Monday, July 31, 2006

A desperate Lebanese family awaits evacuation in Tibnine.
FDQL: Fire Dept. Qana Lebanon, 7/30.
Zheia Bateool, age 2, is released from a hospital in Lebanon after she was treated for burns and shrapnel wounds suffered when her family home was bombed by Israelis.

"The perception that Israel has lost the battle for hearts and minds, and that Hezbollah and Iran have won, was reinforced by the Israeli attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, which killed dozens of civilians, including many children."

--Michael Slackman, New York Times, Aug. 1, 2006

The Qana Tipping Point
Jefferson Morely, Washington Post, Aug. 1, 2006

The Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana early Sunday morning did more than kill 57 civilians. According to a wide range of commentary in the international media, it inflamed already boiling public opinion in the Arab world against Israel, undermined what little support the United States has among the Lebanese people, and illuminated the continuing inability of Israel and the United States to achieve their goal of decisively weakening Hezbollah.

On Monday, the leading English-language news sites in the Arab world -- including Aljazeera.net, the Jordan Times, the Beirut "Daily Star," and the Arab News -- featured photos of rescue workers carrying the dusty bodies of children from the wreckage of a Qana apartment building where they had taken refuge. The headlines were blunt: "Israel Massacres Kids," said the Arab News in Saudi Arabia. The Qana attack wiped out concerns in the Sunni Arab world, voiced early in the conflict, about Hezbollah and its allies in Shiite Iran.

The "Daily Star" and many other sites emphasized a historical angle that most Americans were probably unaware of: that Qana had been the site of an unprovoked Israeli attack on a refugee camp in 1996 that killed 106 civilians. "The Israeli butchers have added a new line to their bloody record," said Al Ahram, the leading daily newspaper of Egypt whose editor is appointed by the country's pro-American leader Hosni Mubarak. "This dark chapter resembles the one that took place ten years ago. The place is the same... the butchers are the same and the victims again are innocent children and women."

Almost ninety percent of all respondents agreed that the United States “is not an honest mediator” in the Middle East. The Bush administration has said that its goal is bolster Lebanese democracy. The vast majority of Lebanese don’t believe it...

Lebanon's "Daily Star" newspaper said July 31 that the Qana massacre has boosted support for Hezbollah. “Now that fresh images of the broken bodies of the women and children of Qana are being shown on our television screens, the idea of forgetting has become all the more unthinkable. These images have stirred the anger and outrage of even the most moderate Lebanese, proving that Israeli brutality - not Hizbullah - has become Israel's own worst enemy. Israel's unabashed butchery in Qana has only demonstrated to many of those who were on the fence that there is indeed a legitimate need for resistance.”

***

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

On Jul 31, 2006, at 21:11, B.F. wrote: Re: "Israel has lost the battle for hearts and minds."

This has truly been my experience. The information gathering efforts of so many people on the internet has been stellar. May God bless them all, and most especially yourself. Any sincere person with half a brain could piece the story together from the information available. And as you say, many people are tracing the pathology back to it's source in rabbinic Judaism, which is a very positive development.

From the work I've been doing on internet forums it's obvious that the big guns of Zionist apologetics are sitting this one out. It has been a great window of opportunity to get the message out in places where I'm certain that I would have been tarred, feathered and then lit on fire before being banned from the forum at any other time.

It's a small triumph, and sadly it came at the expense of the suffering of an entire nation, but it's a triumph nonetheless.

As one who always attempts to keep a level head, I wonder, what do we make of it all?

I am of the opinion that at some point Zionists are going to attempt to create anti-"Jewish" sentiments on a much greater scale as a means of drawing the more liberated Judaics into the fold. Could that be related to what's happening here?

Sincerely, B.F.

HOFFMAN REPLIES:

Yes, I agree, the Israelis may generate their own atrocity sympathy through black ops.

Second, they commit crimes and massacres in Lebanon based in part on psychological and other studies that determine that the carnage will be but a hazy memory a year from now.

The April, 1996 Israeli massacre at Qana, which according to Amnesty International was deliberate and unprovoked, was described by both the NY Times (Steve Erlanger) and the LA Times yesterday, July 31, as having been an accident. There is no price to pay for this holocaust denial on the part of the these major newspapers. Even if the blame were pinned squarely and deservedly on the Israelis by the US media, Qana '96 has not been indelibly memorialized in any way: no monumental statue, no annual commemoration, no documentary movie with interviews with the survivors; no stirring song, renowned poem or gripping theatre to enshrine it for all time.

Furthermore, Beirut was horribly firebombed throughout the summer of 1982 by the Israelis, including schools and hospitals. No one remembers it today, not even the victims. The Arab memory for 1982 is mainly of the September massacre at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp, not the city of Beirut (particularly in August) under Israeli terror-bombing.

Whenever the bombs stop falling in Lebanon, the world will turn its eye to some other disaster zone, perhaps in Asia or America's own hurricane alley. At that point it will be up to the Arabs to kindle the memory of what transpired in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Let's hope they change their apathetic, amnesiac ways, otherwise, as time progresses, the memory of Israeli war crimes there will recede, as it always has, even as the memory of what the Nazis did to Judaics (real and imagined) more than 60 years ago, becomes, by some perverse wizardry, ever more vibrant and compelling.

This is the psychology which the White House and Jerusalem are banking on to extricate themselves over the long term. Yes, I believe the Israelis are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the short-term. But in the long view, this loss is by no means certain, as yet.

Wake up, Arabs and do your duty to the memory of your dead -- the preservation of that memory may help to prevent future Israeli holocausts.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

This man's mother, wife, and five children were all killed by the Israelis in Qana.
One of the injured, Mohammed Shalhoub, lies on a stretcher on his way to the hospital. His 2-1/2 year old daughter was killed in the bombing.
Child wounded in Israeli terror attack at Qana.
Civilians killed in Israeli terror bombing in Qana.
A rescue worker removes the body of a Lebanese child from the rubble of a building in the aftermath of an Israeli terror bombing in the village of Qana, near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre.

"34 Children Among 57 Dead in Israeli Strike." --Rone Tempest and Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, 10:03 AM PDT, July 30, 2006.

Images of children’s bodies tangled in the building’s ruins, being carried away on blankets or wrapped in plastic sheeting were aired on Arab news networks. The televised images of stiffened, dust-covered bodies of children being pulled from the wreckage spread rage. In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother’s body taken out on a stretcher. “Why are they killing us? What have we done?” he screamed.

Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, warning the Muslim world will “not forgive” nations that stand in the way of stopping the Israeli bombing. Headlines of “Carnage’’ and “Barbaric’’ filled the front pages of newspapers across the Arab world July 31, and a member of the parliament of Kuwait, a staunch ally of the United States, called American policy makers “sons of dogs’’ for supplying the bombs for the Israeli attacks, news services said. The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, issued a statement saying that “nothing can justify” the Qana "airstrike."

Nearly 550 Lebanese civilians have been killed in Israeli attacks, with as many as 200 more missing, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Nearly 2,000 have been wounded, the ministry said. Israel apologized for the deaths in Qana but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas. The Israeli defense chief, Amir Peretz said, “An Israeli pilot has never been given an order to hurt civilians.”

"The Zionists are the world's most accomplished and brazen liars."
-Michael A. Hoffman II

"Nazi Holocaust" propaganda has dulled the sensibilities of the world to holocausts against Arabs

by Michael A. Hoffman II | Sunday, July 30, 2006

Today we awaken to the dreadful news, according to the Associated Press, that the Israelis bombed several homes in the southern Lebanon village of Qana early Sunday, "killing at least 56 people, most of them children, in the deadliest attack in 19 days...."

Even Jack Straw, the former British Foreign Secretary, said of the Israeli attacks: "These are not surgical strikes, but have instead caused death and misery among innocent civilians."

This is the second Israeli mass murder at Qana. In April, 1996, Israelis murdered 102 Arab civilian refugees at a United Nations camp in Qana. An Amnesty International report described the Israeli attack as deliberate. The July 31, 2006 New York Times describes the 1996 slaughter in accordance with the official Israeli military account, as a case of the Israelis having "mistakenly shelled a United Nations post in Qana..." Link

The Israeli holocaust against Lebanon continues, while the world does nothing. Ever more Arab women and children in Lebanon are murdered with impunity. They are less than human in the eyes of the West.

Nothing like this would ever be permitted if it were Judaic children who were dying. In such a case, the words, "The Holocaust is happening again, the world must not stand by silent!" would reverberate from every pulpit, radio, TV and newspaper front page in America. But since it is the children of Lebanon who are being killed, "sub-human Amalekites" according to the secret teaching of the Orthodox rabbis, the US obstructs a ceasefire, with help from American journalists, editors, clergymen and the US Congress.

This is a shame, and a disgrace. It proves that the perpetual, pious human rights tears shed over the "Nazi Holocaust against the Jews" in schools, churches and national museums and memorials day-in-and-day out, have nothing to do with ensuring that it "never happens again" to "any other people."

Rather, "The Holocaust" is a cynical power-politics hammer used to build special privileges and a sense of sacred awe and racial superiority for Judaics, which in turn renders them forever immune from war crimes prosecutions, or any interdiction of the holocausts which they perpetrate against Palestine and Lebanon.

If "The Holocaust" was a true human rights lobby for all mankind, then Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt and Steven Spielberg would be using their clout and prestige to demand an immediate end to Israeli mass murder in Lebanon.

Instead, Wiesel is on record supporting Israeli bombing in Lebanon, while the vast majority of the Israeli people, including the "Holocaust Survivors" among them, also endorse it.

"Holocaust" propaganda has dulled the moral sense of the West. The "Holocaust" is little more than an arm of Zionist psychological warfare for the maintenance of Judaic superiority, racial and ethical, throughout the earth, not for saving the lives of other marginalized peoples.

In fact, it seems to have given the Israelis a hubris as supra-human ethicists with a license to kill civilians without moral qualms or the least fear of war crime prosecution.

No doubt the movie Spielberg will make about what is happening in Lebanon, will show Israeli commanders and troops agonizing about their bombings. But in reality there are no such reservations, just exultation and the arrogance of stone-cold killers swaggering in the knowledge that their murder spree is backed by US super-power money and might. (The Israelis are not so brave when they have to confront Hezbollah militiamen on the ground, man-to-man, rather than from 30,000 feet up in the cockpit of a jet-bomber).

The racial and moral superiority engendered for the Israelis by "Nazi Holocaust" propaganda is the reason why the massacre at Qana in 1996 was forgotten, allowing it to happen all over again in 2006.

"Never again"? Ha!

"Never Again" does not apply when it comes to Israeli extermination of the people of Lebanon, according to an exact Zionist timetable that brooks no "ceasefire." The Israelis will cease fire when every Lebanese woman and child they intend to slaughter is properly dead and buried, and not before. And the "Nazi Holocaust"-saturated human rights campaigners will sit on their hands, exactly as they have been trained to do by Spielberg and Wiesel, and a parade of professors and preachers.

Tears, guilt, classroom curricula, movies and museums are reserved for the victims of the Nazis. Cluster bombs, napalm, missiles and cannon shells are reserved for helpless Arab mothers and their children, with applause from Hillary, Elie and four hundred members of the House of Representatives.

This, in part, is why I am a "Holocaust" revisionist. As grating sanctimony, "The Holocaust" exceeds the Pharisees in bloated hypocrisy, and as a prop for Israeli mass murder, it is a bloodthirsty alibi for arrogant Judaic supremacy and merciless mass murder.

Copyright©2006 RevisionistHistory.org

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: ISRAELI AIR FORCE BOMBING IN LEBANON IS "INDISCRIMINATE"

Haaretz | July 31, 2006

An Israeli air raid on the Lebanese village of Qana which killed at least 56 civilians was the result of indiscriminate Israeli bombing which amounts to a war crime, Human Rights Watch said. The New York-based rights group said Sunday's strike on Qana which killed 37 children suggested the Israeli military was treating southern Lebanon as "a free-fire zone."

"The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game for attack," Human Rights Executive Director Kenneth Roth said in a statement. "(The Qana attack) is the latest product of an indiscriminate bombing campaign that the Israel Defense Forces have waged in Lebanon", the statement said. "Indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon (is) a war crime," read the statement's headline.

Israel says it warned civilians to leave southern Lebanon, where it says it has been targeting Hizbollah guerrillas. But the Lebanese government says Israeli bombardment of roads and cars made it impossible for people to escape...Human Rights Watch said responsibility for Qana rested "squarely with the Israeli military".

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Document said to be hand-written report of arresting officer concerning Mel Gibson's alleged drunk-driving

ABC television network, has a development deal with Mel Gibson's company to make a miniseries about the Holocaust...the Holocaust project, to be adapted from a little-known 1998 memoir called "Flory: Survival in the Valley of Death," which recounts the experiences of a young Dutch Jew during World War II, is in the early stages. An ABC spokeswoman Sunday would confirm only that the project was in development... Gibson and his spokesman, Alan Nierob, have said little about the project, which is backed by Gibson's Con Artists Productions, the TV division of his Icon Productions. [Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2006]

(CNN) -- Mel Gibson's statement regarding his arrest Friday on suspicion of DUI: After drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I drove a car when I should not have, and was stopped by the LA County Sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person.

I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said, and I apologize to anyone who I have offended. Also, I take this opportunity to apologize to the deputies involved for my belligerent behavior. They have always been there for me in my community and indeed probably saved me from myself. I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry.

I have battled with the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse. I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state and have already taken necessary steps to ensure my return to health.
Much has been made in the U.S. media of the Syrian and Iranian-origin weaponry used by Hezbollah in the escalating violence in Israel and Lebanon. There has been no parallel discussion of the origin of Israel's weaponry, the vast bulk of which is from the United States.

The United States is the primary source of Israel's far superior arsenal. For more than 30 years, Israel had been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance and since 1985 Jerusalem has received about $3 billion in military and economic aid each year from Washington. U.S. aid accounts for more than 20% of Israel's total defense budget.

Over the past decade, the United States has transferred more than $17 billion in military aid to this country of just under 7 million people.

Israel is one of the United States' largest arms importers. Between 1996 and 2005 (the last year for which full data is available), Israel took delivery of $10.19 billion in U.S. weaponry and military equipment, including more than $8.58 billion through the Foreign Military Sales program, and another $1.61 billion in Direct Commercial Sales

During the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, Israel received $10.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing—the Pentagon's biggest military aid program—and $6.3 billion in U.S. arms deliveries. The aid figure is larger than the arms transfer figure because it includes financing for major arms agreements for which the equipment has yet to be fully delivered. The most prominent of these deals is a $4.5 billion sale of 102 Lockheed Martin F-16s to Israel.

Source: Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3387
Israel army Sergeant Rafael Ezra has little sympathy for Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli attacks. "I think they need to choose better where they live," he said.

NEAR THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER - Rafael Ezra's artillery is pounding unseen targets miles away with blast after deafening blast. But the 21-year-old Israeli soldier isn't too concerned about whether the shells are killing Hezbollah fighters or innocent civilians. "Most of the people killed in Lebanon lived in Hezbollah neighborhoods," Ezra said while getting his hair shaved and listening to Arabic music as shells soared over a nearby hillside. "So I think they need to choose better where they live. People should know better."

Few Israelis, however, are shedding many tears for the civilians dying in Lebanon or wondering whether their country's tactics might make it harder rather than easier to reach a peace that would last longer than a few weeks or months.

The latest conflict with Hezbollah has united Israel...public support for the military action remains above 80 percent...three-quarters of Israelis in one recent poll urged their country to go further.

"I am prepared to hail down hellfire...their innocent bystanders can die instead of ours," Rafi Ginat, the editor of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest newspaper, wrote in Friday's edition. "We are in the middle of a war...We have to strike hard - and we can allow ourselves to feel good about it."

Earlier this week, an Israeli airstrike hit a United Nations base, killing four unarmed peacekeepers. Eight Canadian citizens were killed last week as they tried to escape the attacks. Dozens of Lebanese citizens have been killed when Israeli planes hit convoys of civilians heeding Israeli warnings for them to leave their homes.

Israeli officials generally say they're sorry after such attacks. But their statements usually come with a "but"...Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert...recently complained that the world was getting a "distorted picture in which the victim is portrayed as the aggressor."

Source: Dion Nissenbaum
McClatchy Newspapers | July 28, 2006

Friday, July 28, 2006

"Souris, mon fils, sinon on pourrait t'accuser d'antisémitisme."
(Smile, my son, or else we will be accused of anti-semitism).