Galloway:Israel launches barbaric action against the people of Lebanon
Imagine if Lebanon destroyed every bridge in Israel, blew up the international airport, blockaded the ports, severed every arterial road, ordered people to leave their homes and then bombed them to pieces when they did… Do you think any Western leader would utter the words ‘Lebanon has a right to defend itself’?
This is the basic truth that every news bulletin seems designed to obscure. It is the reality that is enraging hundreds of millions of people across the globe as Israel launches its barbaric action against the people of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
And it is not just Israel, of course. Barely commented on in the British media is the fact that it was Britain and the US that prevented the G8 summit from calling for a ceasefire.
Tony Blair and his ministers were again instrumental on Monday in preventing the European Union from issuing a condemnation of Israel’s aggression. No one should be in any doubt why – George Bush and Blair want Israel to continue its assault on Lebanon.
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Israel angry, US wary as Annan peace plan calls for ceasefire
…A UN source said there was a sense of depression at the organisation’s headquarters. “There is a game of rhetoric in New York versus bullets and bombs in Lebanon and Gaza. The Israelis want time to eliminate Hizbullah. They do not care how long it takes.”
The US has delayed diplomatic action. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, agreed yesterday that it was time for the security council to start formulating a response, but repeated his assertion that it was not practical to agree “a ceasefire with a group of terrorists”.
But Israel was ceding no ground. Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, said his country’s operation in Lebanon “will take as long as it takes”, and “a cessation of terrorism” had to precede any “cessation of hostilities”.
Mr Gillerman said “something very important was missing” from Mr Annan’s speech: any mention of terrorism. Hizbullah were “ruthless indiscriminate animals”, he told reporters. “We must first address the core and the root cause of why these hostilities started in the first place, and who started them … If there’s a ceasefire while this cesspool continues to fester, we’ll leave Hizbullah with the capability to do time and time again what they’ve done this time.”
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.” The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated.
Dahiyeh sports terrible scars from merciless bombardment
DAHIYEH, Lebanon: Rubble, smoke and tangled webs of dangling electrical cables now reside in an area that formerly housed over 500,000 Lebanese, the aftermath of Israeli air strikes that have ravaged Beirut’s southern suburbs and show no sign of ending.
“Only civilians lived here,” said a Hizbullah spokesperson as he led journalists through what he called a “tour of the terror by Israel” in the once densely populated neighborhood.
The scene included the usual debris of twisted metal, shattered glass and chunks of cement that follows bomb and rocket blasts, along with personal items, including abandoned toys, scorched mattresses and dusty books and photos.
Before the tour, the spokesperson warned journalists that if he ordered them to evacuate, they “must obey” and do it immediately as Israeli fighter-bombers and warships have been sporadically bombarding the area. Within an hour of the tour, Israeli helicopters attacked again.
“Israel always invents pretexts and excuses for its attacks,” said the guide. “Instead of cowardly bombs on civilian areas, come and face the actual Hizbullah fighters in combat along the borders.”
He denied persistent statements by journalists that Israel is only targeting Hizbullah headquarters and the residences of its fighters and officials.
“People live here and some may be supporters of Hizbullah but that doesn’t make them fighters,” he added as he pointed to a demolished “Hizbullah media center” building and a convenience store nearby where a cash register and some merchandise survived.
“Israel keeps releasing statements that it destroyed 50 percent of Hizbullah’s force, which is all false as [the force] is growing stronger by the day and will fight until the end,” said the spokesperson, adding that on Thursday over 30 rockets were launched at the Israeli Army.
Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know
As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.
The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.
Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.
Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.
Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.
Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.
That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, ‘We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the “peace process”‘.