, as much as he holds Israel accountable?

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Have something to do with HizbAllah, those people have made their choice to put themselves at risk. They put their family members at risk by being in proximity. They've chosen to fire rockets or support suicide bombers causing harm to innocents in city centers. They are also endangering innocents around them.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

I don't know where Bolton ever said such a thing. I think Cockburn is making it up. And this nonsense about bringing shame is just balderdash.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

Ah, so it's shilling for a website and signing a meaningless petition.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

No, you cannot. Syria and Iran did. Israel did not.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

What neo-cons? What American president? What, no evidence? I'm shocked.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

False.

Arafat also said that he wanted a two-state solution as a means of phased destruction of Israel. He never honestly wanted a two-state solution, and told his followers this repeatedly. He said "I am willing to kill for what I believe in, what makes you think I would not lie for it too?"

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Israel wanted a two-state solution and agreed to one in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, and 2004. Today, the ruling party of Israel (Kadima) is founded on the principle and purpose of establishing a Palestinian state in Palestine.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

Or Urquhart was lying. I know very well that Syria shells the Israeli Golan and the PLO and HizbAllah shell Qiryat Shmona regularly.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon.

Please, stick to some facts. There's no desire to invade Lebanon. There is only such a motivation if attacked.

So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

Finally a fact! Finally some truth! Lebanese Christians killed Palestinians at Sabra and Chatilla. Why would they do that, I wonder? What would motivate them to do anything other than live in peace with their peaceful neighbors, the Palestinians? Perhaps, just perhaps, it was because they didn't want murderous thugs who believed in blowing themselves up living next-door.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

That's some great fiction. Israel was satisfied with 242 and thought it would lead to peace. Moshe Dayan said at the time that he was waiting for Jordan, Syria and Egypt to call to negotiate the return of land taken for security during fighting. The calls never came.

Cockburn should really read some history since he's so interested in quoting it. I recommend Benny Morris' "Israel's Secret Wars." It would prove very educational for him.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Inflammatory and no evidence cited. Thank you, come again.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

Incorrect. It was Israel who left under pressure from its own citizens. HizbAllah did not run Israel out of Lebanon, but they claim it as a victory anyway. That's the same as Hamas claiming the Jewish evacuation of Gaza as a victory, despite the fact that it was unilaterally decided by Israel. It is these fictions that allow Hamas and HizbAllah to sleep well at night thinking they're successful.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

More falsehoods. Israel repeatedly agrees to concessions. Israel funds Palestinians with subsidys taken from Israeli citizens. Israel stops some settlements from founding, and founds others. These are not illegal, though they are disputed. It creates Israeli only roads (not Jew only. Christians and Muslims are just fine, but the traveller needs to be the bearer of Israeli identity.) These roads are for security after roads that had no such restrictions prove to enable murderous attacks on Israelis. Same for the fence.

Peaceful protests don't get blown up. Hamas marches regularly through the streets without being bombed. It's the violent 'so-called resistance' that is the target of Israeli retaliation.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

Wrong. Sick of Fatah and Abbas, who keep making nice with Israel and talking about a two-state solution while never implementing one, the Palestinians elect Hamas who make it perfectly clear that they intend to destroy all Israel. Israel supplies Fatah with arms to strengthen Abbas' standing against Hamas. Those arms fall into Hamas' Force 17 fighters hands and are used against Israel.

Israel vacated Gaza and left behind greenhouses worth millions of dollars. Bill Gates purchased them as a gift to the Palestinians, so that they could continue the work the Israelis started of making the desert bloom. Within a week of Israel evacuating Gaza, the greenhouses were looted and stripped. If the Palestinians live in trashed out acres, it is because they sabotage themselves.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

It is a great shame that Lebanon, once the Paris of the mideast, is now hostage to Syria and Iran's HizbAllah. It is a great shame that people fail to place the blame where it belongs: on the shoulders of HizbAllah.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.
http://www.counterpunch.org/Cockburn07212006.html

I hope you've enjoyed this little sojourn back into reality.

I'll close by quoting HizbAllah leadership from those early days.

"We are not fighting so you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you". -- Hassan Massawi, Hezbollah. ca 1982

"We will use the skulls of Zion's sons [Jews] to build a bridge to heaven".
-- Hamas website, December 2002

[red rocket]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Originally Posted by Cockburn

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

I don't know where Bolton ever said such a thing. I think Cockburn is making it up. And this nonsense about bringing shame is just balderdash.

He's referring to this: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060717...n_060717204728

Originally Posted by AFP

Mon Jul 17, 4:47 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - US Ambassador John Bolton said there was no moral equivalence between the civilian casualties from the Israeli raids in Lebanon and those killed in Israel from "malicious terrorist acts".

Asked to comment on the deaths in an Israeli air strike of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon Sunday, he said: "it is a matter of great concern to us ...that these civilian deaths are occurring. It's a tragedy."

"I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts," he added, while defending as "self-defense" Israel's military action, which has had "the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths".

The eight dead Canadians were a Lebanese-Canadian couple, their four children, his mother and an uncle, said relatives in Montreal.

The Montreal pharmacist and his family had arrived in Lebanon 10 days earlier for a vacation in his parents' home village and to introduce his children to relatives, they said.

Three of his Lebanese relatives died too, a family member told AFP.

"It's simply not the same thing to say that it's the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense," Bolton noted.

The overall civilian death toll from the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon since last Wednesday reached 195, in addition to 12 soldiers, officials said. Twenty-four Israelis have also been killed since fighting began last Wednesday, including 12 civilians in a barrage of Hezbollah rocket fire across the border.

Originally Posted by vmarks

Originally Posted by Cockburn

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

No, you cannot. Syria and Iran did. Israel did not.

Come on. You know full well he's referring to the fact that Hezbollah was founded as a direct consequence of Israel's 1982 invasion of the Lebanon. If Israel hadn't gone in, the organisation wouldn't exist.

Originally Posted by vmarks

Finally a fact! Finally some truth! Lebanese Christians killed Palestinians at Sabra and Chatilla. Why would they do that, I wonder? What would motivate them to do anything other than live in peace with their peaceful neighbors, the Palestinians? Perhaps, just perhaps, it was because they didn't want murderous thugs who believed in blowing themselves up living next-door.

Palestinian refugees, mind. If those people had been murderous suicide bombing thugs, I suspect they'd have been down in Israel's streets and markets.

Originally Posted by vmarks

The UN does not defend Israel. Israel's allies do not defend Israel. Israel must then defend itself, and if the people responsible for attacking Israel place civilians in danger, then that is on their shoulders.

No one is disputing Israel's right to defend itself. It's proportionality that people are concerned about.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by MacNStein

Ah, but the Nazi's were the terrorists of their day... the "rallies", ethnic violence, terrorizing Jewish communities (even back in the 20s). They preyed upon the domestic troubles of the time, and found a scapegoat, the same ethnic group that always seems to be the target for such aggression.

Assuming, then, that a violent conflict has "good guys" and "bad guys" (of course, some conflicts will have "bad guys" on both sides), are the "bad guys" always terrorists? Is it possible to have "bad guys" in a violent conflict that aren't terrorists? If so, example? Are there examples of a violent conflict that had "good guys" on both sides?

How about this, if the vast majority of the world's countries view your elected leaders as terrorists, they likely are.

Works for me. Of course, you'd need some sort of international body where such a consensus could be reached, and would have to be prepared to accept the fact if they did determine that your elected leaders (or those of your allies) were terrorists.

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by red rocket

He's referring to this: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060717...n_060717204728

Then Cockburn fails: Bolton is saying that there's no moral equivalence between the different circumstances of death, those which are collateral but unintentional and those which are the direct intentional target of suicide bombers. If Cockburn interprets that to mean that an Israeli life is worth more than a Lebanese life, then Cockburn cannot read, or can read and knows he's lying.

Come on. You know full well he's referring to the fact that Hezbollah was founded as a direct consequence of Israel's 1982 invasion of the Lebanon. If Israel hadn't gone in, the organisation wouldn't exist.

That's not what Cockburn says. Cockburn says that
"You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon."

So his 'excursion into history' isn't suggesting that HizbAllah formed as a result of Israel going into Lebanon. That happened in 1978. The date Cockburn uses is 1982. Cockburn also blames the neo-cons, and an American president that he does not name. Who was that president? Of course Cockburn wants to blame Reagan if his 1982 date is an indication. What about Carter, who had his own problems with Iran? HizbAllah isn't just getting support from Iran for the first time this month.

Palestinian refugees, mind. If those people had been murderous suicide bombing thugs, I suspect they'd have been down in Israel's streets and markets.

Ok, time to go back into history and teach how Palestinians ended up in Lebanon. It was their own doing. In 1968 after the crushing defeat at the hands of Israel, Palestinians, realizing for the first and last time that fighting Israel on their own was a losing battle, set up shop in Jordan and launched attacks on Israel. Israel fought with the intention to destroy Fatah, but the Jordanian army came to their rescue and beat back Israel. Arafat fled like a coward from the fight and then claimed it as a victory for Fatah, nevermind the fact that it was Jordan that saved his sorry ass.

Then, Arafat set up a sort of Palestine within Jordan. He had lots of Jordanian boys joining the PLO after his 'victory' and the Jordanian army and Police were beginning to lose control. Uniformed PLO militants openly carried weapons, set up checkpoints and attempted to collect what they called "taxes". So King Hussein negotiated an agreement with Arafat.

Members of these organizations were forbidden from walking around cities armed and in uniform
They were forbidden from stopping civilian vehicles in order to conduct searches
They were forbidden from competing with the Jordanian Army for recruits
They were required to carry Jordanian identity papers
Their vehicles were required to bear Jordanian license plates
Crimes committed by members of the Palestinian organizations would be investigated by the Jordanian authorities
Disputes between the Palestinian organizations and the government would be settled by a joint council of representatives of the king and of the PLO.

Arafat, as always, reneged on any agreements he had made, just as he would do in the future when bargaining with Israel. Arafat and the Palestinians continued to act like a state-within-a-state, Palestinians clashed with Jordanian security forces, kidnapped them, murdered them. Palestinians regularly committed acts of violence against Jordanian civilians, too. (Sounds like anything happening today?)

Chief of the Jordanian royal court (and subsequently a Prime Minister) Zaid al-Rifai claimed that "the fedayeen killed a soldier, beheaded him, and played soccer with his head in the area where he used to live."- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...ast/xmid68.xml

The PLO also continued attacking Israel from Jordanian territory without regard to Jordanian authority, resulting in heavy Israeli reprisals which resulted in high Jordanian civilian and military casualties. (Sounds like anything happening today?) Jordanian soldiers who were on weekend leave were continuously attacked by Palestinians. After some Jordanian soldiers were ritualistically murdered by hammering nine-inch nails in their heads, the troops were prevented from leaving their camps.

Armed Palestinians set up a parallel system of visa controls, customs checks and checkpoints in Jordanian cities and added more tensions to already polarized Jordanian society and the army.

Then the Arafat's PLA/PLO and the PFLP hijacked airplanes and Hussein saw this and what had preceded as a direct challenge to his authority.

Hussein launched an all out offensive on Arafat in September, having put up with this for far too long. Syria sent reinforcements, about 200 tanks, to back Arafat against Hussein. The Syrians withdrew, having lost about half their armor to the Jordanians in battle. Iran started withdrawing its 12,000 troops from Az Zarqa, Jordan for fear of being beaten. In the process, Hussein killed about 3,500 Palestinians and Arafat signed an agreement to peace with Hussein on October 13.

Hussein appointed Wasfi at Tal as his new prime minister and minister of defense to head a cabinet of fifteen civilian and two military members. The cabinet also included seven Palestinians.

Then Al Fatah abandoned its earlier posture of noninvolvement in the internal affairs of an Arab state and issued a statement demanding the overthrow of the Jordanian "puppet separatist authority." In May it called for "national rule" in Jordan. Against this background of threats to his authority, Hussein struck at the remaining guerrilla forces in Jordan.

Yes, you read that right, Arafat wanted to establish the Palestinian state in Jordan.

The PLO was planning to form a government-in-exile, and Hussein in early June directed Tal to "deal conclusively and without hesitation with the plotters who want to establish a separate Palestinian state and destroy the unity of the Jordanian and Palestinian people." On July 13, the Jordanian army undertook an offensive against fedayeen bases about fifty kilometers northwest of Amman in the Ajlun area--the fedayeen's last stronghold. Tal announced that the Cairo and Amman agreements, which had regulated relations between the fedayeen and the Jordanian governments, were no longer operative. On July 19, the government announced that the remainder of the bases in northern Jordan had been destroyed and that 2,300 of the 2,500 fedayeen had been arrested. A few days later, many of the captured Palestinians were released either to leave for other Arab countries or to return to a peaceful life in Jordan. (Note that some people will say this was ethnic cleansing. Leave to other countries or live peacefully? What a horrible ultimatum.) Hussein became virtually isolated from the rest of the Arab world, which accused him of harsh treatment of the fedayeen and denounced him as being responsible for the deaths of so many of his fellow Arabs.

Where was Arafat in this? Arafat fled dressed in the clothes of a woman and escaped to Lebanon.

What did he do in Lebanon? The same thing. Set up a state within a state, checkpoints, visa issuing authority, etc.

Under the guise of preparing armed resistance to Israel, the PLO insisted on political, police, and economic control of the refugee camps, as well as access to large areas of South Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley that were used for training. This generated increasing friction with the Lebanese population. Clashes over who was in charge between the Palestinians and Lebanese security and military led to armed incidents flaring up all over Lebanon, as the Palestinians were operating from refugee camps in the South, in and around Beirut, and in the North.

For Arab residents of south Lebanon, PLO rule was a nightmare. Countless Lebanese, interviewed by western journalists, told harrowing tales of rape, mutilation and murders committed by PLO forces. Palestinians and Lebanese leftists sacked Damour, a Christian village near Beirut, and massacred hundreds of its inhabitants before turning the town into a military base.

Father Mansour Labaky of the Church of St. Elias in Damour gave this description:

The PLO came and bombed the church without entering it. They kicked open the door and threw in the grenades.

An entire family had been killed, the Can´an family, four children all dead, and the mother, the father, and the grandfather. The mother was still hugging one of the children. And she was pregnant.

The eyes of the children were gone and their limbs were cut off. No legs and no arms. It was awful.
After brutally killing 582 people in the town and terrorizing the rest of the 25,000 residents into fleeing, the PLO forces took over Damour and began using it as a base for their terrorist activities. Father Labaky's church, the one that was gutted by PLO grenades, was turned into a combination garage and gun range. Targets were painted on the eastern wall of the nave.

The PLO kept attacked Israel from the north and abusing the local Lebanese, and soon enough it was 1975 and Lebanese militia groups armed themselves for self-protection from the PLO terrorists. Soon various Lebanese groups were fighting one another as old feuds revived and new atrocities demanded revenge. This fighting would continue in one form or another until 1990.

In 1976, the Lebanese Christian leadership invited the Syrian Army in for assistance in fighting the PLO. An Arab peace-keeping force (usually called the "Arab Deterrent Forces") was subsequently deployed by the Arab League, incorporating into its ranks the Syrian forces. Intermittent cease-fires were followed by new rounds of fighting. The civilian population of all faiths suffered greatly.

By 1978 Israel had enough of the attacks, and the war began. Where did HizbAllah come from? Israel didn't give birth to it- the Palestinians did, by causing Lebanon to call in foreign powers to defend themselves from the Palestinians. HizbAllah was founded by Iran in Lebanon to establish an Islamic republic like Iran's. It sprung out of Islamic Amal.

Among the new leaders was Sayyid Husayn Musawi, head of Islamic Amal which had been established at the end of the 1970s. In June 1982, Musawi parted company from his Amal colleagues to protest Barri's consent to take part, together with Bashir Jumayyil, in the National Salvation Committee founded by thenpresident Ilyas Sarkis. Other radical Shi`i factions sprouted up alongside Islamic Amal, including: the Lebanese branch of the Shi`i organization alDa`wa, The Association of Muslim Clerics of Jabal `Amil (South Lebanon), and the Family of Brotherhood under the leadership of Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah.

As Husayn alMusawi, elaborated in 1984: "We are faithful to Imam Khomeyni politically, religiously and ideologically. In accordance with Khomeyni's teaching we strive to fight all manifestations of corruption and vanity in this world, and all who fight the Muslims....Our struggle is in the east as well as the west....Our goal is to lay the groundwork for the reign of the Mahdi on earth, the reign of truth and justice."

Musawi, you may remember, said famously "We are not fighting so you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

So HizbAllah is following Arafat's pattern- come in, set up shop, and establish a state within a state.

From the very start of its activity, Hizballah tried to give itself an image of an organization based on broad, even spontaneous support in Lebanon. Nevertheless, one characteristic was the establishment of a hierarchical organizational infrastructure, similar in many ways to the Iranian revolution. This is most obvious with respect to the decisive role clerics play in leadership. Spiritual leader Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah serves as a source of inspiration and guidance. Beside him is the Advisory Council (Majlis alShura) of religious sages headed by the Secretary General of the organization, Hasan Nasrallah. The Advisory Council is supplemented by the executive committee in charge of political and organizational activities. Subordinate to the committee are other executive bodies, including a political bureau and cultural, educational and financial committees.

The military apparatus has training bases, weapon stores and recruitment offices, as well as military activities against Israel. Another important apparatus is propaganda whose publications include a weekly, al`Ahd and also alSabil, alWahda alIslamiyya and alMuntaliq. Hizballah operates a television and radio station. In the Biqa`, Beirut and south Lebanon are regional commanders, subordinate to Hizballah's Secretary General and a representative of the central apparatuses.

No one is disputing Israel's right to defend itself. It's proportionality that people are concerned about.

The only good example we have of 'state-within-a-state' actors being beaten is Jordan's expulsion and massacre of the PLO in Jordan. However, it's hard to argue that this was unsuccessful- King Hussein kept his country and restored peace to it by evicting the Palestinians. So, where was the proportionality in that? Or do you prefer the proportionality of suicide bombings and indiscriminate missiles instead of precision ones?

Or would you rather Lebanon remain hostage, victim of Iran and Syria, and that Israel continue putting up with the violence and death that originates in south Lebanon?

[Kevin]

No one is disputing Israel's right to defend itself. It's proportionality that people are concerned about.

You don't go up to a man, and slap him in the face, then complain he slaps you back harder with bigger fists.

If such a thing is your concern you don't slap in the first place.

[Taliesin]

Originally Posted by Kevin

You don't go up to a man, and slap him in the face, then complain he slaps you back harder with bigger fists.

If such a thing is your concern you don't slap in the first place.

But you surely would complain if the guy you slapped in the face not only came back to slap you harder, but also decided to kill you, your family, your neighbours, your visitors and friends, to make a point.

Taliesin

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Taliesin

But you surely would complain if the guy you slapped in the face not only came back to slap you harder, but also decided to kill you, your family, your neighbours, your visitors and friends, to make a point.

Taliesin

Well that is a hyperbolic version of what happened.

[Cody Dawg]

[greenG4]

Originally Posted by Cody Dawg

This picture says even more than 1000 words...

[red rocket]

Originally Posted by vmarks

So his 'excursion into history' isn't suggesting that HizbAllah formed as a result of Israel going into Lebanon. That happened in 1978. The date Cockburn uses is 1982.

Apparently, Israel also invaded the Lebanon in 1982:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to rout out Palestinian militants who had been using southern Lebanon as a base for raids on northern Israel since 1968.[citation needed] As a result the United Nations passed UN Resolutions 425 and 426, which called for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces and an end to military action in Lebanon. At the end of the operation, Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon, leaving behind a UNIFIL force, and their allies, the South Lebanon Army.[citation needed]
Israel invaded again four years later in 1982 in response to an assassination attempt against Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov by Fatah - Revolutionary Council and to artillery attacks launched by the PLO against populated areas in northern Israel. Israel’s attack forced PLO forces out of Lebanon (mostly to Tunisia), and Israel occupied the southern part of the country.

Originally Posted by vmarks

The only good example we have of 'state-within-a-state' actors being beaten is Jordan's expulsion and massacre of the PLO in Jordan. However, it's hard to argue that this was unsuccessful- King Hussein kept his country and restored peace to it by evicting the Palestinians. So, where was the proportionality in that? Or do you prefer the proportionality of suicide bombings and indiscriminate missiles instead of precision ones?

Or would you rather Lebanon remain hostage, victim of Iran and Syria, and that Israel continue putting up with the violence and death that originates in south Lebanon?

Frankly, I'd like to see a more assassination-based policy on Israel's part, and less of that "turning Lebanon's clock back 20 years" (Halutz) attitude. Whatever happened to good old Mossad agents, I thought they were supposed to be the best?

[hyteckit]

Originally Posted by Cody Dawg

Hmm... so Isreal kills babies while Palestine kills soldiers?