http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14656
Rationality and Israeli violence by Issa Khalaf
Date: 21 / 08 / 2006 Time: 15:46

Israel's goals in Palestine and Lebanon are inherently irrational. They represent a distorted rationalisation of power and create the conditions for consequences that Israel cannot control

As we witness the unfolding spectacle of ferocious, indiscriminate violence, destruction, and brutality in Gaza and Lebanon, it's difficult to resist the conclusion that there is something terribly wrong with the Israeli state and society. It's as though all moral and psychological constraints and boundaries have been breached, deviancy normalised. Not that state terrorism, deliberate aggression, extreme disproportionate force, and massive violations of international humanitarian law are new to the Israeli state: from 1948, the list is long, the evidence widely available. And anyway, in this case, disproportionality -- a concept actually inapplicable to the evil being rained on defenceless Lebanon or the genocide in Palestine -- implies that Israel is reacting to others' provocations and acts of aggression, as if the Palestine problem began with Hamas and Hizbullah's capture of Israeli soldiers, or as if only Israel has the right to use force to defend itself while its enemies do not, a concept apparently supported by the West, never mind the slavish idiocy of Bush administration pronouncements.

The Israeli self-image of rationality, self- confidence, restraint, pragmatism, and marshal moral superiority are delusions and myths, constructed to protect the Israeli psyche, manipulated by the state to keep alive the specter of existential terror in the Israeli public and to disguise the state's raison d'être, expansion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and maintain the deeply sociologically and institutionally entrenched Israeli military nature, increasingly blurring the lines between a civilian and military state

In the past five years, one can observe and feel a qualitative change for the worse in Israeli Jewish political psychosis, a turn to the acute. How does one explain the copiously routine, feral, violently racist and bigoted language of Israeli leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, settlers, rabbis, and even academics? The profoundly disturbing disregard for innocent "Arab" life, including children, among Israeli soldiers and the military? The polls that consistently, bizarrely reveal a majority of the Israeli Jewish citizens repelled at living next to or befriending "Arabs"? The rising voices advocating "transfer" of Israeli Arabs or expulsion of the Palestinians? The crazy, unpredictable military rage and terrorism directed at Arab populations? The extremist, self-destructive right-wing drift of Israeli politics?

The Zionist state of Israel seems to be in moral, political, and psychiatric free fall. Unfortunately, its self-imploding, overweening arrogance and terrifyingly dangerous actions are supported by an equally militant government in Washington and a Western world intent on accommodating its violent delusions, not to mention the growing extremism among the organised American Jewish community in support of Israel. This at a time when the principal Arab states and the Palestinians are seeking peace, stability and co-existence, the former's feebleness and inability to defend their people leaving the door open to Islamo-nationalist non-state actors and terrorists.

Those without power increasingly revert to rationality while those with power increasingly rationalise it.

Rational people assume that Israel's behaviour, its "strategy", can be apprehended through reason and political analysis, though its actions in Gaza and Lebanon, apparently meant to cause maximum death and destruction, defy rationality, including when measured against Israel's self-interest. Sure, its actions can be better understood in the context of Zionism's grand design for a Palestinian-free Jewish state in control of maximum territory and its attendant goal (in concert with the Bush administration) of destroying all indigenous resistance and populist, democratic opposition to Israeli military hegemony in the region.

In Lebanon, the apparent objective is to directly destroy Hizbullah, or turn the Lebanese against them, or weaken and politically fragment Lebanon through civil war, or install a collaborative Lebanese government.

Israeli actions are wildly, characteristically disproportionate to the challenges, excluding the peaceful, rational, measured use of instruments for resolving disputes or crises. This has been the story since before 1948. The fury against Lebanon, as in the reaction in Gaza, lacks sensibility, strategic coherence or even calculated utilitarian self-interest, obvious to everyone except those who run the state of Israel, creating the conditions for consequences that Israel cannot control.

The fundamental Israeli goal in laying waste to, and socially and politically fragmenting, Palestine and Lebanon (now that Iraq has been taken care of) is to encourage Islamist extremism in the region and thereby gain Western support in the fight against Islamic terror. While an apparent strategic reason or rationale, it remains fundamentally self-defeating in the long run, contrary to a rational state's calculations for peace, stability, and security for its citizens. Its logic ultimately leads to continual wars and the eventual destruction of Israel itself.

Thus Israel's Palestine-Lebanon (and wider regional) goals are inherently irrational, representing a distorted rationalisation (or in the words of Israeli novelist David Grossman, "mutation") of power -- a distortion of rationality -- the application of which has become a mechanism for its own, nihilistic ends, overturning the modern Western assumption that rationality is universal and constant. This state of affairs obscures, renders fuzzy and indistinct, the domains between reality and fantasy.

And that's where Zionism resides, in states of fantasy, paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, displacement, underlain by absolute power gone amuck. For a time it was fashionable to delineate decades of war, continual states of emergency and existential fear as causes of hate and violence towards Palestinians and Arabs generally. No doubt this is so.

But the problems lie deeper, with a "mutated" power wielded by a narcissistic people with a keen historical sense of both specialness and victimhood, now inheritors of a powerful, exclusionary nation-state, founded through colonial means, predicated on eradication of another nation.

Israel is an ethnic state, with an ethno-religious- nationalist-messianic ideology, based on group identity, not individual rights, whose institutionalised preference is for Jewish superiority, disallowing the possibility of equality for a systematically and sophisticatedly excluded and discriminated against Arab minority. This is far from the system of majority rule based on the principle of moral individual equality, protected through minority rights, rule of law, and civil rights generally found in Western democracies.

Michel Warschawski suggests that these contradictions are dealt with through, one, "denial" leading to schizophrenia (Ilan Pappe also refers to the psychological "mechanism of denial" permeating Israeli society), manifested by the racism and violence and ethnic cleansing and torture and collective punishment of Palestinians and by their general invisibility within Israeli society itself; and, two, through "personalised legislation", that is, the malleability, in the absence of a constitution, of easily changeable electoral and other laws in the absence of the concept of rights in Israel.

Power and its corollary, violence, both physical and psychological, are institutionalised in Israeli state and society. The military, that is, the distorting effect of a culture of militaristic nationalism and the cosy and symbiotic relationship between military and political institutions and leadership of state, has been pointed to by Uri Avnery, Ran HaCohen, Pappe, and Warschawski. A state cannot have apparently liberal minority rights while insisting on the separation of peoples and the institutionalised inferiority of one to the other, a condition similar to Jewish life in Russia of a century ago. Jewish schizophrenia has been transposed onto the Palestinians. Now Israeli Jews are white and European and civilised, keeping at bay genetically and culturally defective and shifty and violent dark skinned Arabs.

The pathological tension between absolute, unconstrained power, aggressiveness, defiance and victimhood, existential fear, and insecurity, produce the violence inherent in the Israeli state. On one level, the stubborn presence of the Palestinians challenges the denial mechanisms and leads to the drive to extirpate the cultural, political, and physical presence of the Other so as not to be reminded of oneself, one's humanity. Israelis are conscious of the fact that their state was created at the original and continuing expense of the Palestinians, through force, but react to this psychosis by denial and violence. Haim Hanegbi expresses the Israeli condition this way:

"I am not a psychologist, but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds.

"There is something gigantic here that doesn't allow us truly to recognise the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us to make peace with them. And that something has to do with the fact that even before the return of the land and the houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation towards the natives of this land must be to restore to them their dignity, their memory, their justness.

"But that is just what we are incapable of doing. Our past won't allow us to do it...Even if Israel surrounds itself with a fence and a moat and a wall, it won't help. Because... Israel as a Jewish state will not be able to exist." (Ari Shavit interview, in Haaretz, with Haim Hanegbi and Meron Benvenisti, 28 August, 2003).

It's as if there is no middle ground for Zionism, no doubt, no introspection: it's our existence or theirs. This psychopathology is made all the more palpable because of the intense moral contradictions: while it has accomplished impressive things, including "Jewish democracy", a place for some Jews to take refuge or to find pride, survival at all odds, and economic and technological development, Israel is a colonial settler society in origin as much as Zionism is also a variant of Jewish nationalism; it is both non-democratic in its exclusion of non-Jews and democratic for its Jewish majority.

Regardless of how one sees it, the end result is, as Israeli observers themselves have commented, a barbarisation, moral decline or debasement, of Israeli society. How could it be otherwise, what with a Zionist ideology that, from its origin, treated the Palestinians with cruelty, disdain, violence, and loathing, traits common to all colonial-settler societies. And with the state since 1948 having so thoroughly indoctrinated Israeli society, through wars and manipulation of existential fears, occupation and relentlessly violent oppression. And with a racist educational system -- which portrays the "Arabs" as inferior, lazy, fatalistic, dirty, easily inflammable, violent and bloodthirsty -- and socialisation of superiority and separation and alienation of Jews from non-Jews, in cities and neighbourhoods, on Jewish owned lands and public domains.

The pathological nature of this indoctrination is illustrated by the cold-blooded murder of the 13-year-old schoolgirl, Iman Al-Hams, by a "Captain R", who was subsequently acquitted and promoted. After shooting her twice in the head, he walked away then turned around and emptied the entire magazine of his automatic rifle, 17 bullets, into her to "confirm the kill". The captain, on tape, "clarifies" why he killed Al-Hams: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

Journalists and human rights organisations have documented countless cases of Israelis killing children, even for sports and game. Notice, here, the captain's language: Anything that's mobile...needs to be killed . Not anyone who is mobile. Palestinian children are like animals, like anything, like animals they are moving, like animals, not human, they, it, need(s) to be killed.

Captain R turns out to be a Druze, a powerful telling of the sick success of Israeli socialisation and indoctrination. This Druze, historically the marginal outsider in mainstream Islamic society, internalised Israel's ethnic/racial pecking order -- its colonially inherited psychopathology in which the indigenous become animals -- therefore violently displacing his inferiority, as Mizrahi Jews do, onto the Palestinians. Dehumanising, hating and killing Palestinians is the ultimate, disturbed act of belonging and loyalty to a society accustomed to its influential members referring to Palestinians as beasts, two-legged animals, cockroaches and worms, unaware of their own degradation and dehumanisation in the process.

The possession of power fused with acute political and social psychosis, manifested by power's irrational application and self-dehumanising behaviour, betrays a deep-seated fear: while Israel possesses unequalled power and its political/military class was historically confident of its ability to militarily prevail against Arab armies, the country is unceasingly, silently, troubled by the possibility of one day being abandoned by the United States. Without its patron, its power is as nothing, not necessarily militarily, but emotionally and psychologically.

Awesome military might and the myth of invincibility is a tenuous psychological condition, masking Israelis' deepest existential fears that the millions they've dispossessed, killed, and continue to torment cannot ultimately be silenced and will come back to haunt them. But Israel's current elites seem unable to transcend their psychological paralysis: they resist abandoning, even self-critically reflecting on, their worn-out ideological, expansionist aspirations yet fervently desire acceptance of the surrounding peoples, to whom they relate only in the language and logic of absolute violence.

The Israeli/Zionist condition, unchanged, is a sure recipe for widespread regional annihilation.

The writer has a PhD in political science and Middle East studies from Oxford University. This article was first published in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram Weekly, 18 August 2006

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14544
As senior politicians fall, Israeli citizens are left with a choice: revenge or justice
Date: 18 / 08 / 2006 Time: 17:51


Bethlehem - Ma'an - Nasser Al Lahham, Ma'an's Editor in Chief, writes:

The Israelis wait for the Israeli Minister of Justice, Haim Ramon, to submit his resignation from his post on Sunday over an immoral charge, and they expect that President Moshe Katsav, will also have to submit his resignation on the same charge. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his wife will be interrogated over allegations of receiving bribes amounting to $500,000, while the Minister of Defence, Amir Peretz, and the Chief of Staff of the military, Dan Halutz, both face down newspaper front pages to submit their resignations quickly. Meanwhile the former Internal Security minister Tzachi Hanegbi, receives an indictment over administrative corruption, lying and cheating, and has expired as a politician.

An Israeli newspaper has revealed that the elderly Zionist, Shimon Peres, has met secretly with the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to discuss Iranian nuclear capability and is also not far away from accusations. Likewise Tsipi Livni, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, has been accused by politicians of failing politically when she rejected the Rome summit and failed to include the issue of the two captive soldiers in Lebanon in the text of resolution 1701.

Despite the existence of investigating commissions and indictments, the Israeli press, did not reveal until today that the soldiers who had occupied Lebanon suffered from hunger and thirst in the field and were looking for the dead bodies of Lebanese resistance fighters in order to loot their food and water to stay alive.

In the first political development in the Palestinian arena since the Lebanon war, Olmert said that his plan to withdraw from the West Bank has been postponed until further notice. Meanwhile the Palestinians, who offer five martyrs on the altar of their independence have conducted a demonstration in the streets of Gaza to support Lebanon and its resistance. At the Gaza demonstration, Khalid Al Batch, the leader of the Islamic Jihad Movement, proclaimed that the Israeli army no longer held the prestige it had before.

Now in Israel, two main parties are fighting. One party calls for revenge against Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Iran, and for the re-establishing the stature of the military, and the other calls for a more rational approach; a return to the negotiating table quickly to repair the paths of dialogue with the Arabs and Palestinians.

30% support the first party and about 30% also support the second party, while the remainder remain silent, awaiting the first accounting and expecting the coup that the leadership in Tel Aviv must also be predicting, to decide whether to align themselves with the first or second.

Whether the Palestinians wanted it, or not, the ball is now thrown in their playground and they will play a crucial role in pushing the Israeli society into the arms of the first party or to laps of the second party, and if we want to know what will happen in Tel Aviv, we should know what is happening in Gaza.

As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real war begins
By Robert Fisk
If the ceasefire collapses, as seems certain, neither the Israelis nor the Americans appear to have any plans to escape the consequences. The US saw this war as an opportunity to humble Hizbollah's Iranian and Syrian sponsors but already it seems as if the tables have been turned.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14536.htm
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Ceasefire or Trojan Horse?
By Mike Whitney
If Sheik Nasrallah chooses to disarm and put his faith in Israel’s assurances of non aggression, that’s his choice. But he should pay close attention to the treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza before he sets his rifle down.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14535.htm
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Seymour Hersh: U.S. Helped Plan Israeli Attack
Video and transcript
Cheney "Convinced" Assault on Lebanon Could Serve as Prelude to Preemptive Attack on Iran.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14540.htm

Washington’s Interests In Israel’s war.
By Seymour M. Hersh
The Bush Administration, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14526.htm

Gullible Americans
Paul Craig Roberts
The two co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission Report, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have just released a new book, “Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.” Kean and Hamilton reveal that the commission suppressed the fact that Muslim ire toward the US is due to US support for Israel’s persecution and dispossession of the Palestinians, not to our “freedom and democracy” as Bush propagandistically claims.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14531.htm
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U.S. Pressured UK To Arrest Alleged Terror Suspects
By Aram Roston, Lisa Myers, and the NBC News Investigative Unit
The official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14533.htm
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Fear and Smear
By William Greider
An evil symbiosis does exist between Muslim terrorists and American politicians, but it is not the one Republicans describe. The jihadists need George W. Bush to sustain their cause. His bloody crusade in the Middle East bolsters their accusation that America is out to destroy Islam. The president has unwittingly made himself the lead recruiter of willing young martyrs.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14537.htm
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Are New Weapons Being Used In Gaza and Lebanon
______________________________________________
David Halpin MB BS FRCS
Dr. Bashir Sham, member of "French Association of Cardiovascular Surgeons", explains that the way the corpses look when they reach the hospital, especially those from the 'air strikes' in Doueir and Rmayleih, is very abnormal. "One might think they were burnt , but their colour is dark, they're inflated, and they have a terrible smell.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14530.htm
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Terror Nation: Lies, Injustice, and the American Empire’s Way
Who are the real terrorists?
By Jason Miller
Are they the relative handful of militants (amongst the billions of oppressed people around the globe) who are ready to sacrifice their lives to strike at the deeply corrupt machinations of the socioeconomic system which supports a few wealthy elites ruling the United States, Israel and their sycophants (i.e. Great Britain, Saudi Arabia)?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14529.htm
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New Ruler's of the World
A documentary film by John Pilger
'Global economy' is a modern Orwellian term. On the surface, it is instant financial trading, mobile phones, McDonald's, Starbucks, holidays booked on the net. Beneath this gloss, it is the globalisation of poverty, a world where most human beings never make a phone call and live on less than two dollars a day, where 6,000 children die every day from diarrhea because most have no access to clean water.
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Israeli attacks kill at least 17 people in Lebanon:
Hizbollah kill one person. Olmert orders army to observe truce -
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/latest/200608141419/3a866388

24 IDF soldiers killed Saturday in south Lebanon :
Twenty-four Israel Defense Forces soldiers were killed and another 11 seriously wounded in heavy clashes Saturday with Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon, after Israel dramatically expanded its ground operation in the area.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749479.html

Israel says it can still target Hezbollah arms:
_______________________________________________
ISRAEL believes it will be entitled to use force to prevent Hezbollah from rearming and to clear guerrilla positions out of southern Lebanon after a UN truce takes effect.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20118587-2,00.html

Israeli general:
Troops lacking food can steal from Lebanese stores :
_____________________________________________________
"If our fighters deep in Lebanese territory are left without food our water, I believe they can break into local Lebanese stores to solve that problem," Brigadier General Avi Mizrahi, the head of the Israel Defense Forces logistics branch, said Monday.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/750384.html

The UN Mideast Ceasefire Resolution Paragraph-by-Paragraph :
Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law offers a detailed analysis of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities in the Middle East conflict involving Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14528.htm

Stephen Lendman: UN Resolution Guarantees No End To Israel's War:
It allows Israel the right to resume hostilities any time it wishes and for any reason so long as the Israelis claim an imminent threat exists regardless of whether or not it's true.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14538.htm
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UN rights council rebukes Israel for human rights violations in Lebanon :
The UN Human Rights Council in a an emergency special session in Geneva Friday adopted by majority vote a resolution condemning Israel for violating international human rights laws in the ongoing Middle East conflict
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/08/un-rights-council-rebukes-israel-for.php
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Israeli Occupation Forces kill 3 Palestinians :
According to the Palestinians the three were working near the Agricultural High School in Beit Hanoun.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/750341.html
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THE Begining Of The End Of The Zionist State Of Israel...? :
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If the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped, the only possible solution to the Palestine problem is One State for All. That would, of course, be the end of Zionism’s colonial enterprise and of Zionism itself.
http://www.williambowles.info/isrl-pal/2006/0806/end_of_israel.html

American support may no longer be enough :
Israel's long-term future lies in connecting with its Arab neighbours, not a western superpower thousands of miles away
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1843882,00.html
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Jostein Gaarder: God's Chosen People:
There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as a justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14532.htm
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I wrote out of disgust for the war:
Jostein Gaarder sticks to the intentions behind his controversial critique of Israel's conduct in recent fighting in Lebanon, but admits that the approach chosen was 'problematic'
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1415414.ece
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Bush 'viewed war in Lebanon as a curtain-raiser for attack on Iran' :
The Bush administration was informed in advance and gave the "green light" to Israel's military strikes against Hizbollah ­ with plans drawn up months before two Israeli soldiers were seized ­it has been claimed.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14539.htm

Iranian Leader Opens Up :
Iran's President Mahmoud speaks with Mike Wallace
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14527.htm
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War pimp alert: U.S.: can not be both ways!!!!!!!!
Iraqi Shiites get help from Iran:
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The U.S. military has evidence that Shiite extremists in Iraq are receiving arms and training from Iran
http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/news/15270986.htm

No evidence Iran active in Iraq: US general
________________________________
There is no evidence the Iranian government is stirring trouble in Iraq, a U.S. general said on Monday, playing down suggestions that Tehran will retaliate for U.S. backing of Israel's war on Hizbollah.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/14/AR2006081400362.html
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Sickened Iraq vets cite depleted uranium::
Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid.
http://tinyurl.com/jd6r2
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Voters For Peace
"I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign."
http://www.votersforpeace.us/
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Terror police target 70 'plots':
More than 70 anti-terrorist investigations involving over 100 suspected Islamic extremists are under way in Britain in an operation unmatched even at the height of the IRA's mainland campaign.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/14/nterror14.xml
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Craig Murry: The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?:
This is more propaganda than plot.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14541.htm

Abid Ullah Jan: Why the Terror Plots Are False:
Those who attribute terrorism to Al-Qaeda have no evidence. The FBI has clearly said that it doesn’t have any evidence against Osama for his involvement in 9/11
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14534.htm
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Critics warn against attempt to push through 90-day detention :
John Reid has provoked anger by signalling he is likely to make a fresh attempt to push through 90-day detention without charge for terrorist suspects in the wake of the alleged transatlantic bomb plot.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1219066.ece
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(and we thought we were seeing shades of 1984....)
Chertoff Says U.S. Needs More Authority:
The nation's chief of homeland security said Sunday that the U.S. should consider reviewing its laws to allow for more electronic surveillance and detention of possible terror suspects, citing last week's foiled plot.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2308590
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Video: John Pilger: Stealing a Nation :
There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraq's along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1027.htm
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( a good example of man's inhumanity to man would be this)
(Hello Dr. Mengala)
Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials :
An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0813-01.htm

http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-middle_east_politics/hizbollah_victory_3809.jsp#

Whatever happens, Hizbollah has already won”
Zaid Al-Ali
10 - 8 - 2006

Lebanese and their fellow Arabs are digesting the war's lessons and debating what comes next. Zaid Al-Ali, in Beirut, reports.
In Homage to Catalonia, his 1938 account of his experiences during the Spanish revolution at the start of the country’s civil war, George Orwell asked an important question that is directly relevant to the current Israeli-Lebanese war. In light of a British foreign policy of “non-interference” which hindered the Spanish republic and helped its fascist opponents (thus paving the way for the second world war), Orwell commented: “(whether) the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time”.

In that respect, today’s war in Lebanon is analogous to the situation that Orwell lived through and reflected on in Spain. On 6 August 2006, Haim Ramon, the Israeli minister of justice, explained how the Tel Aviv government was intending to proceed in the coming days. He said that “we have to continue fighting, continue hitting anyone we can hit in Hizbollah, and I assume that as long as that goes on, Israel’s standing diplomatically and militarily, will improve”.

Could it possibly be that Israel’s security cabinet does not realise that the effect of its current campaign may very well be the exact opposite of what it intends to achieve? Is Ramon not aware that his government has transformed Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s secretary-general, into one of the most influential, powerful and popular leaders in the middle east?

Israel’s boomerang

The stated objective of Israel’s government and military forces since the beginning of the war has varied, but they have been consistent in seeking to reoccupy a portion of Lebanese land, perhaps all the way up to the Litani river. At the same time, the Israelis are intent on damaging the prestige that Hizbollah enjoys in both Lebanon and the Arab world. In this regard, the Israeli offensive has been a complete failure. The comparison cries out to be made: in 1967, the Israelis conquered the joint armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and occupied enormous tracks of land in a mere six days; in 1973, the Israelis defeated these same armies, who were joined that time by Iraq, in twenty days; at the time of writing, Israel does not seem anywhere near defeating Hizbollah, a small guerrilla army of at most 5,000 fighters, although the conflict is now almost a month old.

The effect has been an enormous boost for Hizbollah in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Hassan Nasrallah has made three speeches since the conflict began, and each occasion brings a significant part of the Arab world to a standstill. People throughout the middle east stand silently next to their radios, huddle attentively around their televisions, and consider his every word with both admiration and worry that he might reveal that Hizbollah has suffered a defeat.

After one such occasion, Omar, a taxi driver from Amman, Jordan, said to me: “the only thing that I ask is for the chance to fight alongside Hizbollah”. I have heard this same desire expressed more than a dozen times in the past few days alone. Mahmoud, the manager of a small hotel in Syria, urged his staff to provide assistance to the flow of Lebanese refugees into their country, and declared: “Hizbollah’s victory will be our victory”. Ayla, an apolitical 19-year old architecture student from Beirut, expressed the feeling that is prevalent amongst most Arabs the best when she said that “whatever happens now, Hizbollah has already won”.

Hizbollah has indeed already won. Hizbollah has won because, despite its inferior weaponry, and its comparatively insignificant numbers, it has so far successfully managed to defend Lebanese territory.

The Israelis first entered Bint Jbeil, a small town a few kilometers north of the border, on 24 July but the Israelis are still suffering casualties in the town on an almost daily basis. The Israelis’ slow progress on the ground in Lebanon, coupled with the constant barrage of missiles that have been raining down on northern Israel runs somewhat contrary to Ehud Olmert’s statement on 2 August that “we have completely destroyed Hizbollah’s infrastructure”. The Israelis cannot bring themselves to admit that they are struggling to defeat this small group of guerrillas.

This highlights another new development that the Israelis have brought upon themselves: amongst the citizens of the middle east, Israeli statements and news relating to the progress of the war are dismissed outright as lies, whereas everything that Nasrallah says is considered to be unspoiled truth. Merwan, an employee in a music store in Beirut, told me that “when the Israelis want to find out what is going on, they watch al-Manar [Hizbollah’s television station]”. “The Israelis lied about their boat not having been hit, they lied about Qana, they lie about everything”, says Dany, an employee in an insurance firm in Beirut.

What is striking is that this skyrocketing in support for Hizbollah in the Arab world has occurred despite widespread ignorance about what the movement stands for and who it represents. Mohammed, an Egyptian employee of a foreign embassy in Cairo, professed the view that Hassan Nasrallah is the only real leader that the Arab world has produced since Jamal Abdel Nasser, then asked me: “please tell me something. Do the hi’a pray? Do they fast during Ramadan? Are they Muslims?” Waleed, an Algerian law student, asked: “is it true that they don’t read the Qur’an?”

After the battle

But the reaction in the Arab world has not been universally in favour of Hizbollah. In Iraq, the current civil war between Sunni and Shi’a in Baghdad permeates everything, including attitudes towards Hizbollah and its Shi’a leadership. Abdullah, a wealthy Sunni merchant who now lives in Amman, spoke for everyone at a dinner table when he declared to me one week ago that “we don’t want either party to win because they are both our enemies. We want for both sides to continue fighting until they eliminate each other”.

Samir, a former army helicopter pilot in the Iraqi army, echoes this feeling: “I have no sympathy for Nasrallah. He has never said anything in support of the Iraqi resistance against the occupation. This means that he isn’t a real resistance leader, and that he is just an Iranian puppet”. It is difficult to find anyone amongst Iraq’s Sunni population who supports Hizbollah. There are even – unsubstantiated – rumours that Hizbollah trains Shi’a death squads in Baghdad in support of their struggle to control the Iraqi capital. The feeling is completely the opposite amongst Iraq’s Shi’a population. A series of large demonstrations were held in Baghdad in support of Hizbollah, must to the annoyance of the American military.

More importantly however, and perhaps more worryingly too, is that opinion remains divided within Lebanon itself about Hizbollah’s share of responsibility for starting the current crisis. Rouba, a political-science graduate and employee of an international organisation, expressed a common complaint in relation to the guerrilla group: “all they are doing is designed to help them satisfy their internal Lebanese agenda”. Rumours have been circulating in Beirut that some Shi’a refugees, having snubbed aid from a charity on the basis that its Sunni patrons are pro-American, were driven out of the neighbourhood in which they were seeking refuge. Whether or not the story is true hardly matters, as it reflects the mood amongst certain Beirut residents.

In that sense, Israel has had some success in increasing antagonism between’s Lebanon’s different communities through its policy of collective punishment. In the end, that may prove to be enough to bring the roof down on Hizbollah’s head. The group has proven that it can resist an Israeli invasion and that it can cause significant Israeli losses in the process. But can it resist the pressure that will no doubt follow the war, from all Lebanon’s communities, to disarm once and for all?

taylor 82: http://www.rense.com/general73/conss.htm