Was Racism and Fundamentalism a Factor?

The Massacre at Qana

By OMAR BARGHOUTI

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora condemned Israel's massacre in Qana today as a "heinous crime" and called Israeli leaders "war criminals." Reacting to an earlier atrocity, he wondered: "Is the value of human life in Lebanon less than that of the citizens of other countries?"[1] The answer, at least as far as Israel is concerned, is an unambiguous "yes!" Israel's latest bloodbath, which claimed the lives of dozens of children and women hiding from the relentless bombing in what they hoped was a secure basement in Qana, betrays not only Israel's criminal disregard for the value of Arab human life, a typical colonial attitude towards natives, but also its increasingly fundamentalist perception of Gentiles in general as lesser humans.

Israel apologists who will try to spin this new massacre as yet another "mistake" must expect their audience to have an awfully short memory or a very low IQ. Israel has explicitly indicated in the past few days that it may resort to such atrocious measures, especially since its armed forces have failed to achieve any tangible military gains after 19 days of rolling massacres and wanton destruction across Lebanon. Israeli minister of justice, Haim Ramon, issued a stern warning [2] only days ago that a large area in south Lebanon was regarded by his government effectively as a free-fire zone, advocating indiscriminate bombing of villages inside it to ease the so-far unsuccessful advance of the Israeli army. "These places are not villages. They are military bases in which Hizbollah are hiding and from which they are operating," he said, adding that, since Israel had ordered Lebanese civilians to leave the area, "All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hizbollah."

Israel's biggest-selling paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, advocated [3] raising the threshold of Israel's response to Katyusha rockets: "In other words: a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." It is worth noting that all available evidence points to the fact that no Katyusha was fired by the Lebanese resistance from Qana before the bombing.

Among Israel's staunch Zionist supporters in the West, the same "talking points" were parroted. Harvard academic Alan Dershowitz recently argued [4] that, "Hezbollah and Hamas militants [] are difficult to distinguish from those 'civilians' who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks." He concluded saying, "The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit."

Thus the massacre in Qana.

Qana's name is associated with an earlier Israeli massacre. In 1996, during its military offensive codenamed "Grapes of Wrath," Israel's air force bombed a UN shelter in the village, slaying more than 100 civilians, mostly children, and inviting almost universal verbal condemnation but no real threats of sanctions or any other form of effective punitive measures from the international community. In the current Israeli war on Lebanon this is only the most recent episode in a series of smaller atrocities deliberately committed by the Israeli army against Lebanese civilians in an attempt to collectively "punish" them for the humiliating defeat its elite military units have so far experienced at the hands of the formidable Lebanese resistance, most noticeably in the legendary town of Bint Jbeil.

This intentional and coldly calculated Israeli policy of targeting innocent Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure stems from a time-honoured, but hardly ever successful, Israeli doctrine of applying intense "pressure" against a civilian population in order to compel them, in-turn, to pressure the resistance into submitting to Israeli dictates, thereby doing Israel's bidding by proxy. It has been consistently used against the Palestinians ever since the Nakba of 1948, and is still applied now in the ongoing barbaric offensive and hermetic siege against Gaza. Israel may have plagiarized this doctrine from the legacies of previous oppressors, but it has refined it to a degree that it no longer raises any moral qualms in most of Israeli society, where it is widely accepted by the public as a right, even a duty in the fight for Israel's "security."

Such blatant racism, which may have been frowned upon in the past by many Jewish-Israelis as a pathological anomaly, is now quite popular in the Israeli mainstream, including among lawmakers, academics, journalists and, of course, military leaders. While it has become normal to read scathing -- occasionally valid -- critiques of the hateful and chauvinistic discourse "inherent" in Islamic and even Christian brands of fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, which is among the key factors informing current Israeli apartheid policies and laws, remains a taboo subject that is rarely discussed or debated in the West. It is rooted in a long tradition of fanatic, yet popular, fundamentalist interpretations of Halakhah, or Jewish law, propagated by influential rabbis and internalized by a widely acquiescent Israeli society, secular and religious sectors alike. Even before the creation of Israel, the core concept in this fundamentalist worldview was publicly espoused by Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, who said, "The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews...is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."[5]

The late Israeli academic and human rights advocate, Israel Shahak, traced the roots of Israeli public justification for killing Palestinians, for instance, to similar readings of the tenets of Halakhah. While the murder of a Jew is considered a capital offence in Jewish law, the murder of a Gentile is treated quite differently. "A Jew who murders a Gentile," Shahak reveals, "is guilty only of a sin against the laws of heaven, not punishable by court." Indirectly, but intentionally, causing the death of a Gentile is "no sin at all." [6] A booklet published in 1973 by the Central Region Command of the Israeli army subscribes to this same doctrine. In it, the Command's Chief Chaplain writes:

"When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah they may and even should be killed Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good. [7]

In 1996, the same year the first Qana massacre was committed, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a leader of the powerful Lubavitch Hassidic sect, echoed the same principle, rhetorically asking, "If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save [the Jew]?," answering, "The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life." [8] Moreover, Ginsburgh coauthored a book defending the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in Al-Ibrahimi mosque (Patriarchs' Cave) in Hebron, in which he argued that when a Jew kills a non-Jew the act does not constitute murder according to the Halakhah, adding that the killing of innocent Palestinians as an act of revenge is a Jewish virtue.

During the first months of the current Palestinian initfada, it was common for Israeli army spokespeople to justify killing Palestinian children throwing stones by saying that they "threatened human life." (B'Tselem Report) Not soldiers' lives, not Israeli lives, but human life. One cannot escape the implication that the alleged sources of the threat are not exactly eligible to be called human in the army's common diction.

In this context, it is entirely justified to see Israel's second massacre in Qana as the rule, not the exception.

This often ignored menace of Jewish fundamentalism needs to be addressed as seriously as other forms of fanatic religious thought which sows racial hatred, animosity and war mongering. While adhering to moral principles alone will certainly not bring any of Qana's murdered children back to life or compensate any bereaved parent or loved one anywhere, perhaps insisting on the equal worth of all human lives, regardless of ethnicity or religion, and rejecting racism from any source, including from sanctimonious former victims, can help diminish the chances of such ruthless crimes recurring in the future. Irrespective of the Holocaust, or precisely because of it, Israel should not be allowed to get away with its racist, at-will flaunting of international law and its state terrorism against defenseless civilians. It is time to go beyond mere condemnation to properly channel irrepressible grief and simmering anger into morally sound acts of intervention. Just as it worked against apartheid South Africa, a comprehensive regime of boycott against Israel is urgently called for. People of conscience everywhere share the responsibility of stopping this unrestrained behemoth before it scorches everything in its blind quest for hegemony and colonial control.



Omar Barghouti is an independent political analyst.

References:

[1] Jonathan Steele and Rory McCarthy. "Strike on bunker failed, says Hizbullah. The Guardian, July 20, 2006.

[2] Patrick Bishop. Diplomats argue as all of south Lebanon is targeted. Telegraph, July 28, 2006.

[3] Harry de Quetteville. You're all targets, Israel tells Lebanese in South. Telegraph, July 28, 2006.

[4] Alan Dershowitz. 'Civilian Casualty'? It Depends. Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2006.

[5] Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press, London, 1999. P. ix.

[6] Israel Shahak. Jewish History, Jewish Religion-The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Pluto Press. London, 2002. P. 75-76.

[7] Ibid. P. 76.

[8] Ibid. P. 43.

srael Kills 34 Kids in Qana

How Can We Stand By and Allow This to Go On?

By ROBERT FISK

They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. " Mehdi Hashem, aged seven Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 Qana", "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the "pinpoint accuracy" it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening " western civilisation" as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing -- a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana, whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine, has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.

I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"

Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the country began on July 12 after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as " an ugly crime".

Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.

No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire, a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.

Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colorful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.

And Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorized and terror is the word they used by Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Israel's savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.

Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Program aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and when they do they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?

Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

Ever heard of Molech, a.k.a. Baal? Baal/Molech was a deity of the Canaanites, to whom the "Israelite" culture was so closely related it's pretty ridiculous to claim there was a difference (for anyone who doesn't have, you know, **identity issues**. Hi-ya slabber-boy... ). According to Jewish scripture, Solomon built more than one "Great Temple" on the Temple Mount, and one of these was dedicated to Molech

1 Kings 11:7

"Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem."

Was this the ACTUAL "Great Temple" we keep hearing about??

The core ritual of Molech worship was the sacrifice of human infants by incineration, and Molech's altars were essentially ornate open-hearth crematoria.

I suspect the Jewish sore spot regarding "blood libels" traces back to this period when they were all the time inviting their friends over for backyard baby barbecues and there was no libel involved in such claims. It's just another dark corner of their history & culture they deny absolutely, just like the way they kill babies left and right today -- but don't you dare notice! There are "JUSTIFICATIONS" for this, you see...

"Naomi Ragen is lying zionist psycho-trash"

An ad hominem is not a rebuttal. Its a way to change the subject. Show us where/why/how she is lying.

According to your own historical accounts, Baal/Molech worship is integral to your ancient history. It's not "bigoted" to point this out. This is just a thing you don't want anybody to remember, so you stand guard around it and scream "anti-Semite!!!" at anyone who threatens to discover it. It seems there's always some such game afoot when you scream "anti-Semite!!!"

Given the evil / insane nature of the Western world's relationship to the earth, criminal malice toward other people minding their own business, etc., it makes perfect sense that the mainstream of Western "spirituality" would trace directly back to burning babies alive. It could hardly be otherwise.

1. Molech in Cana'anite and related pantheons was an identity separate than Ba`al..

2. Even your KJV doesn't claim Solomon built more than one temple on Mount Moriah a.k.a. the Temple Mount. The mountain "east of Jerusalem" isn't Mt. Moriah, dumbfuck.

3. The verse you quoted relates that he built a *high place* for Molech among others. A high place in the ancient near east wasn't necessarily a temple.

4. The verse in question explicitly speaks of Molech being an Amonite deity. You've gotta be careful what you quote unless you really enjoy demolishing your preceding arguments, e.g. the Canaanite Ba`al = Molech.

Stop living off land stolen from its rightful inhabitants and leave for Scottland.

Did Solomon or did he not build facilities for Molech worship, Molech being the deity to whom infants were ritually sacrificed?

The IDF is looking into allegations raised over the past few days by several pro-Israel, Jewish and conservative Weblogs that Hizbullah may have staged aspects of the Kana tragedy on Sunday, in which some 60 Lebanese bodies were removed from a building that collapsed seven hours after being hit in an Israel Air Force strike.

The dead were mainly children, women and elderly people.

The International Committee of the Red Cross Mission in Israel said Tuesday that it would inform its Swiss headquarters about the allegations and seek to clarify the questions raised.

Israel has acknowledged hitting the building, and said 150 Katyushas had been fired from the village in the previous 20 days, with Hizbullah hiding rocket launchers in civilian buildings there. Israel said it did not know civilians were inside the building and expressed sorrow over the tragedy.

In a speech on Monday night, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he deeply regretted the deaths of civilians there. "We did not seek to harm them, we did not want their death," he said. "They were not our enemies, they were not the target of our aircraft."

At a press conference on Sunday night, Air Force Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel said the building was struck by IAF missiles a little after midnight, but only collapsed seven hours later, at about 7 a.m.

Eshel said he could not explain what caused the structure to collapse so many hours after it was hit, and speculated, while stressing that he had no conclusive evidence, about whether Hizbullah had played a role in what had transpired, perhaps by firing on the building itself.

Another possibility that has been raised is that the building sustained damage from the original strike, but collapsed only later from structural damage or the impact of further IAF strikes nearby. Alternatively, the building may have contained Hizbullah weaponry that detonated after the strike.

MK Benny Elon (National Union) suggested Tuesday that Hizbullah may have played a role in the building's collapse in an attempt to prevent an international force from entering Lebanon and to place blame on Israel.

"In general, Hizbullah prevents citizens from moving from places that the IDF is attacking. This time it was more," said Elon. "It wasn't just prohibiting citizens from leaving this time, it was bringing refugees that aren't residents of Kafr Kana to areas that they know are going to be attacked. And to be sure it's attacked, Hizbullah fires from the building next door in order to create the crisis and in order to create the pictures."

According to Elon, Hizbullah took such action in an attempt to recreate the situation at Kafr Kana in 1996, which resulted in a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon.

"What they wanted to do was 'deja vu.' Last time, Kafr Kana was the end of the conflict... and this time they expected that the results would be the same: cease-fire," said Elon. "They needed the cease fire immediately because of the results of the war so far and their fear that UN Resolution 1559 can be enforced and fulfilled by the international force."

According to Elon, the IDF had "sources and information which were sure that civilians had left the area after warning pamphlets were dropped," but the information turned out to be mistaken.

According to one of the Web sites raising questions about the affair, Israel Insider, "the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to 'plant' bodies killed in previous fighting... place them in the basement, and then engineer a 'controlled demolition' to fake another Israeli attack."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153292055086&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Stage-Managed Massacre

By Robert Spencer

“The Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana early Sunday morning did more than kill 57 civilians,” says Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post. “According to a wide range of commentary in the international media, it inflamed already boiling public opinion in the Arab world against Israel, undermined what little support the United States has among the Lebanese people, and illuminated the continuing inability of Israel and the United States to achieve their goal of decisively weakening Hezbollah.” The Hindustan Times editorialized that “with Qana, one senses that the Israelis’ definition of ‘collateral damage’ has started to bear a striking resemblance to that of the very terrorist organisation that they are keen to destroy.” At a rally outside the State Department building protesting the Qana “massacre” on Monday, Leftist protestors chanted, “Hey, Rice! What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?”; “Israel Out of Lebanon! Ceasefire, Now”; and “Shame! Shame! Shame, on you!” An Australian Muslim in Qana told Australia’s Herald Sun: “I would say a few hundred have died. This isn’t war, it’s genocide.”

Except for one little detail: it is increasingly clear that the Qana “massacre” was a stage-managed Hizballah production, designed precisely to enflame international sentiment against Israel and compel the Israelis to accept a ceasefire that would enable the jihad terrorist group to gain some time to recover from the Israeli attacks. Some of the principal evidence for this:

* The Israeli bombardment took place about midnight, but the house where the civilians were gathered reportedly did not collapse until 8AM. Said Brigadier General Amir Eshel of the Israeli Air Force, “It is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it.” Indeed, it strains credulity that not only did these Lebanese civilians remain in a house that had been bombed for eight hours, but peacefully went to sleep in it after the bombing – since the victims were all apparently sleeping, despite continuing Israeli air bombardment in the area, when the building collapsed. Eshel suggested that “it could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there” – in other words, Hizballah bombs and/or weapons.

* Photos of the rescue operation, which were transmitted all over the world and appeared on the front page of the New York Times and other major newspapers, are extremely suspicious. The blog EU Referendum has done important work scrutinizing the photos, finding numerous anomalies. Most notably, the dating of the various photos suggests that the same bodies were paraded before reporters on different occasions, each time as if they had just been pulled from the rubble. In a rebuttal to this charge, AP’s David Bauder rather lamely asserts: “web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken.” Responds Richard North of EU Referendum: “Note, however, the use of the word ‘can’. He does not say that the ‘date stamps’ are wrong.” EU Referendum has also uncovered strange anomalies in the photos themselves: some workers are wearing different gear in different photos, yet clearly carrying the same corpse. Richard North comments about one of these workers: “It stretches belief to breaking point to argue that, on his way to the ambulance, he took off his helmet, his fluorescent waistcoat and his flack jacket just in order to pose for the cameras putting the body in the wagon – especially as we have the body being placed on the ‘guerney’ – which means the scenes are totally inconsistent.”

* The very existence of these pictures raises more questions. As Israel Insider puts it: “While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.”

* The Christian Lebanese website LIBANOSCOPIE has charged that Hizballah staged the entire incident in order to stimulate calls for a ceasefire, thereby staving off its destruction by Israel and Lebanese plans to rid themselves of this terrorist plague: “We have it from a credible source that Hizbullah, alarmed by Siniora’s plan, has concocted an incident that would help thwart the negotiations. Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death of innocents and curtail the negotiation initiative.”

* According to the German scholar Matthias Küntzel, “the Berlin daily the Tagesspiegel published a letter-to-the-editor from Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a Shiite from the South of Lebanon. Dr. Herzallah reports on how Hezbollah-terrorists came to his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence directly over it. He writes: ‘Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.’ Hezbollah, he says, uses the civilian population ‘as a human shield and then when they are dead as propaganda.’”

Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, declared that “War is deceit.” Specifically, he taught that lying was permissible in battle.[1] While the doctrines of religious deception (taqiyya and kitman) are most often identified with Shi’ite Islam, and ostensibly rejected by Sunnis, because they were sanctioned by the Prophet, they can still be found in traditions that Sunni Muslims consider reliable, and are practiced among Salafis. Jihadists today have spoken of the usefulness of deceptive practices.

Americans and Westerners are not used to dealing with carefully orchestrated and large-scale deception of this kind. It is time that it be recognized as a weapon of warfare, and an extremely potent one at that. Qana has already largely accomplished what it was supposed to. It will now take its place beside the Danish cartoons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and all the rest as a useful focal point for Muslim outrage and a magnet for jihad recruitment. The dhimmi Leftist Western press is happy, for it can again show America and Israel as guilty in the world’s site. The mujahedin are happy, for jihad and Sharia will advance still more. The only people who couldn’t possibly be happy with this are the Israelis and others on the front lines of the jihad worldwide.

But who cares about them?

Notes:

[1] Bukhari, vol. 4, book 56, no. 3030; Muslim, vol. 4, book 32, no. 6303.

An ad hominem is not a rebuttal.

I mean the way the editors allow zionazis to pollute the threads with ad hominems, putdowns, senseless profanity, obscene language, off topic rants, pointless distractions and naked racist hatred. If they knew "disgusting scum" they wouldn't allow Zio- Naziboys and racists like you befoul this site with their droppings and demonstrable lies.

I've been *really* busy lately (and out of the country again too -- and *still* got back in without being stopped), but I always enjoy reading your stuff. I like the information you give -- *and* how you zing those Ziopaths too. It's *fun* as well as informative to read your posts.

There's so much out there to read in cyberspace about the ZioNazis, but most of the time I only have time to bounce between DissidentVoice.org and CounterPunch.org.

I see that Yidiot is still around, but I don't see nearly as much of Gerhig, Tia and not even Bullshit Becko Johnson lately. Were they so discredited by now that they're hiding out lately or going under other names? You mean they're not here vigorously defending Israel's civilian massacres in Israel's greatest time of propaganda need?

Well, I don't know why it didn't happen in Israel's first Lebanon invasion -- where Israel killed between 17,000-20,000 people -- mostly civilians, again, of course, but this time Israel has *definitely* lost the war, morally. I heard an establishment poll yesterday that said that, for the firsts time, *half* the American pubic opposes Israel's behavior. Israel will *never* be able to play 'Little Orphan Annie' again: it's finally lost the moral card (even moreso, certainly, among the people of the rest of the world).

Now, what's really interesting: it's like Israel doesn't even *care* anymore! That's what I can't quite figure out. It's always tried to bank on "poor little Israel" and "the Palestinians don't like us taking their land because we're *Jews* ". Maybe it's just sheer utter *hubris* on mega-steroids. Maybe Israel figures that it's gotten away with so MUCH endless shit for over 6 DECADES (including the pre-Israel partition) that, I guess, Israel feels that as long as it still gets 6-10 billion-dollars a year *every year* from the U.S., then *fuck* looking innocent anymore: it can do *anything* it wants to do against civilians. (It's like any spoiled brat bully with a rich uncle who continually gives him, the bully, a fat allowance -- and doesn't even cut the allowance for gross misbehavior.)

And since the tenacious HIZBOLLAH (OH THOSE IS SOME *'BAAAD'* BOYZ) is showing the, ahem, *vaunted* IDF (in the word of one IDF soldier) the gates of *HELL* in ground combat (see Haaretz.com) -- every time Israel goes after Hizbollah on the ground, Israel loses a bunch of soldiers (or a tank or two and some other armored personnel vehicles) -- it's a LOT different when Israel isn't going up against some relatively defenseless penned-in Arabs (isn't it gerhig, Tia, Becko, Yidiot) -- Arabs who have some *real* combat weapons and *heart* -- Israel is going after women and children and old men and people in ambulances and, in general, civilians instead.

But, even the American mainstream media is buckling under a little -- a media Israel usually depends on to ALWAYS *LIE* for Israel. Now almost *everyone* is comparing Israel to Nazis (openly or silently, because the comparison is morally *unavoidable*) -- not just people like me a long time ago.

I've read many good articles about Israel's (what I said on the radio) "echoes of the Wehrmacht and Guernica" (and I also said that, "the sirens of Nazi Germany's Stutka bombers have become the sonic booms of Israel's F-16''s, both used for the same purpose"), but just one of numerous *very* good articles, recently, was "The Case for Israel, by Israel", by Gabriel Ash: http://dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Ash01.htm)



Take care TW,

JA

I miss having you around to kick ass along with me, but I know how it is. As for Israel "not even caring any more," I know what you mean, and I have a very sinking feeling about it. I think they're working arm in arm with the Washington neocons and that both are determined to expand this war to Syria and Iran. They know they'll look exactly like Hitler for doing it, and they just don't give a shit. They seem to think they're so powerful now that it doesn't matter. If they get their wish, the result will be a for-real WWIII, and they have to know this. I'm very apprehensive that we're about to see the Amero-Nazis and Israelo-Nazis nice-guy masks just drop completely away, and that the consequences of this are going to be incredibly horrible, especially for the people of the Middle East