Jonathan Cook, Electronic Lebanon, 7 September 2006

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5698.shtml

NAZARETH – The measure of a human rights organisation is to be found not just in the strides it takes to seek justice for the oppressed and victimised but also in the compromises it makes to keep itself out of trouble. Because of the business that human rights defenders are in, they must be held to a standard higher than we demand of others.

Unfortunately, one of the best — Human Rights Watch — has failed that test during the war in Lebanon this summer. (…اكثر)

By Patrick Cockburn in Gaza
Published: 08 September 2006
Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world’s attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.
A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

(…اكثر)

IDF commander: We fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon

Meron Rappaport (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/761781.html)

“What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.

Cluster bomblets on the ground outside Nabatiyeh.

(…اكثر)

The following letter was sent by Hassan El Akhras to the National Post in response to an article about the killing of the El Akhras family published in that newspaper. The Post has refused to publish this letter.

23 August 2006

Sunday July 16 was the darkest day of my life. I lost 12 members of my family. They include my father, Ali El Akhras, my cousin, Ali Al-Akhrass, and his wife, Amira, and their four children, aged 1 to 8: Salam (which means ‘Peace’), Ahmad, Zeinab and Saja as well as the children’s grandmother Haniya Al-Akhrass.

Their bodies were crushed under the rubble of our house in the southern Lebanese village of Aytaroun. Their lives were cut short by the Israeli shelling of their hideout from the bombs. (…اكثر)

by Rami El-Amine

Originally published by Zmag.

Racism against Arabs and Muslims long preceded the 9-11 terrorist attacks and has much of its roots in Western imperialism in the Middle East, especially Israel’s colonization of Palestine.  Yet, the escalation that we witness today can be traced to the war on terror launched after 9-11 by Bush and his neoconservative ideologues with the backing of the Democrats. Anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism has helped sell the detentions, wars, gulags, and occupations of US imperialism’s latest and boldest venture into the Middle East and South Asia.  In turn, this imperial venture has further inflamed racist views of Arabs and Muslims.   What makes this growing racism so frightening is its wide acceptance in US society, particularly by the left.  With the latter, it is not as much conscious racism as not doing enough to fight it.  Part of this may be due to ambivalence, but it also stems from a lack of a dynamic understanding of Islamism.  Broad support gives anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism a sense of legitimacy and respectability that makes building a mass movement that can end the war and occupation of Iraq difficult, if not impossible, since so much of the support for the war is fueled by fear and racism.

We thrash, curse for air
As our strangler declares, look
How violent the Arab
              – Haiku for the Head Locked by Zein El-Amine

(…اكثر)

“In this first address that I give in these days following Operation True Promise, I would like to say a few words — a word to the Lebanese people, a word to the resistance fighters, a word to the Zionists, and a word to the Arab rulers. I will not offer words to the international community because I have never for one day believed that there is any such thing as an international community, just as many in our nation feel.”The address of the General Secretary of Hizballah, His Excellency Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, to the Nation, the Lebanese people, the resistance fighters, the Zionists, and the Arab leaders.

Tadamon! Montreal posts an address from the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, delivered on Friday, July 14th, during the first week of the Israeli assault on Lebanon. This address focuses on some important social, cultural & political motivations for the military actions of Hezbollah, and thus provides some important context to the war…. Tadamon! Montreal posts this address from Hassan Nasrallah in light of the misrepresentation of Hezbollah in the majority of major media outlets in North America.

(…اكثر)

Reporting from South Lebanon

August 27th, 2006
Hicham Takache

In the afternoon, I took my family and made a tour to the neighboring villages and towns to survey the war damage. Yohmor in particular was badly hit. This small village overlooking the Litani River was bombed mercilessly by all types of ammunition; from artillery shells, to cluster bombs, to smart bombs shot from Apache helicopters and F16 fighter jets. The damage is extensive and incredible.

(…اكثر)

View a photo essay of Haret Hreik from independent media activist & organizer with the Samidoun coalition, Mohammad Shublaq taken on Tuesday, 15 August 2006. Haret Hreik is a neighborhood in the southern suburb of Beirut that was most heavily targeted by Israeli air-strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs or Dahye in Arabic.
(…اكثر)

Deliberate destruction or ‘collateral damage’?

Excerpt from Amnesty International report, “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate destruction or “collateral damage”? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure.” Full report: www.amnesty.org.

During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment of Lebanon by the Israeli armed forces, the country’s infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale. Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground, reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns, as their inhabitants fled the bombardments. Main roads, bridges and petrol stations were blown to bits. Entire families were killed in air strikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their villages. (…اكثر)

The UN’s humanitarian chief has accused Israel of “completely immoral” use of cluster bombs in Lebanon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5299938.stm

UN clearance experts had so far found 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets at 359 separate sites, Jan Egeland said.

(…اكثر)