Taking Aim at Civilians

It has become agonizingly obvious Israel is targetting civilians and anyone helping the Lebanese. More disturbing news of death and painful injuries is coming out of Lebanon.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported on a family hit by an Israeli missile as it drove to get out of the area. Not an uncommon scenario, as many attempt to flee, their activity draws attention from the Israeli forces resulting in a scramble for safety before the lock-on-target is engaged.

"Where's my father? Where's my father?" asked Mahmoud Srour, an 8-year-old whose face was burned beyond recognition after an Israeli missile struck the family's car Sunday. His mother, Nouhad, lurched toward his hospital bed, her eyes welling with tears.

"Is he coming?" he asked her.

"Don't worry about your father," she said, her words broken by sobs.

Barely conscious, bewildered, he lay with his eyes almost swollen shut. His head lolled toward her. A whisper followed.

"Don't cry, mother," he told her.

Mahmoud's father, Mohammed, was dead. An Israeli missile had struck their green Mercedes as they fled the southern town of Mansuri, where the family had been vacationing. The boy's uncle, Darwish Mudaihli, was dead, too. The bodies were left in the burning car. Mahmoud's sister Mariam, 8 months old, lay next to him, staring at the ceiling with a Donald Duck pacifier in her mouth. Her eyes were open but lifeless, a stare that suggested having seen too much. Her hair was singed, her face slightly burned. Blisters swelled the tiny fingers on her left hand to twice their size. In other beds of Najm Hospital were their other brothers, 13-year-old Ali and 15-year-old Ahmed.

Israeli forces repeatedly struck cars on southern Lebanon's already perilous roads in attacks that victims said were indiscriminate. Seven people were killed, three of them when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a white minibus carrying 19 people fleeing the village of Tairi, which Israeli forces had ordered residents to evacuate.

There were also reports and video of phosporous weapons being used on civilians. What is the justification of such a weapon being used in response to the actions against a small number of soldiers? One of certainly many egregious acts by the Israeli military which will likely continue to persist without an authoritative response from the international community.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported six Red Cross volunteers were injured. These volunteers risk their lives to transport civilians injured by Israeli bombs to hospitals for medical care. I can already hear the likely excuse for targetting the ambulances... they are a cover for the transport of terrorists. Yeah, right.

Six Red Cross volunteers were wounded in the Sunday attack, and the injured family they were ferrying to safety suffered fresh agonies. A middle-age man lost his leg from the knee down. His mother was partially paralyzed. A little boy's head was hammered by shrapnel.

Today, CNN reports of the death of four UN observers. An apparently intentional strike since the UN personnel had been in constant contact with the Israeli military officers throughout the day informing them of their location.

The U.N. observers were killed when an Israeli bomb made a direct hit on their bunker in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. They had called an Israeli military liaison about 10 times in the six hours before they died to warn that the aerial attacks were getting close to their position, according to a U.N. officer.

"This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked U.N. post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that U.N. positions would be spared Israeli fire," he [U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan] said in a statement.

"Furthermore, General Alain Pelligrini, the U.N. force commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular U.N. position from attack."

Consider this from an opinion piece in Dar Al-Hayat.

Israel has always relied on brute force to ensure its security. Since its creation in 1948, it has sought to dominate the region by military means. This doctrine rests on the belief that the Arabs will never be strong enough, or capable enough, to challenge it. This is a fundamentally racist attitude.

But beneath the bluster and the muscle-flexing lies a deep-seated paranoia and insecurity, reflected in the conviction, shared by many of Israel's citizens, that the Arabs want to kill them and that they face a permanent existential threat. The choice, they seem to believe, is between killing or being killed. This dark view of their environment - something of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- goes some way to explaining the extravagantly disproportionate nature of Israel's attacks and its blatant disregard for international legality and any semblance of morality.

Israel is able to behave in this way because it has been given extraordinary immunity by the United States. A striking aspect of the crisis is, indeed, America's total political, diplomatic and strategic support for Israel -- even to the point of rushing to give it $300 million of aviation fuel with which to continue smashing Lebanon!

America's gross bias has paralysed the Security Council, the G8 and the European Union. So great is American pressure that none of these bodies has been able to insist on an immediate end to the Israeli onslaught. Britain dutifully followed its American Big Brother in repeating the mantra that 'Israel has the right to defend itself', while even France, Lebanon's traditional protector, has tended to put the blame on Hizballah, rather than Israel, for the massive destruction and loss of life.

Terrorism is usually defined as the indiscriminate killing of civilians in pursuit of political goals. Is this not what Israel is doing in both Lebanon and Gaza? It is killing large numbers of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in pursuit of its political aim of annihilating Hizballah and Hamas. By any objective standard, Israel is guilty of state terrorism.

But killing Arabs in this wanton manner and smashing their countries must inevitably have negative consequences for Israel's own security. Israel's terrorist behaviour legitimizes the terrorism of its enemies. And America's uncritical support for Israel legitimises terrorism against the United States itself. That is what 9/11 was all about, although to this day the United States has not faced up to why it was attacked. The United States and Israel are sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind.

The evidence continues to mount, weighing heavily against Israel, that the military actions being taken by Israel are nothing short of ethnic cleansing of the area. Whether it be by use of banned weapons, the blatant targetting of civilians, or destruction of the country's infrastructure, one thing is certain, Lebanon as a country will be weaker and many Lebanese will die, if not immediately over time, as the world sits idly while Israel continues to crush anyone in her path toward domination in the Middle East.


Tagged: Current Affairs, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News, News and Politics, Opinion, Politics, Terrorism, War.

Voices

Civilian deaths in Tyre, Lebanon

Sydney Morning Herald

Parked outside the small general hospital in Tyre is a badly refrigerated lorry container in which are stacked the bodies of 91 Lebanese civilians, 55 of them children.

Since Israel began bombing and shelling south Lebanon last Wednesday, about 380 patients have passed through this 65-bed hospital, plus the 91 dead.

Not one of the victims, he says, has been a member of Hezbollah, the militia group that triggered Israel's onslaught with a border raid last week.

"The army and Hezbollah - I don't care if they kill all of them," he said. "But the civilians - it's very hard. Everyone who has come in here has been a civilian."

Robert Fisk

How soon must we use the words "war crime"? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase "collateral damage" and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?

The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were traveling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village - on Israel's own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.

The Israelis constantly boast of their "pin-point" or "surgical" precision in air attacks. If this is true, then there are far too many civilians being killed in the Lebanese bloodbath to make every one of them an accident. And since Israel's target list now includes obviously civilian targets - deliberately bombed to punish the civilian population - the evidence is mounting that these air raids are intended to kill the innocent as well as the Hizbollah guerrillas whom Israel claims to be fighting.

True, the Hizbollah are killing civilians in Israel, but their missiles are inaccurate and the West, which has done no more than mildly disapprove of Israel's retaliatory onslaught, must surely expect higher standards of the Israeli armed forces than of the men whom both Israel and President George Bush describe as "terrorists".

Why, for example, did the Israelis attack and destroy the headquarters of the Liban-Lait company in the Bekaa Valley, the largest milk factory in Lebanon? Why did they bomb out the factory of the main importer for Proctor and Gamble products in Lebanon, based in Bchmoun? Why did they destroy a paper box factory outside Beirut? And why did Israeli planes attack a convoy of new ambulances being brought into Lebanon from Syria yesterday, vehicles which were the gift of the medical authorities of the United Arab Emirates? The ambulances were clearly marked as a relief aid convoy, according to an Emirates official. Were all these "terrorist" targets? Was the little girl in the field at Tel Harfa a "terrorist" target?

Jefferson Morley (Washington Post)

Are Americans being given a very different view of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict than their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere?

Yes, according to commentators in Muslim and European media.

In European media, the civilian toll in Lebanon is often seen as trumping all other considerations.

Is the U.S. media just providing reports that conform to its consumers' world view? After all, Americans are the most sympathetic towards Israel of 15 nations surveyed by the Pew Global Attitude survey conducted earlier this year. That survey found that 48 percent of Americans sympathized with Israel as compared with 13 percent who sympathized with Palestinians.

Americans are also more likely than the people of any other country to regard U.S. policy in the Middle East as "fair," according to Pew pollsters. In one 2003 survey, 47 percent thought U.S. policy in the Middle East favored neither the Israelis or the Palestinians. Only five percent of Lebanese shared that view.

The disparate reaction to Lebanon's civilian casualties may simply reflect the larger beliefs of the societies in which journalists work.

Paul Craig Roberts

Many Muslims believe that Bush and Israel see them as animals to be slain. On July 17, neocon John Bolton, Bush’s unconfirmed ambassador to the UN, gave credence to this Muslim belief when he announced that Israelis killed by terrorists were more important than the Lebanese civilians killed by Israel. Bolton said that there is no "moral equivalence" between Lebanese civilians killed by Israel and Israeli civilians killed by Muslim terrorists: "It’s simply not the same thing to say that it’s the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense."

In Bolton’s sick mind, Lebanese civilians are not experiencing terrorism when Israel deliberately targets them and drops high explosives on their apartment buildings, streets, bridges, power plants, and bombs the Beirut International Airport. This, says Bolton, is Israel acting in self-defense.

If Israel grabs Palestinian or Lebanese land and murders civilians, that is "self-defense," but if someone responds to Israeli aggression with a rocket, that is "Muslim terrorism."

Isolated in their evil, the neoconservatives are frantically and shrilly demanding that Bush join Israel in military attacks on Syria and Iran in order to “build democracy” and to clear the Middle East of any opposition to Israel’s unbridled self-interest. The crazed David Horowitz writes that "Israel is doing the work of the rest of the civilized world."

Neoconservatives believe that the US and Israel can extirpate Islam with fire and sword and that the present opportunity to escalate the current conflict into generalized war in the Middle East must not be missed.

Are Americans too inattentive and too brainwashed to prevent their moronic president and his neocon government from initiating a dangerous war?

Manuel Valenzuela

The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the state of Israel's policies in the continued destruction of Palestinian identity, and now Lebanese society and infrastructure, and the increasing domination into American foreign policy no longer has the sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered. For too long this masquerade has been used to silence those opposing anything Israel, shouted at anyone disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the boy who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or hypnotic control, and today only serves to breed more anger and resentment against the apologists and smear mongers protecting the cancerous tentacles of Zionism and the crimes against humanity it spawns.

The time has come to stop bending over to the dictates of intimidation and scare tactics used by Israel's protectors, defenders and apologists. The time has come to say "Never Again" to such fictional libel and slander whose only purpose is the continued subjugation of truth and awakening. The labeling of "anti-Semite" does not bother us, nor does it stop us from writing truth to justice and reality to intimidation because we refuse to be frightened into submission and silenced into acquiescence by a mechanism we know to be false.

Our convictions, search for truth and want for justice supercedes the trash invented to protect the malfeasance ruining humanity and the crimes perpetrated against our fellow human beings. The time has come to stand up and be heard, refusing to believe the smears and the labels, instead living life in truth, devoid of veiled threats and intimidation tactics whose power over us continues to erode thanks to its incessant overuse and abuse. So smear if you must, defenders, appeasers and apologists of human wickedness, continue to blindly believe in the majesty of a fiction you know to be false, ensuring your daily complicity in the crimes against humanity being committed by those you protect and defend.

We are above your labels, above your intimidation and smear tactics, following the path of truth in the voice of our writings and in the convictions of humanity. If pursuing truth, fighting criminality and awakening justice makes us anti-Semites, then guilty we are. If seeing the dehumanization, exploitation and utter destruction of the Palestinian people makes the voices of reason anti-Semitic, then guilty we stand. To defend the humanity of other Semitic people is to defend humanity itself. To speak out against injustice and dehumanization makes us human, to defend it makes you complicit.

Tagged: Current Affairs, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News, News and Politics, Opinion, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, War.

Unconscionable

How can the US government condone Israel's behavior? How can the US media not present the gruesome images of the attacks on the civilian population of a soveriegn country by an aggressor?

The US government has lost its conscience, assuming it existed in the first place.

The US media has lost its bearing. Perhaps a new compass with an emphasis on the presentation of well-researched, unbiased, and objective reporting is required.

Nevertheless, what is happenning, and is allowed to continue, in Lebanon is unconscionable. The Washington Post reports on Congress' vote of confidence to Israel. The support reflects the obvious power of the Israeli/Jewish lobby.

Democratic and Republican congressional leaders are rushing to offer unalloyed support for Israel's offensive against Hezbollah fighters, reflecting a bipartisan desire to not only defend a key U.S. ally but also solidify long-term backing of Jewish voters and political donors in the United States, according to officials and strategists in both parties.

And, not to lose an opportunity to further Israel's agenda for the region, President Bush implicates Syria and Iran as part of the problem. Again, from the Washington Post:

Bush, in remarks at the White House after he briefed members of Congress about the recent Group of Eight summit of industrialized nations, said the "root cause" of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon "is terrorism and terrorist attacks on a democratic country."

"And part of those terrorist attacks are inspired by nation states, like Syria and Iran. And in order to be able to deal with this crisis, the world must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria and to continue to work to isolate Iran," Bush said.

Someone needs to educate Mr Bush on the history of the region. The "root cause" of the conflict is not terrorism, it is Israel's continued land-grab and displacement of the indigenous people. As said many times before, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. It all depends on one's objectivity.

Today, there is talk of a full-scale Israeli invasion, as if that's not already the case.

Slate's Jacob Weisberg writes "Don't Blame Bush". Really? You can't blame Bush for starting the conflict, but you can blame him for allowing it continue with such ferocity. His continued support of Israel, regardless of Israel's exagerated response to the initial Hezbollah capture of the soldiers, has resulted in many innocent deaths and destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

Robert Fisk writes...

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

For graphic images of the destruction of life and property in Lebanon at the hands of Israeli munitions, follow this link and this one.

Tagged: Current Affairs, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News, News and Politics, Opinion, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, War.