http://www.countercurrents.org/...
Lebanon Massacre Will Live In Infamy
By Ghali Hassan - 24 July, 2006 - Countercurrents.org
In one week of deliberately calculated act of aggression and savagery against Lebanon and the Lebanese people, the Israeli army have destroyed the entire nation civilian infrastructure and massacred more than 400 innocent civilians in cold blood, injured at least 1,000 people and caused a million people to flee their homes.
Do you think if Israel will give the Lebanese the right to return to their rubble? (They will have plenty of stones to throw at Israeli tanks).
The "civilised" U.S. (and its Western allies) justified this massacre of innocent civilians and wanton destruction by publicly stating (at the UN) that there is no "moral equivalence" between innocent Lebanese civilians killed by Israel's terror and those Israelis killed by Lebanese resisting it.
Israel and the U.S. alleged that the motive behind this criminal atrocity is that Israel trying "to free" two Israeli soldiers, taken prisoners of war by the legitimate Lebanese resistance movement (Hizbullah) during a heroic military operation. However, "freeing" the soldiers was never an Israeli priority; it is only a pretext used to justify state terrorism. Israel' real motives are:
(1) The destruction of Lebanon economy;
(2) The destruction of legitimate anti-Israel resistance movement;
(3) The terrorising of the Lebanese civilian population; and
(4) The imposition of subordinate dependent (puppet) government. In other words, Israel's planned agenda is designed to perpetuate violence against legitimate resistance to Israel's terror and in the process instigate a region-wide war.
If Hizbullah is the target, why then is Israel deliberately killing innocent civilians and destroying the country's vital civilian infrastructure?
In violation of international law, Israeli war paleness (U.S.-made F-16s) destroyed the country's largest milk factory, a major food factory and two pharmaceutical plants. In addition to the destruction of electricity supply, roads and bridges, water purification plants, power plants and grain silos have been destroyed. As the media reported, a convoy of two trucks carrying medical supplies was hit and destroyed. Furthermore, Israeli force deliberately massacred eleven and injured many Lebanese soldiers while sitting in their base. In the village of Srifa (Sreefa), Israeli warplanes (U.S.-made F-16s) destroyed an entire neighbourhood murdering at least 18 innocent civilians, including many children. According to UN, one third of all victims are innocent children. "Israel has thrown an atom bomb on Lebanon, it is the Israeli Hiroshima", wrote Palestinian author Azmi Bishara.
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Is that a prediction? Or is Azmi really mad? Will Nuclear Winter save us from Global Warming?
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http://www.alertnet.org/...
TUNIS, Aug. 1 (Reuters) - Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tunis on Tuesday to demand that those who carried out the "massacre" in the Lebanese village of Qana be put on trial.
Many held up photographs of the victims of Israel's weekend air strike on Qana, which killed at least 54 civilians, including 37 children.
"Qana is a shame on humanity," they cried, some holding aloft photos of the leader of the Islamist group Hizbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.
"O beloved Nasrallah, after Haifa, strike at Tel Aviv," shouted the demonstrators as they filed down Mohamed V avenue in the centre of the Tunisian capital, referring to a Hizbollah rocket attack on the Israeli city of Haifa last month.
Some in the crowd, estimated by police at 7,000 and including intellectuals and singers, described Israeli leaders as the "New Nazis" and called on Arab states to intervene to end the "Zionist crimes".
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http://news.monstersandcritics.com/...
The only result for the Qana massacre, it said, was Israel`s 'lie' for a 48-hour cessation of air strikes.
The daily, which describes itself as an independent political paper, argued the entire war is the turning point, saying that all of Lebanon was 'other Qanas, as the turning point in this war was drawn up from its start.' Israel`s only official objective, it said, is to try to break the Shiite Hezbollah movement by destroying and paralyzing the entire country.
It added, however, that Qana has drawn anger that is not affecting decision-makers that would make Israel change its approach, even if the massacre caused the death of more than 30 children. The paper warned the coming days will be more dangerous as Israel prepares to commit more massacres in Lebanon.
Another Lebanese daily, an-Nahar, said Israel`s decision to halt its air strikes for 48 hours was just a station in a long war to try to dilute the results of the Qana massacre and to speed up the vacating of southern Lebanon before resuming a more fierce and destructive military offensive.
The anti-Syrian daily argued in a commentary that Israel`s inability to achieve significant military gains is preventing it from agreeing to a cease-fire, adding this inability shows the 'ugly face shown in Qana and the impotent face in the battle fields.' Israel`s failures, it said, put the Lebanese before a new round in this war that might be more relentless because the 'window of time before Israel is beginning to close despite the American green light.'
The mass-circulation paper feared that Qana will not be the last...
From Thailand:
http://www.asiantribune.com/...
Israel's latest invasion of Lebanon and western culpability
Thu, 2006-08-03 02:50 - By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
It should be quite obvious by now that Israel's latest invasion of Gaza and Lebanon had very little to do with rescuing her fallen soldiers. As I write, Israel has killed some 750 unarmed Lebanese civilians - mostly women and children, destroyed mosques, bridges, roads, houses, schools, hospitals and much of the infra-structure of southern half of Lebanon. As in 1996, she has massacred scores of civilians in Qana this past weekend (July 30, 2006).
Israel has bombed Red Cross center and ambulances, and a UN observation post killing 4 observers. She has displaced a million people inside the country, some of whom are forced to take shelters in even prisons. Infants have been forcibly separated from their parents, and the elderly from their care-taking children. Relief supplies are difficult to get to the internally displaced refugees. Nothing is immune from Israel's bombing campaign.
If a small fraction of these crimes were to be committed by any invading state, in contravention to international laws, Bush and Blair and their European allies in the NATO would be screaming aloud demanding cease-fire, failing which they would threaten the invading nation with all kinds of actions - UN sanctions, embargo and war.
But when it comes to crimes of Israel, they are her greatest cheer-leaders. They want to see more Muslim blood, more destruction, literally hell on earth and not cease-fire, because to them Muslim lives and properties are cheap and expendable.
As Michael Schure, an ex-CIA analyst and the foremost expert on al-Qaeda, has said, Bush and Blair through their naked support of such monumental crimes against Muslims have repeatedly given credence to everything that their adversaries have been saying about the West. No bones about it. Truly, it is not OBL and al-Zawahiri that is radicalizing Muslims throughout the world, but these two world leaders. With world leaders like these, who needs OBL to bring the Armageddon on earth?
Exchange of prisoners between contending parties is not new. It takes place all the time. Even Israel has, in the past, negotiated such exchanges. Moreover, the demand of Hizbullah and Hamas to exchange captured Israeli soldiers for Muslims prisoners held by Israel is justified given the fact that it is Israel that for decades has been holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners and hundreds of Lebanese citizens -- many of whom are women, children and (even) infants -- some literally kidnapped.
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From Turkey:
http://www.zaman.com/...
Searching for Deeper Meanings in the Lebanon War/Gaza Offensive
by
Prof. Richard Falk
While the world rightly laments the daily horrors inflicted on the people of Lebanon, there is a distressing tendency to ignore the parallel sufferings of the Palestinians in Gaza.
And even more serious there exists a reluctance to explore the deeper meanings of the ghastly happenings that we as citizens witness each night on TV. The media has done an admirable job of awakening the conscience of the world to the suffering and devastation being visited upon Lebanon, but it has in the process unacceptably forgotten to report upon the torment of Palestinians enduring the several weeks of Hell, politely labeled as the 'Gaza Offensive,' but more accurately described as 'Israel's Criminality in Gaza.'
Why this difference? Lebanon, for all its problems, as a state and member of the United Nations, at least enjoys the benefits of 'voice,' being allowed to tell its terrible story before the eyes and ears of the world. In contrast, the Palestinians lack this international status, and their fate is ignored, or even condoned, by a mainly indifferent media, as well as by the UN and most influential governments. The realities of Lebanon and Gaza are fundamentally similar: in both situations routine border incidents involving attacks and abductions of Israeli soldiers were used as excuses to wage long-planned military campaigns against these two essentially defenseless populations.
At this point it is crystal clear that these Israeli military operations amount to state terrorism on a grand scale, and not the less so because perversely justified by Tel Aviv and Washington as battlefields in 'the war on global terror.'
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it is conceded that almost all of the 750 or so Lebanese so far killed are civilians, while of the 51 Israelis who have died, only 18 are civilians.
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