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Israel's Double Standard
by James J. David
(Monday August 21 2006)
"If the United States wants to win this war on terrorism then getting tough with Israel would
be the best step they could take. Politicallly, it is a hard choice, but ultimately a sensible and
realistic one that would bring about true peace and justice in the Middle East."
Why is Israel not held to the same standards as other nations?
Why is it that those who resist an illegal occupation of their land are considered freedom fighters
except for those who resist an illegal Israeli occpation? In that case they are considered terrorists.
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Amnesty International Details Israeli War Crimes In Lebanon
By Peter Symonds
25 August 2006
World Socialist Web
An Amnesty International (AI) report published on Tuesday provides a chilling
account of the death and destruction inflicted on the civilian population of Lebanon
by the Israeli military during its month-long, US-backed offensive. Entitled “Deliberate
destruction or ‘collateral damage’? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure”, the document
demonstrates that the Israeli government is directly responsible for numerous war crimes
against the Lebanese people.
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Lebanese Devastated In All Sorts of Ways
By Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service
Posted on July 25, 2006, Printed on July 25, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/39439/
BEIRUT, Jul 23 (IPS) - Much of Beirut is a devastated city, infrastructure in many areas lies in a
shambles after the Israeli bombing. But the Lebanese are also just feeling devastated.
"Does our country not have the right to move forward like other democracies," says Nidal Mothman,
a 35-year-old taxi driver in downtown Beirut. "We hate the American government for giving the green
light for the Israelis to bomb us back to the stone age."
Mothman, like so many Lebanese in the capital city, is seething with anger over what he called "indiscriminate"
Israeli aggression towards their country.
"How many Hezbollah have they killed," Mothman said. "Maybe just a few, while they've killed over 350
Lebanese civilians. What kind of war are they waging against my country?"
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Israelis Rain Down Deadly DU On Lebanese Civilians
Esteemed expert and whistleblower highlights US sale of GBU 28 weapons
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | July 28 2006
Esteemed depleted uranium expert Dr. Doug Rokke is pointing the finger at Israel for
using deadly and illegal depleted uranium munitions against the Lebanese people which were
sold to them by the U.S. government - and calls for an immediate halt to the practice.
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A New War Frenzy
By Robert Parry
July 20, 2006
Americans are being whipped into a new war frenzy with simplistic visions of evil villains, much like
occurred four years ago before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Just as Saddam Hussein was cast as the monster whose elimination would transform Iraq into a
democratic oasis, Hezbollah and its allies in Syria and Iran are presented now as the crux of all evil
in the Middle East whose military defeat will bring a new day.
Inside the United States, many of the same politicians and pundits who stampeded the nation into Iraq
are back again urging the application of even more violence. While George W. Bush and his neoconservative
advisers may be leading the herd, influential Democrats – like Hillary Clinton and Alan Dershowitz – are
running with this pack, too.
But the ease with which these Middle East hawks tolerate the slaughter of Arabs in Lebanon – as well as in
Iraq and in the Palestinian territories – has a flavor of racism that has poisoned U.S. policy as far as many
Muslims are concerned and indeed has strengthened popular support for Islamic extremists on the Arab street.
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Israel Prepares to Invade Syria
Saturday July 15th 2006, 8:13 am
As to be expected, the story about a Hezbollah drone hitting an Israeli warship was tweaked this morning
to fit the emerging agenda. “Senior Israeli army officers said Saturday that the rocket which hit an Israeli
missile boat off the Lebanese coast Friday night was an Iranian-built radar-guided C-802,” reports the Bangkok Post.
How Israel mistook an “aircraft rigged with explosives” for a missile, as the Associated Press reports, is not
explained. However, blaming Iran certainly fits the picture, as both Israel and the United States are trying to
drag Iran and Syria into Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and thus widen the conflict, as planned.
In a Market Watch article provocatively entitled “Bush points finger at Hezbollah, Syria,” we learn that our
ruler, attending a globalist confab in St. Petersburg, Russia, has blamed Syria for Israel’s invasion.
“In my judgment, the best way to stop the violence is to understand why the violence occurred in the first place,”
said Bush. “And that’s because Hizbullah has been launching rocket attacks out of Lebanon into Israel and because
Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers,” Naharnet reports.
No mention here of the hundreds of Lebanese held illegally in Israeli torture dungeons. Earlier this month, the
Lebanese government complained to the UN Secretary General representative in Beirut about “the nonstop arrest
of detainees, and … the hundreds of missing persons, which poses as a violation of human rights.”
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Lebanon’s Expendable People
Mike Whitney
The most shocking thing about Israel’s assault on Lebanon is the dispassionate precision with which
the bombardment has been carried out. From bridge to granary, from granary to power plant, from power
plant to factory, from factory to mosque, from mosque to hospital, from hospital to apartment building;
each decimated with the calm disdain of a surgeon removing a cancerous tumor. We get no sense of rage
in Israel’s behavior, just the calculated savagery of men who see their duty as systematically decapitating
an entire civilization and leaving it in ruins.
The destruction of Lebanon is the work of robots not men; unfeeling, remorseless bundles of skin and bone.
No one could have done what these men did in just seven days and be a part of the same human family as you and I.
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The Abyss Beckons
By Robert Parry
July 18, 2006
The Israel-Lebanon conflict has opened up a possible route for George W. Bush and his neoconservative
strategists to achieve a prized goal that otherwise appeared to be blocked for them – military assaults on Syria
and Iran aimed at crippling those governments.
After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 – after only three weeks of fighting – the question posed by some Bush
administration officials was whether the U.S. military should go “left or right,” to Syria or Iran. Some joked that
“real men go to Tehran.”
According to the neocon strategy, “regime change” in Syria and Iran, in turn, would undermine Hezbollah, the
Shiite militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, and would strengthen Israel’s hand in dictating peace terms
to the Palestinians.
But the emergence of a powerful insurgency in Iraq – and a worsening situation for U.S. forces in Afghanistan –
stilled the neoconservative dream of making George W. Bush a modern-day Alexander conquering the major cities
of the Middle East, one after another.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq also unwittingly enhanced the power of Iran’s Shiite government by eliminating its chief
counterweight, the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. With Iran’s Shiite allies in control of the Iraqi government
and a Shiite-led government also in Syria, the region’s balance between the two rival Islamic sects was thrown out
of whack.
The neocon dream of “regime change” in Syria and Iran never died, however. It stirred when Bush accused Syria
of assisting Iraqi insurgents and when he insisted that Iran submit its nuclear research to strict international controls.
The border conflict between Israel and Lebanon now has let Bush toughen his rhetoric again against Syria and Iran.
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Nothing but Anti-Arab Racism Can Fully Explain the Behaviour of the Israelis
I have heard Zionists panicking over the breeding rate of Arabs, debating their brain size
By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The extreme Zionist impulses of Ehud Olmert's government are dishonouring its own excruciating history.
And noxious anti-Arab prejudices are evident too among a number of Jewish friends of Israel in the United
Kingdom, not only firebrand loyalists, but nice, good, funny people. Speaking on BBC 1's This Week on
Thursday, that national treasure Maureen Lipman responded thus when asked about the disproportionate
reaction of Israel to Hamas and Hizbollah provocations: "What's proportion got to do with it? It's not about
proportion is it? Human life is not cheap to the Israelis. And human life on the other side is quite cheap
actually because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up".
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Only One Man Stands Between Israel And World War III
By Geov Parrish
16 July, 2006
Working For Change
The leaders of Israel are brutal, and could not care less about human rights, civilian casualties,
international law, or the commission of war crimes. But they are not stupid.
That is why there is one man, and one man only, who can prevent what is otherwise rapidly going
to escalate into at minimum, a messy and destructive regional war; at worst, World War III. That
man is, unfortunately, George W. Bush, who in five years has never shown the slightest inclination
for doing what he must now do at a time of great provocation and crisis: rein in Israel. He is the only
world leader with the credibility and leverage to do it, and the political and national self-interest to compel it.
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