Death in Lebanon : Spinning an assassination....

25 November 2006.

• Yesterday, Information Clearing House published an article entitled Syria is a convenient fallguy for Gemayel’s death in which Jonathan Cook took the liberty of calling attention to what should be the obvious fact that none of the journalists, including himself, who pontificate on the recent assassination of the Phalangist politician and Minister of Industry in the Lebanese coalition government, Pierre Gemayel, know for a fact who it was that lay behind the Mafia-style murder (unless, of course, they maintain unusually close connexions with the perpetrators). Unlike many of his colleagues, however, Mr Cook does not claim to know who did the deed, but he does offers a «few impolite thoughts» regarding who benefits from it. He points out that neither Syria nor Hezbollah (nor the Lebanese people, of course) stand to gain from the situation resulting from the assassination, which nudges Lebanon further to the brink of civil war (here, I cannot help but reflect over the fact that the US «intervention» has resulted in something that certainly resembles a civil war. There are those, of course, who claim that this is an unforeseen and undesired consequence of the invasion ; there are also those who believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy). Which states then, do stand to gain from the assassination and its aftermath ? Mr Cook is not coy about indicating a possible answer :

  Conversely, civil war may pose serious threats to Syrian interests -- and offer significant benefits to Israel. If Hizbullah’s energies are seriously depleted in a civil war, Israel may be in a much better position to attack Lebanon again. Almost everyone in Israel is agreed that the Israeli army is itching to settle the score with Hizbullah in another round of fighting. This way it may get the next war it wants on much better terms; or Israel may be able to fight a proxy war against Hizbullah by aiding the Shiite group’s opponents. Certainly one of the main goals of Israel’s bombing campaign over the summer, when much of Lebanon’s infrastructure was destroyed, appeared to be to provoke such a civil war. It was widely reported at the time that Israel’s generals hoped that the devastation would provoke the Christian, Sunni and Druze communities to rise up against Hizbullah.

  The Litani River remains, no doubt, a major (if not the ultimate) strategic goal for Israeli expansionism ; a civil war in Lebanon could, perhaps be perceived by its strategists as providing yet another opportunity to attain that for which the Israeli state has been straining but never quite achieved (despite a 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon) during the whole of its 60 years of existence. In any event, Mr Cook's voice is one to which we should be wise to listen ; below the response I posted to the International Clearing House thread and to StumbleUpon, upon reading his article :

Somehow, I doubt that we shall be given the opportunity to read Jonathan Cook any time soon in the New York Times, for example, or the Washington Post, or, for that matter, in the Independent or the Guardian. But we very much need to hear more from him, and of his carefully reasoned, dispassionate analyses of the latest spin on the latest atrocity taking place in Southwest Asia. We are thus all indebted to Information Clearing House for publishing Mr Cook's work....

The gift that keeps on giving....

18 September 2006.

• In today's Independent, Patrick Cockburn has written an article entitled Deadly harvest: The Lebanese fields sown with cluster bombs, which in some 1100 words effectively gives the lie to the claims of the Israeli state and its supporters and bagmen that the former was waging a war of self-defence, not against Lebanon, but against Hezbollah. Mr Cockburn cites a report in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz :
  

  
  Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. 'In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs,' he said. 'What we did there was crazy and monstrous.' What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.

  
  The consequences of this kind of warfare ? Aside from the individual tragedies - according to Cockburn some four people a day have been killed and many more wounded since (the overt) hostilities ceased, note the effect on the economic life of the villages affected :
  

  
  ... Villagers said that they were most worried by the cluster bombs still infesting their gardens, roofs and fruit trees. In the village street, were the white vehicles of the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose teams are trying to clear the bomblets.
  
  It is not an easy job. Whenever members of one of the MAG teams finds and removes a bomblet, they put a stick, painted red on top and then yellow, in the ground. There are so many of these sticks that it looks as if some sinister plant had taken root and is flourishing in the village.
  
  'The cluster bombs all landed in the last days of the war,' said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly cheerful 65-year-old woman. 'There were 35 on the roof of our house and 200 in our garden so we can't visit our olive trees.' People in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should begin now before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. 'My husband and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell,' Mrs Hejazi says. 'Now we don't know what to do.' The sheer number of the bomblets makes it almost impossible to remove them all.

  
  The strategic consequences are obvious, and just as the destruction of olive trees, roads and fields (with bulldozers, mainly, not as yet with cluster bombs) in the 22 % of Mandate Palestine which is supposed to become the territory of a Palestinian state has nothing to do with fighting Hamas, so the destruction of the basis for the livelihoods of the Lebanese has nothing to do with fighting Hezbollah. Here the sea in which the guerrillas swim, the population of southern Lebanon, is not being drained in order to get rid of the guerrillas (Hezbollah) - although that would certainly be a most welcome by-product of the strategy, were it to succeed - but rather just in order to drain the sea, so that one population can be replaced by another, more to the liking of the Israeli state's strategists. Here below the response I posted to StumbleUpon after reading Mr Cockburn's article :

Read Mr Cockburn's article, and then tell me that the Israeli state was «making war on Hezbollah» ! This flood of cluster bombs, dropped or fired in the last 72 hours before the cease fire that everyone knew was coming (but which the Israeli state, backed by the US - the same US that supplied the cluster bombs in the first place - har resisted as long as politically possible) had, of course, another purpose than putting Hezbollah fighters out of action : that of removing the population in the villages in which they were dropped by making it impossible for people to go about there daily lives without risking their lives and limbs. The name of the game is ethnic cleansing, by means of the gift which keeps on giving, long after the war is thought to be over !...

Enabling war

13 September 2006.

• 
  Yesterday, David Wearing published an article entitled Britain's role in the Israeli-Hezbollah war on Information Clearing House. The title is unfortunate, as it strengthens the erroneous perceptions which the general public has gained from the best efforts of the mainstream media, that the state of Israel was making war on an organisation known as «God's Party», or Hezbollah, in order to protect its long-suffering citizens from terrorist attacks on the part of the latter. But the article itself, in which Mr Wearing details how the UK leadership has provided both material and immaterial aid which was of the greatest importance in enabling the Israeli state to carry out its brutal war upon the population of Lebanon in general and southern Lebanon in particular, deserves the widest possible readership.Below, my response to the article, as posted to StumbleUpon and to my website :

Apart from the fact that he unfortunately neglects the territorial imperative as a vital part of the Israeli state's strategy vis-à-vis Lebanon (and one which explains why the war against the civilian population was waged with the extreme cruelty that he notes in his article - Israel wants the territory and in particular the water (the Litani river), but not the population, and what is now termed «ethnic cleansing» is a procedure the state learned to exercise as early as the 1947-48 war which resulted in its establishment), David Waearing's analysis is as good as anything I've yet seen published on the political bands that permit the Israeli state to act with total impunity, despite UNO resolution after resolution. And his characterisation of the policies of the present UK government is spot on, and he provides the documentation to prove it. What he also demonstrates, and which leaves an especially bitter after-taste, is that the prospects for a change in policy after the egregious Mr Blair is finally forced to leave the premiership and the leadership of the party he has transformed in his own image, are less than negligible :

In a famous leaked internal memo, Tony Blair called for "eye-catching initiatives" with which he "should be personally associated". The Israel-Hezbollah war no doubt falls squarely into this category. But as Westminster gossip over the diverting subject of the Prime Minister's retirement continues, no one should assume that any substantial change from the policies highlighted here will be forthcoming after Blair's departure. As polls revealed strong popular opposition to Britain's handling of the conflict, media reports informed the public of "unease", even "serious concerns" amongst members of Blair's cabinet. Yet at no point during or after the thirty-four day bloodbath did this purported "unease" move a single senior member of the British government to resign their position rather than continue their complicity in war crimes and acts of terrorism. To them, none of the horrors visited by Britain's ally on innocent Lebanese civilians represented a moral concern of greater magnitude than keeping their own job.

Can anyone imagine Mr Brown being less ready and willing to obey the slightest wink from the regent in the White House than Mr Blair ? Perhaps he will do it less obsequiously, but do it he will, happily wagging his tail behind him....

Eyeless in Lebanon - and Israel

8 September 2006.

• Jonathan Cook, a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, has published an article, entitled How Human Rights Watch lost its way in Lebanon and which one can't help wishing that all those whose views on the Israeli war on Lebanon's population would read with the attention it deserves - fat chance ! - on Information Clearing House in which he not only details the intellectual somersaults which Human Rights Watch has been forced to perform in its reporting on that war, but also who the lion tamers are that have put the organisation through its paces. Inevitably, the influence of the Israeli lobby is discussed and its attack on Human Rights Watch when the latter's report pointed out the Israeli targeting of civilians, which led directly to the acrobatics, as in the following example :
  

  Rather than concentrating on HRW’s findings of war crimes in Lebanon -- the focus of the research -- Bouckaert [senior HRW researcher, Peter Bouckaert in a New York Times interview made after the organisation's recent report «Fatal Strikes» was released] digresses: “I mean, it's perfectly clear that Hezbollah is directly targeting civilians, and that their aim is to kill Israeli civilians. We don't accuse the Israeli army of deliberately trying to kill civilians. Our accusation, clearly stated in the report, is that the Israeli army is not taking the necessary precautions to distinguish between civilian and military targets. So, there is a difference in intent between the two sides. At the same time, they are both violating the Geneva Convention.”
  
  ....
  
  First, how does Bouckaert know that Israel’s failure to distinguish between civilian and military targets was simply a technical failure, a failure to take precautions, and not intentional? Was he or another HRW researcher sitting in one of the military bunkers in northern Israel when army planners pressed the button to unleash the missiles from their spy drones? Was he sitting alongside the air force pilots as they circled over Lebanon dropping their US-made bombs or tens of thousands of “cluster munitions”, tiny land mines that are now sprinkled over a vast area of south Lebanon? Did he have intimate conversations with the Israeli chiefs of staff about their war strategy?
  
  Of course not. He has no more idea than you or I what Israel’s military planners and its politicians decided was necessary to achieve their war goals. In fact, he does not even know what those goals were. So why make a statement suggesting he does?
  
  Similarly, just as Bouckaert is apparently sure that he can divine Israel’s intentions in the war, and that they were essentially benign, he is equally convinced that he knows Hizbullah’s intentions, and that they were malign. Whatever the evidence suggests -- in a war in which Israel overwhelmingly killed Lebanese civilians and is still doing so, and in which Hizbullah overwhelmingly killed Israeli soldiers -- Bouckaert knows better. He admits that both violated the Geneva Conventions, a failure he makes sound little more than a technicality, but apparently only Hizbullah had evil designs.
  
  How is it “perfectly clear” to Bouckaert that Hizbullah was “directly” targeting Israeli civilians? It is most certainly not clear from the casualty figures.
  
  It is also not clear, as I tried to document during the war, from the geographical locations where Hizbullah’s rockets struck. My ability to discuss those locations was limited because all journalists based in Israel are subject to the rules of the military censor. We cannot divulge information useful to the “enemy” about Israel’s myriad military installations -- its army camps, military airfields, intelligence posts, arms stores and Rafael weapons factories.
  
  What I did try to alert readers to was the fact that many, if not most, of those military sites are located next to or inside Israeli communities, including Arab towns and villages.
  
  At least it is now possible, because some army positions were temporary, to reveal that many communities in the north had artillery batteries stationed next to them firing into Lebanon and that from Haifa Bay warships continually launched warheads at Lebanon. That information is now publicly available in Israel, and other examples are regularly coming to light.
  
  I reported, for example, the other day that the Haaretz newspaper referred to legal documents to be presented in a compensation suit which show that the Arab village of Fassouta, close to the border with Lebanon, had an artiller battery stationed next to it throughout much of the war. A press release this week from a Nazareth-based welfare organisation, the Laborers’ Voice, reveals that another battery was positioned by an Arab town, Majd al-Krum, during the war. Arab member of Knesset Abbas Zakour has also gone publicly on the record: "During a short visit to offer condolences to the families of victims killed in Hizbullah's rocket attacks, I saw Israeli tanks shelling Lebanon from the two towns of Arab Al-Aramisha and Tarshiha."
  
  In other Arab communities, including Jish, Shaghour, and Kfar Manda, the Israeli army requisitioned areas to train their troops for the ground invasion of south Lebanon. According to the Human Rights Association, based in Nazareth, army officials justified their decision on the following grounds: "The landscape of Arab towns [in Israel] is similar to Arab towns in Lebanon."
  
  Aside from the fact that this effective use of Israeli civilians as human shields by the army outdoes any "cowardly blending" (in the words of Jan Egeland of the United Nations) by Hizbullah in Lebanon, it also makes any attempt at second-guessing the targets of the Shiite militia’s rockets futile. Unless Bouckaert was given a private audience with Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, or drove around with a Katyusha rocket team, his talk is pure hot air.

  
  But Jonathan Cook's essay has a weak point ; it fails to take up the burning question(s) : How is that the Israeli lobby has accrued such power and influence that it can determine what views and opinions are acceptable in the mainstream media ? Who has given them this power ? In whose interests ? Admittedly, an exhaustive treatment of these questions would have been far beyond the scope of the article, but to my mind, they should at least have been adumbrated. In any event, here below my response to this important article, as posted to StumbleUpon :

A very important article by a man on the spot, which alas will go unreported by the so-called mainstream media, not merely in the United States, but also abroad. It demonstrates very clearly the contortions to which even well-meaning organisations like Human Rights Watch are constrained in order to maintain what is called their «credibility» in these media, and therewith their access to large-scale public debate (and funding). Were they to tell the plain, unvarnished truth about matters like the Israeli war on the civilian population of Lebanon (or indeed, the role of NATO in the war on Serbia in the declining years of the last century, they would, as far as the US media is concerned, become non-entities, never to be mentioned in polite society, just as Professor Chomsky has become such a non-entity. Thus, the absurd «Israel did bad things, but not deliberately, while Hezbollah did equally bad things, if not worse, and deliberately» tale that they are forced to spin. Even then, as Jonathan Cook points out, they cannot escape the ire of the Israeli lobby, for as we know Israel is constitutionally incapable of doing evil. The proof : European Nazis (of whom there were many, and not only Germans) attempted to utroot European Jewry during WW II. And those who find it difficult to accept this non-syllogistic argument are, as we frequently informed, either «anti-Semites», «Holocaust deniers», or «self-hating Jews», or (most often) a combination of all three. Che mondo cane !...