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

McGentrix, no surprise to see you endorsing the use of WMD.

TYRE, Lebanon - Israeli air strikes are taking a tremendous toll on the civilian population in southern Lebanon, with an attack Sunday on a bus filled with women and children that left three dead and 13 injured, many of them severely.

At Jabal Amel Hospital in the southern city of Tyre, where most of the victims were taken after the incident, Rhonda Shaloub is wheeled into a recovery room next to her 15-year-old niece, Radije, following emergency surgery.

Their faces are both mummy-wrapped with gauze bandages. There are openings only for their noses and mouths. What can be seen of their faces is deeply disturbing. There is blood seeping at the edges of Rhonda's bandages, while Radije's lips are stitched with medical sutures, the skin on her chin speckled with red tissue damage caused by the blast.


Rhonda is still deeply sedated from surgery, but when she does regain consciousness she will be told that her husband and her mother are dead, both killed when the bus was hit.


A nurse at the hospital says the victims were traveling from their village of Tairi, fleeing north because of the air strikes, when their own bus was hit.


In another room down the hallway, another victim of the bus attack, Radia Shaitoo, raises her bandaged and broken arm near her face, which is covered with tiny blast lacerations. She rolls her head back and forth on the pillow and moans almost as if she is sick. She mumbles something like, "only people with no religion would do this," an insult against Israel.


The bus incident is the latest, and one of the most dramatic, illustrations of civilians being killed and wounded by Israeli air strikes, which Israel claims are focused on Hezbollah forces and weapons. Yet the strikes are having a punishing effect on the general Lebanese population and infrastructure.

"People are starting to realize this isn't a war against Hezbollah," says Timor Goksel, former head of the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon for more than 25 years. "It's a war against the country, against the infrastructure."

Some analysts have theorized that with attacks against civilians and non-military installations, Israel is trying to turn the Lebanese population against Hezbollah by making them pay a price as Hezbollah's host nation. Goksel says the strategy will never work, since Hezbollah isn't just an organization, but part of the fabric of Shia society.


"I spent a lot of time in the south," he says. "I've seen women down there attack Israeli tanks with knives. You're not going to turn these people against Hezbollah by making their lives miserable."

At the entrance to Jabel Amel Hospital, an exhausted medical technician, Bassem Mteirek, lies on an empty gurney, taking a short break from the flood of patients.


"We've seen more than 400 people come through this hospital in the last ten days," he says, shaking his head.


At the base of the gurney is a suitcase covered with blood. It belonged to one of the passengers on the bus. A man comes out of the entrance, talking on the telephone. He has lost his wife in the attack. He says he's too heartbroken to speak. He picks up the suitcase and walks back inside.


In another hospital room inside, Aneza Hamza lies in bed with a head injury and a broken leg, a victim of an earlier air strike. When I approach her, she covers the bandages on her head with her scarf. She is an older woman, but despite her injuries smiles beatifically and seems almost cheerful.

"What can we do," she says, with a slight shrug.

Imani Darwish doesn't have a scratch but lost her husband and four of her eight children in an air strike against an apartment building in Tyre. The only reason she is alive, she says, is because one of her daughters was in the hospital, pregnant, and she was visiting. She shows no sign of grief or emotion about the loss.

"We can't cry every day," she says. "What good will that do? It's all up to God what happens."

Amina Shaloub and her 12-year-old son, Hussein, were victims of an air strike against a civil defense building in Tyre. Her face has the now familiar marks of blast trauma. Her son took shrapnel in the stomach, which had to be removed by surgeons.

"I'm happy for my life and I'm happy for the life of my son," she says. "But it doesn't really matter if we live or die. Whatever [happens] is God's will."

Asked if they can ever live in peace with Israel, especially after the toll from the recent air strikes, she is surprisingly conciliatory.

"If they stop bombing the women and children, if they let us live in freedom," she says, "then we can live with them like family, like brothers and sisters."

Hezbollah cowards, says UN chief
By Charlie Charalambous in Larnaca, Cyprus
July 25, 2006
UN relief chief Jan Egeland launched a scathing attack on Hezbollah today, branding the Shiite militants cowards for boasting that Lebanese civilians were enduring the Israeli bombardments.

"Some believe I spoke only about excessive use of force by Israel there (in Beirut)," he said in Cyprus after arriving from Lebanon en route to Israel.

"However, consistently from Hezbollah heartlands my message was: 'Hezbollah - stop this cowardly blending in among women and children'.

"I heard there was a statement they were proud they had lost very few fighters, and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think you want to be proud of having many more children and women than armed men (killed)," Mr Egeland said.

In Beirut yesterday, as he toured areas devastated by Israeli air strikes, he called the campaign "a violation of humanitarian law".

Today he repeated that the devastation caused by the Israeli bombardment of Beirut was "truly horrific", and said he was "surprised" after seeing the level of destruction first-hand.

Mr Egeland said his message to the Israelis would be similar to the one he made repeatedly in Lebanon.

"We need a cessation of hostilities because this is a war where the civilians are paying the price."

Asked if he believed Israel would heed his call he said: "Yes, I think they will listen".

"I think the Israelis are right when they say they do not want to unnecessarily hurt the civilian population, and I believe I will get a final breakthrough on the humanitarian corridors."

In Beirut yesterday, Mr Egeland made an urgent appeal for $US150 million ($200 million) to meet the needs in the next three months of about 800,000 people displaced by the conflict.

He said both a cessation of hostilities and getting effective aid to vulnerable groups were "long overdue".

The overall amount of the appeal included a call by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) for $US23.8 million to help Lebanese children who have borne the brunt of Israel's military onslaught.

Mr Egeland said the first UN convoy of trucks carrying emergency humanitarian aid will leave Beirut for the southern port city of Tyre on Wednesday.

Another convoy is due for Friday, and Mr Egeland said he hoped the delivery of aid would continue "every second day" with the agreement of the Israeli military.

gungasnake wrote:

najmelliw wrote:

For the record, I'm very glad nazi-germany lost the war...

Freedom4free isn't...



I'm guessing he lies awake two or three hours every night wondering what if anything his A-number-1 hero (Hitler) could have done differently to produce a happier (for them) outcome. I'm just trying to help him out a bit.

Mr gung, let me make something clear, in any of my threads/posts, when ever i mention anything related to Hitlers germany or the Holocaust, i'm basically comparing Israel's atrocities/crimes and more importantly their way of thinking with that of Hitler and his Nazi crimes...

Formerly, he was called Adolf Hitler. Had not this latter committed an inexpiable crime by getting in the way of gold, of the Jews and of Communism? He had had the effrontery to refuse the gold standard. He had got on so well without it that his new economic system was allowing him to trade on a large scale with other countries poor in gold, notably Italy, Japan and some central European and Latin American states. Panic had struck Britain, France and the United States: Germany was encroaching on their turf and taking away their markets. The rich (in gold) never appreciate the revolt, the coalition and the success of the poor (in gold). In the late 1930s, the three rich ones, who claimed to be linked by one democratic system, were above all bound to one other by a chain of gold. After the war, in 1947, L. Genet and Victor-L. Tapié were able to publish, in their Précis d’histoire contemporaine, 1919-1939 (Paris, Hatier), a quotation which in English would read: "It is thus not an ideological link but a chain of gold that binds the great democracies to one another" (p. 206); they added: "Six years of self-sufficiency made Germany the world’s greatest industrial country" (p. 209). Still more than others, the Jewish financiers had taken offence: how could anyone get on in the world without them and their gold?!

"Sweetest love, favorite of my heart, my one and only, my dearest, my truest and hottest beloved," one of the letters begins. "I could kiss you a thousand times and still not be satisfied. My love for you is endless, so tender, so hot and so complete."

...Bahhhh, bahhhhh, black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full...

Brand X, so you listen to Egeland when he talks of Israel's "excessive use of force" and Israel's "violation of humanitarian law" also? Do you think Israel has used excessive force and is in violation of humanitarian law?

The ambulance headlamps were on, the blue light overhead was flashing, and another light illuminated the Red Cross flag when the first Israeli missile hit, shearing off the right leg of the man on the stretcher inside. As he lay screaming beneath fire and smoke, patients and ambulance workers scrambled for safety, crawling over glass in the dark. Then another missile hit the second ambulance.


Even in a war which has turned the roads of south Lebanon into killing zones, Israel's rocket strike on two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances on Sunday night set a deadly new milestone.

Just my luck. I go away on vacation and it happens to be the week when George W. Bush's strategic view of the current world situation is revealed: Russia big. China big, too. World leaders boring. Lady world leaders need neck rub. Terrorism bad. Elections good (when the right people get elected). Israel good. Time to go home yet?

I felt better when I thought the Decider didn't have a worldview, just a set of instincts about freedom and democracy. But even if you set aside the president's embarrassing open-mike performance at the Group of Eight summit, which is hard to do, events of the past week show that this administration actually thinks it knows what it's doing. Bush and his folks haven't just blundered around and created this dangerous mess, they've done it on purpose. And they intend to make it worse.

Bush's endorsement of the violence that Israel is inflicting on Lebanon -- a sustained bombing campaign that has killed hundreds of civilians and can only be seen as collective punishment -- is truly astonishing. Of course Israel has the right to defend itself against Hezbollah's rocket attacks. But how can this utterly disproportionate, seemingly indiscriminate carnage be anything but counterproductive?

Destroying the Beirut airport, blasting communications towers into oblivion and cleansing southern Lebanon of its civilian population are not measures the world will see as an attack on Hezbollah terrorists. The Israeli campaign is so intense and widespread that it is creating more terrorists than it kills. Proportionate military action might have enhanced Israel's security, but video footage of grandmothers weeping amid the rubble of their homes and bloodied children lying in hospital beds won't make Israel more secure. Hezbollah's stature in the Arab world is growing, and its patrons in Damascus and Tehran must be smugly satisfied.

The role of any American president and secretary of state should have been to move quickly to bring hostilities to an end. Instead, Bush all but egged the Israelis on, and Condoleezza Rice went so far as to reject the idea of a cease-fire. Belatedly, she has flown to the region with no real credibility as an honest broker. Her words of concern about the "humanitarian crisis" in Lebanon ring hollow.

But this administration doesn't want to be an honest broker in the Middle East. Bush and Rice have staked their Middle East policy on a single incontrovertible idea -- that terrorism is bad -- and it has led them to the mistaken notion that Israel can achieve long-term security by creating a kind of scorched-earth buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

It's hard to imagine a more unpromising course of action. Even Rice (who is an expert on Russia, not the Middle East) and Bush (who knows that Russia and China are big) must recall that a full-fledged military occupation of southern Lebanon didn't work, which should lead them to question whether a few weeks of bombing will do the trick. Even the Israelis, who boasted at first that they were out to destroy Hezbollah, now speak only of severely weakening the enemy and are leaving the door open to some sort of international force on the border.

Perhaps that will be the resolution. Perhaps Israel will get its buffer zone and Hezbollah rockets will stop falling on Haifa for the time being. But ultimately Israel will be less secure, and so will the rest of us.

Bush, Rice et al. refuse to see that their crusade against terrorism can never be won by military action alone, because a victory in the war of arms can also be a defeat in the war of ideas. Lebanon was moving -- imperfectly but unmistakably -- toward becoming the kind of society we paint as a model for the Arab world, a secular democracy with a modernizing economy. Now billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure are in ruins and the country's most promising industry, tourism, has effectively been obliterated. It will be some time before Beirut is anyone's first choice for a holiday of sun and fun.

Hezbollah started this with its rockets, but the unrestrained Israeli response threatens to make an iconic hero of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah. Hezbollah's new prominence enhances Iranian influence in the region, which creates problems for pro-Western governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Iraq, meanwhile, is in the midst of a brutal civil war, and American troops are bogged down in a long-term occupation. This is winning a war on terrorism?

The next time you hear someone praise the simplicity of George W. Bush's worldview, keep in mind that what you don't know can indeed hurt you.

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?"

From the street to the leadership, most people seem to talk the same language. Last Thursday Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora told reporters that his country has been torn to shreds. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?"

Siniora also accused Israel of massacring Lebanese civilians and attempting to destroy everything that allows the country to stay alive.

The facts on the ground add credence to his remarks. The humanitarian crisis continues to worsen by the hour, with close to a million Lebanese displaced. Officials say at least 64 bridges have been bombed. Many roads are cut by the bombing, and this is hindering transportation of food and aid supplies.

Other Israeli targets have included the country's largest milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centres, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, hospitals and an ambulance convoy.

In certain districts of Beirut life goes on as normal, but southern Beirut has been hit hard, with entire buildings brought to the ground by Israeli air raids.

"When do you think this war will end," 22-year-old student at the American University of Beirut Nishan Ishaqi said. "I lived in southern Beirut, and everything I know is totally destroyed now. I only want peace, and a safe place to stay."

Ishaqi, who was preparing to leave for Tripoli (north of Beirut in Lebanon) to stay with relatives, wept as he said, "Why must they do this to us? If they want to fight Hezbollah, let them fight them -- but not the Lebanese civilians."

Meanwhile, Israeli military operations continue to pummel southern Lebanon, including the city of Tyre, while Lebanese in Beirut had a day of relative calm Sunday.

Foreign war ships are crowding ports as evacuation of foreign nationals continues. "Yes, we see the priorities of the western countries as they evacuate their people," 55-year-old clothing merchant in the Hamra district of Beirut, Ayad Harrar said. "So you see, screw the Lebanese, they do not matter to us. This is what their governments are saying to us by these actions."

Harrar said people are shocked that his country was once again plunged into war, just when they thought they had found peace.

"This afternoon it is calm, but we all know that when they finish evacuating their people, we will be bombed once more," Harrar said. "It is not possible to live a life while we live under these conditions; not knowing when our day to die is coming from more Israeli bombs."

On Saturday, after meeting with members from a United Nations team who had just returned from the region, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that the situation in Lebanon was part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East," and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.

Not many people in Beirut are able to see it that way. Suthir Amalat carrying her child in one arm as she bought water to take home for emergencies said she was preparing for everything to worsen.

"We are angry at Hezbollah for starting this catastrophe, but even more angry at the Israelis for destroying all of Lebanon," she said. "And America, who we thought was our friend, clearly now supports the Israeli destruction of our country."

All I know is that Israeli life is not worth more than Lebonese life.