Hatred of the US is Now Universal

Osama Has Won

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

Anyone who even attempts to defend the killing of the children in Qana by Israeli air strikes is criminally insane. There can be no justification for slaughtering children, in any circumstances, anywhere.

You feel revulsion when you see photographs of Israeli kids writing hate slogans on artillery shells that are going to be fired at Arab kids. In fact real human beings feel more than revulsion when seeing photographs of brainwashed hatred in the young: they experience utter despair because these kids are deliberately being taught to hate other who are different from them.

This isn't new, this insistence that young minds should automatically accept, embrace and expand on hideous loathing displayed by a previous generation. In Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, for example, school text books on history and world affairs are bizarre in their one-sided portrayal of each other as terminally evil. Hatred in India and Pakistan is imbued from infancy, and there is little can be done in maturity to alter this attitude which is irrevocably instilled in other than a few highly intelligent free spirits who can rise above mindless racist bigotry.

It's exactly the same in Northern Ireland, of course, lest anyone imagine I espouse the notion that pea-brained hatred, to the point of desire to murder people because they are different, is the prerogative of non-Western peoples. Many Protestants and Catholics in Ulster behave like any other ignorant bloodthirsty thugs. Irrational hatred exists in lots of other regions and countries. Just look around.

And Palestinian children hate, too. They hate Israelis because their grandparents had their lands stolen and occupied by a foreign power which has ignored countless UN resolutions to obey the law. It is only because of unremitting US support that Israel has been able to defy the entire world and trample over the basics of natural justice. These Palestinian children hate Israel because it is a brutal and bigoted occupying power that denies decency and human dignity to a race of people who differ from them in looks, religion and customs. In other parts of the world this is called racism.

Israel is supported root and branch by the President and Congress of United States of America. They unconditionally endorse the actions, no matter how barbaric or bizarre, of a racist, nuclear-armed country that willfully ignores UN resolutions and assassinates people as a matter of national policy. In the course of providing support Condoleezza Rice declared that "An immediate ceasefire [in Lebanon] without political conditions does not make sense", which gave the Israelis the green light to kill the Qana kids.

Rice declared last year that "Israel has no greater friend and no stronger supporter than the United States of America . . . . The United States and Israel share much in common. We both affirm the innate freedom and dignity of every human life, not as prizes that people confer to one another, but as divine gifts of the Almighty."

If Rice and Bush so greatly respect the dignity of human life they would have ordered Israel to cease its murderous onslaught on civilians. They could have done it in a nanosecond, make no mistake. But they chose to encourage Israel in its killing spree.

Groveling at the feet of Israel is not just unseemly and pathetic, it is directly contrary to the ideals that Bush and Rice profess to hold. Israel is nuclear-armed, yet there has never been a peep of criticism from a US administration that claims to be gravely disturbed by the spread of nuclear weapons. Israel flouts international rules and should be held responsible for its flagrant violations of international trust and order, yet its very scorn for the UN is warmly endorsed by its patron and paymaster. Its deliberate murder of four UN officers and refusal to permit an independent inquiry into the atrocity demonstrate its utter contempt for the world at large.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, the repulsive Dan Gillerman said " . . . we grieve the deaths of those civilians and children. But it is very, very important to stress that they may have been hit by an Israeli bomb, but they are victims of the Hezbollah. If Hezbollah wasn't there, this would never have happened." His suggestion that the children might have been kept in Qana by force was the product of a diseased mind.

Which brings us to the gallant Israeli pilot who sent the MK-84 guided bomb smashing down on Qana to kill dozens of children.

The United States gives Israel about three billion dollars a year and provides bombs, airplanes, bulldozers and other weapons with which to crush and punish Arabs. There is but one caveat on the flow of cash: three quarters of it must be spent with US weapons' manufacturers. The US taxpayer funds Boeing and the rest of the death-merchants in one of the most blatant scams perpetrated against a long-suffering US public.

Washington provided the bomb that killed the children in Qana and bears responsibility for their deaths. Final responsibility rests with the brave airman dareman who flew his aluminum death tube high in the sky, free and easy, in no danger whatever from enemy aircraft or ground fire, then smashed three dozen kids to bits with his US-supplied bomb from his US-supplied airplane.

What does he think, now, this airman? Is he proud of himself? Is he the toast of his squadron? ­ "Hey Gideon: what a hit you were", chuckle chuckle. Has he children himself? Does he look fondly at his kids at night when he sees them sleeping? Does he think of the kids he killed, blown to shreds by his US bomb from his US airplane? Will this man ever be able to sleep again?

The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz (more balanced than most) noted on July 31 that "The Israel Defense Forces have killed 97 people in the Gaza Strip since the fighting began in Lebanon. Most of them were armed, and the rest were civilians - children, women, men, the elderly. The large number of fatalities suggests the IDF is engaged in indiscriminate killing under the cover of the war in the north."

In Gaza, too, the Israelis pursue their berserk campaign of ethnic cleansing by murder. There is no point in trying to disguise it. And the US doesn't even bother to hide its endorsement of slaughter. Washington does, however, bother to tell silly little lies as well as large-scale ones. Here is Rice at her most fautous: "In the wake of the tragedy [in Qana] that the people and the government of Lebanon are dealing with today, I have decided to postpone my discussions in Beirut".

But Lebanon's Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, had said "There is no place on this sad morning for any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional ceasefire as well as an international investigation into the Israeli massacres in Lebanon now."

So Rice left the region in dudgeon. The Lebanese wouldn't talk to her, but she couldn't bear to admit this and had to tell a silly lie to try to overcome her humiliation. Artistic she is. Cultured most definitely. But she is devoid of human compassion and ordinary common sense. She is, there is no kinder word for it, a booby.

The US approach to world affairs is disastrous. After 9/11 there were demonstrations in some countries in support of bin Laden's loonies, to be sure, but the overwhelming feeling was of support for America. There were enormous and absolutely genuine outpourings of grief and solidarity. Hardly a country but was one hundred per cent behind Bush, Washington and the American people in their time of national grief.

No longer.

America is the most hated nation on earth. In most countries its president is by far the most despised international figure. To read the State Department's Travel Advisories is to realise that for an American to take a trip overseas is a pretty grim prospect as there are so many countries to which it is highly dangerous for a US citizen to venture.

The reason that America is so detested, distrusted and abominated is that its president and his coterie decided their policy should be total aggression and antagonism. Diplomacy, courtesy and negotiation were for wimps. And thus they played right into the hands of bin Laden and his tiny number of dedicated weirdo fanatics.

Washington's immature truculence was at first considered regrettable but manageable by most civilised nations. But when the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were ordered against the flow of international advice it became apparent that America had an erratic policy of chauvinistic domination. It became increasingly and embarrassingly apparent to America's friends that Bush and his coterie were determined to engage in an entirely one-sided gladiatorial contest. Their arena was the world, and US forces were sent to wage ferocious and bitter war on pygmy nations that could not possibly retaliate in any conventional fashion.

The fact that the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq have become national military disasters does not disturb the Bush administration. Retaliation for US adventurism has been unconventional and enormously damaging, but Bush and his acolytes are comfortable with self-deception. Their optimism about "progress" in these chaotic countries is absurd.

The Bush administration belief that everything will be all right in the end ("We will Prevail") is becoming even more preposterous day by day. And one of the reasons the belief is so foolish is that the US has been even further isolated by its flat refusal to condemn Israel's atrocities. The US-made bomb that killed dozens of Arab children in Qana has been an enormous bonus for bin Laden, if he is still alive. But even if Bush policy did not play into his personal hands, it certainly played into the hands of all who recruit the militants and suicide bombers who are determined to take revenge on those who give Israel bombs to kill Arab children.

The peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq consider themselves occupied by foreign powers and are being told by influential figures in their countries that the US and Israel are waging war on Muslims. Moderate Muslims, such as President Musharraf of Pakistan, who went out on a very far limb by talking to a Jewish organization in New York in September last year, have had the ground cut from beneath their feet by Washington. Musharraf wants to encourage the Muslim world to recognize Israel and has tried hard to foster pan-Islamic tolerance. But after the Qana atrocity he and other progressive Muslims will find it impossible to even mention tolerance for Israel. And by deliberate choice of the Bush administration the US is inextricably linked with Israel's criminal ferocity.

Osama bin Laden may not be alive, but this is irrelevant because countless millions of Muslims regard him as a hero, alive or dead. Their reasoning is that he has caused a dramatic and continuing amount of disruption to the western world's economic and social structure. He has hit us hard. And his ongoing success in disrupting our lives is helped by the weaknesses of Bush and his people. Their smugness, arrogance and casual savagery are some of bin Laden's most effective weapons.

Osama bin Laden need never do anything again to ensure permanency and prosperity of his legacy of hatred. Thanks to the imperious policies of the Bush administration and its fervent support for Israel the United States is hated and despised to an almost unbelievable degree. Osama has won.

Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

End the Occupation!

Peace in the Middle East?

By SAUL LANDAU

A fog of rhetoric has impeded clear public vision of the latest Middle East war. Israeli spokespeople and White House echoers punctuate "explanatory" sentences with the "t" word, to connote the root of current evil, and the necessary violent remedy as well: more terrorism, directed by the state of Israel. The barrage of words and images syncopates with the barrage of bombs and rockets. The cacophony of babble tends to erase precedents and obscure facts: Palestine, not terrorism, remains the central conflictive issue in the area.

On July 22, as Israel invaded Lebanon to crush the "Hezbollah terrorists"­ momentarily turning attention away from the "Hamas terrorists"--former Irgun warriors unveiled a plaque "commemorating the attack on the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. On that day the Irgun 'resistance' to British rule in Palestine detonated a bomb inside the hotel." 91 people died, including 28 British subjects. (Harry de Quetteville, Telegraph July 22, 2006)

"The Hebrew Resistance Movement" ops planted explosives in the hotel basement, claiming to have warned the hotel's occupants to leave. For unknown reasons the hotel remained full when the bombs exploded. A mistake; regrettable! Indeed, the Israeli government has continued to regret subsequent civilian killings. These unintentional mistakes have cost thousands of mostly Palestinian lives. By late July, Israeli bombs on Lebanese cities produced more deaths and almost a million refugees--another regrettable but necessary consequence of the war on terrorism.

The media barrage of carnage reports from Lebanon and Israel--where Hezbollah rockets did considerably less destruction--obscures causes and possible solutions to the new Middle East war. Indeed, as the TV public wrung its collective hands in despair, none other than George Bush offered a way out. For W, the solution appeared as obvious.

"See?" he poked British Minister Tony Blair at the St. Petersburg G-8 summit, "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing that shit, and it's over."

He didn't explain "they" or "shit." Nor did Bush seem aware that his recent epiphany on shit stopping clashed with his February 2005 epiphany after the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri. Bush accused Syria of killing Hariri and demanded Damascus remove its forces from Lebanon. In his latest spiritual flash, Bush now apparently wants Syria to re-intervene in Lebanon to stop shit. (A UN investigation under Serge Brammertz found no evidence implicating Syria.)

Was Bush only kidding around? NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that Bush "turns summit meetings into fraternity parties." At this kegger he even managed to give action--an unexpected back rub -- to German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, who proved by her negative body language that for all her conservatism, she was not a sorority girl.

World leaders may demean Bush's intellect, but not ignore US power, despite its seemingly capricious zig zags. In 1982, with US backing, Israel ousted the PLO from Lebanon. In the interim, a Hezbollah militia arose to fill the military vacuum.

In 1985, at the height of the Lebanese civil war and Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Christians asked Syria to send troops into southern Lebanon. The Israeli government responded with outrage. Defense Minister Shimon Peres "demanded that Israel deliver an ultimatum to the Syrians, to prevent them from reaching the Israeli border." Israeli journalist Uri Avneri recalls how "Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister, told me then that that was sheer nonsense, because the best that could happen to Israel was for the Syrian army to spread out along the border. Only thus could calm be assured, the same calm that reigned along our border with Syria."

Rabin, however, did not follow the dictates of his own insight. The consensus at the time would not permit Syrian troops to mobilize near the Israeli border. Unlike Hezbollah, the Syrians, suggests Avneri, "are cautious, they do not act recklessly." Israelis might recall that under the misty cloud created by the utterance of the "t" word, there lies a cauldron of ugly facts. For 18 years, Hezbollah inflicted serious casualties on Israeli occupying forces as Israel unsuccessfully tried to "stabilize" Lebanon by creating a loyal puppet government. Even after they withdrew, the Israeli military made plans for another invasion. The expected "provocation" occurred on July 12 when Hezbollah fighters killed eight Israel soldiers and abducted two others near the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah claimed the two captured soldiers should signify a negotiated prisoner exchange. "No military operation will return them," Nasrallah told a July 12 news conference in Beirut. "The prisoners will not be returned except through one way: indirect negotiations and a trade."

This incident, according to Gilad Atzmon, led to the elaboration of a new "Hebraic arithmetic laws. For 2 kidnapped Israeli soldiers who are still kept alive, 500,000 innocent Lebanese civilians are displaced. For 2 abducted Israeli soldiers, Lebanon, a sovereign state, is brought back down on its knees. Its civil infrastructure is 'gone'. Some of its capital's residential quarters and southern villages are already wiped out. Indeed, 'two equals half a million' is the new arithmetic the Israelis insist upon imposing on the region."

US TV viewers have not seen this Israeli point of view. But approximately one billion Arabs see daily images of Israeli brutality in Palestine, a land stolen from Arab people. On Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, they watch graphic examples of suffering in Gaza. Arabs understand that the US campaign for democracy in the Middle East means that if the "wrong" party prevails, Washington won't recognize the power of the ballot. Since Hamas carried the "terrorist" label, Bush agreed that the Israelis should nullify the elections by force in Gaza.

While US TV tends to elicit empathy with Israelis who have lost loved ones or homes, Arab TV portrays a heroic Hezbollah and its images bring forth sympathy for Palestinian and Lebanese victims of Israeli bombings. The US media uncritically accepts Bush's version of Syria as a source of terror. In the Arab world, Syria has emerged as the place that offers refuge to more than 100,000 Lebanese fleeing from Israeli aggression. On top of that, Syria has taken in some 450,000 escaping Iraqis.

Americans, thanks to their media, have bought the line that evil Syria and "nuclear Iran" are the twin sources of Middle East evil, as if they control the behavior of Hezbollah militants living in southern Lebanon.

Media rhetoric, like that of the White House, focuses on terrorism. Fox news makes it sound as if for decades Israel has had to use disproportionate violence on Palestinians. Israel "had" to build a wall to keep terrorists out. In fact, Palestinian casualties far outnumber Israeli dead and wounded. But dead and wounded terrorists don't count.

As the US military experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq worsen, and Bush uses the "t" word even more frequently than in the past, the real source of Middle East conflict remains the same. Israel remains intransigent about Palestine and about Syria's Golan Height which Israel occupies in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 224 and 338.

The Israeli government never tires of seizing opportunities to break Palestinian will, usually with the claims that it is defending its own security. It rained more bombs and rockets on Gaza just before it invaded Lebanon. It withheld water and medicine from the people there.

The Arab world watched this. When Hezbollah attacked, many Arabs saw this as an act of solidarity with Palestinians.

They did not believe that Israel marched into Lebanon, bombed and shelled civilian targets, mostly in poor Shi'ite areas, just to get two soldiers released. When Ms. Rice left Lebanon in late July, she did not demand that Israel cease its destruction campaign. Instead, the United States rushed a fresh bomb supply to the Israeli Air Force.

This has converted US policy to "democratize" the Middle East into a sick joke. At a July 25 press conference, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who offered solidarity to the Lebanese people, standing next to him, Bush responded to a reporter's question about Hezbollah.

"The terrorists are afraid of democracies," Bush declared. "And what you've witnessed in Israel, in my judgment, is the act of a terrorist organization trying to stop the advance of democracy in the regionPeople fear democracy if your vision is based upon kind of a totalitarian view of the world. And that's the ultimate challenge facing Iraq and Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories, and that is, will the free world, and the neighborhood, work in concert to help develop sustainable democracy?"

Huh?

Perhaps, Bush needs a sticker pasted on his forehead. Every time he looks in the mirror he would see, "It's the occupation of Palestine, stupid!"

Saul Landau is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. His forthcoming book, A Bush and Botox World, will be published by CounterPunch Press this fall.

"Justice" Comes to Qana

Patrick McGreevy writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 4 August 2006

"Qana" by Mazen Kerbaj. View more of his work.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 gave many ordinary Americans a palpable experience of injustice. Addressing both houses of Congress nine days later, President Bush proclaimed: "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." By nearly conflating justice and revenge, the President - and, alas, the vast majority of Americans who applauded him - lost an opportunity to see with new clarity, justice itself cast into relief by the very experience of injustice. Instead, the United States launched an endless war, the first stage of which was to be called Operation Infinite Justice.

This week "justice" came to the Lebanese Village of Qana. The United States had blocked every attempt to end the violence, and, before the attack, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon had announced that "everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hizbullah." The Anglo-American-Israeli juggernaut had brought "justice" to "our enemies."

Reacting to the horrors of World War II, the bold-thinking Max Horkheimer suggested that we finally make social progress from the experience of the opposite of justice. We learn about the value of the individual life, for instance, from the experience of a world that treads mercilessly on human lives and bodies, treating them as so much soulless stuff. Though a European Jew, Horkheimer was a dialectical materialist, and therefore no kind of theist. Yet he believed that the notion that each human is equally and, in a sense, infinitely valuable, was a religious innovation. "The very concept of the soul as the inner light, the dwelling place of God," he wrote, "came into being only with Christianity, and all antiquity has an element of emptiness and aloofness by contrast." To our modern sensibilities, he observed, "some of the Gospel teachings and stories about the simple fishermen and carpenters of Galilee seem to make the Greek masterpieces mute and soulless - lacking that very 'inner light' - and the leading figures of antiquity roughhewn and barbaric." For Horkheimer, this insight came from the painful experience of its negation, and any hope of justice lay, paradoxically, in the deep experience of injustice. Hence, "the anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born," and we could expect insight from those "who have gone through the infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression."

Hassan Nasrallah speaks to the Arab world and the Muslim World about their common experience of injustice. Do not doubt its deep resonance, its truth. Qana is just the latest, and one of the clearest, and most globally visible, examples. Can those who launched the endless war finally recognize the infinitely valuable "inner light" so callously snuffed out of each of those dusty child corpses? Will Nasrallah, and those now fixated on his voice, see justice, against the background of injustice, any more clearly than did Bush and those fixated on his voice? Can we expect such magnanimity, given the asymmetry of the suffering?

In human affairs, cycles of violence and revenge, cascades of injustice, are not inevitable. Our sole hope is that we have not only an inner light but an ability to choose and act, to consider not only means, but ends, with what Horkheimer called reason - that having lived through hell, we might see not only the injustice done to us, but the horror of injustice no matter who is the victim. A simple thing. We know the alternative.

Just like the US global-domination kleptobigotocracy supplied your IDF with all its fun toys. What are you saying? That Lebanon shouldn't recieve military support from any other country -- unlike Israel? That Iran is EEEE-VYILL and should be destroyed because Hizbullah's weapons say "made in Iran" on them? You think you're addressing fucking children here, don't you? We don't watch Fox news, so our brains haven't been primed for you. We've already witnessed every mealy-mouthed manipulative little game you got, and have seen through them like x-ray machines. It's time you took your song and dance elsewhere. We're all sick and tired of your speaking of lies FROM power

Children are mostly free of the diabolic malaise of hatred that continually grips you. To compare the putridity of your mind to children is an insult to unindoctrinated children.

Regardless, Israel's war pig zionist racist regime must go. At the very least these pet arch-racist theocrats of yours need de-indoctrination en route to reeducation. We could then argue the details of the education which will surely be devorced from radical Judaism.