Sunday Afternoon Reading
Kos Diary on Kalman's piece about the preplanned character of Israel's war on Lebanon.
Candide's Notebooks - Lebanese-American Blog.
Congress and the Lebanon crisis-- Steve Zunes.
Israeli Peace movement.
Jane Hamsher.
Billmon.
Wayne White at TPM
Steve Gilliard on wooing Syria (hat tip to Eschaton)
Digby
Andrew Sullivan on Losing Faith
Tomdispatch.com on Bushworld.
Israel's arrest of Professor Ghazi Falah and refusal to charge him.
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/23/2006 07:24:00 AM
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An Open Letter to Hillel
Dear Hillel representatives at U of Maryland,
I was very disturbed to receive an email from the University of Maryland Hillel. The email urged students to sign a petition to Kofi Annan of the UN available online. The petition asked the UN to "join us in clearly and immediately reaffirming the right of Israel to defend its citizen."
Though apparently benevolent language in itself, this letter came in the context of an Israeli invasion and bombardment of Lebanon that has disproportionately affected civilians. Furthermore, as Kofi Annan and other UN representatives have been pushing for an immediate ceasefire, this petition can only be seen as a lobbying effort against the ceasefire to allow the Israeli military to continue the bombing and invasion of Lebanon.
While we no doubt agree about the immorality of Hizbollah's attacks on civilians., Israeli attacks targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon (including civilian convoys, ambulance convoys, pharmaceutical factories, dairy facilities, apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods, and power plants) have killed 20 times as many civilians as Hizbollah has.
From all evidence, it appears that the Israeli military is purposefully targeting civilians in order to scare them out of Southern Lebanon. They are terrorizing the civilian population. This is terrorism. Bombing a civilian convoy, an ambulance or a hospital from tanks and plans is just as morally repugnant as strapping a pack of explosives on to bomb a bus, or launching an unguided missile into an Israeli city. Despite what the US representative to the UN John Bolton says, the killing of Lebanese civilians is every bit as immoral as the killing of Americans or Israelis.
This is not Tikkun Olum, this is not Tzedekah, this is not Mitzvot.
This does not represent Judaism, and I think it undermines the credibility of our religious leaders when they support the murder of God's children.
For photographic evidence of the carnage in Lebanon, please visit
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/
Please ask, or better yet demand, that Hillel stand for peace, rather than war. Justice rather than vengeance.
Sincerely,
Simon Fitzgerald
of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation
U of MD class of 2005
From La Luchita
On "Congress and the Lebanon Crisis", I was directed to congress.org by a poster at a site originally founded to fill in the void when
Billmon stopped posting comments :
"ISRAEL SUPPORT RESOLUTION PASSES 410-8: Should the House have voted to support Israel in the latest conflict and call for Syria and Iran to be held accountable? (How They Voted) Let Congress and President Bush hear your views on the latest Middle East crisis.
- 22% say Support Pro-Israel Resolution
- 78% say Oppose Pro-Israel Resolution"
The eight who stood up for America :
Neil Abercrombie (D-HI)
John Conyers (D-MI)
John Dingell (D-MI)
Carloyn Kilpatrick (D-MI)
Jim McDermott (D-WA)
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Fortney Stark (D-CA)
Nick Rahall (D-WV)
Let us make sure that these eight are returned to office in November! They will certainly be targeted by the AIPAC for elimination.
So who do these other toads represent?
Certainly not us, the American people.
The four who, although "present", would wash their hands of the blood of the Lebanese :
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
Barbara Lee (D-CA)
Maxine Waters (D-CA)
The 10 "not voting", for whatever reason, who need to be investigated case-by-case :
Jim Davis (D-FL)
Jo Ann Davis (R-VA)
John Duncan (R-TN)
Lane Evans (D-IL)
Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)
Anne Northup (R-KY)
Jim Nussle (R-IA)
Loretta Sanchez (D-CA)
Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA)
The loyalty of the 410 toads is not in question. They are the "made men and women" of the AIPAC gang.
The 10 must be investigated, separated into those with the AIPAC and those with us Americans, and removed from or returned to office on that basis!
Can there be any remaining doubt that the Middle East war with all its warts on all its fronts was and is directed by The Israel Lobby, with the gleeful, greedy seconding of The Oil and The War Lobby?
Remember that it can always get worse. And it assuredly will if we do not finally stir our stumps and clean house in Washington DC.
A paraphrae of Michael Lerner :
If I vote against AIPAC they will come after me, fund opposition, etc. But I pay no price from you (left-liberals) 'cuz I vote on things you care about most of the time. Until voting "against AIPAC" is The Bottom Line issue for liberals nothing will change.
I'm not sure why you give publicity to the Democrat's attack dogs posed as liberal bloggers. Sites such as TPM and Kos are doing nothing more than spewing things that the official party dare not do, namely attacking the Republicans. They even made some excuse up about why they don't even talk about Israel, which is mainly that there is no use talking about it when nothing could be done. Then why even protest against the war when the century+ long American global hegemony is not even going to dented by them?
In addition to Juan, Anatol Lieven us right at the top of my personal list of keen US analysts worth paying attention to. His "Push for War" LRB Oct 2002 is a seminal essay, trenchantly prophesying what Gen Odom would later aptly label the Greatest Strategic Disaster in US History.
As the saying goes, "The thing about opinions is that everybody can afford to have one."
Those who know their onions. Mine is a very short list.
America the Impotent: Bush's Big Democracy Flop
THE BUSH administration's plan to bring democracy to the Middle East is now in ruins. In a nation where political responsibility still counted for something, the architects of that strategy would be forced to resign.
Anatol Lieven
Remember the argument for the Iraq war — that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a stable, democratic Iraq and bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians? Remember the argument that the key problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was lack of Palestinian democracy? Remember Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's promise that the U.S. would "support the new Lebanon"?
In truth, reliance on democratization was always not so much a strategy as an excuse for the lack of one. It provided a flimsy cover for the Bush administration's inability or unwillingness to address the key challenges and opportunities of the region. These failures included walking away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and refusing to consider deals with Iran and Syria when, in the wake of 9/11, these regimes were extremely eager for compromise. As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and Mideast scholar Flynt Leverett, among others, have argued, Bush forfeited the chance to recruit these two states as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Sunni extremist world, which the Syrian and Iranian regimes have their own good reasons to hate.....
The neoconservatives who shaped Bush's "strategy" toward the Middle East always embodied a quite Orwellian contradiction. On the one hand, they professed to believe that early democracy is possible for the Middle East and that it would solve the region's problems, including the Israeli-Arab dispute. On the other hand, many made no secret of their belief that, as neocon scholar Michael Ledeen has written (quoting Machiavelli), "it is better to be feared than loved." Raphael Patai, whose book "The Arab Mind" influenced neoconservative thinking, argues that Arabs chiefly respond to the language of force.
But as the experience of Israel shows, rejecting compromise and relying mainly on force leads only to endless conflict. Now that the U.S. dream of combining democratization of the region with submission to Washington's policies is dead, the U.S. too is faced with a stark choice: seek genuine compromise with key regional actors, or be prepared to fight repeated wars
See what I mean? Lieven's head and shoulders above his Think Tank peers. Not just another Bushville courtesan.
Billmon is ripping the neocons, delightful Sinday reading. He is number two on my list now that Amanda Congdon has fled NYNY for LA. But, I digress,
Billmon has violated *******'s law, where mention of Hitler signals the end of discussion. Perhaps because we are talking about Hitler, really, and the aftermath, Israel, the discussion will not end.
One of the mantras for the founding/support of Israel is that it must never happen again.
I'm all for that, or against that. It must never happen again.
Let's discuss what it is. I have always thought that it was the commission of genocide, where one group of nasties, i.e. Nazis, takes another group of nice people, eg. the Jews of Europe, out back and shoots them. One hopes we all agree that this particular it was a crime against humanity and must never happen again.
One also hopes that we recognize the types of people who oppose it during the commission of it are the sort of people who do so not because the victims were Jews and the perps Nazis, but because it is the commission of it which is bad. Really bad.
So what are we to make of the commission of it by the descendents of the victims of it? That is exactly what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon, not on as grand a scale, but still, one group of not so nice people, the Israeli Defense Forces, is bombing and burning people in the name of war, because it must never be allowed to happen again.
So, when the IDF does it to prevent it from happening again, are they laboring under the distinction that it applies only to themselves as victim? To Israel, does it must never be allowed to happen again mean that only their kind of people must never be the victims again?
Is this what Alan Dershowitz means when he says that the murder of innocent Lebanese civilians is regrettable but necessary?
More to the point, when Israel does it to innocent Lebanese civilans, does Israel expect people of conscience to look the other way, but to suddenly pay attention when Israel claims, falsely, that Iran wants to do it to Israel?
This imposes quite a burden on people of conscience. Perhaps Israel could fund some sort of morality clinic to explain their twisted uses and misuses of it.
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