Free Iraq

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

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". ...

No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire - a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. ...

Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars.
 

Uri Avnery, Mobilize to avenge the blood of Qana
 

Abdel Wahab Badrakhan, A World without Conscience: Tears and grief are not enough. Anger and sorrow is not enough. Cursing Israel and America will not do, any more than cursing the war criminals, Bush and Olmert and Rice and Blair, and the rest of the gang. Words have no meaning in the face of this deliberate murder of children, and hatred knows no bounds in the presence of such wholesale devastation. This hatred is directed at the world, the UN and the immoral, inhumane, irresponsible Security Council.

April 18, 1996; 30 July 2006… the murderers have returned to the scene of their first crime, repeating the exact deed, and once again in cold blood. ...

Condemnations of this Israeli crime poured out, but condemnations alone bring no justice, do not uphold rights, any more than they bring the dead back to life. As for the murderers, the Americans and the Israelis, they did not even bat an eye. Washington called for 'self-restraint', as if mocking the victims of Qana and all the other massacres. As for Olmert, this call for 'self-restraint' has not restrained him from demanding an extra two weeks so he can destroy more homes and burn more buildings and farms and target more relief trucks. One must not forget that he also wants to continue with his genocide against Bint Jbail, targeting its hospitals by way of declaring that another massacre will take place soon.

The US will need Olmert's shamelessness and Hitler's stubbornness to prevent the Security Council from calling for a ceasefire. ...

The Israeli murderers will not find a way to get around the Qana massacre except by committing other massacres to make such crimes a de facto reality forced on everyone. The world wants this massacre to be the last, but Israel is fighting this war on the premise that it will be the last war, which means it will have to go to the extremes of terrorism, savagery and criminality. It is not certain that it will achieve any goal, but it will definitely succeed in prolonging the struggle. Whatever the balance of power may be, Israel will never be able to force a solution in which its terrorism dominates its Arab neighbors. They will not create a surrounding where no voice of protest can be heard, where no one calls for their rights and where no one dares reply to its crimes.
 

Mike Whitney, Dear Kofi, It’s Time remove the U.S. and Israel from the United Nations
 

Sarah Meyer, INDEX ON ILLEGAL US WEAPONS IN LEBANON: I have put together an index of photographs, reports and articles which, at our peril, have been irresponsibly ignored by the corporate Mainstream Media.
 

Mulham Assir, Al Qaeda’s Arabic Discourse: American with a Hebrew Accent?: Ayman Al-Zawahiri (or the character that plays him on videotape) could not have chosen a more opportune time to suddenly announce Al-Qaeda’s support for Arab resistance against Israel.

Opportune for the plans of the Tel Aviv-Washington axis, that is.
 

IRAQ: Child prisoners left without support
 

The children went to sleep believing they were safe. And then Israel targeted them as terrorists: The women put down a carpet of foam mattresses. It was a warm night and the children stripped to their shorts and vests as they settled down.

Far above them an Israeli warplane had settled on the building as a terrorist target. Twice it illuminated the house with a laser designator, and twice it bombed it with deadly precision.

Dawn revealed a scene of horror. The left half of the building had been replaced with a crater lined with shattered masonry and twisted reinforcement rods.

When ambulance crews arrived from Tyre, bravely covering roads on which they have been attacked in recent days, they began the grimmest search and rescue task, but without any real chance of rescue.

They found limbs sticking from a muddle of broken concrete and mattresses soaked with blood attracting the busy attention of swarming flies. For a few hours the more wreckage they moved the more bodies they found.

"The Israelis have planes, Hizbollah has no planes," shouted 31-year-old Kassam Abbas. "The Israelis can see everything. Surely they can see that this house had nothing but children playing in front of it?"
 

Haaretz.com, Anti-war Tel Aviv rally draws Jewish, Israeli Arab crowd: Beside the usual calls for the prime minister and defense minister to resign, this was a distinctly anti-American protest. Alongside chants of "We will not kill, we will not die in the name of Zionism" there were chants of "We will not die and will not kill in the service of the United States," and slogans condemning President George W. Bush.
 

And, in case we don't understand - yet . . .

"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
-- David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
-- Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."
-- Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

"(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
-- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more"....
-- Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force...."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.
 

Boycott Israeli Products & Services (You'll recognize some notable brand names.) See here also. Keep an eye on the goods bar code: Israel's country prefix is 729.
 

Did you know? . . .
Home Depot: Its founder, and Co-Chairman of the Board Bernard Marcus is an active zionist. He is on the board of directors of Emet, the Pro-Israel Media "War Room" whose function is to ensure that all media in the US stays biased in favour of Israel.
 

David Icke Newsletter, WHAT IS THIS CARNAGE REALLY ALL ABOUT ... ?
 

Juan Cole, What is Hizbullah?: 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.

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. ...
 

Ghali Hassan, Iraq’s Destiny; How the US is destroying Iraq in order to enforce its colonial agenda: ... The main aims of the U.S.-generated violence in Iraq are:

1. To frame the Occupation-generated violence as “Iraqis killing Iraqis” or “Sunni” vs. “Shiite” warfare;
2. To divert attention from the Occupation and avoid holding the occupying forces and their leaders responsible for the crimes that are committed in Iraq today;
3. To reduce Resistance attacks against the occupying forces;
4. To terrorise the Iraqi population and force them to see the Occupation as their only saviour; and
5. Foment civil war and encourage the division of Iraq.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary of the political and resistance movement of Hizbullah in Lebanon, who knows a lot about sectarianism and imperialism-promoted divisions told AL-jazeera recently; “The U.S. has driven the situation in Iraq to a state where they offer themselves to Shiites as a guarantee against Sunnis, and offer themselves to Sunnis as a guarantee against Shiites. “They present themselves to Arabs as a guarantee against Kurds, and present themselves to Kurds as a guarantee against Arabs. “Their plot is doing just fine. Look at the situation in Iraq nowadays: What could possibly happen that is more appropriate for separatists to say that they have to split from Iraq to protect their community?” The criminal agenda is also encouraged by some Arab regimes, such as Kuwait and Israel.

... [I]t is becoming clear that the U.S. agenda was a well-planned imperialist-Zionist agenda. The U.S. is perpetuating the current violence as a pretext for ongoing Occupation and colonisation of Iraq. Indeed, the Bush Administration continues to link troops' withdrawal to “security”. The pretext is no longer “democracy building”, but a U.S.-generated violence to sponsor a colonial dictatorship - dressed up in seasonal and U.S.-style fraudulent elections - ruled by a façade of expatriate stooges and paramilitary militias dependent on the presence of U.S. forces.

However, Iraq’s strong identity and history of resistance to Western imperialism provide evidence that the U.S. will fail to impose its imperialist-Zionist agenda on the Iraqi people. Iraq’s destiny will remain with the Iraqi people.
 

Stephen Lendman, The US and Israel: The Hypocrisy of UN Security Council Resolutions
 

Dahr Jamail, "Supporters of Hezbollah": "Fuck the UN! Fuck those bastards for not stopping this Israeli slaughtering of the innocents," screamed a young protestor waving a Lebanese flag outside the UN building, which by now had smoke billowing out of portions of it. "What good are they if they cannot do what they were designed to do - to stop the killing of innocents?"

It's wonderful to see the thoroughness of the Israeli military, their effectiveness at eradicating "supporters of Hezbollah." Like 51-year-old Sumi Marden Ruwiri. On July 14th his home in Bint Jbail was bombed while most of his family members were inside, killing his mother and sister while they surely were strategizing the next rocket launches for Hezbollah. When he and several others began to sift through the rubble for their loved ones, the warplanes returned to bomb the rescuers. He lay in bed, his back shredded by shrapnel, countless patches of gauze stuck to his wounds. His sheets were stained red by blood and yellow by pus that oozed from the wounds.

I met dozens of other Hezbollah supporters, most of them women, children and elderly - the kind most ill-equipped to flee their homes on a moment's notice. They lay in their beds, many of them moaning, some crying, and others comatose and kept alive only by machines. The man comatose in this picture was fleeing his village on a motorcycle after receiving the leaflets of instruction to do so, according to his mother - the only one left alive from their family of 10.

Meanwhile, Israeli defense sources told Israel's Haaretz newspaper Sunday that the Israeli army's general staff had received orders to accelerate its offensive on Hezbollah before the declaration of any cease-fire.

Yet as War Criminal Rice and her cronies back in DC drag their feet, postponing any real cease-fire, Israel's military needn't hasten itself too much as they go about their daily slaughtering of the "supporters of Hezbollah."
 

Imad

I did some checking up on the "Settler Rabbis: "No such thing as 'innocent Arab women and children'".

Surprise, surprise, they are a very authentic perspective on what the fundamentalist Jewish rabbis of Israel are saying about the nature of war against the Arabs:

Specifically, "KILL ALL OF THEM! WOMEN AND CHILDREN TOO! THEY'RE ALL THE ENEMY AND THEY ALL DESERVE TO DIE! KILL, KILL, KILL!"

The reason that I'm posting is to point out that endlessly, the conservative Western news media loves to portray Arab opponents of Israel -- for example, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, etc., as "fanatic terrorists who don't distinguish between civilians and the military, when attacking poor, helpless little Israel".

While this label is partly true, what the media never point out, is that the ideologues running Israel have exactly the same attitude when it comes to the Arabs -- the only difference between the two, is that Israel has been armed to the teeth with high-tech U.S. weaponry, while the Arabs have home-made rockets and stones to fire back at them.

So the next time one hears some Israeli spokesperson self-righteously pontificating about "they target civilians, we don't", you may want to keep the two appended articles in mind.

The truth is, Ehud Olmert and Nasrullah Whatsisname are both terrorists, using exactly the same methods, with the same goals.

The only difference is that the Americans helping the Israelis kill women and children. After all, that's what Americans do best.

===================================

Yesha Rabbinical Council: During time of war, enemy has no innocents

The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that "according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy."

All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians," the statement said. (Efrat Weiss)

(07.30.06, 17:37)

==================================

Jul. 12, 2006 17:40
Yesha rabbis call for 'extermination of the enemy'
By JPOST.COM STAFF

The Yesha Rabbinical Council blamed the attack on the north on Wednesday morning on a "weakening of our grip on the land of Israel."

The rabbis saw the attack as a "direct continuation of relinquishing [territory] and weakness."

The Council called on the IDF to ignore Christian morals and "exterminate the enemy in the north and the south." They advised that an emergency government be established to "fight the true enemy as is appropriate, and to rescind orders to destroy and evict Jews."
 

MadAsHell

With all due respect to your views, what would be your position on the article In the beginning, there was terror published in a previous posting Corner stones of Israel's terror

Or has your perspective become stigmaized?
 

Israel okays wider ground offensive
 

Lebanon sees rare unity: Thousands of Lebanese have reached across the sectarian and religious divide to help hundreds of thousands of mostly Shia refugees fleeing Israel’s bombardment in the south of the country.
 

Robert Fisk, A Nato-led force would be in Israel's interests, but not Lebanon's: Indeed, how come the people of southern Lebanon have not been consulted about the army which is supposed to live in their lands? Because, of course, it is not coming for them. It will come because the Israelis and the Americans want it there to help reshape the Middle East.
 

Assad tells Syrian army to get ready