America's Inglorious past; Israelis Murderous Present
danmac
Posts: 387
Empire: War and Propaganda
The US role in supporting Israel’s military assault on Lebanon falls into a pattern of imperial tyranny, where history is rewritten to suit America’s needs while Europe stands cravenly by.
By John Pilger
07/26/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to rid the world of evil", as President Bush has also said.
One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message that America has always "built freedom and democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".
The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of them democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling against tyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.
In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People's History of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's definition of patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.
To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also to understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.
Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash of civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion - in a high court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether her editary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clearly a US-ordained operation, with the long-planned assault on Gaza and the destruction of Leba non pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."
The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.
"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two narratives".
Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture - I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining silent about America's $3bn-a-year gift of planes and small arms and bombs to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record. There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead. There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.
Government silence
The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exception of the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually . . ."
Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman - and there have been many of them - screams in pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.
I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:
"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."
John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam Press
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The US role in supporting Israel’s military assault on Lebanon falls into a pattern of imperial tyranny, where history is rewritten to suit America’s needs while Europe stands cravenly by.
By John Pilger
07/26/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to rid the world of evil", as President Bush has also said.
One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message that America has always "built freedom and democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".
The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of them democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling against tyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.
In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People's History of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's definition of patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.
To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also to understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.
Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash of civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion - in a high court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether her editary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clearly a US-ordained operation, with the long-planned assault on Gaza and the destruction of Leba non pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."
The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.
"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two narratives".
Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture - I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining silent about America's $3bn-a-year gift of planes and small arms and bombs to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record. There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead. There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.
Government silence
The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exception of the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually . . ."
Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman - and there have been many of them - screams in pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.
I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:
"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."
John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam Press
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
That's an incisive article. Thanks. No doubt those defenders of U.S and Israeli state terrorism on the board will find a way to criticise it, with their tired comments about how 'Hizbollah started it', and of how Israel must defend itself against 'terrorists' e.t.c.
Thanks for the read Danman.
Maybe you should have thought of that with all your Arab hating posts you had. Just an idea. Seems you like to spew the hate and read it by all the posts in all the "jew hating threads". Observation is super.
Another nonsensical ramble. Good job. You and danmac sure are smart.
Prove I have ever said I hate the jews?
Proof, fact, please.
Without them, you have no credibility.
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
Smarter than what? People who don't know how to take warnings and leave a country when they aren't wanted? Please tell me what you are comparing my smarts with?
Denying any massacre is a good idea. But you stepped up to the plate yesterday. When your race is filled with selfdenial, what more could I expect from a person like you. Zero!
We have already had decades of diplomacy, talks, “road maps,” and any number of various “agreements” that have all shipwrecked on Palestinian intransigence. Worse yet, every concession made by Israel to further the elusive “peace” has been met with more attacks and more terrorism. Such concessions, most recently the withdrawal from Gaza, have been seen as signs of weakness, evidence that the long-term strategy of Israel’s destruction by “phases” is bearing fruit. Such “agreements” simply buy time that allows the terrorists to consolidate their organization and rearm, as Hezbollah did in southern Lebanon after Israel withdrew.
The idea that “diplomacy” is the silver bullet that will slay the monster of Middle-Eastern dysfunction is founded on false assumptions. Diplomacy works when both sides sincerely want an agreement and pledge in good faith to adhere to the terms of the agreement, when they have what contract lawyers call a “meeting of the minds.” And diplomacy works when there is a credible, serious deterrent to violations of the agreements. None of these requirements have been met by the major players in the Muslim Middle East. Indeed, for decades the Palestinians have continued to receive billions in aid from the West even as it has failed to live up to the core requirements of the various agreements: dismantling the terrorist networks and sincerely endorsing, in deeds rather than words, Israel’s right to exist.
The false assumption in the West has been that the Palestinians accept the “two-state” framework and have negotiated in good faith to that end. Yet precious few deeds exist that provide evidence that a critical mass of Palestinians want their own state rather than the destruction of Israel. In fact, most of the evidence, such as the recent election of Hamas, suggest otherwise. There may be Palestinians and other Muslims who sincerely accept Israel’s existence and want to live in peace, but those few voices have been drowned out by those who cheer Al Qaeda, who begged for Hussein to rain SCUDS on Israel, who put up posters of the “martyrs” who go out to murder Israelis, who dress their toddlers in toy suicide belts and AK-47’s, and who voted into power an organization whose reason for being is the destruction of Israel.
Meanwhile the West and most of the Western media continue to peddle the melodrama of Palestinian suffering and Israeli oppression. They chant “diplomacy” and bumper-sticker bromides like “force solves nothing” when in fact force has done plenty for Israel for the last sixty years: allowed it to exist. And force will continue to insure Israel’s survival until a critical mass of Palestinian Arabs and other Middle Eastern Muslims sincerely accept Israel’s existence, and demonstrate that acceptance with concrete actions rather than with the sly rhetoric that dupes gullible Westerners.
Would you care to provide an example of a a road map, or agreement which has presented the Palestinians a settlement in which they can live in anything other than a condition which existed in South Africa during Apartheid? Why should the Palestinians accept an 'agreement' which simply furthers the political and geographical goals of Israel?
Perhaps the Israelis would be happy to accept a life deprived of their natural resources, and in which they were forced to live in bantustans, separated from one another by an ever present military force which forces them to queue for hours at a time at checkpoints and which bulldozes their homes and kills their women and children at will?
I'm sure that, being the conciliatory peace loving nation that you present them to be, they would be only too happy to live like animals under the boot of another nation?
"Your race" - more proof that you're a racist, evenflow
Israel, Lebanon, and the "Peace Process"
Noam Chomsky
Z Magazine, April 23, 1996
Lebanon has been a victim of the Arab-Israel conflict for half a century. In 1948, and again in 1967, it was a dumping ground for Palestinians who fled or were expelled by the Israeli army. Their right to return or compensation is written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Dec. 10, 1948), spelled out more explicitly in UN Resolution 194 passed unanimously the next day, and reiterated annually.
That right, of course, is conditional on U.S. decisions. Since World War II, the U.S. has controlled the region, recognizing it to be "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Washington's support of the right of return was rhetorical only, and has been officially abandoned by the Clinton Administration. By U.S. decision, then, the refugees are a problem for Lebanon and Jordan, and do not have the rights accorded them by the community of nations.
After the 1967 Israel-Arab war, a diplomatic framework was established calling for peace along with Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, with at most minor and mutual adjustment (UN 242, reiterated in official U.S. policy statements). The Arab states refused peace and Israel refused withdrawal, proposing instead the "Allon Plan," which left it in control of much of the territories. The impasse was broken in 1971, when President Sadat of Egypt agreed to full peace in return for Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory. U.S. policy then shifted to support for Israel's stand, under Kissinger's formula of "stalemate."
International isolation increased in the mid-1970s, when virtually the entire world endorsed a modification of UN 242 to include a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Washington was compelled to veto a Security Council resolution to this effect in January 1976, to vote regularly against subsequent UN resolutions, and to block other diplomatic initiatives from Europe, the Arab states, the PLO, and others.
From the early 1970s, Lebanon was drawn into the conflict as a result of cross-border PLO terror and far more destructive Israeli attacks on Lebanon, sometimes retaliatory, often not. Thus in February 1973, Israeli forces attacked north of Beirut, killing many civilians, in a raid justified as preemptive. In December 1975, Israeli bombing killed over 50 Lebanese in an attack Israel described as "preventive, not punitive"; it appears to have been a reaction to the UN Security Council meeting debating the diplomatic settlement that Israel opposed and Washington vetoed. There are many other examples.
The Camp David agreements in 1978-79 neutralized Egypt, leaving Israel "free to sustain military operations against the PLO in Lebanon as well as settlement activity on the West Bank" (Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv). As Yaniv and other Israeli commentators have observed, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, after a year of Israeli attacks that failed to elicit PLO retaliation, was motivated by concern that the PLO's public advocacy of the international consensus might undermine U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. The invasion eliminated the problem of PLO moderation by demolishing the organization in Lebanon, but created a new problem: the formation of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hizbollah, with the official aim of driving Israel from Lebanon. Despite massive resort to terror, Israel was forced to withdraw from all but the southern part of Lebanon, where it maintains a "security zone" in violation of orders of the UN Security Council issued in March 1978.
The Iraq war in 1991 put the U.S. in a position to implement its own unilateral settlement, ratified in the Oslo Agreements. The latest phase, Oslo II, grants Israel control of far more of the territories than it demanded in the Allon Plan, and affirms its legal rights throughout the territories, thus rescinding UN 242 and other relevant UN Resolutions and official declarations. A greatly expanded Jerusalem region is effectively incorporated within Israel, which also keeps control of most of West Bank water resources. Settlement and construction programs implementing these plans were extended, relying on U.S. subsidies. During the first three years of the Rabin-Peres Labor government, to July 1995, the number of settlers increased by 30% (not counting Greater Jerusalem). Government expenditures and inducements for new settlers continue after Oslo II. The intended goal, it appears, is to ensure Israel's control of the territories, with scattered cantons of local Palestinian administration. If these are called a "Palestinian state," the result will resemble South Africa's Bantustan policy, but not quite. The Bantustans were subsidized by South Africa, while the U.S.-Israeli plan is to leave to the Palestinian cantons the task of dealing with the bitter effects of the military occupation, which barred any possibility of economic development.
Meanwhile Israeli attacks on Lebanon continued, killing many civilians. In 1993, these attacks elicited retaliation by Hizbollah, to which Israel responded by invading Lebanon. An agreement was reached to restrict military actions by either side to Israel's "security zone" in Lebanon. Israel has ignored the agreement, attacking elsewhere at will. Thus, the day that Prime Minister Shimon Peres took office after the Rabin assassination in November 1995, the New York Times reported approvingly that Israeli warplanes attacked targets near Beirut, thus demonstrating that Peres would maintain Rabin's hard line. So matters continued, occasionally receiving brief notice, as on March 21 1996, when Israel attacked Muslim villages north of the "security zone" in retaliation for attacks on its occupying army. The standard story in U.S. commentary is that "the accord had largely held until [April 1996], when Hezbollah resumed its attacks" (New York Times). The slightest attention to facts suffices to refute the doctrine, which nevertheless reigns unchallenged.
The Israeli offensive of April 1996, much like those of earlier years, has the openly expressed intent of punishing the civilian population so that the government of Lebanon will be compelled to accept U.S. - Israeli demands. It is this "rational prospect" that has always motivated Israel's attacks on civilian populations, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban explained years ago.
The short-term goal today, Washington announced, is to modify the 1993 agreement to require that all actions against the Israeli occupying forces cease, and that Hizbollah disarm; Lebanon rejected the proposal, insisting on the right of resistance to foreign occupation that was endorsed by the UN in 1987 by a vote of 153-2 (U.S. and Israel opposed, Honduras alone abstaining), still unreported in the U.S. Washington's long-term goal is to integrate Lebanon and Syria into the Middle East system based on U.S. client states. Palestinians in the occupied territories are to be reduced to a minor annoyance, with local administration under general Israeli control. The refugees are to be forgotten.
It is well to remember that Israel's actions, however one assesses them, are conducted with virtual impunity. As Washington's leading client state, Israel inherits the right to do as it chooses. A dramatic illustration of this right, quite relevant to Lebanon, has just been offered in the home country. On April 19, there was much anguished commentary on the car bombing at Oklahoma City a year earlier, when middle America "looked like Beirut," headlines lamented.
Beirut, of course, had looked like Beirut long before; for example, just 10 years before, when the worst terrorist act of the period was perpetrated in Beirut, a car bombing timed to cause maximum civilian casualties, virtually duplicated at Oklahoma City. The facts are well known, but unmentionable. That act of terror was carried out by the CIA, a fact that suffices to remove the incident from history along with much else that suffers the same defect. The implications are of no slight significance in world affairs.
I like keeping to my own race. It reminds me to keep reading your posts and those of your ilk so I don't have to rely on you for anything. Seems to be the way of the world. Just reread your own posts.
No offense to animals in the similar, but much more open-minded and logical When Animals Attack! " .
I don't even understand what you're trying to say. We've been down this road before - you post nonsense and try to pass it off as reasoned debate. Did you, danmac and animhus go to the same school?
HA!
take that evenflow , damn racist
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I have no idea what this post is trying to say? It has no core argument, only a series of subjective "facts".
I'm more than willing to admit that Israel has gone overboard on many occasions in respect to their policies towards Palestine. However, I feel you are ignoring some of the truths about the Palestinian people and putting too much of the blame on Israel. Actually, you come accross as putting all of the blame on Israel.
Palestine is just as much a victim of itself as it is Israel. It has always suffered from greedy, oppresive leaders. Yassir Arafat is without a doubt one of the most corrupt leaders of all time, funneling aid money to build personal wealth and appease radical factions within his regime.
Regardless who you want to blame, the Palestinian people are grossly uneducated and perpetuate rascist and hatefull ideology from generation to generation. As mentioned in my post above - parents dress their children with fake suicide belts, the people cheered in the street after 9/11, it is a common game for children to gather in a bunch around one kid who pretends to blow himself up and the children all fall to the ground as if they had been killed by the "suicide bomber". Perhaps the most telling symbol of the Palestinian mindset is the democratic victory of Hamas - an organization whose main purpse is to deny the existence of Israel.
Look at the double standard here... when the US elects Bush, the world balks at "stupid americans" for putting such a terrible leader in charge. Yet, when Palestine elects Hamas - the world voice says "They did it becuase Hamas could gurantee better government and civil services."
The world gives Palestine a total pass, yet they give zero creedence to the American position that we want a leader who is tough on those that would harm us.
The situation is much more complex than you would have us all believe, and there is plenty of blame to be shared. But everything boils down to the fact that Palestinians and the majority of Muslim countries do not want to recognize Israel as a legitmate state, BOTTOM LINE.
Everything stems from that....
"Regardless who you want to blame, the Palestinian people are grossly uneducated and perpetuate rascist and hatefull ideology from generation to generation."
And that statement itself isn't racist?
Was the Palestinian Edward Said, who wrote 'Culture and Imperialism' and 'Orientalism' also 'grossly uneducated'?
"As mentioned in my post above - parents dress their children with fake suicide belts, the people cheered in the street after 9/11, it is a common game for children to gather in a bunch around one kid who pretends to blow himself up and the children all fall to the ground as if they had been killed by the "suicide bomber"."
Yes, and Israeli children write messages on bombs being dropped on Lebanese civilians and members of the U.N.
"Yassir Arafat is without a doubt one of the most corrupt leaders of all time, funneling aid money to build personal wealth and appease radical factions within his regime."
A man who lived in a half bombed out building with little food and no running water.
Oh, and have you not heard of someone called Ariel Sharon? A man who was being charged with corruption by members of his own party?
"The world gives Palestine a total pass, yet they give zero creedence to the American position that we want a leader who is tough on those that would harm us."
Those that would harm you are your government, who insist on remaining in the illegally oocupied territories and defying over 60 U.N resolutions, whilst fermenting more and more hatred in your neighbours who are being constantly terrorised, oppressed and threatened. Withdraw from the occupied territories and then talk about right and wrong, and 'those that would harm' you.
"But everything boils down to the fact that Palestinians and the majority of Muslim countries do not want to recognize Israel as a legitmate state, BOTTOM LINE."
But "..the situation is much more complex than would have [you]believe", right?
Palestinian officials have repeatedly said that they would recognise Israel if it was prepared to withdraw to the pre 1967 borders.
Funny that English is your first language and you don't understand. Must make for a great American citizen. But that is for another day. I do enjoy reading your protests for equality. So do keep posting but stop using the on line dictionary, we all know it is full of shit.
What is your backround again?
I don't understand because you apparently have no grasp on the English language.
My background is none of your fucking business.
Yet, we both can respond to each other. Odd? Maybe we went to the same school.
Too bad about the backround question. I would really like to know.
Wow, such mental prowess you have...
Repeating the fact that Palestinians are grossly uneducated is racist? 4 out of every 100 citizens have internet access... I'm sure they are very aware of the larger world around them. At least we don’t have to worry about the little information they do get being biased…
I mean, since when has the truth been racist?!?!
Edward Said was educated in America - he graduated from Princeton and Harvard, LOL. Even so, how pathetic can you be to attempt to debunk the notion that Palestinians are under-educated by producing one person, as if Edward Said is somehow a representation of the average Palestinian?
I'll just stop right here. Your manner of debate reveals your lack of knowledge, maturity and open-mindedness. I'm sure you think you've got it all figured out, but sadly you could probably do more for your cause by keeping to yourself. Every time you post, the incoherent and one-sided half-argument you present only reinforces my belief that not only is your side wrong, but is mostly represented and supported by people such as yourself.
Very well done!
Discuss the ISSUE please...without the sniping at each other. Posting privileges are at risk.
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