Dreams Thoughts Activism

Late night thoughts

2006-10-16T01:12:00.000-05:00

Life is running so fast and I'm not able to stop for a while, even to blog, because I'm afraid it will run without me. But looking back at what I have accomplished, and I feel I've done nothing. So why running?

Yesterday I heard an amazing sentence that I decided to make as my new mantra: Every morning symbolizes the beginning of the rest of your life. So every morning, I can make a new decision and try it for the day. Wow, I can be really abusive of my own mantra :)

So, today I made some very important decisions, that I am hoping to stick to, but with my new mantra, it seems that I just waited less than 12 hrs to change all of my decisions. Now, people can call me indecisive, in addition to the description I gave myself on the profile. Perfect! I am now Ms. Complicated Par Excellence.

To all my friends who keep checking this blog, I love you so much and I'm so sorry I'm not staying in touch, but I'm so busy being indecisive.

Please not another Sykes-Pico Agreement!

2006-10-16T01:09:00.000-05:00

James Baker prepares the exits in IraqBy Michael Young Daily Star staffThursday, October 12, 2006

In Washington, there is a frequent step before old soldiers die and after they've faded away; recruitment into a blue ribbon panel established to resolve one administration headache or other. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by a former secretary of state, James Baker, and a former congressman, Lee Hamilton, is one such venture. The group, whose creation was urged by Congress, is tasked with recommending new ways for the Bush administration to deal with the war in Iraq. Its report will come out after the November elections, to avoid being politicized.

The group includes establishment stalwarts, including former CIA Director Robert Gates, Bill Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan, Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Senator and Virginian Governor Charles Robb, and former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson. While the conclusions of these insiders, well-lubed in the etiquette of American power, are not binding, President George W. Bush will have to take them seriously, because the next Congress is bound to be hostile to "staying the course" in Iraq and might oblige him to do so.

It's still unclear what the group will recommend. Baker, in an interview on ABC television last weekend, played his cards close to his chest, but did throw out hints: "I think it's fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of 'stay the course' and 'cut and run.'" He dismissed as unworkable a plan by Senator Joseph Biden to decentralize Iraq and give Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis their own regions, distributing oil revenue to all. Baker argued "there's no way to draw lines" between the three groups in Iraq's major cities, where the communities are mixed.
However, an article in The Times of London suggested a different plan. The group would recommend breaking Iraq up into "three highly autonomous regions." According to "informed sources" cited by the paper, the Iraq group "has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq ... His group will not advise 'partition,' but is believed to favor a division of the country that will devolve power and security to the regions, leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs, border protection and the distribution of oil revenue. The Iraqi government will be encouraged to hold a constitutional conference paving the way for greater devolution. Iran and Syria will be urged to back a regional settlement that could be brokered at an international conference."

It's not clear how the conclusions of The Times square with Baker's own dismissal of the Biden plan. However, the likelihood is that the differences are in the details, not in the overall principle of distributing power away from the center, a process explicit in the federal structure mandated by the Iraqi Constitution. In addition, Baghdad's control over Iraq has all but disintegrated, so that any practical plan must take this into consideration. But just how much is unclear. The proposal outlined by The Times, if it is proven true, would suggest substantial dissemination of power. This would create a confederal structure in form, but the partition of Iraq in fact, regardless of claims that the Iraq Study Group has no such agenda.

What of Baker's admission that the mixed nature of urban areas makes the Biden plan unworkable? His focus on Iraqi cities, as opposed to surrounding rural areas, might mean his group will propose some sort of mechanism to leave Iraqi cities "open" to all communities, under separate administrations. If that's the case, however, the scheme would have little practical meaning in places like Kirkuk, where Kurds have the means, and the wherewithal, to pressure their adversaries. As for Baghdad, the challenge would be to isolate the city from the ambient ethnic and sectarian fighting. Like Sarajevo, the Iraqi capital is likely to end up being a mere extension of the wars around it, with the battle lines already drawn between "pure" sectarian neighborhoods.

In reality, the Baker-Hamilton group is less there to engineer a stable future for Iraq than to create conditions for American forces to leave the country. Baker doesn't want to "cut and run," but there is an awful lot of cutting, and not a little hurried walking, in his thinking. The idea is that once Kurds and Shiites fully take security into their own hands in their autonomous areas, the US will be able to substantially reduce its troop levels and withdraw the remainder to safe areas, probably to Kurdistan.

However, partition is a dangerous proposition. A favored course of action of uninspired diplomats, the partitioning of territories has usually visited little more than trauma on countries, accompanied by war. That's what happened in India, Palestine, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus and Bosnia, and nothing suggests that Iraq will be any different. Iraqis may today have fallen back on their ethnic or sectarian identities, but that doesn't mean they will accept a foreign plan for effective partition. If anything, this may provoke their hostility and that of many Arabs who will certainly interpret the proposal as an effort to fragment Iraq to Israel's benefit. You will hear the familiar tropes that this is all part of a vast neoconservative project to weaken the Arab world, though members of the Baker-Hamilton team - particularly Baker, a sleek facilitator between big oil and Arab custodians of stalemate - would shudder at such an association.
Finally, asking Iran and Syria to guarantee this process means asking the two states most responsible for destabilizing Iraq since 2003 to oversee its stabilization. That's a typical realist habit, and Baker has long enjoyed transacting with American foes. Syrian President Hafez Assad allowed Shiite Islamists to kill American soldiers and civilians in Lebanon in the 1980s, but was nonetheless rewarded by Baker and President George H.W. Bush with a blank check for total hegemony over Lebanon in 1990. What Baker can't understand, or won't, is that the Syrian regime survives thanks to the instability of its neighbors. A peaceful Iraq threatens to make Syria, its intelligence services, and the artificial state of insecurity the regime has created to sustain itself, superfluous. Bashar Assad won't feel any compulsion to do the US favors as it prepares to exit from Iraq.

But don't expect Baker to care by then. His brief is to find an "honorable" way for American soldiers to pull out; what comes afterward is no longer in his hands. It's best to wait before judging the final Iraq Study Group report, and Baker is too much of a calculator to cross Bush. But what he ends up writing will be an American document for Americans. Pity the Iraqis if they are once again secondary in deciding their own fate.

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.

Gideon Levy for next Israel Prime Minister

2006-10-11T12:04:00.000-05:00

Gideon Levy is AWESOME. Check the last paragraph of the article. it's my favorite :)

The mystery of America
By Gideon Levy

It happens once every few months. Like a periodic visit by an especially annoying relative from
overseas, Condoleezza Rice was here again. The same declarations, the same texts devoid of content, the
same sycophancy, the same official aircraft heading back to where it came from. The results were also the
same: Israel promised in December, after a stormy night of discussions, to open the "safe passage"
between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This time, in what was considered the "achievement" of the
current visit, Israel also promised to open the Karni crossing. Karni will be open, one can assume, only
slightly more than the "safe passage," which never opened following the previous futile visit.

Rice has been here six times in the course of a year and a half, and what has come of it? Has anyone asked
her about this? Does she ask herself? It is hard to understand how the secretary of state
allows herself to be so humiliated. It is even harder to understand how the superpower she represents allows
itself to act in such a hollow and useless way. The mystery of America remains unsolved: How is it that
the United States is doing nothing to advance a solution to the most dangerous and lengthiest conflict
in our world? How is it that the world's only superpower, which has the power to quickly facilitate
a solution, does not lift a finger to promote it?

What happened since 1956, when the U.S. made Israel withdraw from Sinai overnight with a single telephone
call, immediately after the "Third Kingdom of Israel" speech by the strongest Israeli leader of all times,
David Ben-Gurion? Now, as the occupation continues for years, with a government no less dependent on the good
graces of the U.S. than in the past, why is America a bystander?

Countless trips by presidents and secretaries of state, peace initiatives and peace plans aplenty, from
the Roger's Plan to the Road Map, via "reassessment," fruitless talks and flowery declarations, pressure and
promises, discussions and decisions - and nothing has happened. And in the background, a fundamental
question echoes, without a response: Is America at all interested in bringing about a solution in the Middle
East? Is it possible that it does not understand how crucial it is to end the conflict?

As things appear, America can and does not want to. No government in Israel, and surely not the most
recent ones, which are terrified of the American administration, would stand up to a firm American
demand to bring the occupation to an end. But there has never been an American president who wanted to put
an end to the occupation. Does America not understand that without ending the occupation there will be no
peace? Peace in the region would deliver a greater blow to world terrorism than any war America has
pursued, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Does America not understand this? Can all this be attributed to the
omnipotent Jewish lobby, which causes Israel more harm than good?

The declared aim of U.S. policy in the Middle East is to bring democracy to the region. For this reason,
ostensibly, the U.S. also went to war in Iraq. Even if one ignores the hypocrisy, self-righteousness and
double-standard of the Bush administration, which supports quite a few despotic regimes, one should ask
the great seeker of democracy: Have your eyes failed to see that the most undemocratic and brutal regime in
the region is the Israeli occupation in the territories? And how does the White House reconcile
the contradiction between the aspiration to instill democracy in the peoples of the region and the boycott
of the Hamas government, which was chosen in democratic elections as America wanted and preached?

The U.S. also speaks loftily about peace. At the same time, its president warns Israel against any attempt
to forge peace with Syria. Here America is taking a stance that not only fails to advance an accord but
even undermines it. Ever since it began to give Israel a free hand to impose the brutal occupation in the
territories, it has become a party that bequeaths undemocratic values to the entire world. Where are the
days when there was still concern in Jerusalem about the U.S. reaction before each military operation?
Israel then thought twice before every liquidation and each arrest. Every demolition of a Palestinian home
and each nocturnal groundbreaking of a settlement raised fears about how Uncle Sam would react. And now
- carte blanche. There is a blank check for every belligerent action by Israel. Should this also be
called an effort for peace, for democracy?

The recent years have not been good for America. From "the leader of the free world," it has become detested
by the world. Not only do South Africa, Asia and Africa feel strong animosity toward it, most of the
public opinion in Europe has also turned away from it. Is anyone in the administration asking why the world
loves so much to hate America? And what implications will this growing global feeling have on the strength
of the U.S. in the years ahead? Can the dollar, the Tomahawk and the F-16 provide an answer for
everything?

In the Middle East, the U.S. has an opportunity to fundamentally change its image, from a warmonger to a
peacemaker. And how does the U.S. respond to the challenge? It sends Rice to tell the excited Ehud
Olmert how she falls asleep easily on her unnecessary and ridiculous flights to and from the Middle East.

The Holocaust's Arab Heroes

2006-10-11T10:44:00.000-05:00

By Robert Satloff
October 8, 2006; B01

Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently told an interviewer that he doesn't have "any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed." And Hamas's official Web site labels the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews "an alleged and invented story with no basis."

Such Arab viewpoints are not exceptional. A respected Holocaust research institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers. The records of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum show that only one Arab leader at or near the highest level of government -- a young prince from a Persian Gulf state -- has ever made an official visit to the museum in its 13-year history. Not a single official textbook or educational program on the Holocaust exists in an Arab country. In Arab media, literature and popular culture, Holocaust denial is pervasive and legitimized.

Yet when Arab leaders and their people deny the Holocaust, they deny their own history as well -- the lost history of the Holocaust in Arab lands. It took me four years of research -- scouring dozens of archives and conducting scores of interviews in 11 countries -- to unearth this history, one that reveals complicity and indifference on the part of some Arabs during the Holocaust, but also heroism on the part of others who took great risks to save Jewish lives.

Neither Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to Holocaust victims, nor any other Holocaust memorial has ever recognized an Arab rescuer. It is time for that to change. It is also time for Arabs to recall and embrace these episodes in their history. That may not change the minds of the most radical Arab leaders or populations, but for some it could make the Holocaust a source of pride, worthy of remembrance -- rather than avoidance or denial.

The Holocaust was an Arab story, too. From the beginning of World War II, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews extended throughout the area that Germany and its allies hoped to conquer. That included a great Arab expanse, from Casablanca to Tripoli and on to Cairo, home to more than half a million Jews.

Though Germany and its allies controlled this region only briefly, they made substantial headway toward their goal. From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only laws depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood, residence and free movement, but also torture, slave labor, deportation and execution.
There were no death camps, but many thousands of Jews were consigned to more than 100 brutal labor camps, many solely for Jews. Recall Maj. Strasser's warning to Ilsa, the wife of the Czech underground leader, in the 1942 film "Casablanca": "It is possible the French authorities will find a reason to put him in the concentration camp here." Indeed, the Arab lands of Algeria and Morocco were the site of the first concentration camps ever liberated by Allied troops.
About 1 percent of Jews in North Africa (4,000 to 5,000) perished under Axis control in Arab lands, compared with more than half of European Jews. These Jews were lucky to be on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, where the fighting ended relatively early and where boats -- not just cattle cars -- would have been needed to take them to the ovens in Europe. But if U.S. and British troops had not pushed Axis forces from the African continent by May 1943, the Jews of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and perhaps even Egypt and Palestine almost certainly would have met the same fate as those in Europe.

The Arabs in these lands were not too different from Europeans: With war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing; many participated fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; and a brave few even helped save Jews.

Arab collaborators were everywhere. These included Arab officials conniving against Jews at royal courts, Arab overseers of Jewish work gangs, sadistic Arab guards at Jewish labor camps and Arab interpreters who went house to house with SS officers pointing out where Jews lived. Without the help of local Arabs, the persecution of Jews would have been virtually impossible.
Were Arabs, then under the domination of European colonialists, merely following orders? An interviewer once posed that question to Harry Alexander, a Jew from Leipzig, Germany, who survived a notoriously harsh French labor camp at Djelfa, in the Algerian desert. "No, no, no!" he exploded in reply. "Nobody told them to beat us all the time. Nobody told them to chain us together. Nobody told them to tie us naked to a post and beat us and to hang us by our arms and hose us down, to bury us in the sand so our heads should look up and bash our brains in and urinate on our heads. . . . No, they took this into their own hands and they enjoyed what they did."

But not all Arabs joined with the European-spawned campaign against the Jews. The few who risked their lives to save Jews provide inspiration beyond their numbers.
Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews' valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, "The Arabs watched over the Jews."

I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the predations of a German officer bent on rape.

And there is strong evidence that the most influential Arab in Europe -- Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris -- saved as many as 100 Jews by having the mosque's administrative personnel give them certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. These men, and others, were true heroes.

According to the Koran: "Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world." This passage echoes the Talmud's injunction, "If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world."
Arabs need to hear these stories -- both of heroes and of villains. They especially need to hear them from their own teachers, preachers and leaders. If they do, they may respond as did that one Arab prince who visited the Holocaust museum. "What we saw today," he commented after his tour, "must help us change evil into good and hate into love and war into peace."

rsatloff@washingtoninstitute.org

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is author of "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands" (PublicAffairs).

Back again

2006-09-25T23:59:00.000-05:00

I know I disappeared but I'm back now. I had so much work, I didn't have time to sleep. This past weekend, I tired to recover, so I slept for about 12 hrs/day. GREAT! I still have a lot of work to do, as always, but also I have to put a plan for my life. I have to start acting to put my future together instead of only reacting to work. A plan should be ready in the very near future, like tomorrow.

It's 1 in the morning, time to go to sleep, but I'm still waiting for my brother to come online so we can talk. It seems he didn't wake up yet. But my other friends in Lebanon are awake and I'm talking to them. There's always someone to talk to. Now the favorite subject is when did you start fasting?

Well in the wonderful world of Ramadan, the majority of the Sunnis started fasting on Saturday, a minority of Sunnis and Shias fasted on Sunday, and the majority of Shias considered Monday as the first day of Ramadan. I, personally, started fasting on Friday, maybe to keep the Druze company.

And still in the same state of confusion regarding the beginning of Ramadan, I would like to wish everybody a Merry Ramadan and a Happy Iftar :)

Peace and love

When will the world WAKE UP?

2006-09-19T15:00:00.000-05:00

Gaza’s human calamity

By Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson
The Daily Star-Egypt
September 18, 2006

While the world’s gaze remains focused on Lebanon, less than 200 km south in Gaza, there is a human time bomb is ticking away. Some 1.4 million people in Gaza – more than half of them children – are packed inside one of the world’s most densely populated areas with no freedom of movement and no place to run, no place to hide. With access virtually cut off since late June, poverty, unemployment, shortages and desperation in Gaza are mounting. Sadly, what is most needed in Gaza today is precisely what is most lacking: hope.

Earlier in September, 35 nations, joined by the UN, Red Cross movement and non-governmental organizations, met in Stockholm to help restore some small measure of hope for the people of Gaza. Donor nations pledged an additional $116 million for urgent humanitarian needs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with half of that going toward the UN’s $384 million appeal. While we commend donors for this step forward, the people of Gaza need much more – and soon. The UN’s humanitarian appeal is still 42 percent unfunded despite warnings of a rapidly worsening situation that could push many families in Gaza over the brink.
Since the Israeli operation “Summer Rain” began in late June in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldier, one Israeli soldier has been killed. During that same time, 235 Palestinians have been killed, 46 of whom were children. Every loss of life must be deplored. But there can be no doubt that the response, measured in the loss of civilian lives, is disproportionate. For Palestinians and Israelis alike, the consequences of this summer’s fighting are as lethal as they are corrosive to prospects for peace in this troubled region.

Air, sea and land access has been virtually cut off in Gaza. Movement of goods and people has come to a near stand-still. Power and water supplies, crippled by an Israeli Defense Force strike on the main power plant, are erratic and insufficient. Key civilian infrastructure has been crippled. Gaza today remains reliant on external sources of food and commercial supplies. Health conditions are deteriorating as supplies of clean water remain in short supply. As the Palestinian economy continues in a free fall, we can expect humanitarian conditions to worsen further.

Imagine you are a mother or father in Gaza, living in an area less than one-fourth the size of Greater London (1,620 sq kilometers) with a population the size of Leeds (1.49 million) You cannot leave this small territory, and you cannot import or export goods. Your children live in constant fear of violence. Shortages of basic provisions, including water, increase the possibility of communicable disease outbreaks and add further strain to daily life. Every day, up to 185 artillery shells rain down on your territory. Every night, you see rockets shot off indiscriminately into Israel by militant groups. You know that when retaliation comes, you and your family may not be spared the effects. Now imagine you live in Israel every night, the rockets come crashing down. Armed groups continually undermine the very idea of your country, your daily life and your existence.

We believe it is in neither side’s interest to have violence prevail in Gaza and the West Bank, situated at the crossroads of so many of the world’s great cultures and religions.
To help defuse the ticking time bomb in Gaza, we need immediate action on three fronts: humanitarian, economic and political.

First, civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected by all parties. We call upon the Israeli Government as the Occupying Power, the Palestinian Authority and all armed groups to uphold their responsibilities under international law.

Along with a cessation of hostilities, there must also be freedom of movement for civilians and humanitarian workers. For the population of Gaza, the perception of being trapped, of living in a cage, is intolerable, and fuels further desperation and despair. The Agreement on Movement and Access of Nov. 15 2005 must now be fully implemented.

Freedom of movement is also essential for aid workers to reach those in need throughout Gaza and the West Bank. The Karni Crossing, the main crossing point between Israel and Gaza, should be made a no-conflict, protected zone, open to the flow of essential goods for the Palestinian population. An independent third-party could be appointed to monitor this zone in order to address Israel’s legitimate security concerns. With the majority of Gaza’s population dependent on external aid for basic survival, unimpeded humanitarian access a matter of life or death.

On the economic front, we call on Israeli authorities to release the approximately $500 million in Palestinian tax and customs revenues they have withheld. These funds are urgently needed to meet humanitarian and economic needs.

But money alone is not the answer, of course, nor are humanitarian plasters [band-aids] on an open wound. In the end, only a return to the peace process and a durable, two-state political solution can bring hope and healing to this troubled area. The need is urgent. The time is now. It is a matter of solidarity, and a matter of security for us all.

Jan Egeland is the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Jan Eliasson is the Foreign Minister of Sweden and the former UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs (1992–94).

Quarter Century!

2006-09-14T23:02:00.000-05:00

Gee!!!!!! I'm 25....

Creative Ways for a Ceasefire

2006-09-14T08:50:00.000-05:00

When rockets and phosphorous cluster
By Meron Rapoport
Ha'aretz

"In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs, what we did there was crazy and monstrous," testifies a commander in the Israel Defense Forces' MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) unit. Quoting his battalion commander, he said the IDF fired some 1,800 cluster rockets on Lebanon during the war and they contained over 1.2 million cluster bombs. The IDF also used cluster shells fired by 155 mm artillery cannons, so the number of cluster bombs fired on Lebanon is even higher. At the same time, soldiers in the artillery corps testified that the IDF used phosphorous shells, which many experts say is prohibited by international law. According to the claims, the overwhelming majority of the weapons mentioned were fired during the last ten days of the war. The commander asserted that there was massive use of MLRS rockets despite the fact that they are known to be very inaccurate - the rockets' deviation from the target reaches to around 1,200 meters - and that a substantial percentage do not explode and become mines. Due to these facts, most experts view cluster ammunitions as a "non-discerning" weapon that is prohibited for use in a civilian environment. The percentage of duds among the rockets fired by the U.S. army in Iraq reached 30 percent and the United Nations' land mine removal team in Lebanon claims that the percentage of duds among the rockets fired by the IDF reaches some 40 percent. In light of these figures, the number of duds left behind by the Israeli cluster rockets in Lebanon is likely to reach half a million. According to the commander, in order to compensate for the rockets' imprecision, the order was to "flood" the area with them. "We have no option of striking an isolated target, and the commanders know this very well," he said. He also stated that the reserve soldiers were surprised by the use of MLRS rockets, because during their regular army service, they were told these are the IDF's "judgment day weapons" and intended for use in a full-scale war.

The commander also said that at least in one case, they were asked to fire cluster rockets toward "a village's outskirts" in the early morning: "They told us that this is a good time because people are coming out of the mosques and the rockets would deter them." In other cases, they fired the rockets at a range of less than 15 kilometers, even though the manufacturer's guidelines state that firing at this range considerably increases the number of duds. The commander further related that during IDF training exercises hardly any live rockets are fired, for fear that they would leave duds behind and fill the IDF's firing grounds with mines. After being discharged from his reserve duty, the commander sent a letter to Defense Minister Amir Peretz and protested the number of cluster rockets fired in Lebanon, which "perhaps the generals forgot to mention." "As far as the duds are concerned," he wrote, "we have no control over who is hurt. Sooner or later they will explode in people's hands." He has yet to receive a response from the defense minister.

At the same time, soldiers are reporting that they fired phosphorous shells, which are supposed to be used by the IDF for marking or setting fire to areas, in order to start fires in Lebanon. The artillery commander says he saw trucks with phosphorous shells en route to artillery batteries in the North. A direct hit from a phosphorous shell causes severe burns and a painful death. Around a year ago, there was an international scandal after a television crew presented harsh pictures of the charred bodies of Iraqis injured by phosphorous bombs during the course of the American attack on the city of Fallujah. International law prohibits the use of weapons that cause "excessive damage and unnecessary suffering," and many experts feel that phosphorous is included in this category. The International Red Cross determined that international law prohibits the use of phosphorous against humans. The American "Book of War," published in 1999, which sets down the rules of war for the American army, states: "The ground war law prohibits the use of phosphorous against human targets." The pact on prohibiting or limiting flammable weapons bans the use of phosphorous against civilian targets and against military targets found amid large civil populations.

The IDF Spokesperson said: "International law does not contain a sweeping ban on the use of cluster bombs. The Conventional Weapons Pact does not stipulate a ban on the use of inflammatory weapons (i.e., phosphorous - M.R.), rather it only offers rules for organizing the use of this weapon. For understandable operational reasons, the IDF will not comment on a detailed listing of the weaponry at its disposal. The IDF uses only methods and weapons that are permitted according to international law. The firing of artillery in general, including the firing of artillery to demolish a target, was initiated in response to firing at the State of Israel only." The defense minister's bureau said in response that it had yet to receive an inquiry on the matter of firing cluster rockets.

Birthday Cards

2006-09-09T21:54:00.000-05:00

All day, I've been wondering about this stupid person who created the birthday cards showing the person going off the hill to say that he/she is older now!
It's not my fear of growing older that is speaking, but it's more the stupid meaning behind this card. Needless to say, I have sent this card to so many people, I even lost counting.
If you're wondering who sent me this card today, well get some rest, because no one sent it to me, I was just wondering about life and I remembered this kind of cards.
What intrigued about the card today that it doesn't have another uphill, as if the person's life is on its way to end. Does this mean that after a certain age, you just sit and wait for your death? What if one day, when you're on this downhill you discover that you lead your life in another direction that you intended to; does the downhill mean, you can't start all over again, and you should just get a bottle of beer—diet pepsi in my case—and sit in front of the TV and wait for Seth—I was watching City of Angels—to come and take my spirit? Is it true that after a certain age, we're only bodies moving waiting for death? Or we can always bring change to our lives? How can we know that there's always an uphill, and life is not only about downhills?
I kindly ask birthday card designers to take into consideration the psychological aspects of the person receiving the card. Isn't hope one of the driving forces in our lives? Then why the $%&# it is not apparent on this stupid card!!!!!!!!!!!

What happens when you kill a hundred innocent civilians?

2006-09-04T12:56:00.000-05:00

Well said...

Lebanon, Lebanon,
John Le Carre
Open Democracy
August 29, 2006

So answer me this one, please. If you kill a hundred innocent civilians and one terrorist, are you winning or losing the war on terror? "Ah", you may reply, "but that one terrorist could kill two hundred people, a thousand, more!" But then comes another question: if, by killing a hundred innocent people, you are creating five new terrorists in the future, and a popular base clamouring to give them aid and comfort, have you achieved a net gain for future generations of your countrymen, or created the enemy you deserve?

To read the whole article click here

Their View of the World is Through a Bombsight

2006-09-03T16:15:00.000-05:00

We need more Chomskys in this world...

Their View of the World is Through a BombsightAmerican support for Israel's unwinnable aim of destroying Hizbullah only boosts its support in Lebanon and beyond
By Noam Chomsky
Published on Friday, September 1, 2006 by the Guardian/UK

In Lebanon, a little-honored truce remains in effect - yet another in a decades-long series of ceasefires between Israel and its adversaries in a cycle that, as if inevitably, returns to warfare, carnage and human misery. Let's describe the current crisis for what it is: a US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with only a cynical pretense to legitimacy. Amid all the charges and counter-charges, the most immediate factor behind the assault is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is hardly the first time that Israel has invaded Lebanon to eliminate an alleged threat. The most important of the US-backed Israeli invasions of Lebanon, in 1982, was widely described in Israel as a war for the West Bank. It was undertaken to end the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's annoying calls for a diplomatic settlement. Despite many different circumstances, the July invasion falls into the same pattern.

What would break the cycle? The basic outlines of a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict have been supported by a broad international consensus for 30 years: a two-state settlement on the international border, perhaps with minor and mutual adjustments.

The Arab states formally accepted this proposal in 2002, as the Palestinians had long before. Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has made it clear that though this solution is not Hizbullah's preference, they will not disrupt it. Iran's "supreme leader" Ayatollah Khamenei recently reaffirmed that Iran too supports this settlement. Hamas has indicated clearly that it is prepared to negotiate for a settlement in these terms as well.

The US and Israel continue to block this political settlement, as they have done for 30 years, with brief and inconsequential exceptions. Denial may be preferred at home, but the victims do not enjoy that luxury.

US-Israeli rejectionism is not only in words but, more importantly, in actions. With decisive US backing, Israel has been formalizing its program of annexation, dismemberment of shrinking Palestinian territories and imprisonment of what remains by taking over the Jordan valley - the "convergence" program that is, astonishingly, called "courageous withdrawal" in the US.

In consequence, the Palestinians are facing national destruction. The most meaningful support for Palestine is from Hizbullah, which was formed in reaction to the 1982 invasion. It won considerable prestige by leading the effort to force Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Also, like other Islamic movements including Hamas, Hizbullah has gained popular support by providing social services to the poor. To US and Israeli planners it therefore follows that Hizbullah must be severely weakened or destroyed, just as the PLO had to be evicted from Lebanon in 1982. But Hizbullah is so deeply embedded in society that it cannot be eradicated without destroying much of Lebanon as well. Hence the scale of the attack on the country's population and infrastructure.

In keeping with a familiar pattern, the aggression is sharply increasing the support for Hizbullah, not only in the Arab and Muslim worlds beyond, but also in Lebanon itself. Late last month, polls revealed that 87% of Lebanese support Hizbullah's resistance against the invasion, including 80% of Christians and Druze. Even the Maronite Catholic patriarch, the spiritual leader of the most pro-western sector in Lebanon, joined Sunni and Shia religious leaders in a statement condemning the "aggression" and hailing "the resistance, mainly led by Hizbullah". The poll also found that 90% of Lebanese regard the US as "complicit in Israel's war crimes against the Lebanese people".

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Lebanon's leading academic scholar on Hizbullah, observes that "these findings are all the more significant when compared to the results of a similar survey conducted just five months ago, which showed that only 58% of all Lebanese believed Hizbullah had the right to remain armed, and hence continue its resistance activity". The dynamics are familiar. Rami Khouri, an editor of Lebanon's Daily Star, writes that "the Lebanese and Palestinians have responded to Israel's persistent and increasingly savage attacks against entire civilian populations by creating parallel or alternative leaderships that can protect them and deliver essential services". Such popular forces will only gain in power and become more extremist if the US and Israel persist in demolishing any hope of Palestinian national rights, and in destroying Lebanon.Even King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Washington's oldest ally in the region, was compelled to say: "If the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance, then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire."

It is no secret that Israel has helped to destroy secular Arab nationalism and to create Hizbullah and Hamas, just as US violence has expedited the rise of extremist Islamic fundamentalism and jihadi terror. The latest adventure is likely to create new generations of bitter and angry jihadis, just as the invasion of Iraq did. Israeli writer Uri Avnery observed that the Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz, a former air force commander, "views the world below through a bombsight". Much the same is true of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and other top Bush administration planners. As history reveals, that view of the world is not uncommon among those who wield most of the means of violence. Saad-Ghorayeb describes the current violence in "apocalyptic terms", warning that possibly "all hell would be let loose" if the outcome of the US-Israel campaign leaves a situation in which "the Shia community is seething with resentment at Israel, the US and the government that it perceives as its betrayer".

The core issue - the Israel-Palestine conflict - can be settled by diplomacy, if the US and Israel abandon their rejectionist commitments. Other outstanding problems in the region are also susceptible to negotiation and diplomacy. Their success can never be guaranteed. But we can be reasonably confident that viewing the world through a bombsight will bring further misery and suffering, perhaps even in "apocalyptic terms".

Growing up!

2006-09-02T18:22:00.000-05:00

On September 15, I will be 25. I prefer to say quarter of a century. It's a weird feeling I have: this struggle between growing older while the child deep down inside of me wanting to persist.

How would 25 be different than 24 or 23 or even 18? I think what changes is the pressure and the stress levels. When I was a kid, I had million questions that I used to ask my mom, sisters, and brothers. And the only answer I used to get was you will understand when you grow up, or, you will know when you grow up. They lied to me!

I did grow up, and my questions were not answered, my questions doubled and tripled. I miss the kid in me who dreamt about the grown-ups' "fantasy world" thinking it's the land of answers. This kid did not know how self destructive and masochists grown ups are.

I think when we grow up and find no answers, we discover that no matter how old we are, we will always be small, miniature, and insignificant. From this point on, our lives will always be enveloped with fear and anguish. Security and safety will soon become dreams of the past. Being powerless is the nightmare that will always haunt us.

Then what do we do to rationalize our feelings? We shut down everything and everyone that make us remember the uneasy feelings. We become selfish, we look for the "I" and no more the "WE", because "I" want to be powerful. Most importantly we learn to be loners, because we are scared to let others know that we are powerless.

What a sad specie we are! From the life's teachings we take selfishness, snobbism, narcissism, and carelessness. We don't ask ourselves why we learned these qualities or why we are rationalizing ourselves in a certain way. We are scared of more questions because we proved to be powerless in answering previous questions.

And here we are, we grow up to be obnoxious people! But, I don't want to be obnoxious….

Politcal Compass

2006-08-29T16:02:00.000-05:00

I found this site of a politicalcompass where one can answer a questionnaire to analyze one's own politcal affiliation. It's pretty cool in making the distinction between the classical and neo libertarians and left and right authoritarian regimes. Also, it elaborates the relation between fascism, communism, anarchism, and neo-liberalism.

On the other hand, it reduced politics into 2 dimensions: social and economic which is a very fair and naive representation since our current politics are multi-dimensional. The era of black and white disappeared with the rapid increase of globalization.

This is said, I think it is really interesting to do the questionnair and discover what you are. If you want to know what I got, check my result.

Broken Glass, Broken Hearts, Broken Lives...

2006-08-26T15:38:00.000-05:00

Once again, I broke another cup!

In the past month, I managed to break 5 cups and a Pyrex. This last cup I broke today was my favorite by far. Knitting Ninja got it for me from the American Chemistry Association. It is so cool and I BROKE IT!

Well, breaking stuff isn't the only disastrous thing I've done last month. I have managed to run away from people and not hang out, unless there is a demonstration or a fundraiser for Lebanon; I've had over 30hours/week of CSI, Jon Stuart, and Sex and the City; I have been blessed with a nightmare every other night-and the problem is I can't remember my nightmares when I wake up; and the best thing is that I started thinking about writing my will! So I'm wondering what I should leave for my best friends and what did people ask from me in the past-if you have anything specific you want, please let me know.
On Thursday, I was so scared of myself. I happen to work on the 10th Fl and I have a big window in my office. I stood in front of my window for 10 min wondering what will happen if I just jumped. People say that I will die, but I want to know what happens afterwards. I want a peek! But then realized there are 2 things that stop me from doing this: (1) my mom and (2) Salto report that I should be submitting in September because none of the other trainers will be paid if I don't submit it.

People might say that this is suicide; but for me it's not. I'm looking for answers because the only thing I have is questions.
- Why is this world full of hatred, wars, and killing?
- Is there anything better waiting for us after death? Or this is as good as it gets?
- I didn't choose to come to this life, then why do I have to live it?
- How can I stop this pain in my heart whenever I see a kid suffering from imperialistic states' policies?
- Is there any chance to make this world a better place to be in?
- Is there an extra-terrestrial life? (this is by far my favorite question)

This is said, I am trying to look for driving forces to keep my feet on this earth. It is not a matter of hope, it is more of not knowing the reasons why I am here and what I can do. I listen to the news, and the only things that are reported are catastrophes, disasters, deaths, wars, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear weapons… maybe there should be news only reporting happy issues. I would love to list some examples of happy news but it seems I forgot what it is like.

I am looking for ways where I can be an effective agent of change, but at the same time I'm not sure people are ready to accept change. I look around me and I see people opting for reality denial in pursuit of happiness. As if you either choose the red pill or the blue pill—a la Matrix.

But my big question is, are people really happy? Are they happy feeling lonely most of the time; eating dinner by themselves, fooling around from time to time and every time it is with a different person; watching senseless shows on TV, one after the other; finishing a bottle of wine to keep the denial push present; and considering their computers, blackberries, IPod, or cell phones as their best friends??? If this is the recipe for happiness, please let me know, because in my dictionary happiness has another definition. Maybe my dictionary has a printing mistake!

Good interview

2006-08-21T15:10:00.000-05:00

Below, in an interview I received that was published in the American Conservative!!!!! Surprisingly, the interview is GREAT!!!! So I think the book should be great too. I will add it to the never ending list. Sometimes, I wonder if I can have a job where I can only read books I like, hehe :)

July 18, 2005 IssueCopyright © 2005 The American Conservative
The Logic of Suicide Terrorism
It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism
Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice. Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration’s current strategy. Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.
The American Conservative: Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?
Robert Pape: Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others—so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.
This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.
TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?
RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.
RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.
Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.
TAC: If we were to back up a little bit before the invasion of Iraq to what happened before 9/11, what was the nature of the agitprop that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were putting out to attract people?
RP: Osama bin Laden’s speeches and sermons run 40 and 50 pages long. They begin by calling tremendous attention to the presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
In 1996, he went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States—that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.
TAC: The fact that we had troops stationed on the Arabian Peninsula was not a very live issue in American debate at all. How many Saudis and other people in the Gulf were conscious of it?
RP: We would like to think that if we could keep a low profile with our troops that it would be okay to station them in foreign countries. The truth is, we did keep a fairly low profile. We did try to keep them away from Saudi society in general, but the key issue with American troops is their actual combat power. Tens of thousands of American combat troops, married with air power, is a tremendously powerful tool.
Now, of course, today we have 150,000 troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and we are more in control of the Arabian Peninsula than ever before.
TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?
RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.
Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.
TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?
RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.
TAC: Do we know who is committing suicide terrorism in Iraq? Are they primarily Iraqis or walk-ins from other countries in the region?
RP: Our best information at the moment is that the Iraqi suicide terrorists are coming from two groups—Iraqi Sunnis and Saudis—the two populations most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of large American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula. This is perfectly consistent with the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.
TAC: Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to launch attacks on the United States, or are they too tied down in Iraq? Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?
RP: Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in order to try to split the coalition.
What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim: Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.
That is exactly what happened. Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger.
TAC: What would constitute a victory in the War on Terror or at least an improvement in the American situation?
RP: For us, victory means not sacrificing any of our vital interests while also not having Americans vulnerable to suicide-terrorist attacks. In the case of the Persian Gulf, that means we should pursue a strategy that secures our interest in oil but does not encourage the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less. We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged.
That strategy, called “offshore balancing,” worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists.
TAC: Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders also talked about the “Crusaders-Zionist alliance,” and I wonder if that, even if we weren’t in Iraq, would not foster suicide terrorism. Even if the policy had helped bring about a Palestinian state, I don’t think that would appease the more hardcore opponents of Israel.
RP: I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn’t occurred. Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community. That is true not only in places such as Lebanon and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka, where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu Tamils.
When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways. Now, that still requires the occupier to be there. Absent the presence of foreign troops, Osama bin Laden could make his arguments but there wouldn’t be much reality behind them. The reason that it is so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.
TAC: Has the next generation of anti-American suicide terrorists already been created? Is it too late to wind this down, even assuming your analysis is correct and we could de-occupy Iraq?
RP: Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime.
In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn’t completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.
This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn’t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.
TAC: There have been many kinds of non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide terrorists?
RP: Not from Christian groups per se, but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists. Three were Christians.
TAC: Has the IRA used suicide terrorism?
RP: The IRA did not. There were IRA members willing to commit suicide—the famous hunger strike was in 1981. What is missing in the IRA case is not the willingness to commit suicide, to kill themselves, but the lack of a suicide-terrorist attack where they try to kill others.
If you look at the pattern of violence in the IRA, almost all of the killing is front-loaded to the 1970s and then trails off rather dramatically as you get through the mid-1980s through the 1990s. There is a good reason for that, which is that the British government, starting in the mid-1980s, began to make numerous concessions to the IRA on the basis of its ordinary violence. In fact, there were secret negotiations in the 1980s, which then led to public negotiations, which then led to the Good Friday Accords. If you look at the pattern of the IRA, this is a case where they actually got virtually everything that they wanted through ordinary violence.
The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is not to die. It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society in order to compel that target society to put pressure on its government to change policy. If the government is already changing policy, then the whole point of suicide terrorism, at least the way it has been used for the last 25 years, doesn’t come up.
TAC: Are you aware of any different strategic decision made by al-Qaeda to change from attacking American troops or ships stationed at or near the Gulf to attacking American civilians in the United States?
RP: I wish I could say yes because that would then make the people reading this a lot more comfortable.
The fact is not only in the case of al-Qaeda, but in suicide-terrorist campaigns in general, we don’t see much evidence that suicide-terrorist groups adhere to a norm of attacking military targets in some circumstances and civilians in others.
In fact, we often see that suicide-terrorist groups routinely attack both civilian and military targets, and often the military targets are off-duty policemen who are unsuspecting. They are not really prepared for battle.
The reasons for the target selection of suicide terrorists appear to be much more based on operational rather than normative criteria. They appear to be looking for the targets where they can maximize the number of casualties.
In the case of the West Bank, for instance, there is a pattern where Hamas and Islamic Jihad use ordinary guerrilla attacks, not suicide attacks, mainly to attack settlers. They use suicide attacks to penetrate into Israel proper. Over 75 percent of all the suicide attacks in the second Intifada were against Israel proper and only 25 percent on the West Bank itself.
TAC: What do you think the chances are of a weapon of mass destruction being used in an American city?
RP: I think it depends not exclusively, but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf. The central motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops. The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological attack.

Reality is harsh

2006-08-03T09:50:00.000-05:00

22 days ago, after Hizbullah kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers, injured 5, and destroyed an Israeli tank, the Israeli government declared the war on Hizbullah to disarm it and dismantle its military base in order to have security in Northern Israel. This war, apparently launched against Hizbullah, but in essence launched against Lebanon and the popular support of Hizbullah-a clear fact especially in Dan Haluz speech on July 12, 2006 when he declared this war will take Lebanon 20 years back- has brought more pride and support for Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Arab world, while it weakened the military status of Israel in the world. Israel is the 6th most powerful military entity in the world, but after 22 days of fighting, it still cannot bring Hizbullah to stop firing rockets on the Northern side of Israel.

Ehud Olmert, Isarel's PM, declared that he will not stop this war until Israel is the winner, but it is a little bit too late to say so. Israel already lost, and Hizbullah won. Israel was not able with all its force to put an end to a non state military group, while Hizbullah showed that it can stand against Israel, something no other Arab country was courageous enough to do in the past 3 decades.

Where to go from here? This is a deadlock! The party that already lost is celebrating its upcoming victory and the party that won cannot be a winner because it is a labelled as a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, in Lebanon and Israel, there are hundreds of deads (around 50 in Israel and around 900 in lebanon), hundreds of thousands of displaced people (900,000 in Lebanon), and high levels of hatred that no future peace agreement can eliminate.

This is an article from Ha'aretz that basically illustrate my point of view.

Ha'aretz
The most unsuccessful war
By Ze'ev Sternhell
August 3rd, 2006

No situation can continue to exist for long without an ideological reason. That's how when once it was clear that it was not achieving its aims, an unsuccessful military campaign was upgraded with the wave of a magic wand to the level of a war of survival. When everyone understood that a moral reason had to be found both for the dimensions of the destruction sowed in Lebanon and the killing of the civilian population there, and for the Israeli dead and wounded (nobody is even talking about the exposure of the entire civilian population in the North of Israel to enemy fire while people are kept in disgraceful conditions in bomb shelters), a war of survival was invented, which by nature must be long and exhausting.

That is how a campaign of collective punishment that was begun in haste, without proper judgment and on the basis of incorrect assessments, including promises that the army is incapable of fulfilling, turned into a war of life and death, if not some kind of second War of Independence. In the press there have even been embarrassing comparisons to the struggle against Nazism, comparisons that are not only a crude distortion of history, but disgrace the memory of the Jews who were exterminated.

The architect of this unsuccessful campaign has outdone himself: In order to cover up his failures, he delivered a poor man's pseudo-Churchillian speech, and promised us more "pain, tears and blood." There really is no limit to shamelessness. It must be said in favor of the government spokesmen who are in greatest demand on the foreign stations, from the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman to Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- that none of them has stooped to propaganda of this kind.

At the same time, the campaign's goals have been reduced and shrunk during these three weeks. From restoring Israel's power of deterrence, eliminating Hezbollah, and disarming it immediately -- after three weeks we have arrived at the present goal, which is the dismantling of the forward outposts of Hezbollah and the deployment of an international force to defend the North of Israel from the possibility of a repeat attack. At this point, the average citizen, who is not working day and night in the corridors of power and is not sunning himself near the generals' command rooms, is at a loss. Is this how we are restoring the IDF's power of deterrence? Haven't we accomplished exactly the opposite? Hasn't it become clear to the entire world that our "invincible" air force not only failed for three weeks to end the barrage of rockets, but also even needs an emergency airlift of war materiel, as during the 1973 Yom Kippur War?

Moreover, the ordinary citizen is asking himself another question: If several thousand guerrilla fighters do constitute an existential danger to a country with a strike force and weaponry that are unparalleled in this part of the world, how is it that during the past five or six years we heard nothing to that effect from government leaders? It is true that since 2000 we have not been preoccupied with anything except the Palestinian issue. Hypnotized by the "Palestinian danger," Israel turned its back during the past two years on all national efforts that preceded the disengagement from Gaza, and then the split in the Likud and the establishment of Kadima, as a prologue to the second major campaign, "convergence" behind the separation fence. And when the present government was formed, a national agenda was formulated for the next two, if not four, years, whose main component is fulfillment of the "Sharon legacy": a unilateral drawing of borders in the territories, pulverizing them into cantons and in effect eliminating the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state in them.

This led citizens to understand that this is the issue that will determine Israel's future. The clearest evidence of the national order of priorities is the situation in which the IDF's fighting units find themselves. It was no secret that the army almost stopped training in large units and complex operations, and became totally immersed in the struggle against the Palestinian uprising. When infantry brigades turn into a police force specializing in breaking down doors and walls in refugee camps, or in pursuit of groups of terrorists in olive orchards, when the criterion for the success of a senior officer is the number of wanted men he has managed to catch rather than his operational talents and ability to command large units -- the army deteriorates. I cannot recall that the reserve divisions that were drafted on Yom Kippur in 1973, or the Israelis who returned as individuals from abroad in order to join the fighting, were in need of training and refresher exercises.

Nevertheless, the Agranat Commission of inquiry was established to investigate, among other things, the level of the forces' battle preparedness. The Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War were wars of survival, and through them the IDF was revealed in all its greatness. The present war is the most unsuccessful we have ever had; it is much worse than the first Lebanon War, which at least was properly prepared, and in which, with the exception of gaining control over the Beirut-Damascus highway, the army more or less achieved its goals as determined by then-defense minister Ariel Sharon. It is frightening to think that those who decided to embark on the present war did not even dream of its outcome and its destructive consequences in almost every possible realm, of the political and psychological damage, the serious blow to the government's credibility, and yes -- the killing of children in vain. The cynicism being demonstrated by government spokesmen, official and otherwise, including several military correspondents, in the face of the disaster suffered by the Lebanese, amazes even someone who has long since lost many of his youthful illusions.

It takes TWO to tango

2006-08-02T10:22:00.000-05:00

Like it takes TWO to tango, peace requires all parties involved to talk and negotiate in order to have security. Creating peace unliaterally gives no space for security to exist.

Oren Ben-Dor: Who are the real terrorists in the Middle East? What exactly is being defended? Is it the citizens of Israel or the natureof the Israeli state?

Published: 26 July 2006

As its citizens are being killed, Israel is, yet again, inflicting death and destruction on Lebanon. It tries to portray this horror as necessary for itsself-defence. Indeed, the casual observer might regard the rocket attacks onIsraeli cities such as Haifa and my own home town, Nahariya, as justifying this claim.While states should defend their citizens, states which fail this dutyshould be questioned and, if necessary, reconfigured. Israel is a statewhich, instead of defending its citizens, puts all of them, Jews as well as non-Jews, in danger.What exactly is being defended by the violence in Gaza and Lebanon? Is it the citizens of Israel or the nature of the Israeli state? I suggest thelatter. Israel's statehood is based on an unjust ideology which causes indignity and suffering for those who are classified as non-Jewish by eithera religious or ethnic test.

To hide this primordial immorality, Israelfosters an image of victimhood. Provoking violence, consciously or unconsciously, against which one must defend oneself is a key feature of thevictim-mentality. By perpetuating such a tragic cycle, Israel is a terroriststate like no other.Many who wish to hide the immorality of the Israeli state do so by restricting attention to the horrors of the post-1967 occupation and talkingabout a two-state solution, since endorsing a Palestinian state implicitlyendorses the ideology behind a Jewish one.The very creation of Israel required an act of terror. In 1948, most of the non-Jewish indigenous people were ethnically cleansed from the part ofPalestine which became Israel.

This action was carefully planned. Withoutit, no state with a Jewish majority and character would have been possible. Since 1948, the "Israeli Arabs", those Palestinians who avoided expulsion,have suffered continuous discrimination. Indeed, many have been internallydisplaced, ostensibly for "security reasons", but really to acquire their lands for Jews.Surely Holocaust memory and Jewish longing for Eretz Israel would not besufficient to justify ethnic cleansing and ethnocracy? To avoid thedestabilisation that would result from ethical inquiry, the Israeli state must hide the core problem, by nourishing a victim mentality among IsraeliJews.

To sustain that mentality and to preserve an impression of victimhood amongoutsiders, Israel must breed conditions for violence. Whenever prospects of violence against it subside, Israel must do its utmost to regenerate them:the myth that it is a peace-seeking victim which has "no partner for peace"is a key panel in the screen with which Israel hides its primordial and continuing immorality.Israel's successful campaign to silence criticism of its initial andcontinuing dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians leaves the latter nooption but to resort to violent resistance.

In the wake of electing Hamas - the only party which, in the eyes of Palestinians, has not yet given uptheir cause - the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank weresubjected to an Israeli campaign of starvation, humiliation and violence. The insincere "withdrawal" from Gaza, and the subsequent blockade, ensured achronicle of violence which, so far, includes Palestinian firing of Kasemrockets, the capture of an Israeli soldier and the Israeli near re-occupation of Gaza.

What we witness is more hatred, more violence fromPalestinians, more humiliation and collective punishments from Israelis -all useful reinforcement for the Israeli victim mentality and for the sacred cow status of Israeli statehood.The truth is that there never could have been a partition of Palestine byethically acceptable means. Israel was created through terror and it needsterror to cover-up its core immorality. Whenever there is a glimmer of stability, the state orders a targeted assassination, such as that in Sidonwhich preceded the current Lebanon crisis, knowing well that this brings notsecurity but more violence. Israel's unilateralism and the cycle of violence nourish one another.

Amidst the violence and despite the conventional discourse which hides theroot of this violence, actuality calls upon us to think. The more we silenceits voice, the more violently actuality is sure to speak. In Hebrew, the word elem (a stunned silence resulting from oppression orshock) is etymologically linked to the word almut (violence). Silence about the immoral core of Israeli statehood makes us all complicit in breeding the terrorism that threatens a catastrophe which could tear the world apart.

Interesting artice in Ha'aretz

2006-08-02T10:12:00.000-05:00

We do need more accountability to have justice and peace...

Morality is not on our side
By Ze'ev Maoz

There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards. This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.

Let's start with a few facts. We invaded a sovereign state, and occupied its capital in 1982. In the process of this occupation, we dropped several tons of bombs from the air, ground and sea, while wounding and killing thousands of civilians. Approximately 14,000 civilians were killed between June and September of 1982, according to a conservative estimate. The majority of these civilians had nothing to do with the PLO, which provided the official pretext for the war.

In Operations Accountability and Grapes of Wrath, we caused the mass flight of about 500,000 refugees from southern Lebanon on each occasion. There are no exact data on the number of casualties in these operations, but one can recall that in Operation Grapes of Wrath, we bombed a shelter in the village of Kafr Kana which killed 103 civilians. The bombing may have been accidental, but that did not make the operation any more moral.

On July 28, 1989, we kidnapped Sheikh Obeid, and on May 12, 1994, we kidnapped Mustafa Dirani, who had captured Ron Arad. Israel held these two people and another 20-odd Lebanese detainees without trial, as "negotiating chips." That which is permissible to us is, of course, forbidden to Hezbollah. Hezbollah crossed a border that is recognized by the international community.

That is true. What we are forgetting is that ever since our withdrawal from Lebanon, the Israel Air Force has conducted photo-surveillance sorties on a daily basis in Lebanese airspace. While these flights caused no casualties, border violations are border violations. Here too, morality is not on our side. So much for the history of morality. Now, let's consider current affairs. What exactly is the difference between launching Katyushas into civilian population centers in Israel and the Israel Air Force bombing population centers in south Beirut, Tyre, Sidon and Tripoli? The IDF has fired thousands of shells into south Lebanon villages, alleging that Hezbollah men are concealed among the civilian population. Approximately 25 Israeli civilians have been killed as a result of Katyusha missiles to date. The number of dead in Lebanon, the vast majority comprised of civilians who have nothing to do with Hezbollah, is more than 300.

Worse yet, bombing infrastructure targets such as power stations, bridges and other civil facilities turns the entire Lebanese civilian population into a victim and hostage, even if we are not physically harming civilians. The use of bombings to achieve a diplomatic goal - namely, coercing the Lebanese government into implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559 - is an attempt at political blackmail, and no less than the kidnapping of IDF soldiers by Hezbollah is the aim of bringing about a prisoner exchange.

There is a propaganda aspect to this war, and it involves a competition as to who is more miserable. Each side tries to persuade the world that it is more miserable. As in every propaganda campaign, the use of information is selective, distorted and self-righteous. If we want to base our information (or shall we call it propaganda?) policy on the assumption that the international environment is going to buy the dubious merchandise that we are selling, be it out of ignorance or hypocrisy, then fine.

But in terms of our own national soul searching, we owe ourselves to confront the bitter truth - maybe we will win this conflict on the military field, maybe we will make some diplomatic gains, but on the moral plane, we have no advantage, and we have no special status.

The writer is a professor of political science at Tel Aviv university.

Finally....

2006-08-02T10:02:00.000-05:00

It's time for somebody to stand up and take a stand!!!! Hundreds of people have been dying for the past 21 days and it seems as if everybody took a sleeping pill in order not to comment on this!!! Hellooooooooooooooo, DO SOMETHING! Isn't terrorism the act of killing civilian people, so how come we're shuting up and accepting terrorism while civilians are being killed...
Carter says it right: "The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support."

Stop the Band-Aid TreatmentWe Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace
By Jimmy CarterTuesday, August 1, 2006; A17

The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners. Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israeli soldiers in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004.

This stratagem precipitated the renewed violence that erupted in June when Palestinians dug a tunnel under the barrier that surrounds Gaza and assaulted some Israeli soldiers, killing two and capturing one. They offered to exchange the soldier for the release of 95 women and 313 children who are among almost 10,000 Arabs in Israeli prisons, but this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel. The resulting destruction brought reconciliation between warring Palestinian factions and support for them throughout the Arab world.

Hezbollah militants then killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others, and insisted on Israel's withdrawal from disputed territory and an exchange for some of the several thousand incarcerated Lebanese. With American backing, Israeli bombs and missiles rained down on Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets from Syria and Iran struck northern Israel.
It is inarguable that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks on its citizens, but it is inhumane and counterproductive to punish civilian populations in the illogical hope that somehow they will blame Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking the devastating response. The result instead has been that broad Arab and worldwide support has been rallied for these groups, while condemnation of both Israel and the United States has intensified.
Israel belatedly announced, but did not carry out, a two-day cessation in bombing Lebanon, responding to the global condemnation of an air attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, where 57 civilians were killed this past weekend and where 106 died from the same cause 10 years ago. As before there were expressions of "deep regret," a promise of "immediate investigation" and the explanation that dropped leaflets had warned families in the region to leave their homes. The urgent need in Lebanon is that Israeli attacks stop, the nation's regular military forces control the southern region, Hezbollah cease as a separate fighting force, and future attacks against Israel be prevented. Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms, and release the Lebanese prisoners. Yet yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire.

These are ambitious hopes, but even if the U.N. Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.

Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative "security barrier" that embarrasses Israel's friends and that fails to bring safety or stability.

The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal.

A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.

The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support.

Former president Carter is the founder of the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta.

Urgent Humanitarian Aid for Lebanon

2006-08-02T09:56:00.000-05:00

Dear friends of Lebanon,
As you all know, the violence in the Middle East is intensifying and there is an imminent humanitarian crisis in Lebanon. So far at least 425 people have been killed, half a million people have been displaced, and the numbers are increasing by the minute. Moreover, the country has been under a total blockade for the last week preventing medications and necessary supplies to enter the country. Wounded people are not able to have the necessary treatment, and children and adults are suffering from a shortage of food and water. Nonetheless, there is a dire need to mobilize resources for relief operations in Lebanon. Below are contacts for international and local organizations that are helping Lebanon through this humanitarian crisis. Your help is immensely needed. Please give a hand to you fellow Lebanese through these hard times… At the end of this email, you can find an article published in the Lebanese newspaper “DailyStar” about the relief work in the country. Please circulate,

1- BENEFICIARY: LEBANESE RED CROSS (Lebanon)
BANK NAME: AUDI BANK, BAB IDRISS
ACCOUNT NUMBER: 841500
SWIFT: AUDBLBBX
WEBSITE: http://www.saveleb.org/

2- Beneficiary: Hariri Foundation Lebanon Relief Fund (the money will be wired from the US to Lebanon)
Bank Name: Citibank
8001 Wisconsin Avenue
Bethesda, MD 20814
Account #: 240 70249
ABA#: 254070116

3- Aid for the Lebanese government:
In Dollars:
BENEFICIARY: the Ministry of Finance, Donations and Grants Account (specifying in favor Banque du Liban)
Bank Name: Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Account number 021084694
BIC Code FRNYUS33
Routing Number 021084694

In Euros:

BENEFICIARY: the Ministry of Finance, Donations and Grants Account (specifying in favor Banque du Liban)
Bank Name: Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt
Account number 021084694
BIC code DEUTDEFF

4-Beneficiary: Democratic Left--Rassemblement pour la democratie au liban(RDL)
Bank Name: La Poste -Centre Financier De Paris
ESTABLISHMENT: 30041
Account #: 5159538Z020
IBAN: FR62 3004 1000 0151 5953 8Z02 041
BIC: PSSSTFRPPPAR
Cle RIP: 41

5-Beneficiary: The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections
Account number: 013-004-360-016454-02-5
Swift number: SGLILSBX

Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Humanitarian groups rush to Lebanon's aid amid blockade

By Iman Azzi
Special to The Daily Star

BEIRUT: Humanitarian organizations are fighting to save lives and reduce the damage in Lebanon as Israel's devastating offensive continues. "People need everything. They need food, medicine. Some need blankets. The problem is security on the roads ... Trips that used to take half-an-hour now take four to five hours," said Hicham Hassan, official spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Delegation to Lebanon.

"The Lebanese Red Cross [LRC] is managing to move around but with difficulty."

Since the start of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon last Wednesday, the LRC has dispatched 2,000 Lebanese first aid volunteers concentrated in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and the South.

The LRC has mobilized 200 ambulances and set up three operations rooms. Sixty-three wounded Lebanese civilians have been transported to hospitals or clinics by the LRC.

The UN peacekeeping force in South Lebanon said on Monday it was unable to supply food and water to its troops or deliver humanitarian aid to civilians because Israel would not guarantee their safe passage.

The Israeli military has not responded to the force's repeated requests to secure the safe movement of convoys carrying supplies, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said in a statement.

"After a conversation between the UN secretary general and the prime minister of Israel ... we received assurances that UNIFIL will be allowed freedom of movement, but this pledge has not yet been implemented on the ground," the statement said.

Although help in the means of personnel has yet to arrive, some donations have made are making their way to Lebanon.

The Kuwaiti Red Crescent has donated 10 tons of medical supplies to the LRC, most of which will be arriving on Saturday.

On Monday, a statement released by the Kuwaiti Embassy said that Kuwait was preparing to send food items to Lebanon through Syria.

Representatives for the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent have also granted Lebanon a 1 million dirham ($300,000) aid package that included medicine and food packets.

The LRC is one of the few organizations that have been able to access most regions of Lebanon, but not without complications and risks. Israeli fire hit an LRC ambulance during the first day of fighting last Wednesday, wounding two LRC volunteers.

While LRC volunteers work in the field, other aid organizations are joining forces to assess the needs of the country.

The Social Affairs Ministry held a meeting for humanitarian groups in Lebanon Monday. The meeting was one of several held to discuss the various role humanitarian groups will play in the country's recovery.

"It took everyone a few days to see the situation. Now, everyone is making emergency units and we are trying to coordinate so not everyone does the same thing," said Suha Boustani, communications officer for UNICEF Lebanon.

UNICEF is making clean water and sanitation facilities their priority, especially for recently displaced Lebanese families seeking shelter in local schools.

"We were not expecting Israel's assaults would be that dangerous," Social Affairs Minister Nayla Mouawad said Monday at a meeting attended by humanitarian organizations in Lebanon, the Canadian Fund for Social Development and UNICEF.

It is not only a question of donations and resources but about transportation of these materials. "Since we are blockaded ... Arab and foreign countries are unable to offer help as they did in 1996," Mouawad added.

"Materials do exist. We need to bring them from outside through the roads," said Boustani. UNICEF dedicated $800,000 from their reserves for emergency supplies, which were shipped from a UNICEF warehouse in Copenhagen to Amman and Damascus and will enter Lebanon as soon as it is safe.

The UAE announced it is providing the Lebanese Health Ministry with 24 ambulances, scheduled to arrive in Damascus Monday, although it is not clear how they will be transported safely into the country.

Although the offensive has been continuing for nearly a week, aid mobilization has just begun. UNICEF plans to launch an appeal to international organizations later this week and is confident the response will be positive for Lebanon.

Until international aid appears, groups continue to address current conditions.

"We are on permanent and regular dialogue with parties to the conflict urging them to respect international humanitarian law in order to save human dignity and lessen civilian casualties," said Hassan.

Beirut, my city...

2006-08-02T09:36:00.000-05:00

I was never a nationalistic person, and I don't think I will ever be. My dream is to keep hoping from one country to another. But Lebanon has a special place in my heart. I grew up in Beirut and couldn't wait to get out of it because I couldn't feel that I fit in. But the more I visit different countries and stay in different places, I realize how unique Beirut is. This extremely small city has everything one can think of, Beirut brings the whole world to it. Maybe I won't live in Lebanon in the future, but I know that Beirut will always be my city. This is the city where I can sit on the beach, smoke a cig, hold my friend's hand, and know that I own the world...

Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut
Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take?
Published: 19 July 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1185694.ece

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman 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 in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a 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 as compensation to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, 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. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."

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 looked 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 of its 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 - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 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 Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded 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 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance 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 Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade 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 and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was 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 un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful 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 levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands.

Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah'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 pin-point 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 Hizbollah 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 off 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 bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses from the powder of the bombed-out 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 the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. 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 Chim, 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.

And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small 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 Chim.

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 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 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court 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 sea 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 a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "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 Christian Maronites 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 their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.

Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

To Beirut - 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?

Beirut ER: Time's Running Out

2006-08-02T09:32:00.000-05:00

The following story is being pitched to be aired on ABC. It is about AUB ( American University of Beirut) Medical Center.

The more attention (clicks and comments) it gets the more chance it has of actually being aired and watched by millions in the US.

Please go to the link and reply: We need all the media attention that we can get.
Spread the word.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/07/beirut_er_times.html
July 31, 2006 7:10

PMLara Setrakian Reports:There is not much time left before the lights will go out at the American University of Beirut Medical Center. Oil tankers ready to deliver the much-needed fuel are standing by in nearby waters, but they are being kept out by the Israel's blockade. The hospital has only enough oil to fuel their generators for a maximum of 20 days, or as little as seven days if the state cuts off the little power it now provides, according to Dr. Nadim Cortas, Dean of the medical program. Israel and others may fear the fuel those tankers carry would go to Hezbollah fighters, used for their trucks and artillery. But Cortas argues this point."We see no reason why there should be a blockade on fuel delivery. It could be conditional, only going to hospitals, and it can be monitored. It wouldn't go straight to [Hezbollah] warriors. The blockade has no benefit to Israel except to inflict more suffering on the civilian population." What he and other doctors are hoping is that Israel will let the oil through, with either the Lebanese government or third-party agencies, like the Red Cross, making sure it gets to the hospital.

American University Medical Center is Lebanon's biggest and most important hospital. But with the electric grid damaged and the current shortage of fuel, the lights could very well go out for the healthcare provider. Without the Medical Center, more refugees would likely get their healthcare from Hezbollah's grassroots aid efforts. Hezbollah currently hands out food and care in many of the makeshift shelters around Beirut housing refugees from the south of Lebanon and southern suburbs of Beirut. If power runs out, it's unclear what would happen to the dozens of refugees and war injured at the hospital, not to mention the routine patients waiting to give birth or receive organ transplants. "

[The Hospital] has received dozens of injured and will receive transfers of dozens more from the south," Dr. Cortas says. "And we've said yes to all of them. Payment is no issue."

Hunger strike for cease fire

2006-08-02T09:24:00.000-05:00

LET US TALK FAST
STOP THE KILLINGS AND START NEGOTIATING

Washington DC. On Wednesday, August 2, 2006, at 2pm, Lebanese, Israeli and Palestinian citizens will hunger strike in relays at the US State Department joined by many others around the world. The message, together with other Christians, Muslims, and Jews is: Stop the killing and start negotiations with all the fighting parties.

Mubarak Awad, says “as Lebanese, Israelis, and Palestinians, now living in Washington DC, we call upon Americans of all faiths to show compassion for the victims and ethical concern for the current violence by fasting for peace and justice. The right to life is the most valuable of all.”
Edy Kaufman says “We call on the United States government and all the conflicting parties to talk officially or unofficially to each other instead of trying to kill and injure each other. Talk to
all parties have legitimate grievances and \nconcerns. Deal with them.”

Mohamed Abu Nimer says “We are undertaking a fast, knowing well that Middle East conflicts will not be resolved by this action alone. Join us in a hunger strike to share in the suffering of hundreds of innocent civilians killed, the wounded, the displaced, those whose livelihoods were destroyed, and those countless children who will grow up with deep traumas.”The organizers expect thousands of people to join the neffort in the Middle East and around the world, fasting from 1 to 21 days calling on the United States \nand all parties to talk rather than kill. Many are expected to donate their meal savings to peace and humanitarian groups.Others are expected to meet their political representatives and tell them there is no military solution to these conflicts. Therefore we have to talk.For more information: www.nonviolenceinternational.net

Signatories:
Prof. Mohammed Abu-Nimer,Prof. Mubarak Awad,
Prof. Karim Crow,
Prof. Edy Kaufman,
Jonathon Kuttab,
Michael Beer,\nBarbara Wien.

Lebanon's Muslims: Relatively Secular and Pro-Christian

2006-08-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

People usually think that the Lebanese are very religious because of the "sectarian" civil war and the continuous sectarian tensions in the country. In reality, the Lebanese are the least religious in the arab world; they fight for their religion for the end means of "belonging" and "survival" not because of "God's teachings". It is more or or less like a religious tribal system, where religion replaces the tribe while conserving the same old tribal conduct of living...
Anyhow, this article is great in portraying the big picture reagrding the relationship between religion and the individual in Lebanon...
Enjoy!

Lebanon's Muslims: Relatively Secular and Pro-Christian
But Support for Terrorism and Anti-Semitism are Widespread
by Richard Wike and Juliana Menasce Horowitz
Pew Global Attitudes ProjectJuly 26, 2006

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has again drawn the world's attention to Lebanon and its complicated mosaic of religious sects. Despite its small population -- just under four million people -- Lebanon is the most diverse country in the Middle East, with significant Sunni, Shia, Christian, and Druze populations. On many issues, Lebanon's Muslim majority shares the views of other Muslims in the Middle East and throughout the world, especially its antipathy toward Israel (Lebanon's Christian minority also shares this antipathy). But on other issues, Lebanese Muslims stand apart. In particular, data from a Pew Global Attitudes survey conducted in May of last year (this year's survey did not include Lebanon) shows that Lebanon's Muslims are considerably more secular in their outlook than Muslims in other countries.
Although Lebanese Muslims consider Islam an important part of their lives, they place less emphasis on their faith than do Muslims elsewhere. In the six predominantly Islamic countries surveyed, Muslims in Lebanon are the least likely to say religion is very important in their life -- just over half (54%) say religion is very important, compared with 69% of Muslims in Turkey, 86% in Jordan, and more than 90% in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Morocco.

Muslims in Lebanon are also less likely to identify primarily with their religion, rather than with their country, with equal numbers saying they think of themselves first as Muslim (30%) and saying they identify primarily as Lebanese (30%). Elsewhere, majorities or pluralities of Muslims identify more strongly with Islam than with their nationality -- in many cases by lopsided proportions. Even in Turkey -- a country with a long-running tradition of secularism -- Muslim identifiers outnumber those who identify primarily as Turks by 13 percentage points.
Moreover, Lebanese Muslims are less concerned about the global role of Islam -- just under half (47%) say it is very important for Islam to play a more important and influential role on the world stage. In contrast, 84% of Muslims in Morocco and 73% in Jordan would like to see Islam play a major role. Only Turkish Muslims, at 43%, show less interest in Islam's global influence.
Views on Terrorism

Despite their relatively secular worldview, Lebanese Muslims are among the most supportive of terrorist acts in the name of Islam. In 2005, 39% said suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are often or sometimes justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Only Jordan, at 57%, registered more support for suicide attacks. 1
In Morocco, Turkey, and Indonesia, fewer than one-in-five Muslims believe such attacks can often or sometimes be justified.

Lebanese Muslims also express considerable support for suicide bombing in Iraq -- roughly half (49%) said suicide attacks against Americans and other westerners in Iraq are justifiable, a level equal to that found in Jordan (49%) and only slightly less than in Morocco (56%), which recorded the highest level of support.

However, the world's best known proponent of suicide terrorism, Osama bin Laden, receives little support among Lebanese Muslims. Only 4% say they have a lot or some confidence in bin Laden to do the right thing in world affairs. This is the lowest level of support for the al Qaeda leader found in any of the six predominantly Muslim countries surveyed.
Muslims and Christians in Lebanon: Agreement on Israel, Differing Views of the U.S.
Despite widespread sectarian violence during their country's 1975-1990 civil war, today Lebanese Muslims and Christians generally have positive attitudes toward one another. Fully 86% of Muslims have a favorable opinion of Christians, by far the highest rating of Christians by any Muslim public. At the same time, 82% of Christians have a positive view of Muslims.
Attitudes toward Jews, however, are quite another matter. Even before the current conflict, negative sentiments about Jews and Israel were widespread in Lebanon, and they were not confined to the Muslim community. Indeed, no one in our Lebanese sample, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or otherwise, said they had a favorable view of Jews. Of course, negative attitudes towards Jews are not uncommon in the region -- in neighboring Jordan, zero respondents had a favorable view of Jews, and Morocco and Pakistan also posted favorable ratings for Jews in the single digits.

Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, prior research has generally shown the Lebanese to be pessimistic about a two-state solution. A 2003 Pew Global Attitudes survey found that three-in-four Muslims (75%) and one-half of Christians (50%) agreed with the statement "the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists."

Both Lebanese Muslims and Christians are also suspicious of Jewish influence over U.S. foreign policy. When read a list of groups -- including Jews, corporations, Christian conservatives, the media, the military, liberals, and ordinary Americans -- and asked which one has the most influence on American policy towards other countries, 62% of Lebanese Muslims and 59% of Lebanese Christians said Jews are the most influential. This belief was also widely held in the other Arab countries surveyed -- 60% of Jordanians and 50% of Moroccans also said Jews have the most power over America's international policy.
Although Lebanon's Muslims and Christians agree that Jews have wide-ranging influence in the United States, they disagree sharply in their attitudes toward the United States and toward American foreign policy. Only 22% of Muslims have a favorable opinion of the U.S. -- a level consistent with anti-American sentiments found throughout much of the Muslim world. However, nearly three-in-four Christians (72%) have a favorable view of the U.S.
Muslims and Christians also differ with respect to attitudes toward the American people: 52% of Muslims have a favorable view of Americans, compared with 87% of Christians. In countries throughout the world, Pew Global Attitudes surveys have generally found that people give more favorable ratings to Americans than to the United States, and this is largely true in Muslim countries as well. However, the gap between perceptions of Americans and of the U.S. is particularly large among Muslims in Lebanon. Among other Muslim populations, perceptions of Americans tend to reflect perceptions of America more closely.

Muslims and Christians in Lebanon also hold sharply different views of U.S. actions in the international arena. For example, Muslims are considerably more likely to believe America acts unilaterally on the world stage. Only 19% of Muslims believe the U.S. takes into account the interests of countries like Lebanon a great deal or a fair amount when making foreign policy decisions, compared with 59% of Christians. And only 11% of Muslims favor the U.S.-led war on terrorism; however, 60% of Christians back U.S. anti-terrorism policies.

Another issue on which Muslims and Christians disagree is the threat posed to their country by Islamic extremism. Despite the dominant position of Iranian-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, in last year's survey only 4% of Lebanese Muslims considered Islamic extremism a very or fairly great threat to the country, the lowest percentage of the six Muslim publics. Meanwhile, Lebanon's Christian minority sees this issue quite differently: 53% say Islamic extremism poses a very or fairly great threat.

Notes

1The survey was conducted prior to the November 2005 terrorist attacks in Amman, Jordan. Subsequently, the 2006 Global Attitudes survey, which was conducted March-May of this year, found that the percentage of Jordanians who believe suicide bombing can often or sometimes be justified dropped to 29%. The 2006 survey was not conducted in Lebanon.

Who started ? By Gideon Levy

2006-07-11T08:33:00.000-05:00

Finally somebody making the Israelis accountable. And in Haaretz!!!! I wonder how powerful his voice is but we should have more articles written like this. If the Palestinian are responsible for firing Qassams rockets and should go through terrible consequences, the Israelis should be accountable for bombing schools, houses, electricity, water and killing numerous people. What we need in the Middle East is accountability to give space for Justice to exist....

09/07/2006
Who started ?
By Gideon Levy
HAARETZ

"We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams" - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. "They started," will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza. Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but "they started." They are also "breaking the rules" laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an "escalation of the conflict," and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice. So, who really did start? And have we "left Gaza?" Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like "partition" and "an end to the occupation," did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate. Now, less than a year after the disengagement, it is going back, with violence and force. What could otherwise have been expected? That Israel would unilaterally withdraw, brutally and outrageously ignoring the Palestinians and their needs, and that they would silently bear their bitter fate and would not continue to fight for their liberty, livelihood and dignity? We promised a safe passage to the West Bank and didn't keep the promise. We promised to free prisoners and didn't keep the promise. We supported democratic elections and then boycotted the legally elected leadership, confiscating funds that belong to it, and declaring war on it. We could have withdrawn from Gaza through negotiations and coordination, while strengthening the existing Palestinian leadership, but we refused to do so. And now, we complain about "a lack of leadership?" We did everything we could to undermine their society and leadership, making sure as much as possible that the disengagement would not be a new chapter in our relationship with the neighboring nation, and now we are amazed by the violence and hatred that we sowed with our own hands. What would have happened if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege that it imposed on Gaza? Would it open the border to Palestinian laborers? Free prisoners? Meet with the elected leadership and conduct negotiations? Encourage investment in Gaza? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda - here and around the world. Israel would continue with the convergence, which is solely meant to serve its goals, ignoring their needs. Nobody would have given any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they did not behave violently. That is a very bitter truth, but the first 20 years of the occupation passed quietly and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise. With our own hands, we are now once again pushing the Palestinians into using the petty arms they have; and in response, we employ nearly the entire enormous arsenal at our disposal, and continue to complain that "they started." We started. We started with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it, a real and complete ending. We started with the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture. After Oslo, too, there were those who claimed that "we left the territories," in a similar mixture of blindness and lies. Gaza is in serious trouble, ruled by death, horror and daily difficulties, far from the eyes and hearts of Israelis. We are only shown the Qassams. We only see the Qassams. The West Bank is still under the boot of occupation, the settlements are flourishing, and every limply extended hand for an agreement, including that of Ismail Haniyeh, is immediately rejected. And after all this, if someone still has second thoughts, the winning answer is promptly delivered: "They started." They started and justice is on our side, while the fact is that they did not start and justice is not with us.

Al-Jazeera, as American as Apple Pie

2006-07-04T23:41:00.000-05:00

Very Very Very interesting. So, who wants to start working at Al Jazeera???

Al-Jazeera, as American as Apple Pie
By Joanne LevineSunday, June 25, 2006; B03
In a country's hinterlands, a distant region seldom visited by outsiders, a television crew investigates why so many residents are fleeing the area. When local officials catch wind of the crew's presence, they begin interrogating people the journalists interviewed, and pressure others not to talk.
Russia? Uzbekistan? China? No. This incident took place in North Dakota, in the heart of the United States.
That's where a team of reporters I supervise went to shoot a story about the Great Plains emptying out. When the sheriff of Crosby, a town near the Canadian border, heard about it, he contacted the U.S. Border Patrol. An agent soon showed up at the local newspaper, asking for the journalists' names. Other agents asked whether they "seemed like U.S. citizens."
The journalists are Peggy Holter, Josh Rushing and Mark Teboe. They are all experienced reporters, and they are all U.S. citizens. So what was it that raised officials' antennae?
The channel they work for: al-Jazeera.
Say that name in the United States and, likely as not, the listener will practically shudder in revulsion. Many Americans automatically think "terrorist TV," or "Osama bin Laden's network." They see al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language channel based in Qatar, as the al-Qaeda leader's mouthpiece, broadcasting his videotaped messages of jihad.
Yet the truth is that al-Jazeera is a pioneer of news independence that the U.S. government once lauded for bringing freedom of the press to the Middle East. Now it's planning to broadcast worldwide, including in the United States. But as its Arab owners work to make that a reality, the prejudice here persists, and those of us who work for the network find ourselves running, at every turn, into resistance, rejection and racism.
Take Border Patrol Assistant Chief Lonnie Schweitzer, who questioned the legitimacy of our reporters' presence in Crosby. "It's al-Jazeera," he told the local newspaper. "What is the interest of an Arab news organization in Crosby, North Dakota?"
Holter, Rushing, Teboe and I work for al-Jazeera International, a 24-hour English-language news and current affairs channel set to launch later this year from four new broadcast centers -- in Doha, Qatar; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; London; and Washington. The network will still have a lot of news and documentary programming emanating from the Middle East and showing Arab points of view. But in expanding, it hopes to provide news from a broad range of perspectives and to increase coverage of regions largely forgotten by U.S. networks, such as Africa and Latin America.
Yet even as al-Jazeera International prepares to open a window onto the world, the doors here are slamming shut. AJI and its employees are being isolated. The network cannot get liability insurance, which severely hampers our ability to hire freelancers and rent equipment. One of the big five U.S. accounting firms won't touch our business here, even though it is happy to work with us in Doha. The same is true of a major international bank.
The channel has also struggled to get distribution in the United States. Various organizations are angered by the prospect of it hitting the airwaves. The conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media is trying to block us any way it can. The United American Committee, which defines its mission as promoting awareness of extremist Islamic threats in the United States, even organized a protest outside the network's Washington offices in April, although only a handful of demonstrators showed up.
Several employees I know believe they have suffered consequences for joining the network -- one was dropped by an adoption agency she once used and another had two rental applications rejected after naming her employer. I haven't had any experiences as upsetting as those, but many eyebrows were raised in February when I told friends and acquaintances that I was leaving ABC's "Nightline," where I was a producer, to take a job as head of long-form programming for North and South America at al-Jazeera International.
Perhaps most significant, scores of people refuse to be interviewed by our reporters. On numerous stories, I have approached people who know me from my past jobs. They will talk to me on the phone, but they refuse to appear on camera, saying they can't be seen on al-Jazeera. I have heard this too often -- from officials in government and Congress as well as from other people in the media.
My department, for instance, tried to do a story about Civil War reenactors. The journalists were denied access to a reenactment because the organizers were expecting "many patriotic people" who they thought would be upset by al-Jazeera's presence. At the recent Take Back America conference here in Washington, author Kevin Phillips would not accept a business card from our investigative reporter. And even The Washington Post would not allow one of its staff photographers to participate in an AJI discussion about images from the Iraq war.
I am not naive. I know we are living in a time when the Middle East and the West harbor deep-rooted suspicions and mistrust of each other. I've worked and lived in the Middle East for the past six years, covering stories such as the second Palestinian intifada and the invasion of Iraq. I'm a New York Jew married to a Jordanian Druze whom I met when I lived in Amman in 2002 on a fellowship. I heard plenty of anti-Semitic comments there from those who didn't suspect that I might be Jewish. Today, some people ask me how a Jew can work for al-Jazeera. It's that kind of thinking that builds up walls, rather than tearing them down. The racism I experienced was unacceptable in Jordan. And it is unacceptable in the United States.
Most people in this country have never watched al-Jazeera. But in so many minds, it has become synonymous with al-Qaeda. I'd guess that the only thing most people know about it is that it is always the first network to receive bin Laden's videotapes. What they don't know is that al-Jazeera started nearly 10 years ago as the first independent voice in the Middle East. With the courage to tell it like it is, it offended authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Its reporters -- and at times the network itself -- have been routinely kicked out of countries for reporting the real news instead of acting like the sleeping pill known as state-run television news.
Al-Jazeera has even been labeled "Zionist" by the Arab street and its regimes. It is the only Arabic broadcaster to put Israeli officials on television and to report the Israeli side of stories. Israeli leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres have been invited to appear on the network, although they ultimately did not. But Israel routinely sends Arabic-speaking officials to participate on various programs.
What many Americans also don't know is that, before Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera was lauded and applauded by the Bush administration for this fearless attitude toward the dictatorships of the Middle East. High-ranking administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, made frequent appearances on the network.
After 9/11 -- and especially after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- tensions between the West and the Middle East escalated, and al-Jazeera's reporting often angered Americans. The network showed civilian casualties caused by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also showed images of U.S. troops taken hostage in Iraq. It broadcast pictures of Iraqis celebrating over a downed U.S. aircraft. When four U.S. contractors were killed in Fallujah in March 2004 and their burned and mutilated bodies were hung from a bridge, al-Jazeera put it on TV.
The White House now takes every opportunity to demonize the network's editorial choices. Some of these choices may be hard for Americans to stomach. But they undeniably offer another side of the story. And al-Jazeera has a tradition of showing both sides. Many Americans would probably be surprised to learn that last winter, a fiery Syrian American psychiatrist, Wafa Sultan, came out on al-Jazeera to declare that violence is destroying Islam. The impassioned interview made her an international sensation -- and a target of death threats.
It wasn't an easy decision to take the job at al-Jazeera International. I've found it a challenge to work under conditions in which I often feel like an outcast. But I believe that bridges need to be built, and I felt that taking a job with AJI offered a chance to try to do that.
Each incident shrouded in bigotry has served to convince me ever more that the United States needs an outlet like al-Jazeera International, offering a wider panorama of views. These are dangerous times. And they will just get more dangerous if each side continues to retreat. Al-Jazeera doesn't shy away from any side of a story. And Americans should not shy away from al-Jazeera.
levine.joanne@gmail.com
Joanne Levine is executive producer of programming for the Americas at al-Jazeera International.

What Clash of Civilizations?

2006-07-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

I received this article from 6 different people on the same day. What is important to mention is that none of these 6 know each other. We read the same things, we interpret differently, and we act violently...

What Clash of Civilizations?
Why religious identity isn't destiny
By Amartya Sen

This essay is adapted from the new book Identity and Violence, published by Norton.
That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could generate turmoil in so many countries tells us some rather important things about the contemporary world. Among other issues, it points up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about representation and derision of the prophet in the Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim religious beliefs that is taken to go with it) and the evident power of determined agitators to generate the kind of anger that leads immediately to violence. But stereotyped representations of this kind do another sort of damage as well, by making huge groups of people in the world to look peculiarly narrow and unreal.
The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term "algebra" comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi's Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.
The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.
A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington's influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington's approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.
In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.
The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question "Do civilizations clash?" is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations.
This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history that overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.
The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove just as treacherous for programs of "dialogue among civilizations" (much in vogue these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings to one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.
Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for "other people" is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called "Islamic terrorism" in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine—Islam.
To focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people. It also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of people, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain, a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the development of state-financed Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to supplement pre-existing state-supported Christian schools. Under this system, young children are placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy. Now the same predetermination of "discovered" identities is now being allowed and, in effect encouraged, to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.
Religious or civilizational classification can be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William Boykin's blaring—and by now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: "I knew that my God was bigger than his," and that the Christian God "was a real God, and [the Muslim's] was an idol." The idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so there is comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual "guided missiles" that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a "true Muslim" must be a tolerant individual ("so come off it and be peaceful"). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must ask whether it is necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a "true Muslim" must be like.
******
A person's religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.
The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.
People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.
Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of "Western science," leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.
Even the frantic Western search for "the moderate Muslim" confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all.
The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.
The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization.
Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect—and denial—of the roles of reasoning and choice, which follow from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny exacts a remarkably heavy price.
Amartya Sen is the Lamont University Professor at Harvard and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Adapted from Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen. Copyright 2006 by Amartya Sen. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2138731/

SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI

2006-07-04T21:49:00.000-05:00

This is the situation in Iraq every single day. Not only airport, but everything in the country runs like this... Don't expect anything but be prepared for death!

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The Iraqi Airways flight north to Sulaymaniyah is scheduled to depart at 4 p.m., and in line with the airline's instructions, I'm at Baghdad International Airport three hours early for the security drill. So far so good.
Except that instead of a security check, I and my fellow passengers are made to hang around the terminal for more than two hours, only to be informed that our flight has been canceled. Instead, we are told, there will be a 4 p.m. flight to Irbil, two hours' drive from Sulaymaniyah.
We decide to go for it. Our bags pass through an X-ray machine, we go through a metal detector and are then informed that passengers booked for Sulaymaniyah can't take the Irbil flight. Confusion reigns, and the Iraqi Airways agent promises to call the station manager.
About 20 minutes later the manager appears. He tells us that there will be a flight to Sulaymaniyah after all. When? He's unsure. Maybe at 6 p.m.
Take the chance, or argue my way onto the Irbil flight? It's hard to make choices in Iraq these days.
Sulaymaniyah, like Irbil, is in the Kurdistan part of Iraq. I could drive it in five hours, but bombers, kidnappers and highway robbers lurk along the road, and I've already had a white-knuckle ride to the airport along six miles of highway that U.S. soldiers call "RPG Alley," RPG meaning rocket-propelled grenade.
The airport complex is so well-defended that Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants are imprisoned there. But getting airborne is a different matter. To avoid missiles, pilots have to execute a steep corkscrew takeoff maneuver, at the risk of colliding with U.S. helicopters, fighter jets or pilotless spy planes.
Still, having opted for the skies, I decide to wait for the promised 6 p.m. flight.
The Iraqi Airways agent hands me my boarding card. It's blank - no flight, seat numbers nor destination.
How do I know the flight is going to Sulaymaniyah? "You can tell from the color," the agent explains.
But all the airline's boarding cards are green.
Annoyed, the agent scribbles "Sulaymaniyah" in Arabic and the city's airport code, SHL, on the ticket. Seat number? There are no assigned seats, he snaps.
I pay the airport tax of 1,000 dinars (about 70 U.S. cents) and head to the departure lounge, which is spruced up with new potted plants and green carpet. Under its French-designed arched ceilings there's a duty-free shop and a cafeteria.
Scores of tired-looking passengers lounge on soft gray sofas.
Two Iraqi women have been waiting since 7 a.m. for their 10 a.m. flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It's now about 4:15 p.m., night is approaching, and if the Dubai flight is canceled, the women will have to overnight in the terminal. It would be too dangerous to drive back to Baghdad.
The mood in the departure lounge is one of resignation.
At 6 p.m., the flights to Irbil and Dubai are ready to leave. The two women jump to their feet and rush to their gate. The planes depart.
And our 6 p.m. flight to Sulaymaniyah? No airline or airport official is anywhere to be seen. Uniformed men from Global Securities, a private company in charge of airport security, roam around with walkie-talkies but have no answers. All they know is that no flights operate after 6 p.m., and we may have to stay the night in the lounge.
At 7 p.m., an Iraqi Airways official emerges. Passengers swarm around him.
A plane is on its way from Istanbul, he says. It will land at 8:30.
We are skeptical. What time did the plane leave Istanbul? "We don't know."
How long is the flight from Istanbul? "I don't know."
Is there any way he can find out? "We don't have a way to ask."
That's because after 6 p.m., Iraqi civilian controllers hand over the airport to the American military and are cut out of the loop.
So we wait.
At a little after 9 p.m. a Global Security official, a Briton, sheds some light; Iraqi Airways is determined to fly, but the Americans insist the passengers be searched.
But we have already been searched.
No matter, we're told; maybe one of us bought a sharp object like a pair of scissors in an airport shop. And besides, there are no female staff on hand to search me and the other women passengers.
A little while later, the flight from Istanbul lands. We wait to board. And wait, and wait.
"The plane has no fuel and the fuel truck is nowhere to be found," a security guard explains.
The truck driver, an American with Skylink, the firm that manages Baghdad airport, has gone to bed. He is woken up, fuel is delivered, and we start boarding at 9:45, the repeat security checks having been waived after the captain takes full responsibility for the safety of the plane and passengers.
We taxi on a runway lit by blue lights. A female voice over the loudspeaker welcomes us aboard the Iraqi Airways Boeing 737 under the command of Captain Adel Hassan en route to Sulaymaniyah. Flight time is 50 minutes and we will be flying at an altitude of 17,000 feet.
There is no safety demonstration.
Just before takeoff, all lights are doused, and, even though it's a nonsmoking flight, a cabin attendant tells us not to light so much as a cigarette lighter.
It's pitch black - and totally silent.
The plane ascends in a spiral, circling four times. After the fourth circle, we head north into thick clouds.
Underneath, the runway lights fade away. A sigh of relief. We are safe.
At 10:20 the lights come on and the mood relaxes. Two female flight attendants pass around cookies in a basket and serve soft drinks. We're mainly relieved just to be airborne, but there's also a sense of leaving Baghdad's troubles behind, heading into autonomous Kurdistan, where business and reconstruction are surging ahead.
Most of the 40 or so passengers are Iraqi Arabs headed there on business. An Oil Ministry official is going to help the Kurds build an oil depot. Four Chinese businessmen are working with Kurds on their telecommunications network.
After 40 minutes the seatbelt sign comes on and we begin our descent to Sulaymaniyah. Then more bad news. Because of bad weather we are diverting eastward to Irbil.
The passengers break into mocking applause.
After a bumpy landing on the wet runway, we file into Irbil's new terminal. It is about midnight, some 11 hours after I got to Baghdad airport. The staff have gone home, and only security men are present.
There's no telephone link between Irbil and Sulaymaniyah, which are in separate provinces of Kurdistan, so passengers can't call families and friends to tell them the flight has been diverted.
A sleepy Iraqi Airways station manager arrives. Rather than find hotels for the passengers, he tries to persuade Hassan, the captain, to fly us to Sulaymaniyah. Hassan says he's too tired; he has been flying since 8 a.m. - from Sulaymaniyah to Baghdad to Istanbul to Baghdad to Irbil. Besides, he says, Sulaymaniyah lies between two mountains and it's hard to land there in poor visibility.
The Iraqi Airways man asks passengers wishing to fly on to Sulaymaniyah to identify themselves; perhaps a show of hands will persuade the pilot. A few hands go up but to no avail, so the official gives in, but only partially. He'll provide a bus to the hotels of the passengers' choosing, but the airline won't pay for the rooms.
By now I'm resigned to staying in Irbil. Anyway, I have work to do there as well as in Sulaymaniyah.
Jamila Mohammed, an Iraqi Airways ticket saleswoman, is not surprised at our adventure. "This sort of thing happens every day," she says.
Iraqi Airways planes are chronically overbooked, she says, and once a Baghdad-Amman flight took off with nine seatless passengers standing in the aisle.
"Iraqis are used to all this," Mohammed says. "We got used to suffering. Even if we have to stay at the airport for three days, we can take it."
Hassan joined Iraqi Airways in 1976 but lost his pilot's job following the 1990 Gulf War and the international air embargo imposed on Saddam's Iraq.
He's back in the air these days with Teebah Airlines, an Iraqi-owned carrier that leases its planes and crews to Iraqi Airways.
Flying to and from Baghdad is stressful, he says.
"It's very scary, because normally when you approach an airport you make a gradual descent, but here all aircraft come to the same point before descending. At times you see five planes on top of each other, leaving and landing, all at the same point," he says.
"Last night, I came to Baghdad and was approaching the runway. Three hundred feet before landing, all the runway lights were shut," he says, laughing. "They said it was power failure. I had to overshoot and go to another runway.
"When I get on the ground I laugh, but when airborne I feel tension. It's very dangerous."
I tell Hassan it's the last time I'll fly Iraqi Airways. He laughs and says: "Good decision."

Desert BigotryAn obstacle to the future of Iraq. By Andrew Apostolou

2006-07-04T21:47:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine wrote this...

February 23, 2005

The announcement of the Iraqi election results on February 13 evokes memories of the historic polls in South Africa that buried the apartheid system. In both cases a long-discriminated-against majority — blacks in South Africa and Shia Arabs in Iraq — finally achieved power through the ballot box. Neither set of polls was free of irregularities and disorganization: The South African elections were conducted without a register of voters; and around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, insurgent attacks meant that many Christians and Kurds were unable to vote. But despite these problems, voters in both countries patiently queued for hours to exercise a right that many of their compatriots had given their lives for.
The similarities end, however, when it comes to the foreign reaction to the two elections. The South African elections were celebrated almost without exception; the Iraqi elections have too often been shunned or denigrated.
Within the Middle East, hostility to the Iraqi elections has taken on the form of sectarian bigotry — chauvinism of the kind even apologists for apartheid South Africa had the good taste to avoid. Few of those who opposed economic sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s defended the structure and practices of the apartheid regime; its defenders were rarely racists. Instead, they counseled that engagement and dialogue with the pariah regime would hasten its demise more effectively than economic pressure.
By contrast, the Middle Eastern critics of the new Iraq are nostalgic for the old Iraq, a country dominated during its 84-year history by a largely Sunni-Arab ruling caste. They have not hesitated to cite the alleged "special role" — the supposed right to rule — of Sunni Arabs. The other side of this chauvinistic coin is their vilification of the Shia Arabs, the majority of Iraq's population. The Shia Arabs are portrayed as stool pigeons of the Iranian government, traitors-in-waiting ready to betray Arab Iraq to Persian Iran.
The most prominent exponent of the Sunni-Arab ascendancy is King Abdullah II of Jordan. Just as Iraqis were putting together an interim government in May 2004, the king told the New York Times that a dictator was needed to run Iraq — "somebody with a military background who has experience of being a tough guy." He also dropped a hint that the "tough guy" would probably have to be a Sunni Arab. Speaking of the potential candidates, Abdullah said that the Iraqi army contained "a lot of heroes" from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s — "national heroes." Because a core military task of the 1980s had been to slaughter Iraqi Kurds, there are no Kurds running for the post of "tough guy." Equally, as the Shia Arabs were the conscript cannon fodder whose lives were thrown away by the battalion, there are no such "national heroes" from the Shia-Arab community.
To any Iraqi reading the king's words, the implication was clear: Iraq is best run by a Sunni-Arab officer. The assumption that such Sunni-Arab military men might be "national heroes" spoke eloquently for the king's view of Iraq as a country owned by Sunni Arabs, in which Shia Arabs, Kurds, and others are resident foreigners.
Abdullah has taken this further, insinuating that some of the Shia-Arab vote actually is foreign. He told the Washington Post on December 7, 2004, that over one million Iranians had entered Iraq and that many, at the behest of the Iranian government, would vote in the Iraqi elections. His claim went unchallenged.While the king's comments go largely unchallenged in the U.S., the response in Iraq has been to denounce his unadulterated sectarianism. As a result, King Abdullah was force to clarify his stance. Speaking on January 27 with gross rhetorical overcompensation, he claimed that he wanted a good relationship "with our Shiite brothers."
Still the king arrogated to himself a remarkable role as a global Muslim spokesman: "As a Hashemite [i.e. a family descended from the prophet], I speak in the name of all Muslims, Sunnis, and Shiites." Britain forced the Hashemites — a Sunni-Arab dynasty from what is now Saudi Arabia — upon the newly created states of Jordan and Iraq in the 1920s.
Similar pro-Sunni-Arab and anti-Shia-Arab views have come from Salim Lone, the U.N. director of communications for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the special envoy murdered in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. If evidence was needed of U.N. staffers' bias against Iraqi democracy, Lone's collected articles since he left the U.N. make for good candidates.
For Lone, the violence and terrorism of a minority of Sunni Arabs is understandable. Writing in the Guardian on January 31 to denounce the election as "illegitimate," Lone explained that the Sunni Arabs were fighting because they believed that the U.S. was "systematically excluding them from the role they deserve to play in Iraq." Lone's recommendation for peace is "to end the occupation and enfranchise the Sunnis." On this view, Sunni-Arab enfranchisement means giving back to Iraq's third-largest ethnic and religious group their previous leading role.
Lone also denounced the Shia-Arab demand for elections that would emancipate them. For him, the Shia-Arab right to be recognized as Iraq's majority is petty-minded prejudice. Indeed, Lone vilified Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for supporting the American presence "with the single-minded sectarian goal of having the majority Shia at the helm of power in Iraq."
The notion that the Sunni Arabs have a right to rule was stated openly by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi journalist who had covered the fighting in Fallujah from the insurgents' side. Abdul-Ahad stated baldly in the Guardian on January 26, 2005, that "in Iraq — as is the case in most of the Muslim world — the Sunnis were always the natural-born leaders of the community." The prejudice of the Sunni-Arab insurgents was reported as fact. The Sunni Arabs, he claimed, "hate the Shia because they are backed by Iran, and they are killing the police because they are collaborators and because they are all Shia." In fact, the Iraqi policemen and national guardsmen fighting against the terrorists and insurgents in Ramadi, Tikrit, and much of western Iraq are primarily Sunni Arabs.
If there were any doubt as to what a return to the Sunni-Arab ascendancy would mean, one of Abdul-Ahad's Sunni-Arab sources summed it up well: "Our main aim is to drive the Americans out and then everything will go back to normal, as it was before." For Iraq's Kurds and Shia Arabs, "normal, as it was before" meant war and genocide, oppression and discrimination. For the Sunni Arabs, encouraged to regard themselves as a superior caste, it meant a right to rule — an ascendancy as objectionable as that which sustained apartheid.

Simply ME

2006-07-04T21:04:00.000-05:00

I have delayed this for so long but here comes the moment of truth. So where to start from? My name is Jana. My father is Lebanese, my mom is Iraqi and I'm lost. Can't call myself Lebanese or Iraqi because I don't see myself in both places, but I don't know what to call myself. In the past couple of years I've been saying I hold a Lebanese passport since people have to categorize in a specific box.

The funniest thing about me is that I have 2 birthdays: I was born on September 15, 1981 but my dad decided to make me younger so he registered my birthday on January 15, 1982. I celebrate my birthday in September because I prefer to be a Virgo rather than a Capricorn but I always welcome multiple gifts. The joke that I tell people is that my delivery was a long process: my head came out on September 15, but my full body didn't get out until January. My poor mom!!!!

As a kid, I always wanted to become an interpreter because I wanted to speak different languages and talk to as many people as I can. I wanted to talk to them in their language so they feel comfortable. But once I got to college, I chose to study Economics because, honestly, I didn't like anything else in that stupid catalogue. After graduation, I worked as economic researcher and realized this is not what I want to do. I could not understand the point of writing a research and then putting it on the shelf so it would be full of dust. No one is looking into these researches and there is no point of doing more of them. So I decided to act, I quit my job!!! I started working in conflict resolution and OUF that changed my life. I realized how the war affected me as a kid and how the trauma of those days is still present. I realized that I'm always living in a war mentality because everybody around me did and still do. This makes me wonder, would I ever get over this? Would the memories always deeply affect me as much as they do now? How come I'm still living with these memories and other people are so over it? Are they over it or they are pushing it to the back of their minds? Questions, questions and questions is what I am all about. Even my tattoo is a question mark!

So after working in conflict resolution for 2 years in Lebanon, I applied for an MA in Conflict Transformation in the U.S. I graduated 2 months ago which makes a legitimate conflict analyst.
I'm still living in the US, to be more precise DC, the political capital of the world. Currently I'm working on issues of social justice and human rights to advocate for reforms and hopefully some positive change in the American foreign policy, especially towards the Middle East/Arab world/Muslim world.

This is ME, more to come in future postings.

Try this.....

2006-06-28T10:16:00.000-05:00

second attempt.... hope you like it.