Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Monday, July 31, 2006

Israeli-Hizbullah Battles in Deep South
Israelis Bombed Qana while Relief and Rescue troops worked


Update: Israeli war planes conducted further air raids Monday morning, despite Israeli officials' earlier pledge to cease for 48 hours. The Israelis bombed a car with a Lebanese Army officer and soldiers, killing him. They have repeatedly bombed Lebanese army bases and facilities and have killed over a dozen Lebanese troops and officers, but this is the first time I remember them apologizing for it. What does this change of attitude mean?

The Israeli government announced a 48-eight-hour cessation of its air raids on Lebanon while it investigated itself for the killing of large numbers of innocent civilians, especially children, at Qana. During this time, it is also allowing a 24-hour window for Lebanese in the south to leave the area safely without fear of being bombed by the Israeli air force and they flee (a fate that befell some Lebanese refugees in the past few days). Since emptying south Lebanon of people is part of the Israeli war plan, it wasn't actually altruistic of them to allow people to leave.

Nicholas Blanford reports on the horror at Qana.


Courtesy al-Hayat.

Blanford reveals that Israeli warplanes actually continued to bomb the town while the rescue workers were pulling ragdoll-dead children out of the building. That's cold, man. Cold:


' An earth-mover ground down the lane and began clawing chunks of concrete away from the building. Even as the rescue team toiled to recover the dead, Israeli jets continued to roar overhead and the thump of air strikes and exploding artillery shells reverberated around the steep valley. '


Israeli forces and Hizbullah fighters continued to fight on land in the border regions on Sunday. Hizbullah also fired numerous rockets into Israel, though they appear mostly to have been ineffectual, they did cause some damages and injuries.


Max Blumenthal on "The Israeli Checklist"
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What is Hizbullah?

Western and Israeli pundits keep comparing Hizbullah to al-Qaeda. It is a huge conceptual error. There is a crucial difference between an international terrorist network like al-Qaeda, which can be disrupted by good old policing techniques (such as inserting an agent in the Western Union office in Karachi), and a sub-nationalist movement.

Al-Qaeda is some 5,000 multinational volunteers organized in tiny cells.

Hizbullah is a mass expression of subnationalism that has the loyalty of some 1.3 million highly connected and politically mobilized peasants and slum dwellers. Over a relatively compact area.

I take sub-nationalism as a concept from Anthony D. Smith. It would be most familiar to Western readers under the rubric of the Irish Catholics of North Ireland, or even the Scots of the UK. Subnationalism, like the larger, over-arching nationalism, is a mass movement.

Thus, a very large number of the Pushtuns in Afghanistan are sub-nationalists with a commitment to Pushtun dominance. They deeply resent the victory of the Northern Alliance (i.e. Tajiks, Hazara Shiites, and Uzbeks) in 2001-2002. A lot of what our press calls resurgent "Taliban" activity is just Pushtun irredentism. There are approximately 14 million Pushtuns in Afghanistan and another 14 million or so in Pakistan.

The Shiites of southern Lebanon are compact enough to likewise offer a subnationalism. Note that this is a new phenomenon. The Shiite masses were not socially and politically mobilized until at least the 1970s, and probably it is more accurate to say the 1980s. ("Social mobilization" refers to literacy, access to media, urbanization, industrialization and so forth; isolated small villages have difficulty organizing big movements.)

The main factor in causing these peasant sharecroppers to become politically aware and mobilized was the Arab Israeli conflict. The Israelis stole some of their land in 1948 and expelled 100,000 Palestinians north into south Lebanon, where they competed for resources with local Lebanese Shiites. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Palestinians became politically and militarily organized by the PLO. The Shiites' conflict with the PLO in the southern camps in the 1970s was probably a key beginning, but from 1982 it was primarily their conflict with the Israeli Occupation army that spurred them on.

Processes of integration into the world market and increased mechanization of south Lebanon agriculture, as well as urbanization (Tyre, south Beirut) provided a *social* mobilization substrate that enabled but did not cause their *political mobilization* (see A. Richard Norton's book on early AMAL). The rise of a Shiite wealthy class, especially as a result of commerce with the Oil Gulf, added to the community's organizational capacity and resources. Still, the Shiites of south Lebanon are generally poor and a lot of them are still rural.

The Sunni Arabs of central, west and north Iraq are now also creating a subnationalism and organizing extensive paramilitary cells with highly significant asymmetrical warfare capabilities. The entire might of the formidable US military machine has made no headway against these 5 million persons.

Where subnationalisms are organized by party-militias willing to use carbombings and other asymmetrical forms of warfare, they are extremely difficult, if not impossible to defeat militarily. It would take a World War II style crushing military defeat of these populations, with the willingness of the conqueror to suffer tens of thousands dead in troop casualties. Israel is not even in a position to risk such a thing, given its small population.

Hizbullah is not like al-Qaeda in any way, sociologically speaking, and making such an analogy is a sure way for a general or politician to trick himself into entering the fires of hell.

What the Israelis set out to do, if they intended to "destroy" or even substantially attrite Hizbullah, was completely impractical. What they have done is to convince even Lebanese formerly on the fence about the issue that Hizbullah's leaders were correct in predicting that Lebanon would again be attacked in the most brutal and horrible way by the Israelis and that an even more powerful deterrent is needed. I.e more silkworms, not fewer. . The days when the Israelis could lord it over disconnected unmobilized Arab peasant villagers with their high tech army are coming to a close. The Arabs are still very weak, but are throwing up powerful asymmetrical challenges (e.g. party-militias with silkworm missiles!). Israeli alarm about the new connectedness of their foe explains the orgy of destruction aimed at bridges, roads, television and radio facilities and internet servers. But it is too late to disconnect the south Lebanese, who can easily and quickly rebuild all those connectors.

One hope the Israeli hawks appear to entertain is that they can permanently depopulate strips Lebanon south of the Litani river. Since most Shiites vote Hizbullah and offer political support and cover to it, fewer people means fewer assets for the party-militia. This project would require the total destruction of large numbers of villages and the permanent displacement of their inhabitants north to Beirut.

That is why the massacre at Qana occurred. The Israelis had bombed Qana 80 times. They were destroying all of its buildings. Therefore, of course, they destroyed the building where dozens of children and families were hiding. This tactic is both collective punishment and ethnic cleansing all at once. It is not only a matter, as the Israelis claim, of hitting Hizbullah rocket launchers. They are destroying all of the buildings.

The Israeli demographic project of thinning out the population of the far south of Lebanon will fail. They do not control that territory, and cannot stop people from coming back and rebuilding. The Israelis have an Orientalist myth that the Arabs are Bedouin and not attached to their ancestral villages. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon still group their neighborhoods around their camps in accordance with the geography of their former villages. The Lebanese Shiites will mostly come back.

The Israelis cannot win this struggle against a sophisticated, highly organized and well armed subnationalism.

The only practical thing to do when you can't easily beat people into submission is to find a compromise with them that both sides can live with. It will be a hard lesson for both the Lebanese Shiites and the Israelis. But they will learn it or will go on living with a lot of death and destruction.
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Sistani Threatens US over Israeli War on Lebanon

The US punditocracy and ruling elite is fixated on Hizbullah as a "terrorist group" even though the organization hasn't engaged in international terror against American civilians in many years. What they forget about Hizbullah is that it is also a Shiite religious party, and that that is how it is perceived for the most part by Iraqi Shiites. Some 45 percent of Lebanese are probably Shiites.

The other thing to remember is that the United States is now a Shiite Power in part, insofar as it semi-rules a Shiite-majority country, Iraq.

The Associated Press is carrying the story that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has demanded an immediate ceasefire in Israel's war on Lebanon, in the wake of the Qana massacre:


' `Islamic nations will not forgive the entities that hinder a cease-fire,'' al-Sistani said in a clear reference to the United States.

``It is not possible to stand helpless in front of this Israeli aggression on Lebanon,'' he added. ``If an immediate cease-fire in this Israeli aggression is not imposed, dire consequences will befall the region.''


Sistani had earlier condemned Israeli air raids on Lebanon but had confined himself to ordering the Iraqi Shiite religious establishment to provide aid to victims of the war in Lebanon.

Sistani's statements of early Monday morning (which are not yet reflected at his website in Arabic) go substantially beyond his earlier statement.

Several questions arise: 1) Why is Sistani speaking like this? 2) What can he do about it all? and 3) What are the possible consequences if he turns anti-American in practice, not just in rhetoric, as in the past?



Sistani is taking such a hard line on this issue not only because he feels strongly about it (his fatwa against the Jenin operation of 2002 was vehement) but also because he is in danger of being outflanked by Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr's Mahdi Army is said to be "boiling" over the Israeli war on Hizbullah, since after all the Sadrists are also fundamentalist Shiites and they identify with the Lebanese Hizbullah. There have already been big demonstrations in Baghdad against the Israeli attacks, to which Sadrists flocked but probably also other Shiites.

Sistani cannot allow Muqtada to monopolize this issue, or the young cleric's legitimacy will grow among the angry Shiite masses at the expense of Sistani's.

Sistani is not linked to Hizbullah, which is strongly Khomeinist in orientation. Sistani largely rejects Khomeinism. He told an Iraqi acquaintance of mine, "Even if I must be wiped out, I will not allow Iraq to repeat the Iranian experience." When Sistani had his heart problems in summer, 2004, he flew to London via Beirut. He stopped in Beirut several hours, and Nabih Berri came out to the airport to consult with him. Berri is the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and the leader of the Amal Party. Amal is the party of the secularizing, moderate Lebanese Shiites. It was more militant in the 1980s but it mellowed.

So Sistani's political ties in Lebanon go to Amal much more than to Hizbullah. Sistani has many followers or "emulators" (muqallidun) among the Lebanese Shiites, though the hard core Hizbullahis tend to follow Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran instead. Some Lebanese Shiites follow the Lebanese grand ayatollah, Husain Fadlullah.

Note that Amal is allied with Hizbullah in parliament, and some Amal fighters have been killed in clashes with Israelis in the deep south. Amal abandoned its paramilitary during the 1990s, but seems to have kept some units active down near the Israeli border.

So Berri would have been in a position to implore Sistani to intervene. Sistani is hoping for something like a moderate Amal party to coalesce in Iraq and would want to help Berri any way he could.

Sistani has issued a warning to the United States. He wants Bush to intervene to arrange a ceasefire, i.e. the cessation of israeli air raids on Lebanon in general.

What could he do if he were ignored? Sistani could call massive anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations. Given Iraq's profound political instability, this development could be extremely dangerous. US troops in Baghdad and elsewhere are planning offensives against Shiite paramilitary groups, so tensions are likely to rise in the Shiite areas anyway. But big demonstrations could easily boil over into actual attacks on US and British troops. Both depend heavily on fuel that is transported through the Shiite south. Were the Shiites actively to turn on the US for its wholehearted support of continued Israeli air raids, the US military could be cut off from fuel and supplies. The British only have around 8,000 troops in Iraq, and they would be in profound danger if Iraq's Shiites became militantly anti-occupation.

Since the Israeli treatment of Arabs is an issue on which Sunnis and Shiites agree, there is also a possibility that Sistani could finally get some respect from the Sunni community if he led such a compaign. That development would be more dangerous to the continued US military presence in Iraq than any other I can think of.

The US is already not winning against a Sunni Arab insurgency, backed by around 5 million Iraqis. If 16 million Shiites turned on the US because of its wholehearted support for Israel's actions in Lebanon, the US military mission in Iraq could quickly become completely and urgently untenable. In this case, the British troops in particular would be lucky to escape the country with their lives.

Sistani does not issue threats lightly, and he has repeatedly shown a willingness to back them up with action. Bush and US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad will ignore him to their peril.
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Why Mel Gibson is Wrong

It is not very important or interesting that a Hollywood star has substance abuse problems. But the alleged sentiment expressed by Mel Gibson to the police who arrested him, as follows, is worth some comment:


' "Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, 'You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you.' The report also says 'Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me.

"The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: 'F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.' Gibson then asked the deputy, 'Are you a Jew?'" '


I made some comments about this issue when The Passion of the Christ came out, which I reprint below.

As for the rest, simple truths sometimes need restating.

First: It is wrong to corral out a group of people on the basis of some attribute, such as religion, and then blame them collectively for something.

For instance, it would be just as wrong to say that Muslims are responsible for all the terrorism in the world.

Individual human beings aren't responsible for the actions of other people with whom they have some marker of identity in common. (The good Lord knows I wouldn't want to be held responsible for the actions of Donald Rumsfeld, even though we're both English-speaking Americans of Christian background). Collective guilt and collective punishment are always wrong, morally and legally.

Second: It is, like, not correct in any way that "Jews" are responsible for wars in the world. I'd say the credit for WW I goes to the Kaiser. WW II? Hitler. And he did not even like Jews. The Korean and Vietnamese wars were rooted in colonial dynamics (Japan and France), in East Asian Communist Parties, and in rising American power along the Pacific Rim. See, hard as I look, I can't find any evidence of Jewish responsibility here.

Now if one were talking contemporary wars in the Middle East, it wouldn't work there, either. The war of Morocco against the Polisario movement in the Sahara? Muslim on Muslim. The civil war in Algeria of the 1990s? Muslim on Muslim. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988? Secular Arab nationalism versus Shiite fundamentalism. The Israelis were tangentially involved in the latter, since they sold arms to Iran, but they did not cause the war. Saddam Hussein caused the war. Have the Israelis sometimes fired the first shot in a war? Yes. Did "Jews" cause those wars? No.

As for the Iraq War, puh-lease. Opinion polling shows that in spring of 2003, some 75 percent of Americans wanted to go to war against Saddam's regime. At the same time, only a little over 50 percent of American Jews supported the war. "Jews" did not cause the Iraq War. George W. Bush caused the Iraq War. He had Gentile advisers who wanted him to go for it. He had a handful of Jewish advisers who wanted him to go for it. But he is the president. It was his decision. And the American Jewish community was distinctly lukewarm about the whole idea, and very divided.

Finally, defining people is impossible. Human beings cannot be reduced to only one marker of identity. We all have multiple identities. Mel cannot just corral off a group of people and define them in a unidimensional way. And on the other side of things, there is a sense in which the US as a Creole society imbibes a good deal from each of its constituent subcultures. The United States would not have the practical freedoms it does have if it weren't for the activism in the 20th century of American Jews. We would not have nearly as deep and rich a culture without the profound contribution of Jewish thinkers and artists. We are all partially Jewish in this vague, cultural sharing, and are all much the better for it. But the main thing is, we are all human beings together down here, and need each other, and must respect one another.

So how could you draw a line of the sort Drunk Mel wants to draw?

He said a stupid, bigotted thing, and needs to face his problem squarely and apologize explicitly for stereotyping and blaming a whole people.

Here is what I said in February, 2004, about the controversy over "The Passion of the Christ":

=====

The Passion of Christ in the World Religions

The phenomenon of Mel Gibson's The Passion, about the death of Jesus of Nazareth, has provoked a lively debate about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Historians are well aware that medieval passion plays (which shared the sado-masochistic themes of Gibson's movie) often resulted in attacks on Jews. The concern of American Jewish leaders is therefore entirely valid.

Some of the problem goes back to the Gospel writers, who wrote many years after the fact and depict the Jewish leaders in a frankly implausible way because they had lost contact with Jewish customs. They have the Sanhedrin or Jewish religious council meeting about Jesus on the Sabbath, which just would not have happened. They have it meeting at night, which also would not have happened. Their account accords with nothing of the procedures and laws we know to have been followed at that time. The likelihood is that the Romans arrested and killed Jesus as a potential Zealot or religious radical whom they perceived as threatening, but that the later Christian community strove to have better relations with Rome just as Roman-Jewish relations got very bad. So the Gospel authors soft-pedaled Rome's role and invented nocturnal Sabbath Sanhedrins that have gotten Jews beaten up ever since.

In a post-September 11 world, this controversy has taken on wider significance. Film critic Michael Medved argued that American Jewish leaders were wrong to attack the film as anti-Semitic because they risked alienating Christian allies (of rightwing Zionism, apparently), who were needed to fight the "Islamo-fascists" (his word, on the Deborah Norville show) attacking Jews in Israel.

Although Medved appears in this argument to be taking the more "assimilated" position, basically saying that the rightwing Christians should be allowed to broadcast their historically absurd and offensive images of first-century Jews in peace regardless of the consequences, in fact his is the more reactionary position on several levels.

First, he is saying that a minority that faces many attacks every year in the US and Europe should not speak out about cultural phenomena that might increase those attacks. The United States is a relatively tolerant society in world-historical terms, but the ADL alleges that 17 percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic beliefs, and there are every year too many incidents of vandalism of Jewish property and harassment of Jews. I suspect I differ with the ADL on what exactly anti-Semitism is (it isn't criticism of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories), but I accept their number as a ballpark figure. And if that is the number, it is way too high. Bigotry is when you stereotype an entire group, and then blame individuals for imagined "group" traits. Individuals are unique, and you can't tar a whole people with a single brush. And, it is by speaking out about the problem that any minority makes progress in the United States. Who would imagine telling African-Americans they should be quiet about films that depict them as villains harming something whites hold dear? No liberals that I know of.

Second, Medved is eager to perpetuate a dangerous political marriage of convenience between the rightwing settler movement in Israel and the American evangelicals. The rightwing Christians in the US don't support the settlers against the Palestinians because they love Judaism. They want to set things up for the conversion of all Jews to Christianity and the return of Christ, i.e., for the end of the Jewish people. (Interestingly, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is aware of this "Christian Zionism" and cites it as one motive for the US occupation of Iraq; it is not making Israel or the US any friends). The Likud may get votes and de facto campaign money from the rightwing Christians in the short term, but it is encouraging Christian anti-Semitism by disguising it as support for Israel. In fact, Israel's best interests lie in a return to the 1967 borders and making peace with Arab and Muslim neighbors, not by a ruthless expansionism and continued colonial occupation that harms Israel's image and debilitates Israeli democracy. (Yitzhak Rabin's policies of Oslo and after, before an ultra-Orthodox Jewish assassin cut him down, would have pulled the rug out from under Zarqawi's argument).

Third, it is hard to see the difference between the bigotry of anti-Semitism as an evil and the bigotry that Medved displays toward Islam. It is more offensive than I can say for him to use the word "Islamo-fascist." Islam is a sacred term to 1.3 billion people in the world. It enshrines their highest ideals. To combine it with the word "fascist" in one phrase is a desecration and a form of hate speech. Are there Muslims who are fascists? Sure. But there is no Islamic fascism, since "Islam" has to do with the highest ideals of the religion. In the same way, there have been lots of Christian fascists, but to speak of Christo-Fascism is just offensive. It goes without saying that a phrase like Judeo-fascist is an unutterable abortion. (And this despite the fact that Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideological ancestor of Likud and the Neocons, spoke explicitly of the desirability of Jewish fascism in the interwar period). Medved is even inaccurate, since the terrorist attack on civilians in Jerusalem to which he referred was the work of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a secular rather than an ostensibly Muslim group.

Interestingly, the Koran, the holy book of Islam, denies that the Jews were responsible for Jesus's death (4:154-159). It appears that some Jews of the ancient Arabian city of Medinah were disappointed when they learned that the Prophet Muhammad had accepted Jesus as a prophet of God, and had put this decision down by observing that he wasn't much of a prophet if the Jews had managed to kill him. The Koran replies to this boast (surely by some jerk in the Medinan Jewish quarter) by saying, "They did not kill him, and they did not crucify him, it only appeared to them so." What exactly the Koran meant by this phrase has been debated ever since. As an academic, I do not read it as a denial of the crucifixion. The Koran talks of Jesus dying, and is not at all Gnostic in emphasis, at one point insisting that Jesus and Mary ate food (presumably against Gnostics who maintained that their bodies were purely spiritual). A lot of Muslims have adopted the rather absurd belief that Jesus was not crucified, but rather a body double took his place. (This is like something out of the fiction of Argentinean fabulist Jorge Luis Borges). Those Muslims who accepted Jesus' death on the cross (and nothing else in the Koran denies it) interpret the verse as saying it was God's will that Jesus be sacrificed, and so it was not the Jews' doing. (Great Muslims like at-Tabari and Ibn Khaldun accepted the crucifixion). Any way you look at it, though, the Koran explicitly relieves Jews of any responsibility for Jesus' crucifixion and death. In this it displays a more admirable sentiment than some passages of the Gospels, and certainly than the bizarre far-rightwing Catholic cult in which Mel Gibson was raised, which appears to involve Holocaust denial, and which deeply influenced his sanguinary film.
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Sunday, July 30, 2006

The Qana Massacre, Part II

Israeli war planes scored a direct hit on a building in the Shiite village of Qana where destitute farming folk, including old people, women and children, had taken refuge in the basement from Israeli bombing raids. At least 60 are dead, as bodies are pulled from the rubble. 19 children are confirmed dead and another 11 are thought still to be in the basement. The Israelis say they had pamphleted the region demanding that all civilians leave, and high Israeli officials have openly said that anyone who remains is fair game (low civilianity index, and maybe low humanianity index, too). The Israelis don't say, however, how desperately poor hardscrabble farmers including the aged and infirm and children are supposed to travel to Beirut over the roads and bridges that the Israelis have bombed out, and on what they are supposed to live when they get there.

The Israelis had launched 80 air raids on the village of Qana overnight, with large numbers of buildings flattened, according to CNN.

The Israelis appear to be engaged in a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Shiite towns and villages of southern Lebanon, and are indiscriminately bombing all buildings in the area south of the Litani River. They have chased hundreds of thousands of residents out, and are destroying the property they left behind in a systematic way, rather as they destroy the houses belonging to the family members related to suicide bombers. In other words, the Israelis are engaged in collective punishment on a vast scale. They maintain that rocket launching sites are embedded in these villages. But since Hizbullah keeps firing large numbers of rockets, it does not actually appear to be the case that the Israelis are hitting the rocket launchers. They are demonstrably hitting civilian houses and apartment buildings in a methodical way. There is no independent evidence that this civilian building in Qana was used for any military purpose. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has called for an international investigation and an immediate ceasefire, and he summarily sent Condi Rice away until she brings such a proposal.

Thousands of Lebanese in Beirut demonstrated in response and invaded the UN HQ in the capital. They also chanted against the United States ambassador in Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman, screaming "Feltman out now!"

Feltman seems to be trapped in the US embassy, away from which most embassy employees have already been sent abroad. He expressed his regret to the Lebanese government for not being able to come to Baabda.

The Israelis bombed the Beirut-Damascus highway again on Saturday, adding to the crippling of Lebanon's infrastructure. Damascus is Beirut's inland trading partner and Lebanese trying to get out of the country have to go that route.

Mark Perry analyzes the decision-making that led to Qana.

Hamid Mir in Beirut finds that even some Christian nightclub owners are supporting Hizbullah! Opinion polls show Christian support for Hizbullah's resistance to the Israelis to have risen to over 50 percent in recent days, from the mid-40s.

Question 1: In what way is the Israeli compaign in South Lebanon different from Slobodon Milosevic's campaign in Bosnia?

Question 2: Since Bush and Rice derailed any move toward a ceasefire of the sort that the entire rest of the world demanded, aren't they directly implicated in this bloodshed?

AP reports on what the moral response would be of a normal human being in high political office:


' French President Jacques Chirac's office said "France condemns this unjustifiable action, which shows more than ever the need to move toward an immediate cease-fire, without which other such dramas can only be repeated."

Jordan's King Abdullah II condemned "the ugly crime perpetrated by Israeli forces in Qana," calling it "a blatant violation of the law and all international conventions."'


Later in the day, Pope Benedict XVI called for an immediate ceasefire.

I repeat, the Pope has called for an immediate ceasefire.

We know what we can expect from W.

Issandr El Amrani links to pictures of the Qana massacre and reminds us of the massacre of ten years ago.

Tom Engelhardt on the barbarity of air war.

Brent Scowcroft argues for a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since the Arab League made such an offer to Israel way back in 2002, I'd say the ball is in Olmert's court. Good luck.

The Crisis Group has also put up a comprehensive peace plan.

Between 2000, when the Israelis withdrew unilaterally from their illegal military occupation of Lebanon's south, through July 12, 2006, six Israeli civilians died in border violence.

Israel's attack on fuel stations at the Christian port of Jounieh and elsewhere have caused massive oil spills on Lebanese beaches, perhaps the biggest environmental disaster ever in the Mediterranean.
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Renewed Israeli Airstrikes Kill Family,
Others, Wound 2 UN Troops;
Nasrallah Vows Longer Range Rocket Strikes


The Israelis continued air strikes on Saturday. Naharnet.com carries this via AFP and AP:


'Elsewhere, Israeli warplanes demolished houses, killing seven people, including a woman and her five children . . . Lebanese civilians have born the brunt of the Israeli onslaught. The woman and her children were crushed in their home by a strike outside the market town of Nabatiyeh, which also killed a man in a nearby house, Lebanese security officials said. In the border village of Ain Arab in southeast Lebanon, six bodies were dug from the rubble of a house destroyed by a strike Friday, police said. Thirty-two Lebanese villagers killed in Israeli raids were also laid to rest in a mass grave in the southern port city of Tyre. '



Other Israeli attacks on Lebanon:

'Early Saturday, Israeli fighter jets renewed raids on Beirut's southern suburbs destroying a four-wheel-drive vehicle in a missile strike. The driver escaped unharmed when he jumped out of the vehicle. Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted cars and trucks . . . Two people were wounded in an attack on a lorry in the Bekaa Valley area of Sultan Yaacoub, the National News Agency said. Israeli forces also bombarded from the air and the sea various regions of south Lebanon, targeting valleys and houses. There were no immediate reports of casualties. '


And there was this:

' Before dawn on Sunday, Israeli warplanes hit the Masnaa border crossing, cutting the main road that links Lebanon to Syria and forcing the closure of the main transit point for refugees fleeing and humanitarian aid entering Lebanon. Two more missiles hit the area early Sunday. . . Two Indian UN peacekeepers were wounded on Saturday in an Israeli air raid on their post in south Lebanon. Four UN military observers were killed earlier this week in an Israeli strike on their observation post. '


The Israeli military mysteriously and suddenly pulled out of the far-south town of Bint Jbeil on Saturday, after a hard-fought battle to take the town of 30,000 that cost the lives of 8 Israeli troops last Wednesday alone. Naharnet says, "On Friday, the Israeli army said seven of its soldiers were wounded, including one seriously, when Hizbullah fighters attacked a ridge overlooking Bint Jbeil and the nearby village of Maroun al-Ras. " It appears to be the case that the Israelis were over-confident and have been taking much higher casualties than they had been prepared for, and so withdrew lest the casualties mount, until they figured out what to do about Hizbullah's tactics.

Altogether about 33 Israeli troops have been killed in the fighting with Hizbullah, with 17 civilians dead. The Lebanese authorities estimate that some 400 Lebanese civilians have died in the Israeli assaults, plus another 200 that likely are still buried in rubble.

Hizbullah fired 90 rockets at Israel on Saturday, again, but none did significant damage or inflicted severe wounds. 7 civilians and 3 soldiers were reported injured.

Hizbullah leader Shaikh Hasan Nasrallah pledged Saturday to hit even further into the heart of Israel with his rockets if the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon did not cease. He denied that the Israelis had won any victories, pointing to their destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure as a "savage achievement."

Israel rejected a plea from the UN for a 72-hour ceasefire to allow aid to be distributed. Some food and other aid has arrived in Beirut but relief workers are afraid to distribute it because the Israelis are targeting moving trucks for destruction.

Hundreds of Egyptians demonstrated at al-Azhar mosque on Friday against the Israeli war on Lebanon. They called for Hizbullah to destroy Tel Aviv and denounced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Saudii King Abduallh for not intervening with all their energies to denounce Israel.
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Over a Dozen Dead in Civil War Violence
Khafaji denounces Maliki for Visit to Bush



Guerrillas detonated a car bomb in Kirkuk on Saturday, killing four persons and wounding 15. There have been lots of bombings in the volatile multi-ethnic oil city recently, and some worry about a sectarian war breaking out there.

Turkish troops reportedly made a brief incursion into Iraq on Friday in search of members of the PKK guerrilla group.

In other violence, the US military announced that four Marines had been killed in al-Anbar province on Thursday. A grenade attack wounded 12 laborers in Baghdad. A senior officer in the Iraqi border patrol was assassinated in Karbala. Several persons were wounded in an attack in Fallujah. There was a firefight between the US/Iraqi police and the Mahdi Army in Diwaniyah, which left 7 policemen wounded. No word of Mahdi Army casualties if any. My guess is that if the Mahdi Army really wants Diwaniyah there isn't that much anyone can do about it in the medium term. Reuters has other details of the ongoing civil war attacks.

In addition, there were guerrilla attacks on two mosques in Baghdad.

And, guerrillas destroyed a small Shiite shrine in Diyala province.

Also in Diyalah:

' Unknown gunmen on Saturday killed two people, wounded two others and kidnapped two more in separate incidents in the volatile Diyala province in northeast Baghdad. '


The Sadrist Shaikh Khafaji denounced, in his Friday prayer sermon, the visit of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to the US. He also tied the Lebanon war to the war in Iraq. Jeffrey Fleishman writes, ' Nouri al-Maliki's trip to Washington this week as a betrayal of Islam and a humiliation to his people at the hands of U.S. and Israeli aggressors. Sheik Khafaji intertwined the bloodshed in Iraq and Lebanon, calling it a design by Christians and Jews to defeat the Muslim world. '

Meanwhile, on Friday Abdul Aziz al-Hakim finally admitted the need to disband the sectarian militias in Iraq. But he also demanded that the US turn security duties over to the Iraqi government immediately. The main force that might deal with security instead? Sectarian militias, one of which, the Badr Corps, al-Hakim oversees.
Mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad are being ethnically cleansed, as Sunnis flee Shiite districts and vice versa.

Frank Rich, one of our most perceptive intellectuals, points to the odd downplaying of Iraq news what with the advent of the Israel-Lebanon crisis. But Rich is being a little unfair. If they tried to cover two important issues like Iraq and Israel-Lebanon, the television news producers would ask, how could they fit in the missing white women and the small town murder mysteries?

First there is large scale social violence. And then the banks start going under and being robbed at will. Then the economy collapses. I saw it happen to Lebanon in the late 1970s. It is happening in Iraq now, according to James Glanz of the NYT.

Fraud in AID accounting for projects in Iraq?

An Australian general, Major General Maurie McNarn, played a "red card" during the 2003 US attack on Iraq, vetoing massive bombing raids that would unnecessarily kill innocent civilians. See folks, there really is a distinction between making war and committing gross war crimes, and some professional military men know what it is and stand by it. I fear Tommy Franks and some other US officers were not among them.

McNarn reveals that George W. Bush himself vetoed involving the United Nations in Iraq in summer of 2003: '"The UN can't manage a damn thing," Mr Bush told Mr Downer, recalling his visit to Kosovo, where the President found the UN personnel to be "a bunch of drunks". ' Hmmm. Can't manage a damn thing and a bunch of drunks. Sound like anyone we know? Can you say, Reflection fallacy?
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Blair and the Rhetoric of False Equivalence

The techniques of propaganda were on full display during the joint news conference of George W. Bush and British PM Tony Blair on Friday. Blair began by saying,


' What is happening in the Middle East at the moment is a complete tragedy for Lebanon, for Israel and for the wider region. '


Note how by calling it a "tragedy," Blair takes the onus off Israel for launching a total war on the Lebanese infrastructure and population. A hurricane is a tragedy, Mr. Prime Minister. This is a war. It is a war launched by specific persons, including especially Ehud Olmert and Gen. Halutz. It isn't something that can be put into the passive voice.

Moreover, Blair further obscures reality by making the "tragedy" cover 'Lebanon, Israel, and the wider region.' 50 Israelis have died, 33 of them military. On the order of 600 Lebanese civilians have been killed, with over 400 bodies recovered. Hizbullah's rockets have damaged some buildings, but the scale of destruction in Lebanon by far dwarfs that in Israel. The Israelis have targeted residential apartment buildings, bridges, roads, telecom towers, internet servers. They have made 750,000 Lebanese homeless, out of 3.8 million residents of Lebanon.

It isn't a "tragedy" and its effects haven't been the same everywhere.

Here is more of Blair:

' And the scale of destruction is very clear. There are innocent lives that have been lost, both Lebanese and Israeli. There are hundreds of thousands of people that have been displaced from their homes, again, both in Lebanon and in Israel. And it's been a tremendous and terrible setback for Lebanon's democracy. '


His rhetoric attempts to lump together Israel and Lebanon with regard to the "scale of destruction." And, even if it were true that "hundreds of thousands" of Israelis have been displaced, which I doubt, the fact is that very few of them have lost a home or suffered serious wounds, compared to the thousands and thousands of Lebanese who have. There is not any equivalence, of the sort Blair pretends exists, between the suffering of the Lebanese and the suffering of the Israelis. There certainly are Israelis suffering. But their number is tiny in comparison to the Lebanese who have.

I could go on, but it is pretty clear, I think. Even the British cabinet is unhappy with Blair over his performance.
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Saturday, July 29, 2006

Islands in Arabia

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:



' Islands in Arabia

Sitting on my balcony staring down at the Sea Gate of the American University of Beirut, and to the Mediterranean beyond, I am in no danger. The bombs are in the distance. The fighting is in the south. In Tel Aviv, Israeli citizens are staring at the same sea, in perfect safety. The missiles are landing in Haifa and farther north. And those following this war from living rooms around the world are in utter cocoons of safety. Most of us are separated from the violence that under girds our world and its order. But are we safe from fear? And does our fear make us wish for an order more and more strongly under girded?

AUB, like the State of Israel, is an implantation on the Levant from the West. Israel’s unilateral attempt to disengage and repair behind its enormous wall, as if it were an island in a sea of Arabs, reminds me of New Orleans dreaming of safety behind its levees. But New Orleans is an artificial island that is actually below sea level. Is Israel below sea level as well? AUB has evolved in a very different direction with regard to its surroundings. Might the Israelis learn something from its experience?

The American missionaries who first arrived in the eastern Mediterranean in 1820 were inspired by the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. As historian Ussama Makdisi puts it, they sought “to evangelize the world in order to facilitate the Second Coming of Christ.” They also saw themselves as representatives of the most enlightened, most advanced, most modern of civilizations—the truth of their religion being the centerpiece of this superiority. They founded schools because Christians needed to read the Bible. They introduced western medical practices and what later became the standard Arabic script. When they founded Syrian Protestant College in 1866 (later AUB), they hoped to attract students by teaching them about medicine, agriculture and the arts. The entire enterprise was a failure in terms of its goal of gaining converts: there were hardly any. But their inadvertent philanthropy had a profound impact. Many Arabs embraced the modern notions they learned at the college. In 1882, a huge controversy erupted when the Presbyterian Board of Trustees in the US forbade the teaching of the theory of evolution, and eventually dismissed two promising Arab scientists who had dared embrace modernity more thoroughly than the university’s trustees. As years passed, the university’s mission became increasingly secular and its faculty and administration increasingly Arab. In 1920, it changed its name to the American University of Beirut. John Munro, who has written a history of the university, suggests that the word “of” in its name became more and more representative of reality. The university played an important role in the revival of Arabic literature and Arab nationalism. Partly because of AUB, most Arabs held favorable views of the US, at least until the 1967 War. Even during the horrors of Lebanon’s long Civil War, all sides spared the AUB campus and hospital. The University has walls and gates, but its guards do not carry guns. Its walls serve to designate it as a particular place where students from all of the region’s religions and ethnic groups can openly debate and pursue knowledge. As AUB student Randy Nahle put it in his prize-winning Founders’ Day essay in 2004, the university provided “an open forum where Occidental and Oriental streams of thought could meet and debate and reshape each other.” When AUB’s Center for American Studies and Research that I direct decided to offer a course called “The Holocaust in American Literature and Culture” last semester, we were aware that, though our decision was not without controversy, AUB was a free and open space where even this topic could be approached in a scholarly way. Instead of remaining an isolated island, AUB has continued to evolve. If it is an American institution, it is not because it slavishly serves the agenda of any presidential administration, but because it openly embraces ideals that have motivated the most admired of US achievements.

Can Israel evolve and become a country “of” its region rather than an island “in” it? A country where people of all religions have absolute equality? A country with “liberty and justice for all”? If so, both Israel and its neighbors have a great deal to gain.

In the Levant, endless empires have come and gone. Living here naturally turns one’s mind to the long view. In July of 2006, the American University of Beirut may seem vulnerable and Israel invincible, which is more likely to exist in 500 years? Perhaps now is a time to think about these most basic issues. What kind of island is likely to persist: one with open gates, or one with high walls? One that is a meeting place of cultures, or one that strives for cultural purity?

Patrick McGreevy ''


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Israeli Air Strikes Kill 15 Civilians:
Hizbullah Fires longer range Missile, Misses


The Daily Star reports:


' Israel's powerful war machine pounded Lebanon for the 17th day on Friday as Hizbullah launched new, longer-range wepons on settlements in northern Israel . . . Israeli planes and warships hammered Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley . . .

'At least 15 civilians, including a Jordanian, were killed by Israeli raids Friday and several others wounded, including four children, while a church was demolished in Safad al-Battikh . . .

"The Israeli bombing wounded one French journalist in the Southern town of Ainata and another media convoy was bombed on the road leading to the Southern town of Rmeish," the report added. The French journalist was identified as Paul Quatier from France's Channel 2. '


Pictures

Lebanese in the south, mainly Shiites are turning to Hizbullah in a big way.

The UN is calling for a three-day aid cease-fire, so that food and other necessities can be delivered to suffering Lebanese civilians. The Israelis at the moment are only authorizing aid convoys on an ad hoc basis, which means they are constantly in danger of being attacked by the Israeli army.

Many Indians are upset about what is being done to Lebanon. I would guess that there are nearly 5 million Shiites in India (they are about 5 percent of the Muslims, who are 11 percent of India's more than 1 billion persons.

What about the country's executive? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh articulated the country's feelings when he addressed parliament on Thursday:

' While condemning the Hezbollah abduction of two Israeli soldiers, which triggered the Israeli onslaught, Manmohan Singh took Tel Aviv to task: "The virtual destruction of a country which has been painfully rebuilt after two decades of civil war can hardly be countenanced by any civilized state." '


If the US Congress is going to earmark millions for the Lebanese army, wouldn't it want to ask the Israelis to stop bombarding it first?

What do the Lebanese think about all this? They have revenge on their minds and most support Hizbullah's actions, even a majority of the Christians. Christians make up 40 percent of the voting-age population, and hold the presidency and a number of cabinet posts, as well as many positions in the officer corps.

The percentage of Lebanese in a recent poll who think that the US is an honest broker and has a place in Lebanese affairs has fallen from nearly 40 percent last January to 10 percent today. Lebanon was supposed to be the Bush administration's success story. All has turned to ashes.

As for the Israeli hope of getting the Lebanese to turn on Hizbullah, that doesn't seem to be working out very well. 87 percent of the Lebanese expressed support for Hizbullah's retaliatory attacks on northern Israel. 70 percent supported Hizbullah's capture of Israeli troops to force Israel to release Lebanese prisoners. Support for this move actually rose to a clear majority even among Christians. Only
the Druze among Lebanese ethnic/religious communities mostly disapproved (they are 6 percent of the population). 63 percent expect Hizbullah to be victorious over Israel.

As for suffering in Israel, which is widespread and worrisome: The bad news is that Hizbullah was able to fire a missile a little bit south of Haifa on Friday. The good news is that they don't appear to have been able actually to hit anything.

There is another dimension, besides the deaths, wounded and psychological trauma, to the damage Hizbullah's illegal and criminal targetting of civilians is doing, which is the economic.

AFP on the damage the war is doing in Israel to Haifa's economy.

' Haifa port, the Jewish state's second-largest, is closed. So is the railway line north of the city. . . According to a recent study by the Israeli Association of Manufacturers, just a third of enterprises in Israel's north are functioning normally. Thirty-five percent have closed completely and another 35 percent are not operating at full capacity. The conflict is costing Haifa 300-500 million shekels ($68-$113 million) per day, the study estimates. '


Tourism is dead, and some restaurants have suffered a 90 percent fall-off in business.
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Friday, July 28, 2006

Israeli cabinet rejects masive reliance on troops.

The Israeli war with Hizbullah is going badly for the Israelis. Some generals think the problem is too few troops. But the Israeli cabinet rejected that way of thinking, Thursday, sticking to its current mixture of air power and light infantry.

Air strikes in the south will continue.

Bloomberg reports that the the Israeli assault on Lebanon may have much strengthened the hand of Shaikh Hassan Nasrullah.

Mitch Prothero in Salon.com on the myth that Hizbullah hides among civilians.


' Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.

For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too. '


A Christian Bishop in Jerusalem would get a better hearing among American Christians than would non-Christian leaders, right? Wrong.
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32 Killed, 151 Wounded in Karada Strikes

Sunni Arab guerrillas used a combination of car bombs and mortar strikes to kill at least 32 persons in the upscale, predominantly Shiite Karada district on Thursday, while wounding 151.

The explosions took place near the home of Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi, and this area generally supports the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). That is, the Sunni Arab guerrillas were targeting the Shiite bourgeoisie this time, not the poor of Sadr City. SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim also leads the United Iraqi Alliance, the largest party in parliament.


Photo Courtesy KarbalaNews.net

Some 19 bodies were found in the capital, killed execution style, the victims of faith-based reprisals. In East Baghdad, 5 traffic policemen were kidnapped.

Guerrillas opened fire on Georgian troops at a checkpoint near Baquba on Thursday. No word on casualties.

Reuters reports other casualties in the ongoing civil war violence.

Tony Karon on how the Lebanon War imperils Bush's policies in Iraq.

Blackwater and Falluja-- did the mercenaries mess up the US effort in Iraq?
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Criminalizing Civilians

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

' Criminalizing Civilians

In the days before the US-commanded forces unleashed the second siege of Falluja in November 2004, a quarter million women, children and old men fled the city, but males between the ages of 15 and 45 were denied passage. They were essentially criminalized and forced to remain in a zone upon which hell was about to descend. These poor souls were condemned to a legal category that philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls hominus sacres, those without rights who can be killed without it being called the murder of a human, homicide.

Israeli leaders have a decision to make. After the IDF’s devastating losses at Bint Jabeil on Wednesday, the Washington Post Foreign Service reported this statement from former Mossad officer Yossi Alpher: “I dare say, based on what we’ve seen so far, these may be the best Arab troops we’ve seen so far.” An Nahar today reported that, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon proclaimed: “Everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hizbullah, we have called on all who are there to leave.” He then suggested that “maximum firepower has to be used.” As justification, he cited the meeting in Rome, from which “we have in effect obtained the authorization to continue our operations until Hisbullah is no longer present in southern Lebanon.”

Look at this logic: since Israel has asked civilians to leave, any that disobeyed have forfeited their status as civilians. Because the United States and its British followers have blocked the resolution to stop the killing, Israel will continue until Hezbollah “is no longer present.” But remember Hezbollah has been redefined to include all those “still in south Lebanon.” This crude logic renders all the people of southern Lebanon hominus sacres.

A serious war crime may be imminent. The responsibility to protect civilians does not end when an invading army asks them to clear out. An Nahar also reported that hundreds of people were trapped in southern villages. Moreover, there is evidence that some who tried to flee north in cars have been targeted.

On his web log informedcomment.com, Juan Cole argued on Monday that since Hezbollah fighters cannot effectively aim their rockets, and since they must understand they are most likely to hit civilians, they are therefore guilty of war crimes themselves. Hezbollah leaders would undoubtedly respond that they are not intentionally targeting civilians. From the beginning of the war, Israeli leaders have justified the deaths of Lebanese civilians by claiming that they also never target civilians; it is simply that Hezbollah fights from civilian areas and there is a lot of collateral damage when they are targeted.

All of this is bad enough, but what may be in store if the frustrated IDF begins to treat all people in south Lebanon as enemies will be a war crime of a different magnitude. In most past wars, the victors had the luxury of telling the story, and prosecuting the war crimes. In this war, the eyes of the world are squarely fixed on what is about to happen. Israel’s powerful alley may be able to prevent prosecutions of its decision makers, but all will know what decision they made. Most importantly the Arab World we know, and will not forget. Israel has a decision to make. '

Patrick McGreevy
Beirut'

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Boston Benefit

Boston Performing Artists for Peace Present:

A Benefit Concert
for Civilian Victims of the
Israeli-Lebanese Conflict


Including participants from the following area organizations:
(organizations named for identification purposes only)

American Repertory Theater -- The Boston Camerata --
The Boston Philharmonic -- Dünya Turkish Music Ensemble Emmanuel Music -- From the Top --- Sharq Arab-American Ensemble -- Voices of Black Persuasion

Anne Azéma -- Joel Cohen -- Jeremy Geidt -- Kareem Roustom --
Mehmet Sanlikol -- Craig Smith -- Benjamin Zander

And others!


8 P.M. August 7, 2006
at Emmanuel Church, Newbury St., Boston

All proceeds to be forwarded to nonpartisan humanitarian relief

FREE ADMISSION, donations requested

Contact: Yasmina Kamal
yasminakamal@verizon.net
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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Al Qaeda enters Fray

The Israeli occupation of Jerusalem has long been an al Qaeda bugbear. It sent Richard Reid to case El Al, israeli airlines. It hit Israeli tourists in Mombasa and the Sinai. But Bin Laden always avoided investing in an area where there was already an active insurgency. He also could not join in with heretical Shiites like Hizbulah.

Ayman al Zawahiri today made a change in both policies. He wants al Qaeda to pile on in Gaza and to defend Hizbullah in Lebanon.

The Sunni Arab regimes have been reluctant to press too hard for ceasefire because they see Hizbullah as an agent of Iran. This foot dragging has been unpopular among the public. Al Qaeda is now playing to that gallery.

As usual, Israel is radicalizing the Muslim world. The US, too, will suffer.

Zawahiri has turned to pan Islam and the Near Enemy. He is willing to help Nasrallah and the Qassam Brigades. It is a historic about face. It could be significant. More later.
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9 Israeli Troops Killed
Israel Bombs Lebanese Army


The Israelis launched a new wave of bombing attacks on Thursday morning:

' Israeli military aircraft bombed a Lebanese army base in the Amsheet area north of Beirut and destroyed a radio relay station in the area, local media reported, citing Lebanese military sources. Meanwhile, Israel warplanes also struck areas in south Lebanon. . .'


The Israeli official line is that they are only fighting Hizbullah and that the huge number of civilian casualties is an accident. But why are they bombing the regular Lebanese army north of Beirut if their real enemy is Hizbullah, a southern Shiite paramilitary? Why are they bombing radio relay stations?

Note that the only way this conflict can end is for the Lebanese state to be strengthened so that it has a hope of dealing with Hizbullah. Uh, these actions are not, like, strengthening the Lebanese state.

On Wednesday,
An Israeli air strike 'hit a truck carrying medical and food supplies donated to Lebanon by the United Arab Emirates, killing its Syrian driver and wounding two others, security sources said. The truck was destroyed just a few kilometres from Lebanon's eastern border with Syria in the town of Anjar. '


A truck full of medical and food supplies?

China strongly condemned the Israeli air strike on a United Nations peacekeeping base, which left a Chinse soldier dead. President Hu Jintao also called for an immediate ceasefire.

The senior Irish officer in UNIFIL had warned the Israelis 6 times that they were striking too close to the UN base. After the Israelis had killed 4 UN soldiers, Egyptian UN troops were sent in to retrieve the bodies. The Israelis fired on them, too. International law stipulates that those who kill UN peacekeepers can be extradited and tried for the crime.

The true number of Israeli toops killed Wednesday fighing Hizbullah in the south was 9. 8 were killed in the house to house battle for Bint Jbeil, which the Israelis had announced that they had captured the previous day. The Israelis are now claiming to have killed 250 Hizbullah fighters in the south, but no independent observer puts the number so high. The poor performance of the Israeli army in taking two towns, one of them a village of 400 and now a small town of 30,000, has provoked a firestorm of criticism in the Israeli public.

Israeli ground operations in Gaza killed 23 persons on Wednesday, about half of them innocent civilians.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called on Israel to negotiate the return to lebanon of the Shebaa Farms area, Occupied since 1967.

The horror faced by Lebanese civilians in the border towns near Israel is revealed by the VOA:
'Tehfa says the bombs are not the only danger. Yaroun is all but cut off from the outside world. "Plus, the people die without food. There is no water, no electricity, no gas. Nothing!" she added. Tehfa literally walked to safety, wearing a pair of black flip-flop sandals and carrying nothing but her shiny black handbag. After nearly two weeks under siege, she and a group of about 70 townspeople - waving a large white flag - walked six kilometers to the nearest village, a place called Rmeich. Another Australian, Fatima Salim, managed to find a car to take her to Rmeich, and then slept in a cramped apartment with 80 other people for three days. "I lost my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law. I do not know where they are gone," she said. "Because I go out from one door, they go out from another door. And for one minute, I cannot see my parents. I do not know where they are." '


The Number of internally displaced Lebanese, i.e. people reduced to homelessness by Israel's war on Lebanon, has risen to an estimated 600,000, according to the UN.

France is willing to play a major role in any peacekeeping effort in southern Lebanon. But President Jacques Chirac opposes doing it under the rubric of NATO. He says it is viewed in the region as "the armed wing of the West." How refreshing to find a president who both knows this and cares what Arabs think.

Hizbullah sent 10 rockets on Safed early Thursday morning. No word of any casualties. Over a dozen were said to have been wounded on Wednesday by dozens of Hizbullah rockets.
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Al-Zaman: Shiite Clashes with British in
South As Security Deteriorates
Grand Ayatollah al-Najafi calls for
withdrawal of foreign troops


Al-Zaman reports that the security situation in southern Iraq "exploded" on Wednesday. Fighting broke out between local militiamen and British forces in the provinces of Basra, Amara and Diwaniyah. Informed government sources told al-Zaman that the Shiite religious parties have formed lobbies to pressure the Maliki government over its attampts to establish security in all the cities of Iraq. The sources suggest that the military escalation coincided with the exceptional backing Maliki's government has received from the Bush administration.

The sources say that the pressure of these lobbies for the religious parties with militias in the south even reached the grand ayatollahs in Najaf. The Pakistani cleric Bashir al-Najafi warned of the possible eruption of a popular revolution if the government did not address the pressing issues [of security] and the problem of services. His office issued a statement in which the grand ayatollahs said, "We fear the coming of a day when we cannot restrain a revolution of the people, with all its unsavory consequences." He said that the Iraqi government must take over security altogether from the foreign forces in Iraq.

Al-Zaman says that al-Najafi would not speak out on these political issues on his own, and that his remarks almost certainly reflect a consensus among the four grand ayatollahs of Najaf (among whom Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is first among equals.)

The sources said that fighting broke out on Wednesday between the Mahdi Army and British troops in the eastern section of Amara (the districts of Mahmudiyah, al-Saray and Hayy al-Husayn). They said that the Mahdi Army fighters deployed anti-tank missiles against 15 British tanks, after there had been a notable spreading out of Jaysh Mahdi fighters through the city.

Mahdi Army guerrillas in Basra shot anti-tank missiles at British tanks. In Diwaniyah, gunmen bombarded Lake Echo and the Coaltion forces stationed there.

President Bush cited the improved security in the Shiite south of the country (the British have withdrawn from Muthanna) as a sign of progress during his joint news conference in Washington with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Men dressed in police uniforms went into an apartment building in downtown Baghdad and kidnapped 17 persons, including 5 women and 2 children. Typically such abductions are part of faith-based reprisals in the Sunni-Shiite civil war.

Reuters reports civil war violence on Wednesday. In addition, 5 bodies showed up dead in the streets of Baghdad and a general in the Interior Ministry was abducted. The Interior Ministry is in charge of providing domestic security.

Robert Reid of AP sees another confrontation building between Coalition troops and the Mahdi Army of young Shiite clerical nationalist, Muqtada al-Sadr.
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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Israelis Kill UN Peacekeepers
Halutz Commits to War Crimes
Israeli Airstrikes Kill Nabatiyeh Family
$150 Million Damage to Factories


Update: Hizbullah fighters defending Bint Jbeil have killed 14 Israeli soldiers, according to early reports on Wednesday. Hizbullah is ratcheting up its kill ratio with the Israeli military toward 1:1, something no other Arab fighting force has even approached.

A Radio interview with me by Barry Gordon.


UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed shock at the deliberate targetting of the UN peacekeeping base in Khiam, south Lebanon.

' "This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked U.N. post at Khiam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by (Israeli) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that U.N. positions would be spared Israeli fire," '


The Israelis denied that they hit the base deliberately, but Kofi would know. Why do it? When you have in mind war crimes, it is better not to have neutral observers in the region.

Philip Gordon relays the thinking of the Israeli political and military elite behind its inhuman and massive bombing of all Lebanon:

' According to retired Israeli army Col. Gal Luft, the goal of the campaign is to "create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters." The message to Lebanon's elite, he said, is this: "If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land." '


In other words, Zbig was right that the Israelis have kidnapped the 3.8 million Lebanese and are holding them all for ranson, while breaking their legs from time to time to encourage prompt payment. The horrible thing is that the Lebanese could not do anything about Hizbullah if they wanted to. Their government is weak and divided (Hizbullah is in it, and the Bush administration and Ambassador Mark Feltman signed off on that!) Their new, green army only has 60,000 men, and a lot of them are Shiites who would not fight Hizbullah. Lebanon was a patient that needed to be nurtured carefully to health. Instead, it has been drafted and put into the middle of the worst fighting on the battlefield.

Then there is this: ' Brigadier General Dan Halutz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, emphasised that the offensive . . . was open-ended. “Nothing is safe (in Lebanon), as simple as that,” he said. '

In other words, Halutz, who is also said to have threatened ten for one reprisals, is openly declaring that he will commit war crimes if he wants to. Nothing is safe? A Christian school in the northern village of Bsharri? A Druze old people's home in the Shouf mountains? A Sunni family out for a stroll in the northern port of Tripoli? He can murder all of them at will, Halutz says. And Luft gives us the rationale. If these Lebanese civilians aren't curbing Hizbullah for Israel, they just aren't going to be enjoying their lives. They are a nation of hostages until such time as they have properly developed Stockholm syndrome and begin thanking the Israelis for their tender mercies.

I was in Beirut briefly in mid-June. I went downtown in the evening, where big LCD displays had been set up outside at the cafes, and thousands of people were enjoying the World Cup games. The young Lebanese, in jeans, were dancing to the new pop music of stars like Nancy Ajram and Amal Hijazi. Some had painted their faces with Brazilian flags. They were rooting for Brazil. The shops were full of fashionable clothing and jewelry, the restaurants tastefully decorated, the gourmet Lebanese food tantalizing. The bookstores were full of probing studies and intelligent commentary. The Syrians were gone and there was a lighthearted atmosphere. The snooty nightclubs at places like Monot street were choosy about who could get in.

I went to see publishers about my project, of publishing the works of great American thinkers in Arabic. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King. They mentioned about how the US did not have a good reputation and maybe not many readers would be interested. I said, maybe that is changing. Washington supports the new government, after all. We are your well-wishers.

Meanwhile, while Nancy was singing and Brazil was scoring, Halutz and Olmert were putting the final touches on their long-planned bombing campaign. They would go up and hit Tripoli's port, a Sunni area. They would hit the port at Jounieh, the trendy Christian city near Beirut. They would hit Beirut's port and its new shiny airport. They would hit the milk factory, the telecom towers, the roads, the bridges, and some clinics and hospitals for good measure. They would hit the fuel depots. It would be a total war on the Lebanese civilian population, setting 800,000 out of 3.8 million out from their homes or the rubble of their former homes, forcing them to other cities as homeless refugees, or abroad to Syria or Cyprus. They would reduce al-Dahiyah al-Janubiyah, the teeming Shiite slum to the south, to rubble and stray bloody fingers, feet and noses. They would say that these were all military targets, but they lied. Hizbullah is a political party with 14 MPs in parliament. It has political party offices, soup kitchens, clinics, in those Shiite slums. A lot of times it seems to be these that the Israelis hit. They lied and said that missiles were launched from Beirut, when they never were.

Israel's present policy toward Lebanon, of striking at so many civilian targets as to hold the entire civilian population hostage, is unspeakable.

I haven't complained about the Israeli border war with Hizbullah. I'm not sure it is wise, and I don't know how many Israelis Hizbullah even killed in, say, the year 2005. Is it really worth it? But I don't deny that Hizbullah went too far when it shelled dozens of civilian towns and cities and killed over a dozen innocent civilians, even in reprisal for the Israeli bombing campaign. (You can't target civilians. That is a prosecutable crime.) That is a clear casus belli, and I'd like to see Nasrallah tried at the Hague for all those civilian deaths he ordered. The fighting at Maroun al-Ra's and Bint Jbeil was horrible on all sides, but it was understandable, even justifiable. The fighting itself isn't going to lead anywwhere useful, though, and it is time for a ceasefire and political negotiations--the only way to actually settle such disputes.

What was done to Lebanon as a whole is among the most horrible war crimes of the young 21st century. And that it was done tells me that there is something sick in the heart of the Israeli military and political elite, a sickness of the soul that had better be faced and remedied before our entire world catches the contagion.

I mean, who talks like that? "if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land." . . . “Nothing is safe, as simple as that.” If they are the good guys, why do they talk like James Bond villains?

Yes, yes, Nasrallah and his shock troops are also evil. They are also sick in the soul. We have established that. Halutz can have the 5,000 fighters and the 12,000 rockets to do as he pleases to them. I have been to Haifa, too, and the city means a lot to me. I mind deeply when I hear that the mad bombers around Nasrallah have killed people there and done substantial damage.

But you will note that 800,000 Israelis are not homeless, that the ports are still operating, that Tel Aviv airport is open, that over 400 Israeli civilians aren't dead in two weeks, that factories, roads, bridges, telecom towers are still there. In fact, you will note that no flotilla of international vessels had to come to evacuate tens of thousands of foreigners from Israel. It is suffering, and that is wrong. It is not suffering what Lebanon is.

The Daily Star reports

Israeli airstrikes throughout Lebanon killed 10 civilians and wiped out a family:

' Meanwhile, Israeli attacks on Lebanon claimed the lives of at least 10 civilians . . . Israeli warplanes raided Southern Lebanese towns and pounded the Bekaa and the Chouf areas, and committed a new massacre in the Southern town of Nabatiyeh, where six people from the Hamza family, Saad Hamza and his wife and children, were killed in attack on their home.



Rubble in Nabatiyah Courtesy as-Safir

The article adds,


After two days of relative calm, Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hizbullah stronghold, were once again targeted by Israel in an attack which destroyed 10 buildings . . .


I don't know why the wire services keep saying Monday had been a day of "relative calm" in Beirut. The Israelis bombed it at least twice, once before Condi's visit and once after.

Fighting continued in the far south as Israel continued its land invasion of Lebanon, including at Maroun al-Ra's, a small village the Israelis claimed to have taken days ago. One Israeli soldier was announced dead at Maroun al-Ra's on Tuesday. The Israelis claimed to have "sealed off" the town of Bint Jbeil (ordinary pop. 30,000) but admitted that they were engaging in firefights with its defenders. Hizbullah admitted that the Israeli army had killed 5 of its fighters on Tuesday.

With regard to Bint Jbeil, The Daily Star notes

' Sources in the foreign observer force UNIFIL said it was difficult to know which side controlled which parts of the town and that some civilians were feared trapped by the crossfire. '


Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot played down the idea that there were still civilians in Bint Jbeil, saying that there were only 200 to 400 Hizbullah guerrillas left there.

The total death toll for civilians in Israel's total war on Lebanon has risen to 406, with 20 Lebanese Army soldiers killed and 27 Hizbullah fighters.

The Israelis continued to interfere with humanitarian aid efforts despite their announcements to the contrary, according to the Daily Star:

Israeli warships also forbade a French ship loaded with humanitarian aid from reaching a port in Lebanon, according to media reports.

Israeli gunboats also fired warning shots at a Turkish ferry that was helping evacuate Australians from Lebanon and held it for several hours, Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said on Tuesday.


Hizbullah fired more than a dozen rockets into Haifa (see next entry).

Nicholas Blanford of the Daily Star reports on the human dimension of Israel's vast displacement of civilians from their homes in South Lebanon:

' TIBNINE: Wearing only slippers on his feet, it took Youssef Beydoun two-and-a-half terrifying hours to walk from his shell-battered village of Kounine to the relative safety of Tibnine. Here the 78-year-old is one of some 1,600 refugees crammed into Tibnine's government-run hospital, all of them having fled from a cluster of Shiite hill villages to the south. With drinking water running out, no milk, no electricity and declining stocks of food as well as little prospect of imminent escape from Tibnine, the refugees are caught in a vortex of confusion, fear, anger and despair.

"All the time there's bombing; all the houses have been hit. It was very bad. I thought my heart would stop," said Beydoun, a slim, stooped man with a white floppy hat shading his stubbly beard and weather-beaten face from the midday sun. He said he left Kounine after his house was flattened by Israeli bombing, killing his Sri Lankan and Ethiopian maids.

"They are still buried under the rubble," he said . . . Bint Jbeil and the surrounding Shiite villages, such as Aitaroun, Kounine, Beit Yahoun and Ainatta have borne the brunt of Israel's air and artillery blitz.

"It's very bad in Kounine," said Souad Shibli, 45, an Egyptian nurse whose Lebanese husband is working in Kuwait. "All night there are explosions. We want cars to go to Beirut. Please tell Kofi Annan we must have cars to get us out," she added, her voice becoming more desperate and shrill. '


The economic impact of the relentless Israeli bombings would be hard to calculate. Some experts are saying that the Israelis have caused at least $150 million in direct damage to factories:

' "The losses are more than $150 million in the current book value and we are afraid the situation will get worse," Jacques Sarraf, a chemical plant owner and the former president of the industrial association, told The Daily Star. More than a dozen factories in the Bekaa valley and other areas were hit by Israeli strikes in two weeks of bombing. Among the factories that were hit and destroyed were the country's largest dairy farm, Liban Lait; a paper mill; a packaging firm and wood plant.

"I just want to know why these factories are being targeted by the Israelis," Sarraf said. "Why Liban Lait, which makes cheese for the United Nations in Lebanon?" Liban Lait, which produces cheese, yogurt and labeneh, controls more than 50 percent of the Lebanese market. Sarraf said that the one of the industries that was flattened by the raids was an Indian investment project.

Many industrialists strongly believe that the ostensible cause of the Israeli bombardment, the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by the militant group Hizbullah, was nothing more than an excuse to destroy the Lebanese economy because the economy poses a challenge to Israel. '


Among the industries worst damaged is the telecom sector.

' Lebanon's mobile networks and satellite antennas are being targeted by Israeli warplanes, causing at least $10 to $15 million in material damage and a drop in the revenues of the telecom sector, Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamade said on Sunday. . . Israeli warplanes have hit transmitters, relay stations and satellite stations in Beirut, the South, the North and the Bekaa Valley since the war started 12 days ago.

Israeli warplanes bombarded a satellite and antenna station in Kesrouan on Saturday, killing an [Christian] employee of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation and destroying the television antenna. '


For essential background:

Jim Quilty in Middle East Report on Israel's war on the Lebanese Shiites.

Helena Cobban, "Hizbullah's New Face."
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Congress Expects Islamic Dawa to Support Israel, Condemn Hizbullah
Dawa's Unsavory Past


The AIPAC Democrats in Congress came after Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday, condmening him for his refusal to condemn the Lebanese Hizbullah. Al-Maliki had on the contrary complained (quite rightly) about naked Israeli aggression on Lebanon and had called for a cease fire. At his news conference on Tuesday he dodged questions about the issue and said his main concerns were humanitarian.

I respond with a golden oldie from March, 2005.

The US Congress, aside from a strange inability to recognize the disproportionate use of force when it sees it, does not seem to realize that the Dawa Party of Iraq, from which Nuri al-Maliki hails, is a revolutionary Shiite religious party not that much different from the Lebanese Hizbullah.

The members of Congress also don't seem to realize that the Iraqi Dawa helped to form the Lebanese Hizbullah back in the early 1980s. The Dawa was in exile in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut and it formed a shadowy terror wing called, generically, Islamic Jihad. The IJ cell of the Dawa attacked the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, in an operation probably directed by the Tehran branch, which was close to Khomeini.

My understanding is that Nuri al-Maliki was the bureau chief of the Dawa cell in Damascus in the 1980s. He must have been closely involved with the Iraqi Dawa in Beirut, which in turn was intimately involved in Hizbullah. I am not saying he himself did anything wrong. I don't know what he was doing in specific, other than trying to overthrow Saddam, which was heroic. But, did they really think he was going to condemn Hizbullah and take Israel's side?

And if he did, do they think that the Shiite religious parties that backed him would let him stay in office (they are the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa, and the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr)?

Here is what I said the first time a Dawa Prime Minister was brought to power by US-sponsored elections, last year. I kept telling Americans that this was a mixed picture, not an unadulterated feel-good story, and I got nasty mail about raining on their parade. Now you see what I was talking about:

=====

Things have changed, and I am not at all suggesting that a vindictive attitude is appropriate, but Dawa has a background as a terrorist organization. While in Tehran, it spun off a shadowy set of special ops units generically called "Islamic Jihad," which operated in places like Kuwait and Lebanon. The Dawa's Islamic Jihad appears to have been at the nexus of splinter groups that later, in 1982, began to coalesce into Hezbollah (the 1983 truck bombing of US Marines is often blamed on "Hezbollah," but that organization barely existed then.) The current al-Dawa leadership repudiates these anti-West actions, and blames them on cells of al-Dawa temporarily taken over by Iranian elements. The arrest lists do not support this excuse. No one seems to want to bring up the following:


U.S. News & World Report

December 26, 1983 / January 2, 1984

The New Face of Mideast Terrorism

A new brand of terrorism confronting the U.S. in the Mideast was demonstrated in the closing days of 1983 when a suicide bomber wrecked the American Embassy in Kuwait.

Actions that once were hallmarks of Mideast radicals -- takeovers of buildings, hijackings of airliners and seizing of hostages -- are waning. In their place: Terrorism sponsored by governments -- notably Iran and Syria -- and carried out by Moslem fanatics fired by hatred of the U.S. and a desire for martyrdom.

Prompted as much by current issues as by ideology, the new terrorism is more lethal, widespread and harder to contain than terrorism of the 1970s.

U.S. officials blamed the December 12 bombing of their embassy in Kuwait on ''Islamic fundamentalists'' of the Shiite sect, backed by Iran and Syria.

The Americans charged that the attack was ''clearly connected'' to three disastrous bombings in Beirut -- one in April that killed more than 60 people at the U.S. Embassy and two suicide attacks in October that killed more than 240 American servicemen at the Marine barracks and 58 soldiers at the French peacekeeping headquarters. Shiites also are blamed for a bomb that killed 61 persons at an Israeli command center in southern Lebanon in November.

Suspicion for the attacks in Lebanon centered on one group -- the Islamic Jihad [Holy War], a secretive Shiite unit based in Syrian-controlled eastern Lebanon. It is closely linked to the Iranian regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who calls the U.S. the ''great Satan.''

The terrorist who detonated the truckload of explosives at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait was identified as a 25-year-old Iraqi belonging to an outlawed Moslem unit, the Iranian Dawa Group.



And this:


The Associated Press

February 11, 1984, Saturday

Trial Of Bomb Blast Defendants Opens

By ALY MAHMOUD (KUWAIT)

Twenty-one defendants accused of bombing the U.S. and French Embassies last December were formally arraigned today, as their trial began under extreme security.

To be tried in absentia are four defendants who are at large, the prosecutor general said.

Five people were killed and 86 injured in the rash of bombings on Dec. 12. Besides the U.S. and French embassies, four Kuwaiti targets were bombed.

The prosecution has demanded the death penalty for 19 of the defendants. The others are believed to have played a lesser role in the bombings in and around the capital of this oil-rich Arab nation . . . Of the other defendants, 17 are Iraqis; two, Lebanese, three, Kuwaitis and two are stateless. Most of them said they belonged to Al-Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, an Iraqi movement of Shiite Moslem fanatics who are pro-Iranian, said court sources who asked not to be identified.



And this:


The Associated Press

September 21, 1986, Sunday

Underground Iraqi Group Threatens French Hostages

BEIRUT, Lebanon

An Iraqi opposition group warned Sunday that French hostages in Lebanon will suffer if two Iraqis deported from France last February are not allowed to return to Paris soon. The statement was issued by the Beirut-based regional office of the Dawa Party, which is made up of Iraqi Shiite Moslems and supports mainly Shiite Iran in its 6-year-old war with Iraq. Iraq's government is made up mainly of Sunni Moslems. France deported the two students, Fawzi Hamzeh and Hassan Kheireddin, reported to be Dawa members, along with 11 other Middle Easterners after a series of terrorist bombings. The pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad organization, which has close ties with Dawa, said in March that it killed French hostage Michel Seurat in retaliation for the deportation. His body was not found . . .



and this:


The Associated Press

December 27, 1986, Saturday

Five Groups Claim Responsibility; Iraq Accuses Iran

BYLINE: By HAFEZ ABDEL-GHAFFAR

DATELINE: DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia

BODY:
Five groups in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the attempted hijacking of an Iraqi jet, but conflicting accounts remained of what happened before the jetliner crashed, killing at least 62 people. Iraqi Airways flight 163 was en route to Amman, Jordan, from Baghdad, Iraq, on Christmas Day when it crash landed in northern Saudi Arabia. The death toll was thought to be the highest in a hijacking or attempted hijacking in the history of air piracy . . . Another an anonymous caller to a Western news agency claimed responsibility on behalf of Islamic Jihad, or Islamic Holy War, a fundamentalist Shiite Moslem faction loyal to Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini . . . He told a Western news agency the hijackers acted in cooperation with the Dawa party of pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites. The caller demanded the release of two hijackers he said were arrested after the crash.

. . . I am just saying that the Dawa Party has a history that must be recognized if we are to assess the meaning of it coming to power in Baghdad today.
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