Israel Will Create More Terrorists Than It Kills

Despite President George W. Bush’s claim on Monday that the crisis started because Hezbollah decided to “fire hundreds of rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon,” Hezbollah did not attack civilian areas in Israel until after Israel began attacking civilian areas in Lebanon last week.

In fact, until Israel began its recent assault on Lebanon, not a single Israeli civilian had been killed by Hezbollah since well before Israel’s withdrawal of its occupation forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. Virtually all of Hezbollah’s military actions since then have been against Israeli occupation forces in a disputed border region between Lebanon and an Israel-occupied portion of southwestern Syria, not against Israel.

Congressional leaders of both parties have called for tough action against Syria for allowing the transshipment of rockets to Hezbollah forces, which have killed up to a dozen Israeli civilians. However, they have refused to consider suspending the shipments of F-16 jet fighters and other weapons and delivery systems to Israel. These weapons have inflicted far more civilian casualties on the Lebanese side of the border, despite provisions of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act which prohibits U.S. arms transfers to countries that use American weaponry against non-military targets.

In short, both Republicans and Democrats recognize that while arming those who kill innocent Israeli civilians is wrong, they support arming those who kill innocent Lebanese civilians. This is racism, pure and simple.

Not only is Israel’s offensive against Lebanon illegal and immoral, it does not increase Israel’s security or curb the threat of Islamic radicalism. In fact, it does the opposite.

Hezbollah gained popular support in the Shiite community in recent decades largely as a result of the failure of the central government to protect the population from Israeli air and naval attacks and the mass kidnapping and imprisonment of thousands of young men.

Israel’s current offensive will only strengthen Hezbollah’s appeal and undermine Lebanon’s pro-Western government.

This is not about Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense. As with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will create far more terrorists than it destroys.

Stephen Zunes | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

July 24th, 2006 || PermaLink

Willful Fantasies and Reality in Today’s Mideast Conflict

While some conservatives and Democrats have learned lessons from past Israeli-Arab conflicts and from the recent US experiences in Iraq, the Administration and most members of Congress have fallen in line, uttering banalities like, “Israel has a right to defend itself” (even, if that means killing hundreds of civilians and destroying Lebanon in the process), or “let Israel finish the job it started” (as if the deaths and devastation resulting from this war will have no consequences in Lebanon and the broader Middle East).

A symptom of this warped mind-set is the now widely-shared and dangerous notion that has equated calls for ceasefire with weakness. In a rare display of agreement, both the White House and the Washington Post promoted this view last week. In response to a question from Helen Thomas as to why the President opposed calls for a ceasefire, White House spokesperson Tony Snow rudely thanked Ms. Thomas for what he characterized as her “Hezbollah view.” Likewise, the Post editorialized that call for a ceasefire would only “reward the aggressors.”

In this environment, it has been difficult to promote reasoned discourse and promote political solutions. Calls from the Maronite Catholic Patriarch to end the hostilities, or Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora who challenged the West to express outrage over the damage being done to Lebanon and the Lebanese, have fallen on deaf ears in Washington.

Even more tragic has been the total blackout of any news coming out of Gaza regarding the suffering of Palestinians now enduring their fifth week of Israeli assault.

As I have said before, no good will come of this. Absent international pressure to pursue a political solution within Lebanon and Palestine and between Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis, the devastation of the past month will, as in the aftermath of 1982, morph into a new and potentially more lethal extremism.

The prerequisite to beginning such a political process is, of course, a ceasefire. But with the US blocking such an effort, and still believing that good will come from Israel’s “cleansing war,” the tragic dance of death continues.

James Zogby | Huffington Post (read more. . .)

July 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

Collective Punishment Isn’t Self-Defense

Neither the United States nor Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany, yet both countries have adopted a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment. Israeli Defense Forces, which subject centers of Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank to curfews and encirclement by barbed-wire fences, taught their techniques to U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. After Islamist suicide pilots killed 3,000 Americans in the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government justified the killing of 200,000 Afghans and Iraqis as an act of “self-defense.”

George W. Bush exceeded Hitler’s 50-to-1 ratio.

Now Israel is “reacting” to the capture of two of its soldiers by the Palestinian resistance organization Hezbollah by invading and bombing Lebanon. Death tolls that fall disproportionately heavily upon Palestinians have long been a hallmark of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the 2000-03 intifada, for example, at least seven Palestinians were killed by Israelis for every Israeli killed by a Palestinian. Now, as of this writing, more than 500 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli bombs. On the Israeli side, 15 civilians have died in Hezbollah rocket attacks and 14 soldiers have been killed in combat.

Current ratio: 30-to-1.

“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Bush said at the start of the current Middle East crisis. No doubt. But the Israelis aren’t defending themselves any more than the Bush Administrative is defending us. Each is using a crime–the kidnapping of two soldiers, the 9/11 terrorist attacks–as an excuse to wage war against innocent people who had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, the criminals–the kidnappers and those behind 9/11–are allowed to get away scot-free.

In response to criticism that Israel was using “disproportionate” force against Lebanon, its ambassador to the United Nations told a cheering mob in New York: “You’re damned right we are!” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) chimed in: “Since when should a response to aggression and murder be proportionate?”

Congressman Nadler ought to catch up on his reading. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which has been signed and ratified by both Israel and the United States and was drafted in response to the kinds of Nazi atrocities described at the beginning of this column, specifically prohibits collective punishment. As a treaty obligation, it is U.S. law. It is Israeli law.

Ted Rall | Ted Rall  (read more. . .)

July 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

The Most Dangerous Alliance in the World

In American media, the current mumbling about the need for “restraint” is little better than window-dressing for bomb-dropping. The prevalent dynamic is based on a chain of rarely spoken lies, however conscious or unconscious: none more important than the lie that a religion can make one life worth more than another; render a human death unimportant; elevate certain war-inflicted agonies to spiritual significance.

“Israel has overwhelming military superiority in both southern Lebanon and Gaza,” the New York Times noted in mid-July. A pattern is deeply entrenched in U.S. media and politics: the smaller-scale killers condemned, the larger-scale killers justified with endless rationales.

Stripping away the righteous rhetoric, media manipulation and routine journalistic contortions, what remains in joint U.S.-Israeli policy is the unspoken assumption that might makes right. Myths spin around as convenient. Israel ceremoniously “withdraws” from Gaza, only to come back with missiles and troops however and whenever it pleases. The West Bank also continues to be a place of subjugation and resistance. And, as W.H. Auden observed, “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

The Israeli leaders who launched this month’s state-of-the-killing-art air assault on Gaza and Lebanon had to know that many civilians would be killed, many others wounded, many more terrorized. The smug moral posturing that Israel’s military does not target specific civilians is moldy political grist — and, in human terms, irrelevant to the totally predictable carnage.

“There are terrorists who will blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives,” President Bush said on July 13. Of course he was referring to actions by Hezbollah and Hamas. We’re supposed to pretend that Israel does not also “blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives.”

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

July 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

An Imperial Defeatist — And Proud of It

Let’s be very clear: the pursuit of empire and success in what the President calls “the global war on terrorism” are mutually incompatible. The more we seek to dominate the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, the more we will provoke anti-American fury and the very violent extremism with which we claim to be at war.

Recent polling data suggests that hostility toward the United States is on the rise in all of these areas and that our hegemonic policies and hypocritical stance on the spread of democracy are largely responsible for this. Only by repudiating the unilateralist military doctrine of the Bush administration and withdrawing most of our forces from these areas can we hope to achieve a reduction in militant anti-Americanism. By rejecting unilateralism, moreover, we can secure the assistance of local officials whose help is desperately needed to identify and root out hidden terror cells.

Indeed, success in the global struggle against terrorist movements can only be achieved by a multilateral effort entailing the vigorous application of police-type investigative methods and a moral campaign designed to invalidate the legitimacy of indiscriminate violence against innocent people. The unilateralist, shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach of the Bush administration has demonstrably undermined such efforts. The upshot is bound to be but more terrorism and a greater risk to American lives. Only by cooperating with other countries on an equitable basis can we diminish this risk.

Michael T. Klare | Tomdispatch.com (read more. . .)

July 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever more corrupt and ruthless in their drive to secure their own power—a dynamic now playing out in the United States. We Americans base our identity in large measure on the myth that our nation has always embodied the highest principles of democracy, and is devoted to spreading peace and justice to the world.

But there has always been tension between America’s high ideals and its reality as a modern version of Empire. The freedom promised by the Bill of Rights contrasts starkly with the enshrinement of slavery elsewhere in the original articles of the Constitution. The protection of property, an idea central to the American dream, stands in contradiction to the fact that our nation was built on land taken by force from Native Americans. Although we consider the vote to be the hallmark of our democracy, it took nearly 200 years before that right was extended to all citizens.

Americans acculturated to the ideals of America find it difficult to comprehend what our rulers are doing, most of which is at odds with notions of egalitarianism, justice, and democracy. Within the frame of historical reality, it is perfectly clear: they are playing out the endgame of Empire, seeking to consolidate power through increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.

Wise choices necessarily rest on a foundation of truth. The Great Turning depends on awakening to deep truths long denied.

David Korten | Yes! Magazine (read more. . .)

July 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Force Is Not with Them

The Bush administration came to power as a fundamentalist regime; and here I’m not referring to the Christian fundamentalist faith of our President. After all, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and our Vice President seem not to be Christian fundamentalists any more than were Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith. Bush’s top officials may not have agreed among themselves on whether End Time would arrive, or even on the domestic social issues of most concern to the Christian religious right in this country, but they were all linked by a singular belief in the efficacy of force.

In fact, they believed themselves uniquely in possession of an ability to project force in ways no other power on the planet or in history ever could. While hardly elevating the actual military leadership of the country (whom they were eager to sideline), they raised the all-volunteer American military itself onto a pedestal and worshipped it as the highest tech, most shock-and-awesome institution around. They were dazzled by the fact that it was armed with the smartest, most planet-spanning, most destructive set of weapons imaginable, and backed by an unparalleled military-industrial complex as well as a “defense” budget that would knock anyone’s socks off (and their communications systems down). It was enough to dazzle the administration’s top officials with dreams of global domination; to fill them with a vision of a planet-wide Pax Americana; to send them off to the moon (which, by the way, was certainly militarizable).

Force, then, was their idol and they bowed down before it. When it came to the loosing of that force (and the forces at their command), they were nothing short of fervent utopians and blind believers. They were convinced that with such force (and forces), they could reshape the world in just about any way they wanted to fit their visionary desires.

And then, of course, came 9/11, the “Pearl Harbor” of this century. Suddenly, they had a divine wind at their back, a terrified populace before them ready to be led, and everything they believed in seemed just so… well, possible. It was, in faith-based terms, a godsend. Not surprisingly, they promptly began to prepare to act in the stead of an imperially angry god and to bring the world — particularly its energy heartlands — to heel.

Tom Engelhardt | Tom Dispatch (read more. . .)

July 18th, 2006 || PermaLink

Israel Will Create More Terrorists Than It Kills

Despite President George W. Bush’s claim on Monday that the crisis started because Hezbollah decided to “fire hundreds of rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon,” Hezbollah did not attack civilian areas in Israel until after Israel began attacking civilian areas in Lebanon last week.

In fact, until Israel began its recent assault on Lebanon, not a single Israeli civilian had been killed by Hezbollah since well before Israel’s withdrawal of its occupation forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. Virtually all of Hezbollah’s military actions since then have been against Israeli occupation forces in a disputed border region between Lebanon and an Israel-occupied portion of southwestern Syria, not against Israel.

Congressional leaders of both parties have called for tough action against Syria for allowing the transshipment of rockets to Hezbollah forces, which have killed up to a dozen Israeli civilians. However, they have refused to consider suspending the shipments of F-16 jet fighters and other weapons and delivery systems to Israel. These weapons have inflicted far more civilian casualties on the Lebanese side of the border, despite provisions of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act which prohibits U.S. arms transfers to countries that use American weaponry against non-military targets.

In short, both Republicans and Democrats recognize that while arming those who kill innocent Israeli civilians is wrong, they support arming those who kill innocent Lebanese civilians. This is racism, pure and simple.

Not only is Israel’s offensive against Lebanon illegal and immoral, it does not increase Israel’s security or curb the threat of Islamic radicalism. In fact, it does the opposite.

Hezbollah gained popular support in the Shiite community in recent decades largely as a result of the failure of the central government to protect the population from Israeli air and naval attacks and the mass kidnapping and imprisonment of thousands of young men.

Israel’s current offensive will only strengthen Hezbollah’s appeal and undermine Lebanon’s pro-Western government.

This is not about Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense. As with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will create far more terrorists than it destroys.

Stephen Zunes | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

July 24th, 2006 || PermaLink

Willful Fantasies and Reality in Today’s Mideast Conflict

While some conservatives and Democrats have learned lessons from past Israeli-Arab conflicts and from the recent US experiences in Iraq, the Administration and most members of Congress have fallen in line, uttering banalities like, “Israel has a right to defend itself” (even, if that means killing hundreds of civilians and destroying Lebanon in the process), or “let Israel finish the job it started” (as if the deaths and devastation resulting from this war will have no consequences in Lebanon and the broader Middle East).

A symptom of this warped mind-set is the now widely-shared and dangerous notion that has equated calls for ceasefire with weakness. In a rare display of agreement, both the White House and the Washington Post promoted this view last week. In response to a question from Helen Thomas as to why the President opposed calls for a ceasefire, White House spokesperson Tony Snow rudely thanked Ms. Thomas for what he characterized as her “Hezbollah view.” Likewise, the Post editorialized that call for a ceasefire would only “reward the aggressors.”

In this environment, it has been difficult to promote reasoned discourse and promote political solutions. Calls from the Maronite Catholic Patriarch to end the hostilities, or Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora who challenged the West to express outrage over the damage being done to Lebanon and the Lebanese, have fallen on deaf ears in Washington.

Even more tragic has been the total blackout of any news coming out of Gaza regarding the suffering of Palestinians now enduring their fifth week of Israeli assault.

As I have said before, no good will come of this. Absent international pressure to pursue a political solution within Lebanon and Palestine and between Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis, the devastation of the past month will, as in the aftermath of 1982, morph into a new and potentially more lethal extremism.

The prerequisite to beginning such a political process is, of course, a ceasefire. But with the US blocking such an effort, and still believing that good will come from Israel’s “cleansing war,” the tragic dance of death continues.

James Zogby | Huffington Post (read more. . .)

July 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

Collective Punishment Isn’t Self-Defense

Neither the United States nor Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany, yet both countries have adopted a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment. Israeli Defense Forces, which subject centers of Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank to curfews and encirclement by barbed-wire fences, taught their techniques to U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. After Islamist suicide pilots killed 3,000 Americans in the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government justified the killing of 200,000 Afghans and Iraqis as an act of “self-defense.”

George W. Bush exceeded Hitler’s 50-to-1 ratio.

Now Israel is “reacting” to the capture of two of its soldiers by the Palestinian resistance organization Hezbollah by invading and bombing Lebanon. Death tolls that fall disproportionately heavily upon Palestinians have long been a hallmark of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the 2000-03 intifada, for example, at least seven Palestinians were killed by Israelis for every Israeli killed by a Palestinian. Now, as of this writing, more than 500 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli bombs. On the Israeli side, 15 civilians have died in Hezbollah rocket attacks and 14 soldiers have been killed in combat.

Current ratio: 30-to-1.

“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Bush said at the start of the current Middle East crisis. No doubt. But the Israelis aren’t defending themselves any more than the Bush Administrative is defending us. Each is using a crime–the kidnapping of two soldiers, the 9/11 terrorist attacks–as an excuse to wage war against innocent people who had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, the criminals–the kidnappers and those behind 9/11–are allowed to get away scot-free.

In response to criticism that Israel was using “disproportionate” force against Lebanon, its ambassador to the United Nations told a cheering mob in New York: “You’re damned right we are!” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) chimed in: “Since when should a response to aggression and murder be proportionate?”

Congressman Nadler ought to catch up on his reading. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which has been signed and ratified by both Israel and the United States and was drafted in response to the kinds of Nazi atrocities described at the beginning of this column, specifically prohibits collective punishment. As a treaty obligation, it is U.S. law. It is Israeli law.

Ted Rall | Ted Rall  (read more. . .)

July 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

The Most Dangerous Alliance in the World

In American media, the current mumbling about the need for “restraint” is little better than window-dressing for bomb-dropping. The prevalent dynamic is based on a chain of rarely spoken lies, however conscious or unconscious: none more important than the lie that a religion can make one life worth more than another; render a human death unimportant; elevate certain war-inflicted agonies to spiritual significance.

“Israel has overwhelming military superiority in both southern Lebanon and Gaza,” the New York Times noted in mid-July. A pattern is deeply entrenched in U.S. media and politics: the smaller-scale killers condemned, the larger-scale killers justified with endless rationales.

Stripping away the righteous rhetoric, media manipulation and routine journalistic contortions, what remains in joint U.S.-Israeli policy is the unspoken assumption that might makes right. Myths spin around as convenient. Israel ceremoniously “withdraws” from Gaza, only to come back with missiles and troops however and whenever it pleases. The West Bank also continues to be a place of subjugation and resistance. And, as W.H. Auden observed, “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

The Israeli leaders who launched this month’s state-of-the-killing-art air assault on Gaza and Lebanon had to know that many civilians would be killed, many others wounded, many more terrorized. The smug moral posturing that Israel’s military does not target specific civilians is moldy political grist — and, in human terms, irrelevant to the totally predictable carnage.

“There are terrorists who will blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives,” President Bush said on July 13. Of course he was referring to actions by Hezbollah and Hamas. We’re supposed to pretend that Israel does not also “blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives.”

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

July 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

An Imperial Defeatist — And Proud of It

Let’s be very clear: the pursuit of empire and success in what the President calls “the global war on terrorism” are mutually incompatible. The more we seek to dominate the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, the more we will provoke anti-American fury and the very violent extremism with which we claim to be at war.

Recent polling data suggests that hostility toward the United States is on the rise in all of these areas and that our hegemonic policies and hypocritical stance on the spread of democracy are largely responsible for this. Only by repudiating the unilateralist military doctrine of the Bush administration and withdrawing most of our forces from these areas can we hope to achieve a reduction in militant anti-Americanism. By rejecting unilateralism, moreover, we can secure the assistance of local officials whose help is desperately needed to identify and root out hidden terror cells.

Indeed, success in the global struggle against terrorist movements can only be achieved by a multilateral effort entailing the vigorous application of police-type investigative methods and a moral campaign designed to invalidate the legitimacy of indiscriminate violence against innocent people. The unilateralist, shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach of the Bush administration has demonstrably undermined such efforts. The upshot is bound to be but more terrorism and a greater risk to American lives. Only by cooperating with other countries on an equitable basis can we diminish this risk.

Michael T. Klare | Tomdispatch.com (read more. . .)

July 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever more corrupt and ruthless in their drive to secure their own power—a dynamic now playing out in the United States. We Americans base our identity in large measure on the myth that our nation has always embodied the highest principles of democracy, and is devoted to spreading peace and justice to the world.

But there has always been tension between America’s high ideals and its reality as a modern version of Empire. The freedom promised by the Bill of Rights contrasts starkly with the enshrinement of slavery elsewhere in the original articles of the Constitution. The protection of property, an idea central to the American dream, stands in contradiction to the fact that our nation was built on land taken by force from Native Americans. Although we consider the vote to be the hallmark of our democracy, it took nearly 200 years before that right was extended to all citizens.

Americans acculturated to the ideals of America find it difficult to comprehend what our rulers are doing, most of which is at odds with notions of egalitarianism, justice, and democracy. Within the frame of historical reality, it is perfectly clear: they are playing out the endgame of Empire, seeking to consolidate power through increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.

Wise choices necessarily rest on a foundation of truth. The Great Turning depends on awakening to deep truths long denied.

David Korten | Yes! Magazine (read more. . .)

July 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Force Is Not with Them

The Bush administration came to power as a fundamentalist regime; and here I’m not referring to the Christian fundamentalist faith of our President. After all, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and our Vice President seem not to be Christian fundamentalists any more than were Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith. Bush’s top officials may not have agreed among themselves on whether End Time would arrive, or even on the domestic social issues of most concern to the Christian religious right in this country, but they were all linked by a singular belief in the efficacy of force.

In fact, they believed themselves uniquely in possession of an ability to project force in ways no other power on the planet or in history ever could. While hardly elevating the actual military leadership of the country (whom they were eager to sideline), they raised the all-volunteer American military itself onto a pedestal and worshipped it as the highest tech, most shock-and-awesome institution around. They were dazzled by the fact that it was armed with the smartest, most planet-spanning, most destructive set of weapons imaginable, and backed by an unparalleled military-industrial complex as well as a “defense” budget that would knock anyone’s socks off (and their communications systems down). It was enough to dazzle the administration’s top officials with dreams of global domination; to fill them with a vision of a planet-wide Pax Americana; to send them off to the moon (which, by the way, was certainly militarizable).

Force, then, was their idol and they bowed down before it. When it came to the loosing of that force (and the forces at their command), they were nothing short of fervent utopians and blind believers. They were convinced that with such force (and forces), they could reshape the world in just about any way they wanted to fit their visionary desires.

And then, of course, came 9/11, the “Pearl Harbor” of this century. Suddenly, they had a divine wind at their back, a terrified populace before them ready to be led, and everything they believed in seemed just so… well, possible. It was, in faith-based terms, a godsend. Not surprisingly, they promptly began to prepare to act in the stead of an imperially angry god and to bring the world — particularly its energy heartlands — to heel.

Tom Engelhardt | Tom Dispatch (read more. . .)

July 18th, 2006 || PermaLink