Alhambra – A virtual walking tour

Posted on August 29, 2006 by kf1

Alhambra

Click here for the Virtual tour

Click here for find out more

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Hezbollah 2, Israel 0 — Joanna Francis

Posted on August 16, 2006 by kf1

Make no mistake about it – the Israelis are getting their tails kicked in Lebanon! Just like they did in May 2000, when Hezbollah sent them scurrying back across the border with their tails between their legs. The Israelis never forgot that stinging defeat and have now demanded a rematch with Hezbollah. And much to their surprise, Israel has already managed to lose the rematch too. Considering the disparity in numbers and weaponry between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel should have achieved a decisive victory by now. But they haven’t. And it doesn’t help their case any that they have had to resort to bombing the entire country, killing women and children, to try to save face. It only makes them look more pathetic. They will never be able to swagger quite so arrogantly again, or instill fear in the groveling leaders of their neighboring countries in quite the same way. The Israelis have been outfoxed at every turn by an irregular army using prehistoric weaponry, with little to no support from neighboring countries (the leaders, that is), but who have proven themselves to be unwavering in their determination. Hezbollah are fighting against the best weaponry American money can buy. And they are winning.

Because you can’t buy courage. Even with the entire United States treasury at your disposal, the things that matter most to real men simply cannot be purchased. Therefore, the poor man has the advantage over the rich man because valor, manliness, and honor are free to those with nothing to lose. The Israelis had everything to lose in this misguided operation and have proceeded to do so exceedingly well. Even among their most brainwashed sycophants, their credibility is in the single digits. The excuse of the “kidnapped” soldiers is totally bogus to anyone with an I.Q. over 70, because Hezbollah has offered to release them in exchange for a ceasefire but Israel has refused. Meanwhile, Israel has kidnapped thousands of Lebanese citizens over the years who languish in Israeli prisons to this day. And the Katyusha rocket pity party won’t work either, because the Katyusha rockets are simply in retaliation for Israeli aggression, not vice versa, and can hardly compare to the bombs being dropped on Lebanon. If they thought for one moment that they would rout out Hezbollah, they were seriously mistaken. You cannot eliminate a fighting force whose reason for existence is justified by the fact that Israel continues to occupy their land, invade their air space, and hold their people as political prisoners. Kill them all, and another generation will simply step up to the plate and take their place.

The Israelis fight like sissies from fighter jets, dropping bunker-buster bombs on defenseless women and children. That’s real manly! They roll across the border in heavily-armored tanks, confident that they’ll be impervious to Hezbollah’s weaker arsenal. Only lately, those tanks have had the surprising habit of turning into human crematoria for the Israeli soldiers inside them. So why don’t they get out of their tanks and fighter jets and go toe-to-toe with Hezbollah like real men? (See first sentence of essay). The fourth most powerful military in the world has been given a shiny black eye that no amount of make-up will ever be able to hide. The aura of invincibility they so haughtily projected is now tarnished beyond repair. Bragging rights go to Hezbollah, as Israel eats its long-overdue humble pie. Why do I feel so strongly about this, you might ask? Because Israel has made me, an American taxpayer, complicit in their war crimes, and I, for one, am glad to see them finally getting their comeuppance.

In fact, the Israelis are losing so badly that their co-religionists in the West have had to order new false flag operations to take their humiliating defeat off the front pages. It’s like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Toto pulls back the curtain on the “Great Oz,” only to discover that he’s really a weaselly old man, pretending to be something that he’s not. Well, the curtain has been pulled back on the Zionists, and they are standing there in all their naked cowardice and cruelty, for all world to see. And the world is repulsed. Hence, the PR campaign now underway to try to remind us goyim that all Muslims are “terrorists” and that the Israelis are always the victims. So now we’re supposed to feel relieved that the Israelis are only killing “terrorists” (not human beings), and that they are only trying to make the world a safer place for all of us. Only it’s not going to work this time. I mean, how stupid do they think we are? Just when world sympathy was leaning heavily towards Lebanon and away from Israel, does any sane person really believe that Muslims would try to pull off an ill-fated stunt? Only the most credulous of FOX News watchers could fail to notice that the timing of these supposed terror plots is extraordinarily convenient.

The mainstream media is just another weapon in the Israeli armory, but this time, chinks are beginning to show. The Zionist-controlled media try their best to obfuscate the cowardice of their own kin by wrongly portraying Hezbollah as hiding behind women and children. In psychiatry (a dangerous medical specialty they invented), this is called “projection,” or the attempt to transfer your own negative traits onto another person. They know all about projection because they do it so well. But Israel cannot hide the fact that they have slaughtered more than 1,000 civilians, mostly women and children, and have destroyed almost the entire infrastructure of a modern, democratic state. Yet they cynically try to portray themselves as reluctant and contrite killers, in a grotesque attempt to blame innocent victims for their own deaths.

What did they think was going to happen when they plunked themselves down in the middle of a million Arabs, after slaughtering them to steal their land in 1948? Did they really think they would get away with it indefinitely? Obviously so, since they’ve now set out to conquer more sovereign Arab territory, fully revealing their expansionist agenda to anyone with eyes to see. Only something unexpected has happened on the way to Eretz Israel; they’ve run into a brick wall called Hezbollah, who will not relinquish their sovereignty to the Zionist land-grabbers.

It’s slowly starting to dawn on the Zionists that Lebanon will never be part of Eretz Israel, and that the Litani River will never provide drinking water to Israeli settler households. Plan “Eretz Israel” has been put on hold by a small Lebanese militia with more guts than most men can even dream about. In any area that counts, Hezbollah is already victorious. Courage? How brave do you have to be to stay and fight when you are out-numbered, out-gunned, out-tanked, and out-bombed? Very brave, indeed. This war was nothing more than an Israeli land-grab attempt, and an opportunity to exercise collective punishment on an entire people for Israel’s defeat at the hands of Hezbollah in May 2000. But the Israeli soldiers aren’t half the fighters Hezbollah are; hence, their second defeat in six years at the hands of their bitter enemies. Hezbollah now owns them – lock, stock and barrel.

joannafrancis2005@yahoo.com

Source

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Quote of the month

Posted on August 16, 2006 by kf1

“I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism.

I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

US President Harry Truman

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How to Deal with The Lobby – The De-Zionization of the American Mind By JEAN BRICMONT

Posted on August 14, 2006 by kf1

How to Deal with The Lobby
The De-Zionization of the American Mind
By JEAN BRICMONT

Americans are constantly told that they have to defend themselves against people who “hate them”, but without understanding why they are hated. Is the cause our secular democracy? Our appetite for oil? There are lots of democracies in the world that are far more secular than the United States (Sweden, France …) and lots of places that want to buy oil at the best possible price (China) without arousing any noticeable hatred in the Middle East.

Of course, it is true that, throughout the Third World, Americans and Europeans are often considered arrogant and are not particularly liked. But the level of hatred that leads a large number of people to applaud an event like September 11 is peculiar to the Middle East. Indeed, the main political significance of September 11 did not derive from the number of people killed or even the spectacular achievement of the attackers, but from the fact that the attack was popular in large parts of the Middle East. That much was understood by Americans leaders and infuriated them. Such a level of hatred calls for explanation.

And there can be only one explanation: United States support for Israel. It is indeed Israel that is the main object of hatred, for reasons we shall describe, but since the United States uncritically supports Israel on almost every issue, constantly praises it as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and provides its main financial backing, the result is a “transfer” of hatred.

Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of “peace plans” in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred, but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious, like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit.

Both arguments are deeply racist, with their claim that it is right for Jews, and only Jews, to set up a state in a land that would obviously be Arab, like Jordan or Lebanon, if not for the slow Zionist invasion. This is illustrated by the “law of return”: any Jew, anywhere, having no connection with Palestine whatsoever, and not suffering from the slightest persecution, can, if he so wishes, emigrate to Israel and easily become a citizen, while the inhabitants who fled in 1948, or their children, cannot. Add to that the fact that a city claimed to be Holy by three religions has become the “eternal capital of the Jewish people” (and only them) and one should start to understand the rage that all this provokes throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

It is precisely this racist aspect that infuriates most Arabs, even if they do not have any personal connection to Palestine (if they live, say, in the French banlieues). This situation delegitimizes the Arab regimes that are impotent in the face of the Zionist enemy and, after the defeat of the region’s two main secular leaders, Nasser and Saddam Hussein (the latter thanks to the US), leads to the rise of religious fundamentalism.

Now, people often find racism far more unacceptable than “mere” economic exploitation or poverty. Consider South Africa: under apartheid, the living conditions of the Blacks were bad but not necessarily much worse than in other parts of Africa (or even than in South Africa now). But the system was intrinsically racist, and that was felt as an outrage to Blacks everywhere, including in the United States. This is why the conflict over Palestine goes beyond the second class status of Israeli Arabs or even the treatment of the Occupied Territories. Even if a Palestinian state were established on the latter, and even if full equality were granted to Israeli Arabs, the wounds of 1948 would not heal quickly. Arab leaders, even religious ones, can of course sign peace agreements with Israel, but they are fragile so long as the Arab population considers them unjust and does not accept them wholeheartedly. Palestine is the Alsace-Lorraine or the Taiwan of the Arab world and the fact that it is impossible to take it back does not mean that it can be forgotten . (I am not arguing here in favour of « wiping Israel off the map », or in favor of a « one state solution » but simply underlining what seems to me to be the root and the depth of the problem. In fact, I am not arguing for any solution partly because none seems to me to be attainable in the short term, but, more fundamentally, because I do not think that outsiders to the Middle East should propose such solutions.)

There is no sign that any of this is understood in Israel by more than a few individuals; if Arabs hate them, this is just another instance of the fact that everybody hates Jews and it only proves that they have to “defend themselves” (i.e. attack others pre-emptively) by any means necessary. That is bad enough, but why isn’t this understood in the United States either? There are traditionally two answers to that: one is that the population is manipulated into supporting Israel by the government, the arms merchants or the oil industry, because Israel is a strategic U.S. ally; the other answer is that the United States is manipulated by the Israel lobby. The idea that Israel is a strategic ally, if by that one means a useful ally (useful to, say, the oil interests, broadly understood), although widely accepted, specially in the Left, does not survive a critical examination. That may have been the case in 1967 or even during the Cold War period, although one could argue that, even then, the Arab states were attracted by the Soviet Union only because it might support them in their struggle against Israel, albeit ineffectively. But both in 1991 and in 2003, the United States attacked Iraq without any help from Israel, even begging Israel not to intervene in 1991, in order for its Arab coalition not to collapse. Or consider the post-2003 occupation of Iraq, and suppose that the goal of that occupation is control over oil. In what sense does Israel help in that respect? Everything it does (the currents attacks on Gaza and Lebanon for example) further alienates the Arabs, and U.S. support for Israel makes the control of oil harder, not easier. Even the Iraqi parliament, Malaki and Sistani, who are the closest to allies that the United States can find there, condemn Israel’s actions.

Finally, just imagine that the United States would make a 180 turn and suddenly side with the Palestinians, as they did with the Kosovars against the Serbs–who, by the way, were, like the Israelis, richer and more “Western” than their Albanian adversaries . Such a change of policies is by no means impossible : when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the US supported the invasion by providing most of Indonesia’s weapons. Yet, 25 years later, the US supported, or at least did not oppose, East Timor’s accession to independence.

What effect would that have? Can anyone doubt that such a change of policy would facilitate U.S. access to oil fields and help it gain strategic allies (if any were still needed) throughout the Muslim world? In the Middle East, the main charge against the United States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be “manipulated by the Jews”. Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including its control over oil. Thus the notion of Israel as “strategic ally” makes no sense.

This leads us to the “Israel lobby” answer, which is closer to the truth, but not the whole truth. To get a complete picture, one has to understand why the lobby works as effectively as it does, and that depends on factors lying outside the actions of the lobby itself. After all, the militant Zionists constituting the lobby are a minority among Jews, who themselves form a small minority of the American population. The Israel lobby does not work like other lobbies, for example, the arms and the oil industry lobbies (which is one of the reasons why it is easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, as long as one does not understand how it really exerts its influence).

Of course, like the latter, the Israel lobby does fund electoral campaigns and its power derives in part from its ability to target people in Congress who deviate from its “line”. But if that was all, it could easily be defeated ­indeed, there are other sources of electoral funding, the big industrial lobbies for example, and if the pro-Israel candidates could be shown to be paid to serve the interests of another State, their opponents could denounce the people who receive money from the lobby as some sort of agents of a foreign power. Just imagine a pro-French, pro-Chinese or pro-Japanese lobby that would try to significantly influence the US Congress. Certainly, money alone cannot suffice.

What protects the Israel lobby is the fact that anyone who would denounce an opponent funded by the Lobby as a quasi-agent of a foreign power would immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, imagine that Big Business is unhappy with the current U.S. policies (as it well may be) and wants to change them–how could they do it? Any criticism of Lobby influence on U.S. policy would immediately trigger the anti-Zionism-is-anti-Semitism accusation.

So the strength of the Israel lobby resides in part in this second line of defense, which itself is linked to its influence on the media. But even that could easily be defeated — not all the media are under the lobby’s influence, and, more importantly, the media is not all-powerful: in Venezuela, it is anti-Chavez, but Chavez regularly wins elections. In France, the media were overwhelmingly in favour if the “yes” vote to the referendum on the European Constitution, yet the “no” won. The problem, and that is why the Israel lobby is so effective, is that it expresses a world view that is accepted too easily by too many Americans. After all, nothing could be more ridiculous than accusing someone of anti-Semitism because he wants or claims to put America’s interests above those of Israel. Yet, the accusation is likely to be effective, but only because years of ideological brainwashing have predisposed people to consider U.S. and Israeli interests as identical — although instead of “interests” one speaks of “values”.

Associated with this identification comes a systematically hostile view of the Arab and Muslim world, which both increases the lobby’s effectiveness and is in part the result of its propaganda. Despite all the talk about anti-racism and “political correctness”, there is an almost total lack of understanding of the Arab viewpoint on Palestine, and, in particular, of the racist nature of the problem. It is this triple layer of control (selective funding, the anti-Semitism card, or rather canard, and the interiorization) that gives the lobby its peculiar strength. (And that is also why it is easy to dismiss its strength by saying, for instance, that, obviously, Jews don’t control America. Sure, but direct control is not the way it works.)

People who think that it is the arms or the oil industry that are running the show in Washington as far as foreign policy is concerned, should at least answer the following question: how does it work? There is no evidence whatsoever that the oil industry, for example, pushed for the Iraq war, the threats against Iran or the attack on Lebanon . (There is a lot of evidence that the Israel lobby pushed for the Iraq war; see Jeff Blankfort, A War for Israel.They are supposed to act secretly, of course, but where is the evidence that they do? And if they is no evidence, even no indirect evidence, how does one know? Profits from the war, at least for major corporations, haven’t materialized yet, and there are many indications that the U.S. economy will suffer a lot from war-related expenses and the associated deficits. On the other hand, it is enough to open any mainstream U.S. newspaper or TV and read or hear opinions expressed by Zionists calling for more war. War needs war propaganda and a supporting ideology, and the Zionists provide it, while none of this is offered by Big Business in general or the oil industry in particular.

One may also think of historical precedents, like the China lobby (made of post-1949 Chinese exiles and ex-missionaries, supported by their domestic churches) in the 1950’s and 1960’s. That lobby led the United States to maintain the ridiculous claim that a billion people were represented by a government (Taiwan) that had no control over them whatsoever. It was also very influential in bringing on the Vietnam war. Whose interests were they serving? The ones of the American capitalists? But the latter make huge profits in post-Nixon recognized China. And the same is true in Vietnam.

In fact both countries, as well as most of Asia, were anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, as well as anti-feudal (partly because the feudal structures did not allow them to resist foreign invasions). But they were anti-capitalist (in the rhetoric, since capitalism barely existed there) mostly because their aggressors –the West–were capitalist. So that the main lesson to be drawn from the tragic history of the China lobby is that it held, during decades, the US policies hostage to revanchist feudal and clerical forces that were alien to mainstream America, and actually harmful to capitalist America. But they worked to the extent that their ideology– mixing fear with racist contempt for the “Asian mind” — was in sync with Western prejudices. Replace the China lobby by the Israel one and the Asian mind by the Arab one and you get a fair picture of what is going on right now in the U.S.-Middle East relation.

What should the Left do? Well, simple: treat Israel as it did South Africa and attack the Lobby. The reason Israel acts as it does is that it feels strong and that, in turn, is for two reasons: one is its “all-powerful army” (currently being tested in Lebanon, not conclusively yet); the other is the almost complete control over Washington policy-making, specially the Congress. Peace in the Middle East can only come when this feeling of Israeli superiority is shattered, and Americans have a great responsibility is doing half of the job, the one concerning kneejerk U.S. support.

Now, there are, in principle, two ways to do that: one is to appeal to American generosity, the other is to appeal to their self-interest. Both ways should be pursued, but the latter is not enough emphasized by the Left . (See Michael Neumann, What is to be said ?, for a discussion of the ethical aspects of that choice.) That’s probably because self-interest does not appear to be “noble” and because the pursuit of the “U.S. national interest” has all too often been interpreted as overthrowing progressive governments, buying elections etc. But, if the alternative to self-interest is a form of religious fanaticism, then self-interest is far preferable: if the Germans had followed self-interested policies in the 1930’s, even imperialist policies, but rational ones, World War II could have been avoided. Also, if the United States were to distance itself from Israel, it would pursue policies opposed to the traditional ones, and far more humane. The other problem is that a large part of the Right (from Buchanan to Brzezinski) correctly sees American interests as being opposed of those of Israel, and the Left (understandably) does not like to make common cause with such people. But if a cause is just (and, in this case, urgent) it does not become less just because unsavory people endorse it (the same argument applies to genuine anti-Semitic hostility to Israel). The worst thing that the Left can do is to leave the monopoly of a just cause to the Right.

The Left cannot expect the American people to change radically overnight, abandon religious fundamentalism, give up oil addiction or embrace socialism. But a change of perspective in the Middle East is possible: the strength of the lobby is also its weakness, namely the naked king effect-everybody fears it, but the only reason to fear it is that everybody around us fears it. Left alone, it is powerless. To change that, one should systematically defend every politician, every columnist, every teacher, who is targeted by the lobby for his or her views or statements, irrespective of their general political outlook (to take an analogy, act as civil libertarians do with respect to free speech).

When people in the antiwar movement divert attention from Israel by blaming Big Oil or Big Business for the wars (specially the one in Lebanon, or the threats against Iran) one should demand that they provide some evidence for their claims. Challenge all the apologists or excuse makers for Israel or its lobby within progressive circles. When politicians and journalists claim that Israel and the United States have common interests, ask what services exactly has Israel rendered to the United States recently. Of course one can always point to some (minor) services; but, then, ask them what a cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis would reveal and why such an analysis is impossible to undertake publicly. If they speak of common values (the fallback position), provide a list of discriminatory Israeli laws for non-Jews.

Rolling back the lobby would necessitate a change of the American mentality with respect to the people of the Middle East, and to Islam, like ending the Vietnam war required a change in the way Asians were looked at. But that alone would have a greatly humanizing effect on American culture.

It is true that a change in the U.S. policy with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict would change nothing about traditional imperialism– the United States would still support traditional elites everywhere, and press countries to provide a “favorable investment climate”. But the conflict in the Middle East, involving Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, has all the aspects of a religious war-with Islam on one side and Zionism as a secular Western religion on the other. And wars of religion tend to be the most brutal and uncontrollable of all wars. What is at stake in the de-Zionization of the American mind is not only the fate of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine but also unspeakable miseries for the people of that region and maybe of the rest of the world. The ultimate irony in all this is that the fate of much of the world depends of the American people exercizing their right to self-determination, which, of course, they should.

Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium. He is a member of the Brussells Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, will be published by Monthly Review Press.

He can be reached at : bricmont@fyma.ucl.ac.be

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George Galloway Savages SKY NEWS!

Posted on August 8, 2006 by kf1

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Handwritten letter from President Saddam Hussein to the American people. 7 July 2006.

Posted on August 6, 2006 by kf1

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Mercy-giving.

“And among the Believers are men who are true to that which they pledged to God. Some of them have fulfilled their pledge by death and some of them still are waiting and they have not altered in the least. That God may reward the true men for their truth and punish the hypocrites if He will, or relent towards them, for God is forgiving, merciful. And God repulsed the infidels for their wrath. They gained no good. God averted their attack from the Believers. God is strong, mighty.” [Qur’an 33:23-25].

To the American people:

Peace upon those who believe in peace and desire it, and the mercy of God and His blessings.

I address you in this letter from the place of my confinement, as my attempt on the basis of my moral, human, and constitutional responsibility so that no one among you might say that no one came to us with a message of peace after the war began, refuting the arguments for it and desiring peace for you and for our upright, loyal, heroic people. And as I say this, I do no know whether my brothers and comrades who are leading the Resistance outside the prison have come to you with a letter before or not. That is because the “democracy” of your leaders has prevented me since my arrest and until now from getting newspapers and magazines or hearing radio and television and has isolated me from the world and has isolated the world from me so that I might not hear or see anything from outside my place of confinement.

Is this the true face of democracy and human rights that they advocate outside America!? Or have your rulers lied about it? This includes the killing of people in prisons and jails, some of them by means of the pistols of the American investigators. Or has all of this along with other details that would turn an attentive person’s hair white been concealed from you by your officials such that you do not know the truth!?

Anyway, I address you with this letter of mine in the hope that it will reach you and that you will hear it or read it. And on the basis of my responsibility to bring the facts before people, whatever their color or nationality, for that is our duty to them, just as they have a duty to us not to accept evil.

I address you today as my attorney the eminent lawyer and Professor Ramsey Clark has asked that I write this letter of mine to you. Professor Ramsey has presented an excellent example of a humanitarian in his person and in his colleague Professor Curtis Dobler, both of whom left a positive personal impression on me. On this occasion I wish to salute their courage as they have volunteered for the task although they know the dangers that surround them in carrying out their duty, in particular after criminals have killed four of the defense attorneys.

People of America, it still seems to me that the officials in your government are still lying to you and are not giving you true explanations of the reasons that led them to embark on their aggression against Iraq. In what they have said about the reasons they have deceived, from the starting point, not only the international community, and in particular the European Community but also the peoples of America themselves, knowing beforehand that the facts were contrary to what they were declaring. Untrue is what they said, after their lies were exposed, about having been deceived by their intelligence agencies and by the stooges that they brought along to serve as their puppets in Iraq, just as old imperialism and the old empires of the 19th and 20th centuries used to do. What we are saying is based on many facts, the major ones being as follows:

1. The inspection teams – that came to Iraq in the name of the United Nations and carried out searches even of some private houses as well as government departments, presidential palaces and government documents – those teams knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction because most of the leading members in those teams were Americans and British and in addition they had spies and volunteers of other nationalities. Those teams searched Iraq piece by piece from one end to the other and never found any information contrary to what they and others were told by Iraqi government representatives. The inspections lasted for more than seven years. And in addition to the teams that traveled by car and on foot, they used spy planes, helicopters, and satellites in space. The American and English officials thought that this was their historic chance to strike Iraq and destroy its legitimate aspirations and the lofty cultural and scientific achievements made in the course of 35 years, making use of the information gathered by their spies in the inspection teams and making use of the so-called war on terror after the 11 September incident that struck America. They shuffled the cards to bring up the goals that they had already decided upon earlier, and these were not the goals that they publicly announced at the starting line.

It was their assessment that the unjust embargo had not destroyed Iraq’s will nor halted its legitimate aspirations to develop economically, culturally, scientifically, and as a civilization in the conditions of a new independence. They believed that Iraq had come close at that time to breaking the economic embargo as the result of the cooperation of those who cooperated with Iraq on the basis of mutual benefit and fraternal national feelings as far as the Arabs were concerned. The officials in your country thought that this was their chance to impose their will on the world by means of their control of the Middle East’s oil and its production and marketing in new ways and for new goals – those about which we spoke in and before the year 2003 – in addition to attaining one of their Zionist goals and winning support in the election. Iran and its lackeys played a dirty role in making aggression appear attractive and in facilitating its implementation.

2. The American officials did not withdraw from Iraq after they became hard pressed, but declared that the facts were contrary to what they had claimed before the invasion that took place in March and April of the year 2003. If they had been truthful when they claimed that they had been deceived as a result of the information they had been given and which they used as the cover for their invasion, and which they declared at the time was sufficient justification for the invasion – declaring at the time that it involved things that they said affected the security of the United States – then they would have withdrawn from Iraq after discovering that that information had been false. They would have apologized to the heroic Iraqi people, to the American people and to the people of the world for what they had done.

None of the Americans asked their government before the war how Iraq, a country that had still not emerged from backwardness, could threaten the security of a country like America across the Atlantic. And for that matter why would Iraq want to threaten America, which at that time had not violated the territory of Iraq. If the American officials wanted to promote the claim that Iraq’s threat was precisely involved in the opposing stances taken by Iraq and America over the Zionist occupation of the land of Palestine and other Arab land, it could be said that Iraq is not the only state that takes an opposing stance to that of America in regards to the issue, whether that be Arab states or other states in the world. Furthermore, who has authorized America to make the countries of the world tailor their policies to America’s measurements, and if they don’t oblige, then war should be waged against them? How can one understand America’s call for democracy if it does not permit a difference of opinion even in issues of a regional character, to say nothing of international ones?

Another lie was the claim of American officials that Iraq had links to what they called terrorism, although British Prime Minister Blair declared that Iraq does not have any ties to so-called terrorism and had no internationally prohibited weapons, forcing Bush to declare the same thing. Despite that, none of the important American personalities asked President Bush on what sort of rational analysis or what sort of realistic information this claim rested. Do you know, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, why they didn’t ask? Because some of your prominent personalities are directed in what they do by hidden forces that distorted the image you received of Iraq’s positions. They had been laying the groundwork for years to facilitate aggression from the start. Therefore no one asked the American officials, for example, why no Iraqi took part in the events of 11 September!? And if the participation of individuals in the attack on American targets isn’t to be taken as proof of the involvement of any country in those events, then how do you accuse a state like Iraq, the features of whose political system are known, of so-called relations with terror? How can you consider this charge to be one of only two on the basis of which aggression was launched against the people of Iraq, destroying their property and achievements and bringing their lives under daily and direct threat?

Do you know, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, that I asked one of the American officials who talked with me perhaps two weeks after my arrest, just what was it that you based those false charges on? He said that as far as the weapons of mass destruction were concerned, “we didn’t have anything to confirm what you were saying.” And as for the links to terrorism, he said, because you, Saddam Hussein, did not send a letter of condolence to President Bush after the incident [of 11 September].

I smiled bitterly and told him: as regards your claim that you didn’t have confirmation of our statements, it seems that your officials lie and imagine that officials in countries around the world do not tell the truth, or that many of those who have relations with you in fact do not tell you the truth, neither when they oppose your policies nor when they agree with them. This is a dangerous matter, not only for the countries of the world but because they then pose a danger for America as well, if nobody in the world will tell America: ‘this is a mistake’ and ‘this is unacceptable’! And at that time when American planes were striking targets in Iraq and destroying public and private property, killing Iraqi citizens including women and children for no reason and imposing on Iraq their unjust embargo, prohibiting Iraq from importing even pencils for children to use in primary schools, what exactly is it that should obligate Saddam Hussein to send a telegram of condolences to the president of the state whose officials have committed all those crimes, unless it be out of hypocrisy and weakness? But because I am neither a hypocrite nor a weakling I didn’t send Bush a telegram of condolence. But I did agree on the telegram sent containing condolences in the name of the government of Iraq and sent by Comrade Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister, to our friend Ramsey Clark and through him to the stricken families.

Are the great states so deluded as to imagine that whoever does not send a letter of condolence deserves that war should be waged against him, his country, and his people!? Here you see how the American officials used even your own blood to promote their reckless, aggressive policy. Is this the kind of morality that people should have? Or men? Or officials? There is nothing graver than for disasters to ravage people who have been stricken by delusions, committed wrongs, and wantonly despised the roles of others. The worst disease of the American officials who involved the Americans in war against Iraq is this.

3. After I was arrested they made vain attempts to use intimidation and threats against me. One of their generals conveyed that intimidation and host threats and tried to bargain with me, promising to let me live if I agreed to read in my own voice and sign a prepared announcement that was shown to me. That stupid announcement called on the people of Iraq and the courageous Resistance to lay down arms. They said that if I refused, my fate would be that I would be shot just like Mussolini, as my interlocutor put it. But, as you know me and would expect of me, I disdainfully refused, not even touching that dirty document with my hand and sullying myself with it. I told them if I were given the chance to address my people, I would call them to more resistance.

Seven days later, to reinforce themselves, they sent a group to talk with me. They said they were from an American University and that they wanted to engage me in a broad discussion. I agreed and I confirmed to them that Iraq didn’t have any of the things the American officials claimed and I advised them [the US] to leave Iraq quickly and apologize to the people, warning them that they were going to get what they now are facing and what they are now embroiled in – in fact, the fate I expect for them is worse than what they are facing now – and they will never have an adequate chance to pull their arms and equipment out of Iraq if the two halves of Iraq engulf them, and they will engulf them, God willing, because our people are deeply rooted and conscious. They know that our liberation can be clean and complete only with their unity, and that tolerance must be the basis for the orientations of our people within their ranks, and that wounds must be bound up, not ripped open.

I say, I told them all that at that time but they didn’t change their methods; they didn’t replace the keys of falsehood, and they are still knocking on the doors of wrong, failing to try the door of legitimacy, even though they now know. In this connection, attached to this letter are some verses from a long ode; a selection of 56 verses. [Not translated here.]

4. It is neither reasonable nor convincing that a country like America to which the doors of the intelligence agencies in the east and most of the countries of the west have been opened did not know the truth and could not know the truth. Although I am convinced and believe that many countries in the world have an interest in war or wars, she [the United States] does not have an interest in war even though she might believe she does. The contrary, in fact, is the case.

America is a big country on the other side of the Atlantic. It has developed a unique unparalleled power such that I think some people there imagine that it is on its way to attaining the crown of the world all for itself as a world empire. Have they not learned a lesson from their war in Viet Nam? The west used to promote the idea that world Communism and the Soviet bloc threatened their interests and also the security of the entire west. But despite that promotion, this was nothing but a flimsy cover. Nevertheless, America used it and wrapped itself in it until the heroic Vietnamese people expelled them by force.

As to their invasion of Iraq, it came in a situation that made the first step easy from the standpoint of the reaction of the international community because of the international balance of forces. But it came in a situation that might make it more costly that its war in Viet Nam. That is because when America was expelled from Viet Nam it did not lose its standing, or we might say it only lost a small part of its standing. But when it is expelled and routed from Iraq, which has no great power to support it directly, it will lose the fundamental basis of its standing.

In fact it has now already lost the foundation for that standing and its reputation has begun to decay. It is no longer able to wield the big stick that it formerly threatened to use. It used to accomplish more by threatening to use force than by really using force. I will go further and say that after its war in Iraq, that stick no longer frightens many people and America has come to need the silence of the smallest and simplest countries and tries to please them in order to get them to stay quiet about America’s crimes and reckless, deviant policies.

Before, many of the world’s countries used to court the United States and most countries in the world, all except a few, used to fear her threats or parried them with defensive arguments. But now Mao Zedong of fond memory is laughing in his grave because his prediction has been fulfilled and America is a paper tiger. This is by the will of the Living Eternal God, and by His agents on earth, the heroic Mujahideen in glorious, virtuous, militant, jihadist Iraq. So God bless the heroic people of Iraq and God bless the jihad and the mujahideen.

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the peoples of America, the time has come to an end in which greatest and best-equipped armies could scatter the organized formations of the opposing army and thereby bring a war to a close. Now you see our courageous army, our heroic people, and our Mujahideen replacing the system of organized formations with a new kind of warfare. And when the Americans on the ground become targets in the vicinity of the guns of the revolutionaries, who attack them as deadly human bombs with nothing more than their bodies filled with faith in God, American superiority is worn down over time. In fact in the near future that superiority will become a burden whose equipment will be difficult to withdraw. So, will America trust the voice of rationality and logic that calls for the preservation of what still remains, or will Satan the deceiver and the hate-filled supporters of Zionism keep pushing the Americans until the waves swallow them and they sink to the depths of the raging sea?

Who, after all, appointed the American government to be the world policeman, to form the world in the mold that it likes, giving national orders to the countries of the world?

Saddam Hussein, ladies and gentlemen, is an honorable patriot and an honest man. He is a statesman resolute in implementing the law, just, but benevolent. He loves his people and his nation. He is straightforward, doesn’t double-cross or deceive. He speaks the truth even against himself. Do tyrants like Bush like such characteristics? If he were a person like De Gaulle or even like Reagan, perhaps he would understand them, or at least would not abhor them. But I must say to you that your country will discover more, esteemed ladies and gentlemen. It has lost his reputation and his standing. Indeed the American who used to travel around the world respected and safe and welcomed wherever he went, is now no longer able to step outside America without a mine detector. And the State Department issues warnings for you constantly about what world regions are dangerous to American lives

It was American officials and their polices themselves that have created an atmosphere of anti-American hatred in the world by means of their arrogant behavior, their haughty aggressive attitude, their lack of respect for international law and the security of the world – including the security of my Arab Nation through their support for the Zionist entity in Palestine – and other world and human issues.

Today you are in a bad predicament with the world and nobody can rescue you but yourselves. If you reform, you will open for the world and for yourselves a new opportunity. But if you are heedless, that is your decision. What you need is free and fair competition and peace in order to have security.

The years that followed the 18th century had long gone when they came as invaders to the Middle East to bring back memories of things that awaken and arouse. The Middle East, and the Arab homeland in particular, was the cradle of prophets and messengers from God. Is the cradle of the prophets, where the prophets are buried in their tombs, also the home of devils and their mirror images – the malicious invaders?

We have believed, and our faith was suited to us,
Then came the Zionists with a devil for a guide.
They stormed in on us as invaders, unjust.
The did not stop their advance nor sit still,
Their diabolical patron has prepared their dilemma.
But as for us, we have the Merciful God as Patron.

People of America, despite the crimes your government inflicted on our people, our Arab Nation and humanity, the people of Iraq – and I mean by that the Iraqis, not those with split loyalties who prefer to serve foreigners rather than their own people – I say the free people of Iraq even in their present circumstances are not thinking about their destiny alone but about the destiny of others wherever it’s possible to create a solution that treats a painful problem.

On this basis I said to some Americans when I was in my prison, why don’t you come to an agreement with the Resistance to designate a country with a charter and power to which the Resistance can hand over those American soldiers whom they capture, rather than executing them as currently is said to be taking place. In fact the extent to which the Resistance is responsible for this is unknown, but people who are equitable know that America has not abided by international law in any of its activities in Iraq, including the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners and detainees. The Resistance has no secure place in Iraq where prisoners can be kept. So whether the Resistance is at all responsible, or whether the responsibility lies with some other parties that have no connection to the Resistance, the justification for it is that there is no secure place for prisoners to be kept.

Therefore in order to fulfill humanitarian needs and to eliminate the justification [for killing prisoners] I make this proposal to you and to the national Resistance and to anyone concerned, and I make this with the best of intentions. If you accept it and respect the Geneva Conventions then the argument of those who kill rather than detain prisoners will have vanished. But if your government does not accept it, then it will bear the responsibility for refusing and for whatever befalls our people and the heroic Resistance as a result of your government’s violation of international law. This will be particularly true if the number of American prisoners increases in the future, and we think that it will increase. Or is it that your government can’t see anything until it feels it?

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for your government to look at all people as equals before international law regardless of the size of the countries to which they belong. Whoever violates international law in his policies and the behavior of his army, he alone must bear the consequences for that policy. And if his policies are not in accordance with the letter of international law, he has no right to call others to protect his rights in accordance with that law.

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, whoever missed his or her chance to take action to try to prevent the war still has a chance to act to end it and bring back peace and freedom to Iraq in accordance with the choice of its people without foreign interference by anyone whoever that may be.

People of America, I address you not from weakness nor as a supplicant. I, my people, my brothers, comrades, and my nation – we address you on the basis of our moral and human responsibility. I tell you that officials whom you know, and first among them your President, lied to you and deceived you and tricked you using the media that portrayed Iraq to you as incorrigible, and Saddam Hussein as a hateful dictator, and that his people hate him and that his people are just waiting for their chance to get at him. Some of them just wallowed in lying falsehood to the point that they openly declared that the Iraqis would meet the invading armies with roses and celebration.

I know that lots of people don’t do a lot of analysis; they don’t have the time or the ability or the desire to do careful assessments when presented with falsified news so as to uncover the truth. The American peoples had no chance to inquire, for example: why, if the people of Iraq hate Saddam Hussein, how he managed to defeat the Iran of Khomeini after eight years in the aggressive war that Iran sought to impose on us under the slogan of exporting the revolution beginning with Iraq? People of America, the victory over Khomeini’s Iran was not due to the short length of the war, but came only after eight years of grinding warfare in which tens of thousands fell and hundreds of thousands on the Iranian side.

Then if Saddam Hussein were a dictator, why did he establish a parliament with elections for the first time in the year 1980 during wartime, when there had been no parliament in Iraq since 1958? If he and his government were dictators, how could he visit schools, universities, towns, and villages and spend the night with the people wherever the sun went down? How could he travel around and lead at the battle front at night and during the day even in the trenches in the front lines on the battlefield among the Muslim soldiers!?

Yes, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, your government deceived you, and you, or rather most of you, had no chance to inquire of themselves or of others in order to discover the truth because the Zionists in the lobby who advocated the war together with some of the centers of power were deceiving you and tricking you, hiding from your eyes the real truth, exchanging the facts for falsified and slanted information. Last but not least in this regard, if Saddam Hussein were a dictator hated and despised by his people, how is it that his people endured him and why was he chosen President by referendum?

People of America, the misfortunes that have afflicted you and afflicted our Arab Nation and within it our heroic Iraqi people – including the breakdown of America’s standing and reputation – were only caused by the reckless behavior of your government and by pressure from Zionism and power centers that influenced the government to commit those crimes and scandalous actions for specific ends that have nothing to do with the interest of the American peoples. The massacres and blood that now flows in the streets and countryside of Iraq in torrents – the responsibility for that falls on America before all others. You know, or rather you have now come to learn, that neither the stooges whom the American forces brought in on board their aircraft or as shamefaced presents aboard their tanks, nor Iran, which pushed and still pushes forward those who support it and whom they support, would be able to cause the bloodshed, or the destruction of the honor, and property of our people and our state had not America undertaken the aggression and invasion and issued the orders. It is still issuing orders in the Green Zone. Therefore America bears the burden of all those crimes and outrages. So, will you put an end to what is going on by using the methods of direct truth without evasion and digression? Or will you invite the machine of death to continue to eat away at the flesh of Iraqis and the flesh of Americans without doing anything to resolve this?

It is your historical responsibility, esteemed ladies and gentlemen. If you reform, you could save what remains of the standing and reputation of America and its legitimate interests. If you do nothing, you will be keeping silent over something evil. “God grant us patient perseverance and let us die as Muslims.” [Qur’an, 7:126]

People of America, the wars that your government promotes in the world – one of them being the war in Iraq – with input from certain centers of power – which you know better than we – are not in the interests of the American people. You know better than many how you paid in blood so that you might liberate yourselves from British colonialism and after that how the United States of America was unified and what rivers of blood were shed in order for that to come about. So, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, how do you accept this interference that abases America before it abases Iraq? How can you accept not only the invasion but becoming mired in the internal affairs of Iraq? You know that Iraq is a land of prophets, messengers, and righteous figures. You know that Baghdad is the fourth holiest city in the Arab homeland – after Mecca, al-Madinah, and Jerusalem – in the sight of all of the Islamic world and all of our Arab Nation. How can one imagine that Iraq could reconcile itself to colonial rule, even if it comes, this time, under another name and with other slogans? Save your country, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, and leave Iraq.

Peace.

God is greatest. God is greatest.

[signed]

Saddam Hussein,
President of the Republic of Iraq and Commander in Chief of the Mujahid Armed Forces.

7 July 2006.

[Appended to the letter was a selection of poetry by Saddam Hussein dealing with the homeland, invasion and the struggle for liberation]

Source:

http://www.albasrah.net/ar_articles_2006/0706/sadam_o70706.htm

Posted in Disclosure, Quotes | Leave a comment

Thousands of troops say they won’t fight

Posted on August 6, 2006 by kf1

Thousands of troops say they won’t fight

By Ana Radelat
Gannett News Service

Source

Swept up by a wave of patriotism after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Chris Magaoay joined the Marine Corps in November 2004.

The newly married Magaoay thought a military career would allow him to continue his college education, help his country and set his life on the right path.

Less than two years later, Magaoay became one of thousands of military deserters who have chosen a lifetime of exile or possible court-martial rather than fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“It wasn’t something I did on the spur of the moment,” said Magaoay, a native of Maui, Hawaii. “It took me a long time to realize what was going on. The war is illegal.”

Magaoay said his disillusionment with the military began in boot camp in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where a superior officer joked about killing and mistreating Iraqis. When his unit was deployed to Iraq in March, Magaoay and his wife drove to Canada, joining a small group of deserters who are trying to win permission from the Canadian government to stay.

“We’re like a tight-knit family,” Magaoay said.

The Pentagon says deserters like Magaoay represent a tiny fraction of the nation’s fighting forces.

“The vast majority of soldiers who desert do so for personal, family or financial problems, not for political or conscientious objector purposes,” said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the Army.

Since 2000, about 40,000 troops from all branches of the military have deserted, the Pentagon says. More than half served in the Army. But the Army says numbers have decreased each year since the United States began its war on terror in Afghanistan.

Those who help war resisters say desertion is more prevalent than the military has admitted.

“They lied in Vietnam with the amount of opposition to the war and they’re lying now,” said Eric Seitz, an attorney who represents Army Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to the war in Iraq.

Watada is under military custody in Fort Lewis, Wash., because he refused to join his Stryker brigade when it was sent to Iraq last month.

Watada said he doesn’t object to war but considers the conflict in Iraq illegal. The Army has turned down his request to resign and plans to file charges against him.

Critics of the Iraq war have demonstrated on the lieutenant’s behalf. Conservative bloggers call him a traitor and opportunist.

Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said deserters aren’t traitors because they’ve done nothing to help America’s enemies. But he rejects arguments that deserters have a moral right to refuse to fight wars they consider unjust.

“None of us can choose our wars. They’re always a political decision,” Davis said. “They’re letting their buddies down and hurting morale – and morale is everything on the battlefront.”

Because today’s military is an all-volunteer force, troops seeking objector status must convince superior officers they’ve had an honest change of heart about the morality of war.

The last time the U.S. military executed a deserter was World War II. But hundreds face court-martials and imprisonment every year.

Members of the armed forces are considered absent without leave when they are unaccounted for. They become deserters after they’ve been AWOL for 30 days.

A 2002 Army report says desertion is fairly constant but tends to worsen during wartime, when there’s an increased need for troops and enlistment standards are more lax. They also say deserters tend to be less educated and more likely to have engaged in delinquent behavior than other troops.

Army spokesman Hilferty said the Army doesn’t try to find deserters. Instead, their names are given to civilian law enforcement officers who often nab them during routine traffic stops and turn them over to the military.

Commanders then decide whether to rehabilitate or court-martial the alleged deserter. There’s an incentive to rehabilitate because it costs the military an average of $38,000 to recruit and train a replacement.

Jeffry House, an attorney in Toronto who represents Magaoay and other deserters, said there are about 200 deserters living in Canada. They have decided not to seek refugee status but instead are leading clandestine lives, he said.

Like many of the people helping today’s war resisters, House fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. About 50,000 Americans sought legal residency in Canada during the Vietnam era.

“You would apply at the border and if you didn’t have a criminal record, you were in,” House said.

He said changes in Canadian law make it harder for resisters to flee north. Now, potential immigrants must apply for Canadian residency in their home countries. Resisters say that exposes them to U.S. prosecution.

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America: Freedom To Fascism

Posted on July 28, 2006 by kf1

America:From freedom to fascism

Determined to find the law that requires American citizens to pay income tax, producer Aaron Russo (“The Rose,” “Trading Places”) set out on a journey to find the evidence. Neither left, nor right-wing this startling examination of government exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America since 1913.

Official Movie Page | Trailer

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The two Israeli troops were captured in Lebanon

Posted on July 25, 2006 by kf1

The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced on Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. “Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon,” a statement by Hezbollah said. “The two soldiers have already been moved to a safe place,” it added. The Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they “infiltrated” into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. [Hindustan Times 7/12/06]

The Lebanese Hezbollah movement announced Wednesday the arrest of two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were arrested as they entered the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. Israeli aircraft were active in the air over southern Lebanon, police said, with jets bombing roads leading to the market town of Nabatiyeh, 60 kilometers south of Beirut. [Bahrain News Agency 7/12/06]

TRANSLATION: According to the Lebanese police force, the two soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the area of Aïta Al-Chaab close to the border, whereas Israeli television indicated that they had been captured in Israeli territory. [fr.news.yahoo 7/12/06]

In the afternoon, the scene changed in the streets of southern Lebanon, which was the target of 32 Israeli raids that mainly targeted areas near the area where the two soldiers were captured in Aita al Chaab, close to the border with Israel. [news.monstersandcritics.com 7/12/06]

According to the Lebanese police force, the two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the area of Aïta Al-Chaab, near to the border with Israel, where an Israeli unit had penetrated in middle of morning. [AFP 7/12/06]

It all started on July 12 when Israel troops were ambushed on Lebanon’s side of the border with Israel. Hezbollah, which commands the Lebanese south, immediately seized on their crossing. They arrested two Israeli soldiers, killed eight Israelis and wounded over 20 in attacks inside Israeli territory. [Asia Times 7/15/06]

TRANSLATION: In a deliberated way, Tsahal sent a commando in the Lebanese back-country to Aïta Al Chaab. It was attacked by Hezbollah, making two prisoners. [voltairenet.org 7/18/06]

Do you get it yet? Israel sent troops across the border into Lebanon. They then claimed the captured invaders were “kidnap victims” and launched their attacks.

Courtesy:WRH

Posted in Disclosure, Lebanon | 2 Comments

A farewell to Beirut – Robert Fisk – 22 Jul.06

Posted on July 22, 2006 by kf1
IN THE year AD 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus — headquarters of the Romans’ East Mediterranean fleet — was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors — ancestors of the present-day Lebanese — walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed to them. 

That was when a giant tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived in Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city.

In World War I, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine — the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she “passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found …”

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I’ve watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they look like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses.

Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite.

But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis — in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside — tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity?

We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties — more than 300 in all of Lebanon by last night — with Israel’s 34 dead, as if the figures are the same. 

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel’s “disproportionate” response to the capture of its soldiers by Hezbollah.

I walked through the deserted centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded me more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city — once a Dresden of ruins — was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on February 14 last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his legacy is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination — an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant — best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined with French President Jacques Chirac — I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the facade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon’s democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French Mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock-Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. “Ah Robert, come over here,” he roared, turning to Chirac like a cat about to eat a canary. “I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn’t rebuild Beirut!”

And now it is being unbuilt. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri’s transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shiite Muslims to schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hezbollah, another of those “centres of world terror” the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. 

Here lived Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God’s leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man, and Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics, and many of Hezbollah’s top military planners — including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pinpoint accuracy — a doubtful notion in any case, but that’s not the issue — what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well-known and prominent Hezbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes.

“We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or …” And he counts these awful statistics on the fingers of his left hand. “Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis — much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions.”

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillea, white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the inhabitants of the southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdelhamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon’s greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half-million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut: 

My people died of hunger, and he who

Did not perish from starvation was

Butchered with the sword …

They perished from hunger in a land

rich with milk and honey …

They died because the vipers and

sons of vipers spat out poison into

the space where the Holy Cedars and

the roses and the jasmine breathe

their fragrance.

And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft — perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this — came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army’s logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chima, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. “Hello Robert, be quick, because I think the Israelis will bomb again, but we’ll show you everything we can.” And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.

A few hours later the Israelis did come back, as the men of the logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chima.

And why? Be sure: the Israelis know what they are hitting. That’s why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines?

And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near the border village of Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes — beneath long, soft hair — closed, turned away from the camera.

She had been another “terrorist” target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939. 

I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. “Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut”, says one headline. “Israelis Retaliate”. “Lebanon At War”. “Beirut Under Siege”. “Massacre at Sabra and Chatila”.

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Shatila by Israel’s Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops — as they later testified to Israel’s own commission of inquiry — watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians.

“Robert, please take care,” she says. “I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis.” I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony — a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea smog — I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was an Ottoman metropolis: “Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries.”

On my dining room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Maronite Christians from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 30 kilometres out to sea.

Fairuz, the living legend of Lebanese song, was to have performed at this year’s Baalbek Festival, cancelled now like all the country’s festivals. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

Peace to Beirut with all my heart

And kisses — to the sea and clouds,

To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor’s face.

From the soul of her people she makes wine,

From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate.

THE INDEPENDENT

The Age

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