ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

The hypocrisy of those who support Israel.

Quote:

Criticize Israel? You're an Anti-Semite!

How can we have a real discussion about Mideast peace if speaking honestly about Israel is out of bounds?
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Here is an interesting piece that needs no further introduction.


Saturday 2 September 2006
Questioning the Hezbollah-Nazi axis
Louis Greenspan, professor emeritus of religious studies at McMaster University, wrote in the September 1, 2006 edition of the Globe and Mail:

(excerpt)

Hezbollah and other radical movements in the Islamic world have an eerie resemblance to the fascist parties of prewar Europe. On the other hand, I believe we should seek to place radical Islam in its Middle Eastern context where, I believe, we will find greater strengths and greater weaknesses than the paradigm of a war on fascism allows. We need to find an alternative to those on the left who are energized by the thought of a new great revolution and those on the right who have conjured up an ill-defined permanent crusade.

Islamic radicalism has produced a cornucopia of déjà vus. Many on today's left envision a repeat of history. In their writings, they have decoded radical Islamic thinkers as humanists and Western anti-imperialists. They have celebrated contemporary leaders as reincarnations of Che Guevara and even the Minutemen of the American Revolution. Yet, those secular leftists who embraced the Islamic revolution in its finest hour, the 1979 uprising of the Iranian masses against the Shah, have either been executed or thrown into exile.

The warnings of Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Kenney seem prescient by comparison. The literature and actions of Hezbollah recall fascist political outlooks so closely that one suspects the original fascist manifestos were models and inspiration. Hezbollah's call for the removal of Israel from the Middle East and its vigorous opposition to all negotiations to end the conflict is buttressed by ugly discourses on Judaism and the Jewish people and ratified by actions such as the destruction of the Jewish centre in Argentina in the early 1980s.

Hezbollah has played a villainous role in the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombings. Hezbollah itself used suicide bombings against Israeli military targets, but scholars believe it instructed others, primarily Hamas and Islamic Jihad (the latter, like Hezbollah, an Iranian protégé), in the innovation of suicide attacks against civilian targets. Moreover, its theologians and philosophers have provided the justification for such attacks, teaching that, since Israel's army consists of draftees, all Israeli civilians are eligible for destruction. This is Hezbollah's most memorable contribution to moral theology. Its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has declared that the ingathering of Jews in Israel will make it easier to destroy them.

Much of this gives credence to the imagery of a new "war on fascism," but, as this war has unfolded, we have blundered from one disaster to another, in Iraq, in Lebanon and elsewhere. I would argue that it arises from too singular a view of the struggle with fascism. War on fascism conjures up the image of total victories followed by military occupations by millions of soldiers to re-educate deluded masses.

Bleak as this picture seems, I don't want to support any view of this war that freezes the actors in situ. To call Hezbollah a Hitlerite phenomenon is to preclude its evolution into a political party devoted to its country. Its future in this respect is a crucial moment in the evolution of Islamic radicalism.

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Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law
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More spoken articles Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a mainstay of Internet culture, an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. It is particularly concerned with logical fallacies such as reductio ad Hitlerum, wherein an idea is unduly dismissed or rejected on ground of it being associated with persons generally considered "evil".

The law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. [1]

Godwin's Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, a reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be apt. It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin argues in his book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, that hyperbolic overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

Although in one of its early forms Godwin's Law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions[2], the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and Wikipedia discussion pages.

War is not a solution for terrorism
Howard Zinn
September 2, 2006

THERE IS SOMETHING important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

I remember John Hersey's novel, ``The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.

Even the ``victories" of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence -- the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a ``war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a ``suspected terrorist" is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is ``inevitable."

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in ``accidental" events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by ``accident." Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.

Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University and the author of ``A People's History of the United States."

Howard Zinn has next to zero credibility amongst serious historiians. He panders to a very select crowd.