Truth or distortion: One of my guilty pleasures is subscribing to the World Socialist Web Site. Not because I am a socialist, per se, but because it offers a perspective on world events that is very different from the U.S. mainstream media that has some value in occasinally jarring one’s mind out of its rhetorical ruts. Today’s column by Bill Van Auken, “Israeli war crimes aimed at ‘cleansing’ south Lebanon,” raises issues and draws parallels that question U.S. and Israeli motives in the region.
And while the world responds with condemnation of Hugo Chavez’ incediary comments about how Israel is doing to the Lebanese what Hitler did to the Jews, Van Auken makes a couple of similar discomfiting assertions, but uses different — and more effective — examples. You can read the entire column here. I have excerpted some of the more interesting points below:
[The] real context in which the United Nations Security Council is going through the motions of considering a US-French resolution [is] designed not to end the fighting, but to allow it to continue until US-Israeli objectives are met. This document demands that Hezbollah disarm, while it allows the 10,000 Israeli troops occupying Lebanese territory to remain and permits Israel to continue “defensive” air strikes and artillery bombardments.
It essentially demands that Hezbollah, a mass movement of Lebanon’s impoverished Shiite population, commit suicide and that the government of Lebanon accept the status of an occupied protectorate. By presenting an utterly unacceptable proposal, Washington aims at provoking Lebanese rejection and then using this supposed opposition to “peace” as a justification for continuing the month-old war.
Like the one-sided wars waged by fascist regimes that shocked the world’s conscience in the 1930s — from the rape of Ethiopia to the incineration of Guernica — the destruction of Lebanon contains the seeds of a global conflagration.In a further indication that it has no intention of compromising on the terms of its UN diktat to the Lebanese people, the Bush administration Tuesday dismissed a Lebanese proposal to send 15,000 Lebanese troops to the south to take control of the area from the Israeli army. A State Department spokesman declared that the Lebanese army is not “a robust enough entity to be able to, on their own, exercise total control of that southern area of Lebanon.”
This word “robust” is endlessly repeated to describe a proposed multinational force to be sent into the region. It is a euphemism for an occupation army that will utilize murderous force against the local population to achieve US and Israeli war aims.
….The proposed smashing of Hezbollah would be seen by the Shiite population as an attempt to disenfranchise and oppress them, reversing the results of Lebanon’s previous civil war and restoring the power once wielded by Israel’s traditional ally in the country, the Maronite Christian right.
Such social reengineering of the country — carried out under George Bush’s slogans of “freedom” and a “new Middle East” — would undoubtedly ignite a new round of bitter sectarian warfare.
What the US-Israeli offensive aims to accomplish as its immediate goal is the thorough ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon.
This is a term that never appears in the mainstream media in relation to the present war in Lebanon. It appears only in the occasional stories following the continuing tensions in former Yugoslavia, where US-led NATO forces intervened in 1999 with a savage bombing campaign against Serbia, which was carried out under the pretext of halting ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo. The end result has been a thorough ethnic cleansing of the Serb population at the hands of the Kosovar nationalists whom Washington supported.
….
Unlike the wave of moral outrage generated by the US media over the alleged ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, which was critical in conditioning public opinion and providing a pretext for Washington’s war against Serbia, there is no similar condemnation of Israel for the mass expulsion of a population.One major television network, the ineffable Fox News, expressed more concern for the lost dogs of northern Israel than for the Lebanese women and children buried beneath the rubble of buildings demolished by US-supplied Israeli bombs.
….Ethnic cleansing is nothing new for Israel. The very foundation of the Israeli state was bound up with the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and farms. The Zionist leaders employed massacres and terror to drive out the native population.
As the well-known Israeli historian Benny Morris acknowledged in a 2004 interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads.”
In 1967, with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, military terror was once again utilized to drive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land, paving the way for the Zionist settlements in the occupied territories and Israel’s claims over all of Jerusalem.
There is no reason to believe that anything different is being planned for Lebanon. Once again Israel, in the name of “security,” is driving an Arab population off of its land. Where does this process end?
….There is more at work in the current Lebanon war, however, than Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Shiite population and the potential annexation of Lebanese territory. Prodding the Israeli government to intensify its attacks is the Bush administration. It sees the IDF offensive as a means of furthering its own objective of setting the stage for new wars of aggression in the Middle East, to achieve “regime change” in Iran and Syria and bring the extensive oil reserves of the entire region under uncontested US control.
This is the reality behind the Bush’s rhetoric, casting the conflict as one between “freedom” and “democracy,” on the one side, and “Islamic fascism,” on the other.
If anything in the present war recalls the crimes of fascism, it is not the Lebanese, who are fighting an Israeli army that his invaded their land, but rather the regimes in Washington and Israel, which are utilizing overwhelming military force to conquer an oppressed people.
Like the one-sided wars waged by fascist regimes that shocked the world’s conscience in the 1930s — from the rape of Ethiopia to the incineration of Guernica — the destruction of Lebanon contains the seeds of a global conflagration.
You’ve got to be kidding. It is a stretch to refer to the tragedy of this war against Hezbollah as ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. I am sorry that the war has happeneded, happened, keeps happening, but instead of satire, if this was, come up with a solution. Israel gave them the Gaza Strip and they turned it into a place to shoot rockets into Israel. You need to ground yourself a little in reality. These Arabs will only quit when Israel is wiped off the earth and remember, they hate us also.
Abbey: I’m sorry that I didn’t clearly make the distinction between satire and offering a different perspective in this post . The announcement today of an expansion of the ground war by Israel into southern Lebanon seems to support the notion that Israel’s war on civilians is ramping up and that their goal is to turn the Shiites of southern Lebanon into refugees or kill them. The Arabs have good reason to hate us, if you ask me. Let’s talk again when the current debacle in Lebanon becomes the second civil war in the Middle East that Bushco is responsible for. By the way, I do have a solution — an immediate cease-fire with no strings attached. Then at least the killing would stop and the pols could play their chess game.
Buck, I am very aware of the horrors that are being inflicted on Lebanon people. However, are you aware that the Hezbollah embed themselves in buildings and poor areas of Lebanon and use their people as shields. I heard an Israeli soldier interviewed and he said that in one day he watched a old woman deliver food to high rise buildings. She went from building to building delivering the food. The soldier knew that the food was being delivered to Hezbollah, but could not kill an old lady. Hezbollah is a pack of cowards who knew that a war with Israel would harm Lebanon’s citizens. That is why their headquarters are located in the poorest districts in the south. Israel intended to provide the Palestinians with land to become a state and the first thing their group of terrorists, Hamas, did was to begin firing rockets into Israel and tunneling into Israel. What would you do if you were as threatened as Israel. What would you do to fight these people who use humans as shields. Hezbollah has a great PR strategy going with Israel having to bomb buildings and harm the innocent. How would you fight these cowards? I hope Israel accepts a cease fire, but first they need a demilitarized zone. Israel fought a guerrilla war with Hezbollah eight years and were relieved to pull out. Israel does not want to do this again. I would prefer we bring all Israelis to the Mojave Desert and let them make it as beautiful as they have their land in Israel which was desert and waste land until they arrived. Their only request to the Palestinians in the beginning was to leave them alone. They build hospitals and roads in Palestine before Afrafat decided that war against Israel was the only choice. Buck, it is a mess and our safety has been jeopardized by an idiot named Bush who is insane. It is much too serious to become satire and an immediate withdrawal
is very unlikely until Israel feels safe from further Hezbollah and Hamas attacks. If you have a way to deal with Hezbollah or Hamas shout it from the tops of roofs, print it in newspapers, run for office. I want us out of Iraq and I do not want a war with Iran. But if my hometown was threatened by people hiding in buildings ten miles away. I would fight until my family is protected. With Bush at the helm this could happen. He is as scary as the terrorists.
Abbey, perhaps some actual truth and facts will help enlighten your biased view of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Here’s a sample from Jonathan Cook, a journalist in Israel and trying to report the truth:
“What I have argued instead is twofold. First, we cannot easily know what Hizbullah is trying to hit because Israel has located most of its army camps, weapons factories and military installations near or inside civilian communities. If a Hizbullah rocket slams into an Israeli town with a weapons factory, should we count that as an attack on civilians or on a military site?
The claim being made against Hizbullah in Lebanon — that it is “cowardly blending” with civilians, according to the UN’s Jan Egeland — can, in truth, be made far more convincingly of the Israeli army. While there has been little convincing evidence that Hizbullah is firing its rocket from towns and villages in south Lebanon, or that its fighters are hiding there among civilians, it can be known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israeli army camps and military installations are based in northern Israeli communities.
An obvious point that no one seems to be making — and given a news blackout that lasted several hours, Israel clearly hoped no one would make — is that the 12 soldiers who were killed on Sunday in Kfar Giladi by a Hizbullah rocket were, under Egeland’s definition, “cowardly blending” with the civilian population of that community. We know there are still civilians in Giladi because their response to the rocket barrage was quoted in the Israeli media.”
The entire story is online at the Information Clearing House.
There are at least two sides to this story, but the gullible American public only gets to listen to the Israeli pity party that portrays–again–Israel as the victim.
If they were only intent on getting Hezbollah, why did the IDF bomb the power plant station close to the Mediteranean Sea, thereby dumping thousands of gallons of fuel into the sea?
Don’t think Hezbollah was hiding out around 11,000 volt lines and generators.
So far, there’s been about 60 Israeli soliers killed by Hezbollah and around 35 civilians.
On the other hand, there’s been around 100 Hizbollah fighters killed by the IDF and OVER ONE THOUSAND LEBANESE CIVILIANS slaughtered by the IDF.
Not counting the bodies that are still buried.
i have a suggestion how to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah:
First, have Israel stop kidnapping Hamas legislators and stop the artillery bombardments of the Gaza Strip and the daily overflights at supersonic speed of jets, causing sonic booms.
Then, sit down and talk without the US present.
Let Israel know she needs to start acting like a civilized nation and not a nation of murderous thugs.
Tell Israel that either they learn to live with the Palestinians, or the US will cut off both financial and military aid.
With Hezbollah, once again, offer to talk to them and be sincere about the offer.
With both Bush and Rice refusing to have any talks with Hezbollah, it’s obvious they have an agenda driven by Israel.
Israel is losing, both in the criminal invasion of Lebanon and one thing they overlooked: the Internet.
No longer are people forced to watch the Israeli media spin their lies on ABC, CBS, NBC.
greg bacon
ava, mo