| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"peace.seeker.27" |
| Date: |
26 Jul 2006 07:05:20 AM |
| Object: |
Myth: People Like David Horowitz Only Want to Tell Us the Truth |
July 26, 2006
Five Myths That Sanction Israel's War Crimes
by Jonathan Cook
This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura
Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, who most recently made
his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite
witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to
suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the
rest of us.
It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely
exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States
on Middle East matters - well, apart from the regular whackos who
fill my e-mail in-tray. But five minutes of listening to Horowitz
speak, and the sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura
("The Professors - your book's a great read, David"), left me a lot
more frightened about the world's future.
Horowitz's response to every question, every development in the Middle
East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria, or Iran, is
the same: "They want to drive the Jews into the sea." It's as simple as
that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis; just the message that
the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide started by Europe.
And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans buy that stuff.
Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the
round hole of his claims that the Jews are facing an imminent genocide
in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of U.S.
apologists for Israel - regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura's
- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hezbollah's current
rockets strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn,
the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense in
the U.S.
The first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its
military hardware because Hezbollah began "raining down" rockets on the
Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall this was not
the first justification we were offered: that had to do with the two
soldiers captured by Hezbollah on a border post on July 12.
But presumably Horowitz and his friends realized that 400 Lebanese dead
and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a
"proportionate" response. In any case, Hezbollah kept telling the world
how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap.
Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured, and more
than half a million refugees - all because Israel is not ready to sit
down at the negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not "advocate for
Israel" on that one.
So the chronology of war has been reorganized: now we are being told
that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the
barrage of Hezbollah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The
international community is buying the argument hook, line, and sinker.
"Israel has the right to defend itself," says every politician who can
find a microphone to talk into.
But, if we cast our minds back, that is not how the "Middle East
crisis," as TV channels now describe it, started. It is worth recapping
those early events (and I won't document the long history of Lebanese
suffering at Israel's hands that preceded it) before they become
entirely shrouded in the mythology being peddled by Horowitz and
others.
Early on July 12, Hezbollah launched a raid against an army border
post, in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of
Israeli sovereignty. In the fighting, the Shi'ite militia killed three
soldiers and captured two others, while Hezbollah fired a few mortars
at border areas in what the Israeli army described at the time as
"diversionary tactics." As a result of the shelling, five Israelis were
"lightly injured," with most needing treatment for shock, according to
the Ha'aretz newspaper.
Israel's immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in pursuit
of the Hezbollah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese
sovereignty). The tank ran over a land mine, which exploded, killing
four soldiers inside. Another soldier died in further clashes inside
Lebanon as his unit tried to retrieve the bodies.
Rather than open diplomatic channels to calm the violence down and
start the process of getting its soldiers back, Israel launched bombing
raids deep into Lebanese territory the same day. Given Israel's
worldview that it alone has a right to project power and fear, that
might have been expected.
But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into
Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were
pummeled. We now know from reports in the U.S. media that the Israeli
army had been planning such a strike against Lebanon for at least a
year.
In contrast to the image of Hezbollah frothing at the mouth to destroy
Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation.
For the first day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern
borders areas, which have faced Hezbollah attacks in the past and are
well protected.
He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even
though we now know he could have targeted Israel's third largest city
from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused no
injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation.
It was another three days - days of constant Israeli bombardment of
Lebanon, destroying the country and injuring countless civilians -
before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight
workers in a railway depot.
No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what he
had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the path
of war instead. Although the international media quoted his ominous
televised message that "Haifa is just the beginning," Nasrallah in fact
made his threat conditional on Israel's continuing strikes against
Lebanon. In the same speech he warned: "As long as the enemy pursues
its aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue the
confrontation without limits and red lines." Well, Israel did, and so
now has Nasrallah.
The second myth is that Hezbollah's stockpile of 12,000 rockets - the
Israeli army's estimate - poses an existential threat to Israel.
According to Horowitz and others, Hezbollah collected its armory with
the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.
If this really was Hezbollah's intention in amassing the weapons, it
has a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the map.
More likely, it collected the armory in the hope that it might prove a
deterrence - even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now
discovering - against a repeat of Israel's invasions of 1978 and
1982, and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.
In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at
least 2,000 Hezbollah rockets have already been fired into Israel while
the army's bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets.
In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of
Hezbollah's arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range
of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being
expunged. The Galilee may be emptier, as up to a third of Israeli Jews
seek temporary refuge in the south, but Israel's existence is in no
doubt at all.
The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by
targeting only terrorists, Hezbollah prefers to bring death and
destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians.
It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the
efforts of Horowitz and co. it most certainly does. As the civilian
death toll in Lebanon has rocketed, international criticism of Israel
has remained at the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for
"restraint" and "proportionate responses."
One need only cast a quick eye over the casualty figures from this
conflict to see that if Israel is targeting only Hezbollah fighters it
has been making disastrous miscalculations. So far some 400 Lebanese
civilians are reported dead - unfortunately for Horowitz's story, at
least a third of them are children. From the images coming out of
Lebanon's hospitals, many more children have survived but with terrible
burns or disabling injuries.
The best estimates, though no one knows for sure, are that Hezbollah
deaths are not yet close to the three-figures range.
In the latest emerging news from Lebanon, human rights groups are
accusing Israel of violating international law and using cluster
grenades, which kill indiscriminately. There are reports too, so far
unconfirmed, that Israel has been firing illegal incendiary bombs.
Conversely, the breakdown of the smaller number of deaths of Israelis
at the hands of Hezbollah - 42 at the time of writing - show that
more soldiers have been killed than civilians.
In fact, although no one is making the point, Hezbollah's rockets have
been targeted overwhelming at strategic locations: the northern
economic hub of Haifa, its satellite towns, and the array of military
sites across the Galilee.
Nasrallah seems fully aware that Israel has an impressive civil defense
program of shelters that keep most civilians out of harm's way. Unlike
Horowitz, I won't presume to read Nasrallah's mind: whether he wants to
kill large numbers of Israeli civilians or not cannot be known, given
his inability to do so.
But we can see from the choice of the sites he is striking that his
primary goal is to give Israelis a small taste of the disruption of
normal life that is being endured by the Lebanese. He has effectively
closed Haifa for more than a week, shutting its port and financial
centers. Israeli TV is speaking increasingly of the damage being
inflicted on the country's economy.
Because of Israel's press censorship laws, it is impossible to discuss
the locations of Israel's military installations. But Hezbollah's
rockets are accurate enough to show that many are intended for the
army's sites in the Galilee, even if they are rarely precise enough to
hit them.
It is obvious to everyone in Nazareth, for example, that the rockets
landing close by, and once on, the city over the past week are
searching out, and some have fallen extremely close to, the weapons
factory sited near us.
Hezbollah seems to have as little concern for the collateral damage of
civilian deaths as Israel - each wants the balance of terror in its
favor - but it is nonsense to suggest that Hezbollah's goals are any
more ignoble than Israel's. It is trying to dent the economy of
northern Israel in retaliation for Israel's total destruction of the
Lebanese economy. Equally, it is trying to show Israel that it knows
where its military installations are to be found. Both strategies
appear to be having an impact, even if a minor one, on weakening
Israeli resolve.
The fourth myth is a continuation of the third: Hezbollah has been
endangering the lives of ordinary Lebanese by hiding among
noncombatants.
We have seen this kind of dissembling by Israel and Horowitz before,
though not repeated so enthusiastically by Western officials. The UN
head of humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, who is in the region,
accused Hezbollah of "cowardly blending" among the civilian population,
and a similar accusation was leveled by the British Foreign Minister
Kim Howells when he arrived in Israel.
In 2002, Israel made the same charge: that Palestinians resisting its
army's rampage through the refugee camps of the West Bank were hiding
among civilians. The claim grew louder as more Palestinian civilians
showed the irritating habit of getting in the way of Israeli strikes
against population centers. The complaints reached a crescendo when at
least two dozen civilians were killed in Jenin as Israel razed the camp
with Apache helicopters and Caterpillar bulldozers.
The implication of Egeland's cowardly statement seems to be that any
Lebanese fighter, or Palestinian one, resisting Israel and its powerful
military should stand in an open field, his rifle raised to the sky,
waiting to see who fares worse in a shoot-out with an Apache helicopter
or F-16 fighter jet. Hezbollah's reluctance to conduct the war in this
manner, we are supposed to infer, is proof that they are terrorists.
Egeland and Howells need reminding that Hezbollah's fighters are not
aliens recently arrived from training camps in Iran, whatever Horowitz
claims. They belong to and are strongly supported by the Shi'ite
community, nearly half the country's population, and many other
Lebanese. They have families, friends, and neighbors living alongside
them in the country's south and the neighborhoods of Beirut who believe
Hezbollah is the best hope of defending their country from Israel's
regular onslaughts.
Given the indigenous nature of Hezbollah's resistance, we should not be
surprised at the lengths the Shi'ite militia is going to ensure their
loved ones, and the Lebanese people more generally, are not put
directly in danger by their combat.
If only the same could be said of the Israeli army and air force. One
need only look at the images of the victims of its strikes against
residential neighborhoods, cars, ambulances, and factories to see why
most of the dead being extracted from the rubble are civilians.
And finally, there is a fifth myth I almost forgot to mention. That
people like David Horowitz only want to tell us the truth...
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9407
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| User: "docremington" |
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| Title: Re: Myth: People Like David Horowitz Only Want to Tell Us the Truth |
26 Jul 2006 07:49:40 AM |
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peace.seeker.27 wrote:
July 26, 2006
Five Myths That Sanction Israel's War Crimes
by Jonathan Cook
Jonathan is a cretinous k00k, who drivels that, hizbullah rockets are
accurate enough to hit military targets, but rarely precise enough to
hit them.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9407
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