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

Mothers embraced their dead children in shock Sunday as rescue workers tackled the rubble and dust of buildings flattened by Israeli bombing raids on the southern village of Qana that killed at least 59 civilians. Out of whom 37 children between the ages of 2 to 13 years old.....

....All this was inspired by the principle -- which is quite true in itself -- that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper stata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.....

Adolf Hitler

Then how do those journalists get from Beirut to the bomb sites so quickly and easily? Wouldn't you think if traffic can move IN to those areas, traffic can also move OUT? That seems reasonable to me. Now the piece I posted a little while ago summarizes reports that Hezbollah won't always allow the civilians to leave an area and will prevent them from doing so at gunpoint and/or shoot them if they try to run. Now I don't know if that is true because I'm not there. But then we aren't there to see the 'atrocities' committed by Israel either are we?

The evidence more and more points to Hezbollah telling a whole lot of whoppers in this conflict and so far, the evidence points to Israel telling it pretty much as it is.

...pictures of slammites being used as "human shields"...

On 6 October 2005, the High Court of Justice ruled that it was illegal to use Palestinian civilians during military operations. The decision was in response to a petition filed in 2002 by B'Tselem and six other human rights organizations. In its ruling, the Court also prohibited use of the "Prior Warning Procedure," which replaced the "Neighbor Procedure" in July 2003. The court held that any use of Palestinian civilians in IDF military operations is completely forbidden.

Foxfyre wrote:

Then how do those journalists get from Beirut to the bomb sites so quickly and easily? Wouldn't you think if traffic can move IN to those areas, traffic can also move OUT? That seems reasonable to me. Now the piece I posted a little while ago summarizes reports that Hezbollah won't always allow the civilians to leave an area and will prevent them from doing so at gunpoint and/or shoot them if they try to run. Now I don't know if that is true because I'm not there. But then we aren't there to see the 'atrocities' committed by Israel either are we?

The evidence more and more points to Hezbollah telling a whole lot of whoppers in this conflict and so far, the evidence points to Israel telling it pretty much as it is.

What evidence, Foxy? Are you claiming an op-ed piece by some rightwing writer as evidence?

I'd be interested in reading reports, if possible from a third party (neither Hezbollah nor the Israeli Armed Forces), about what you are claiming. Not sure, but shouldn't organizations such as the International Red Cross be reporting that?

So far (while I do not deny I might find that believable), I have seen no evidence that Lebanese can move freely and easily out of the dangerous zones, that purely civilian infrastructure is not targeted, that Hezbollah kills Lebanese civilians to make a case, that Hezbollah prevents Lebanese civilians at gunpoint from moving out of the dangerous zones or, in fact, for almost everything you are claiming, Foxy.

You say it is your belief, it makes sense to you, it's how the situation appears to you etc. That's quite nice, but so far I haven't seen evidence for that. If you're saying that's your unbased opinion, fine. But if you're claiming that as fact, you should be willing to apply the same criteria as when judging reported atrocities by the Israeli army.

Later, when people started to leave, two young men were stopped by armed men in masks, Mr. Ghannam said. The masked men, who Mr. Ghannam said were Hezbollah fighters, refused to let the young men leave, even shooting at one of them.

ONe is that the article itself notes that all such practices have now been banned in the IDF:

THE ISRAELI INFORMATION CENTER FOR
IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES


20 July 2006: Israeli Soldiers use civilians as Human Shields in Beit Hanun

B'Tselem's initial investigation indicates that, during an incursion by Israeli forces into Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 17 July 2006, soldiers seized control of two buildings in the town and used residents as human shield...

http://www.btselem.org/english/Human_Shields/20060720_Human_Shields_in_Beit_Hanun.asp

QANA, Lebanon, July 30 ?- The dead lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with dirt. Faces were puffy. A man's arm was extended straight out from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their skin like wax.

In the all-day scramble to retrieve the bodies from the remains of this one house ?- backhoes dug for hours at the site ?- tallies of the dead varied. Residents said as many as 60 people had been inside. News agencies reported that 56 had been killed, and that 34 of them were children. The Lebanese Red Cross, which conducted the rescue, counted 27 bodies. As many as 17 were children. The youngest was 10, and the oldest was 95. One was in a wheelchair.

This was the single most lethal episode in the course of this sudden war. The survivors will remember it as the day their children died. For the village, it is a fresh pain in wound gouged more than 10 years ago, when an Israeli attack here killed more than 100 civilians. Many of them were children, too.

The Israeli government apologized for that airstrike, as it did for the one here on Sunday. It said that residents had been warned to leave and should have already been gone.

But leaving southern Lebanon now is dangerous, and pricey. The two extended families staying in the house that the Israeli missile struck ?- the Shalhoubs and the Hashims ?- had discussed leaving several times over the past two weeks. But they were poor ?- most worked in tobacco or construction ?- and the family was big and weak, with a 95-year-old, two relatives in wheelchairs and dozens of children. A taxi north, around $1,000, was unaffordable.

And then there is the risk of the road itself.

Dozens, including 21 refugees in the back of a pickup truck on July 15, have been killed by Israeli strikes while trying to evacuate since the war began. Missiles hit two Red Cross ambulances last weekend, injuring six people and punching a circle in the center of the cross on one's roof. A rocket hit the ambulance convoy that responded in Qana on Sunday.

"We heard on the news they were bombing the Red Cross," said Zaineb Shalhoub, a 22-year-old who survived the bombing. She was lying quietly in a hospital bed in Tyre. "What can we do with all of our kids? There was just no way to go."

They had moved to the house on the edge of a high ridge, which was dug into the earth. They thought it would be safer. The position helped muffle the sound of the bombs.

But its most valuable asset was water. The town, mostly abandoned, had not had power or running water in many days. A neighbor rigged up a pumping system, and the Shalhoubs and Hashims ran a pipe from that house to theirs.

Life had taken on a strange stunted quality. In a crawl-space basement area near the crushed house, five mattresses were on the floor. A Koran was open to a prayer. A school notebook was on a pillow. Each morning, the women made breakfast for the children. Ms. Shalhoub gave lessons. They hoped for rescue.

The first missile struck around 1 a.m. local time, throwing Mohamed Shalhoub, 38, into an open doorway. His five children, ages 12 to 2, were still inside the house, as was his wife, his mother, and a 10-year-old nephew. He tried to get to them, but minutes later another missile hit. By morning, when the rescue workers arrived, all eight family members were dead.

"I felt like I was turning around, and the earth was going up and I was going into the earth," he said, staring blankly ahead of him in a hospital bed in Tyre.

Israeli military officials said that the building did not collapse until the early morning, and that "munitions" stored in the house might have brought it down. But the house appeared to have been hit from above, and residents said the walls and ceiling came down around them immediately after the first bomb.

"My mouth was full of sand," Ms. Shalhoub said. She said doctors had told her family that those who died had been suffocated and crushed to death.

"They died because of the sand and the bricks, that's what they told us," she said.

At least eight people in the house survived, and told of a long, terrifying night. Some remained buried until morning. Others crawled free. Ms. Shalhoub sat under a tree with Mohamed Shalhoub, without his wheelchair, and three others, listening to the planes flying overhead in the dark.

"You couldn't see your finger in front of your face," said Ghazi Aidibi, a neighbor.

Ms. Shalhoub said she tried to help a woman who was sobbing from under the wreckage, asking for her baby, but she could not find the child. A neighbor, Haidar Tafleh, said that he heard screaming when he approached the debris, but that bombing kept him away.

"We tried to take them out, but the bombs wouldn't let us," Mr. Tafleh said.

The area took several more hits. A house very close to the Shalhoubs' was crushed. A giant crater was gouged next to it. Residents said as many as eight buildings had been destroyed over two weeks.

Collapsed buildings have been a serious problem in southern Lebanon. In villages where rescuers have not been able to go, dozens of corpses may remain under the rubble. The mayor of Tyre, Abed al-Husseini, said the accounts he had heard from survivors suggested that in just one small village on the border, Slifa, as many as 75 bodies were still buried.

A grocer, Hassan Faraj, stood outside his shop, near a monument to those killed in the 1996 attack. He said that Hezbollah fighters had not come to Qana, but that residents supported them strongly. There was little evidence of fighters on Sunday, but Hezbollah flags the posters of Shiite leaders trimmed the streets. "They like the resistance here," he said.

He cautioned not to stand in the street in front of his shop, because that was where the ambulance convoy had been hit in the morning.

At the Hakoumi Hospital in Tyre, Mr. Shalhoub sat in bed. His face was slack, stunned. His relatives poured him spicy coffee, and the room filled with its scent. The survivors spoke of their faith as a salve. The children, Mr. Shalhoub said, are in paradise now.

But 24-year-old Hala Shalhoub, whose two daughters, ages 1 and 5, were killed, was moaning and rocking slightly in her hospital bed.

"I want to see them," she said slowly. "I want to hold them."

A relative said, "Let her cry."

Zaineb Shalhoub, in the next bed, sat quietly.

"There's nobody left in our village," she said. "Not a human or a stone."

BrandX, you present one instance of Hezbollah stopping two men and then shooting at them as some kind of evidence that Hezbollah is preventing people from leaving wholesale at gun point.

Quote:

BrandX, you present one instance of Hezbollah stopping two men and then shooting at them as some kind of evidence that Hezbollah is preventing people from leaving wholesale at gun point.

One incident is evidence, no?

If you think it happened only once you are fantasizing.

Brand X wrote:

Quote:

BrandX, you present one instance of Hezbollah stopping two men and then shooting at them as some kind of evidence that Hezbollah is preventing people from leaving wholesale at gun point.

One incident is evidence, no?

If you think it happened only once you are fantasizing.

One incident is not evidence of anything when number one you don't know who those two men were or why Hezbollah stopped to question them and later shot at them. And number two there has been more one instance where it was reported that residents are either too poor, the roads in too bad of a condition or wounded or just elderly or too dangerous because of the ongoing fighting... so that I think it is more reasonable to assume this to be more a reasonable explanation of why residents haven't been able to leave is than because Hezbollah is forcing them to stay at gun point.

Heard an live interview with Joseph Kallas, archbishop of Beirut and Byb-Los of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church this noon.

He asked the rhetorical question, why the Christian areas have been bombed this morning, if the Israelian didn't know that such would drive even more towards Hizbollah although they actually didn't support them.
But Christians liked their homecountry Lebanon as well as others, he said.

He noted that the destroyed bridges had stopped some couples of aid convoys, two litterally in eyeside. (One with supplies by German Catholic and Evangelical charities.[Inner Mission and Charity Work of the Evangelical Church in Germany and German Caritas])

Heard an live interview with Joseph Kallas, archbishop of Beirut and Byb-Los of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church this noon.

He asked the rhetorical question, why the Christian areas have been bombed this morning, if the Israelian didn't know that such would drive even more towards Hizbollah although they actually didn't support them.
But Christians liked their homecountry Lebanon as well as others, he said.

He noted that the destroyed bridges had stopped some couples of aid convoys, two litterally in eyeside. (One with supplies by German Catholic and Evangelical charities.[Inner Mission and Charity Work of the Evangelical Church in Germany and German Caritas])

Lebanese are wondering why Hez moved into the Christian areas too. Some reckon Christian casualties make the people of Lebanon united in their hatred for Israel and prevent it from being Israel vs. Hez but rather Israel vs. Lebanon.

In other words to play the media.

Any Christian who buys into this crap is basically out of his mind.

Looking at ALL the evidence thus far presented by media sources, I think there is no question that Israel are the good guys in this fight.

It's like watching two different wars
Julian Borger
August 2, 2006 01:18 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html

The US and European media have always covered the Middle East from different perspectives, but flying back to Washington from a stay in London at the height of the Lebanese conflict made it clear to me how wide the gulf has become. Britons and Americans are watching two different wars.

The overwhelming emphasis of television and press coverage in the UK was the civilian casualties in Lebanon. Day after day, those were the "splash" stories. The smaller number of civilian casualties from Hizbullah rockets in northern Israel was also covered but rarely made the top headlines or front pages.

Back in DC, watching Lebanon through American camera lenses, the centre of the action seemed to be Haifa. CNN, for example, sent two of its top anchors, Miles O'Brien and Wolf Blitzer, to the Israeli port city. Much of the morning news was devoted to showing O'Brien scurrying in and out of shelters when the air raid sirens sounded. Another correspondent was sent on patrol with a Haifa ambulance crew to look for casualties. On the morning I was watching, the crew only came across a man who had a fatal heart attack as a result of the rockets. The paramedics' attempts to save him were shown.

This emphasis on Israeli casualties relative to Lebanese was taken to its breathtaking extreme by Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist on the Washington Post, who described the Hizbullah rocket attacks as "perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz."

From Haifa, the television news typically shifts to the border and to correspondents covering the Israeli army (CNN has another of its leading men, John Roberts, stationed there), who have supplied most of the news on the fighting in south Lebanon.

There have been reports out of Lebanon itself, but they have usually come further down the running order, and reports on civilian casualties there are almost always contextualised, emphasising the Hizbullah tactic of launching rockets from populated areas; in British reporting, that context has often been either missing or weighed separately in analytical pieces.

British journalism generally celebrates eyewitness accounts with a consistency in emotional tone that discourages cool asides to discuss mitigating circumstances; US television reporting out of Lebanon, by contrast, has occasionally been in danger of becoming all context, focusing on Hizbullah tactics to the exclusion of the humanitarian tragedy. Fox News, in particular, has sought to bolster Israeli public relations. An anchor at one point asked Ehud Barak what he would like the world to know about Hizbullah and Hamas.

Qana has changed the tone, at least for the time being. The account of families huddled together in a building in a doomed bid to keep their children safe and the sight of the small bodies being carried out of the rubble has had the emotional force to break through the usual rules of the game, and has mostly been given comprehensive coverage. But one Fox anchor still expressed concern that any pause in the Israeli offensive would allow Hizbullah to regroup.

There is a circular relationship between media coverage of the Middle East and public opinion. Correspondents and editors are often fearful of the avalanches of hate mail that can descend in a heartbeat on matters Middle Eastern, and their reports consequently serve to deepen entrenched points of view.

The difference between British and US polls on the current conflict are striking. Just over a fifth of Britons polled pre-Qana, compared with nearly half of the Americans questioned at about the same time, said they thought the Israeli use of force was proportionate; and another 9% of American respondents thought the Israelis were not being tough enough.

Some of that extraordinary divide must be attributable to the very different realities on British and American television screens.

Meanwhile, more Iraqi civilians are dying every day than Lebanese, but the horror of that war barely appears on television screens in either country any more. Lebanon is newer and much safer to cover. Anyway, Iraq fatigue set in long ago.