You've Got Red On You.

Women call out the Pittsburgh police on domestic violence

2007-07-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has experienced domestic violence, directly or indirectly, knows that it's usually futile to go to the police for help. I worked for Laurel House for a time and was astounded at how many of the DV survivors I spoke with had been dismissed, ignored, and mistreated by the cops. Women are asked what they did 'to piss him off,' or told that they deserve what they get; the few male victims who ask the police for help are laughed off or face more sexist and/or homophobic abuse.

And now Luke Ravenstahl, the 26-year-old mayor of Pittsburgh (he's my age!) has promoted three police officers, Cmdr. George Trosky, Lt. Charles Rodriguez and Sgt. Eugene F. Hlavac, with domestic violence charges on their records. According to the Post-Gazette article, Rodriguez's daughter dropped the charges yesterday.

Ravenstahl's office initially reacted with surprise to this revelation, and Ravenstahl issued a statement in which he claimed to be "announcing a new policy that will set a standard of zero tolerance for domestic abuse." But when the ever-progressive FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) threatened to sue, Ravenstahl decided it wouldn't be worth it to rescind the promotions. Guess we know where women stand.

The local chapter of NOW, fortunately, has decided to do something useful and fight back on this issue. Domestic violence is, unfortunately, a part of police culture-- and that makes it nearly impossible for abuse victims to get a serious hearing from the police. Knowing that, NOW is asking women to come forward and share their experiences being dismissed by the police. You can share your experiences with Joanne Tosti-Vasey at panow@panow.org.

They have also issued a list of demands, including that the city:

Keep records of allegations of alleged stalking, domestic violence, and sexual attacks by police officers in the personnel records during the employment of and for 6-10 years post employment to ensure that current and future police jurisdictions can have access to this record when making hiring or promotion decisions.
Refer allegations of any criminal act by a police officer, including domestic violence, to an outside agency such as the DA’s office or the PA State Police in order to overcome police “codes of silence.”
Set up an anonymous hotline service for community members and police to report allegations of sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence. This would allow victims and police officers to report incidences they would otherwise fear reporting to the local precinct.
Hire more female police officers in an effort to change the climate within the police department.
Establish a community oversight committee to review policies, procedures, and complaints about and within the police department.
Require periodic psychological and other appropriate evaluations of all officers at hire, after any significant job-related occurrence, upon allegations of significant misconduct, substance abuse, or criminal activity including domestic violence, and routinely after every five (5) years of employment.

This is a good start. It's a way to lessen the damage. But I don't think it's a solution.

The problem is that the role of the police in society is, by necessity, a violent one. While there are plenty of well-meaning individuals who join the police force (including some of my relatives, for whom I have a great deal of respect), the police as a societal force are there to protect private property through the use of violent force. They fill this role under a great deal of stress, in a highly sexist environment (and the women who succeed as police officers have to become 'one of the boys' to the point where they are often less sympathetic to female DV survivors than male officers). In that kind of environment, with a culture where DV is tolerated, is it surprising that so many police end up using violence on their families? Or that the 'blue wall of silence' doesn't crack when they do?

Kudos to NOW for helping DV survivors in Pittsburgh speak out. I hope they win their demands. I hope their actions are imitated everywhere. And I hope it becomes part of a wider movement that calls into question the role of the police and the foundations of violence on which our society has stood since the days of slavery.

Frederick Douglass: What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?

2007-07-03T00:27:00.000-07:00

July 4, 1852

Rochester, New York

Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap like as an hart."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin. I can today take up the lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive, required of us a song and they who wasted us, required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then, fellow citizens, is "American Slavery." I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being?

The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute-books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that while we are engaged in all the enterprises common to other men-digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave-we are called upon to prove that we are men?

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer and insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the last, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No; I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy's thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Welcome back, Cindy Sheehan!

2007-07-03T00:14:00.000-07:00

Cindy Sheehan is back in politics! And planning to walk from Atlanta to DC.

If you're in the Philly area, come check out the Philadelphia Emergency Anti-War Convention tomorrow, July 4, at 1 pm at Independence Center.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

2007-07-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

Our very own Anand Gopal, published in Wiretap and The Nation Online!

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/wvacoal

Here's a taste:

Larry Gibson has gotten used to the threats. Gibson, a Lilliputian mountaineer with an impressive belly and an equally impressive baritone drawl, reels off the list of attacks and calamities he has faced almost with a touch of boredom. "We've had up here at my place about 122 acts of violence, from shootings and the burning of my cabin, to shooting my dog to trying to hang the other dog I had," he deadpans.

Sure enough, just yards from Gibson's modest Appalachian home sits a dull gray camper, its facade pockmarked with tiny bullet holes. In the 22 years that he has lived atop Kayford mountain, part of the picturesque massifs that form the coalfields of West Virginia, Gibson has also faced beatings, sabotage, and death threats.

What Gibson has not gotten used to, however, is the view. The rolling, verdant countryside below Gibson's home has been home to hundreds of isolated and close-knit Appalachian mining communities for generations. Much taller peaks that rose high above Gibson's home and filled the surrounding scenery, however, once surrounded Kayford mountain.

Read more...

Sexism in Hollywood? What what?

2007-06-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

Already Under Fire, a Producer Is Going Further
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES, June 24 — For a while Wednesday night’s block party for “Transformers” was shaping up to be the hottest ticket in town.

But that was before Courtney Solomon, planning a celebration of his own, called in the SuicideGirls.

Having already provoked parents, women’s groups and the ratings board with explicit ads for the coming torture movie “Captivity,” Mr. Solomon and his After Dark Films now intend to introduce the film, set for release July 13, with a party that may set a new standard for the politically incorrect.

This is disgusting... this filmmaker is openly declaring his outright, unapologetic misogyny. And hoping to make money from it. His 'justifications' read like a Hollywood version of the explanations "white power" groups give publicly for their politics. Let's see if people actually speak out against it.

One person already has: Joss Whedon, creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and other proudly feminist art, on the blog Whedoneque (thanks to Tina for the link).

Incidentally, can we finally put to bed the whole debate about whether the Suicide Girls are a feminist organization?

A few highlights:

“The women’s groups definitely will love it,” Mr. Solomon hinted. “I call it my personal little tribute to them.”

[dot dot dot]

Mr. Solomon, a Toronto-born entrepreneur who acquired the rights to the game Dungeons & Dragons while working from his bedroom and wound up directing its film under the tutelage of the producer Joel Silver, casts his struggle with those who object to “Captivity” as a Larry Flynt-style fight against censorship and repression. Yet this promotional master of Hollywood’s dark side is waging the battle with typical outrageousness. The movie, which is rated R, will screen only once before its opening, at an expected showing for women’s groups in New York, at which he wants to engage in a town-hall-style debate with detractors.

“We would not be receptive,” said Meaghan Carey, deputy director of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. “We’re not going to go protest so they can get press.”

OK, so let me get this straight: promoting a film about how torturing women (in a very real and non-consensual way, just to be clear) is sexy by paying women to participate in a deliberately, openly anti-woman event is a brave fight against censorship and repression? Amazing. I'm still waiting to find out exactly which movies have been censored for being too sexist. You know, as opposed to the movies that actually do get censored, such as Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia by the great Australian documentary filmmaker John Pilger.

And NOW's predictable response, of course, is to remain silent, because they don't want to take the bait.

Granted, Solomon certainly is deliberately baiting the women's movement. Why? Perhaps he wants to prove that the women's movement is dead in the water, or that feminists are all humorless caricatures who just can't understand that it's "just a movie." (Hint: So was Birth of a Nation. Wonder if the Times would also glowingly describe that gem as, like, so awesomely politically incorrect and badass!)

But here's the thing: the women's movement isn't dead, despite the best efforts of groups like NOW. And we do have sense of humor, and we are a damn creative bunch. So here's a call to my sisters and brothers in LA-- get on this! Show this asshole what a real women's movement looks like!

Now, I'm not advocating that you sunny California types do anything illegal. But according to the article, "the primary audience... will be fans, who can cycle through the club free in groups of 50." How hard is it to get those tickets? And how much chaos could a group of 50 cause once it's deep in the heart of a party filled with a "warren of live torture rooms"? Especially one that "everybody on the Internet gets to watch"?

I'm just saying.

Dehumanizing Aboriginal people in Australia-- again.

2007-06-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

Alcohol banned in Aborigine areas (BBC)

Alcohol and poverty have blighted Aboriginal communities Australia is to ban alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal areas in the Northern Territory in a bid to curb child sex abuse.
All Aboriginal children in the territory will be medically examined.

The new proposals follow a report last week which found evidence of abuse in each of the territory's 45 communities.

The report blamed high levels of alcohol and poverty for the situation, which Prime Minister John Howard has described as a national emergency.

"We're dealing with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present," John Howard told parliament.

"That is a sad and tragic event. Exceptional measures are required to deal with an exceptionally tragic situation."

The article continues on to explain that Aboriginal people have imposed their own alcohol bans in their own communities for decades; most who drink buy their alcohol in nearby towns with mixed white/Aboriginal populations.

So let me get this straight: The government which has murdered Aboriginal people, destroyed their way of life, kidnapped their children and condemned them to racism and poverty, has suddenly developed an interest in protecting Aboriginal children-- not from the white supremacist machinations of the Australian government, but from their parents.

Imagine, for a moment, that the government decided to start a campaign against the sexual abuse of white Australian children, and began requiring mandatory, invasive genital examinations of all children; instituted criminal penalties for not just use or sale but possession of alcoholic beverages; and gave itself the right to search the hard drives of private citizens without a warrant or any justification whatsoever. How long would the Howard government last? Would the courts ever let such a policy stand?

But the Aboriginal population, apparently, doesn't get such constitutional considerations. Just as always, Aboriginal children are treated as the property of the state, not as human beings who are part of families. And since, according to Australia, Aborigines are not people, there's no need to provide decent jobs and infrastructure, end racism, and allow Aboriginal self-determination-- after all, it's not like the problems of alcoholism and sexual abuse have material causes that can be addressed. The answer, clearly, is to treat all Aboriginal people as lazy, drunk, child-molesting criminals without brains or human rights of their own.

Terry Jones on Britain and Iran

2007-04-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

Ha. I was thinking I might have a bit more time to post on this blog, but then I decided to get married in four weeks! Which, yay! But not so great when it comes to having free time.

However, I think this Guardian editorial from Terry Jones (yes, the one from Monty Python) is well worth reposting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2047108,00.html
Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated. And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.

Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Pythonwww.terry-jones.net

Review: Bastards of the Party

2007-03-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

This review of the HBO documentary Bastards of the Party was published in the February 16, 2007 issue of Socialist Worker. This is the uncut version.

Bastards of the Party, directed by Cle Sloan, HBO Documentaries

Bastards of the Party, a documentary film produced, directed and narrated by Cle Shaheed "Bone" Sloan, a former member of the Athens Park Bloods, traces the political history of African American street gangs in Los Angeles. The title refers to the Crips and Bloods as the "bastard children of the Black Panther Party," though Sloan's history stretches back to the Reconstruction era. He traces the evolution of violence by whites against blacks and the forms of black self-defense that evolved as a result, by interviewing current and former gang members, Black Panthers, and historians (including radical urban historian Mike Davis, whose book City of Quartz Sloan credits with inspiring the film).

For instance, Sloan shows why the LAPD's reputation for racism has deep historical roots. The last legal lynching in Los Angeles took place in 1948, and Sloan shows the gruesome images of young Black men hanging from a tree while white men and women cheer and shout. It was when lynching finally became illegal that the LAPD took over the lynch mobs' job. The police commissioner at the time set out on a campaign to recruit police officers from the Deep South-- any white Southern man with a military background had a job waiting for him in Los Angeles, and the city deliberately developed a staunchly racist police force.

In the meantime, economic and political shifts forced a certain measure of desegregation in LA's neighborhoods. White neighborhoods reacted violently to the small numbers of African American families moving in, and there was a rash of beatings and killings of black youths by white gangs-- black newspapers from the time show the police looking on in approval. Young black men began to form their own groups for self-defense. The police force looked on this as a threat and began a campaign of repression that went on for years and culminated in the Watts riots of 1965.

While the Watts riots were portrayed in the white media (and in today's history textbooks) as instances of senseless violence and looting, Sloan paints a picture of an organized uprising that still serves as an inspiring expression of Black anger and shows how the Watts community empowered itself against a racist police force.

He then traces the history of the Black Panther Party's rise not only to political prominence, but as the heart of black self-organization. One woman he interviews says, "In those days, if your husband was gonna hit you, you didn't say 'I'm going to call the police.' You said, 'I'm going to call the Black Panthers.'" The Party organized breakfast programs, sickle cell testing, political education, food pantries, and revolution-- much to the alarm of the FBI. Sloan explains the history of COINTELPRO, the FBI's anti-Left sabotage program, and shows (through an interview with a retired FBI agent who participated in COINTELPRO) how the BPP and its reformist rival, the Us Organization, were pitted against one another and eventually undone by the FBI's relentless attacks.

In the 1970s, as the BPP declined, the problems of self-organization and self-defense remained. Black youth, inspired by the Panthers' example, began their own organizations, the most influential of which was the Crips-- an acronym that initially stood for "Community Revolutionary Inter-Party Service," though in a series of political arguments the "Revolutionary" was replaced with "Reform". The Crips had a political orientation and a constitution based on that of the BPP. However, the political collapse of the New Left left the Crips under attack and without direction. And as the manufacturing economy collapsed, jobs for semi-skilled laborers disappeared, and black men were left without alternatives as the factories closed. As rival gangs began to spring up, and popular culture portrayed the movement as an apolitical way to get rich, the situation declined into pointless black-on-black violence.

Sloan does a brilliant job tracing the political origins of the drug crisis in the 1980s, from the CIA to Nicaragua to South Central, and is unrelenting in his indictment of the police. He interviews experts who explain how the police actually benefit from and rely on the existence of gang violence, which brings them equipment, federal funding, sympathy from the media and a free hand to be as repressive and violent as they like. He intersperses shots of police "gang sweeps" in South Central with shots of soldiers patrolling the peasants of Vietnam.

As the movie draws to a close, Sloan focuses on the human cost of the continued violence and broken truces. He interviews current bangers about their lives and follows them to funerals. It isn't simply about guns and drugs, one Blood explains; he describes the loss of several family members and concludes with "We ain't looking for peace. Too much slaughter." The last few minutes of the movie features clips of Sloan wrestling with his own conscience over the course of several interviews-- the son of his closest friend has been killed, and despite his political commitment to stopping the violence, he wants to kill the killer-- not just out of revenge but out of a sense of loyalty to his family and those he loves. He ends with a roll call of those he knows or has come across during filming who have been cut down young, and the pictures show smiling, painfully young men at their prime.

No two-hour documentary can fully cover such a broad topic, and there are some important components missing. Latino gangs go mostly unmentioned. The effects of welfare reform and the draconian "criminal justice" reforms of the Clinton era are not explored. And the voices of women are largely absent. That said, Bastards of the Party is a remarkably thorough and illuminating documentary that sheds light on a part of Black history-- and American history-- that has been mostly ignored. Sloan is a gifted interviewer who allows his subjects' voices to narrate most of the film, and he conveys complex political ideas in a concise, accessible way. It's worth watching it on HBO or buying the DVD-- and take Sloan's advice and read Mike Davis's City of Quartz for even more depth on this topic.

Review: World War Z

2007-03-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

Hello readers (if you're out there)!

I made a conscious decision to discontinue this blog at the end of last summer, when I switched jobs and no longer had lots of downtime during the day. I still don't have downtime, but I have been doing some writing, and some of you have been asking about the fate of You've Got Red On You... so: what the hell. Here I am. I've been working mostly on environmental issues these days, so look for lots of that, but for right now I'm posting a couple of recent reviews. Enjoy!

This is a review of Max Brooks' new novel, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. (You may also remember Brooks from the Zombie Survival Guide.

"World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" by Max Brooks

In 2005, the world watched in horror, and George W. Bush twiddled his thumbs, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on a defenseless Louisiana. The Bush administration's obsession with "homeland security" did not extend to taking the obvious measures necessary to save the people of New Orleans from disaster. And as climate change and the threat of pandemic disease grow each year, a recent study showed that very few US cities are prepared to care for their citizens in the case of a major disaster.

What does this have to do with zombies? Everything, according to "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War". Written in the interview style of Studs Terkel's classic "Working," "WWZ" is a fictional account of what happens when politicians put profit and ideology before human need. In WWZ's future, a mysterious virus appears in rural China around 2008, just as the Bush administration is winding down and the American people have finally insisted on an end to the war in Iraq. The virus, initially known as "African rabies," kills its victims within a few days and then reanimates their dead bodies, which then become zombies intent on eating human flesh. Anyone bitten by a zombie is doomed to become a zombie. (Brooks' zombies follow the rules horror fans will know from George Romero's classic "Living Dead" movies.) Initially, studies are issued showing that isolated outbreaks of the virus have the potential to become a global pandemic, but the reports are shelved in an election year, and those who protest the government's neglect of the issue are labeled 'NPR liberals' and ignored.

By the time world governments begin to acknowledge the zombie threat and take action, it is too late, and the zombie uprising is unstoppable. It results in a global human-zombie war that lasts ten years, devastates the earth, rearranges the world map and (perhaps) renders capitalism forever irrelevant. Brooks' narrator travels the globe ten years after the end of the war, interviewing survivors, soldiers, profiteers, politicians and others about their role in "World War Z". The interviews illustrate twenty years of world history from the point of view of ordinary people.

Brooks' vision of the future is cynical and bitter. Drug companies do their best to profit from the crisis by marketing useless drugs as miracle cures, causing the deaths of thousands. A nuclear crisis erupts in South Asia as Indian refugees stream through Pakistan and into Iran, causing a nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. Israel, out of desperation, grants Palestinians the right of return and uses its apartheid wall to quarantine itself from the world; it remains safe from the zombie menace but is rocked by a civil war when right-wing Zionists revolt. The US military abandons its citizens on the East Coast, moves the federal government to Hawaii, and uses the Rocky Mountains as its line of defense. And Cuba, relatively safe as an island, finds itself overrun with millions of refugees from the US, houses them in refugee camps, and develops "guest worker" programs to allow Americans to "do the jobs Cubans don't want to do."

"World War Z" is an impressive achievement of speculative fiction: it is both a trenchant left-wing political critique and a well-written page-turner that will satisfy the most demanding horror and sci-fi fans.

Ladies and gentlemen, the great Sy Hersh.

2006-08-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

From the New Yorker:

WATCHING LEBANON
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.

Issue of 2006-08-21
Posted 2006-08-14

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”

Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”

The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”

Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.

The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)

According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”

Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.

The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”

David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.

In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”

“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.

The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.

One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”

Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.

The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)

The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)

Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”

The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.

In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”

There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”

Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)

Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”

Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”

The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”

The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”
Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”

Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”

A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.

A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”

There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”

Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”

Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.

Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”

A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”

The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”

There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”

The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”

Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”

Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”

Philadelphia Antiwar March

2006-08-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

March for a Cease Fire and Israeli Withdrawal from Lebanon & Gaza

Friday, August 11th from 4:30-6:30
Gathering on the west side of City Hall; March starts at 5:30
Ending at the Federal Building btwn 6th & 7th Sts on Market

The U.S. gives about $2.5 billion a year to Israel’s army. This month alone over 1000 civilians have been killed in Lebanon and Gaza; one million Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes.

If the world makes the connection between Iranian writing on Hizballah’s missiles, what are the Lebanese to make of the U.S. writing on Israel’s missiles?

We demand that the U.S. government intervene to stop Israel’s brutal bombing and blockade of Gaza and Lebanon, a form of collective punishment illegal under the Geneva Convention. We further call for an unconditional cease fire with a complete withdrawal of the Israeli army and an end to US aid to the Israeli military.

Lebanon: Nearly 1000 killed, one-third of whom are children, and one-million (a quarter of the population) forced to flee. The Lebanese infrastructure has been destroyed. Israel’s blockade of Lebanon is preventing food and medical aid from reaching the hardest hit areas which will most certainly raise the death toll. Furthermore, the oil slick from the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese power plant has polluted Lebanese coast and is now reaching Syria. The lack of an immediate coordinated response is risking an environmental catastrophe.

Gaza: 175 have been killed in the last month, a quarter of whom are children. What little infrastructure existed has been heavily damaged. There has been a sharp decline in the living conditions of 1.4 million people, more than half of whom are children, creating a humanitarian crisis. With nearly 80% of the population already living below the poverty line, the situation is dire.

We are calling for an end to this madness funded by our U.S. tax dollars.

Current list of Cosponsors: American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC Philly); Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Philly); Bubbes and Zaydes for Peace in the Middle East; Jewish Voice for Peace (Philly Chapter); Network of Arab American Professionals (NAAP-Philly); Philadelphia International Action Center; Suburban Greens; SUSTAIN; Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF-Philly).

Venezuela's Chavez Plans to Cut Ties to Israel to Protest War

2006-08-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

Venezuela's Chavez Plans to Cut Ties to Israel to Protest War
Aug. 9 (Bloomberg) --

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez plans to end relations with Israel to protest the bombing of Lebanon, the Communication and Information Ministry said in a statement.

Venezuela pulled the business attaché from its embassy in Israel on Aug. 4, while Israel recalled its ambassador in Venezuela on Aug. 7.

``The most likely next step is that we break diplomatic relations,'' the statement quoted Chavez as saying. ``I have no interest in maintaining diplomatic relations or offices or business or anything with a state like Israel.''

More than 800 Lebanese and at least 103 Israelis have died in the violence, according to police officials in the two countries.

Israel has occupied an area about 6 kilometers (3.6 miles) deep into Lebanon since the conflict began July 12, when Hezbollah forces fired on Israeli troops patrolling south of the Lebanese border and staged a cross-border raid in which three Israelis were killed and two kidnapped.

Brave war resisters, cowardly mainstream media, and Robert Fisk

2006-08-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! reports that some Israeli soldiers are deliberately missing their targets, out of concern that they are being asked to bomb civilians. Disobeying orders during wartime is a tremendous risk, particularly during a popular war in a country that does not allow conscientious objectors. Those soldiers brave enough to follow their consciences and refuse to kill civilians will likely be vilified in Israel, but I for one salute them. They, like American soldiers Camilo Mejia and Pablo Paredes, are setting an example for soldiers around the world.

But wasn't it just today that the NY Times reported that everyone in Israel, including the left, supports the war? This article is remarkable in that it fails to even acknowledge the existence of a radical left, however small, in Israel. They could have at least gotten a quote from Gideon Levy, who's been criticizing this war from its beginning in the editorial pages of Ha'Aretz, Israel's biggest daily.

As for Lebanon: I highly, highly recommend Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation. I'm reading it now, and it's by far the best and most balanced overview of the history of Lebanon (and all of its interwoven history with Israel/Palestine) that I've seen. I've recommended several of Fisk's articles on this blog; he's probably the foremost English-language journalist covering Lebanon and the Middle East. He's lived in Beirut since the 1970s, had his closest friend and coworker kidnapped, and was one of the first on the scene after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. He's also one of the most thoughtful and talented writers out there, and that shows in his book, which is, believe it or not, a 650-page page-turner. Go and read it, right now. Seriously.

Lebanon: An Open Country for Civil Resistance

2006-08-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Press Release-
Lebanon: An Open Country for Civil Resistance
Beirut
August 7, 2006

Press Contacts:
Rasha Salti, +961 3 970855
Huwaida Arraf, +961 70 974452
Samah Idriss, +961 3 381349
Wadih Al Asmar, +961 70 950780

On August 12, at 7 am, Lebanese from throughout the country and international supporters who have come to Lebanon to express solidarity will gather in Martyr’s Square in Beirut to form a civilian convoy to the south of Lebanon. Hundreds of Lebanese and international civilians will express their solidarity with the inhabitants of the heavily destroyed south who have been bravely withstanding the assault of theIsraeli military. This campaign is endorsed by more than 200 Lebanese and international organizations. This growing coalition of national and international non-governmental organizations hereby launches a campaign of civil resistance for the purpose of challenging the cruel and ruthless use of massive military force by Israel, the regional superpower, upon the people of Lebanon.

August 12 marks the start of this Campaign of Resistance, declaring Lebanon an Open Country for Civil Resistance. August 12 also marks both the international day of protest against the Israeli aggression.

"In the face of Israel’s systematic killing of our people, the indiscriminate bombing of our towns, the scorching of our villages, and the attempted destruction of our civil infrastructure, we say No! In the face of the forced expulsion of a quarter of our population from their homes throughout Lebanon, and the complicity of governments and international bodies, we re-affirm the acts of civil resistance that began from the first day of the Israeli assault, and we stress and add the urgent need to act!," said Rasha Salti, one of the organizers of this national event.

After August 12, the campaign will continue with a series of civil actions, leading to an August 19 civilian march to reclaim the South. "Working together, in solidarity, we will overcome the complacency, inaction, and complicity of the international community and we will deny Israel its goal of removing Lebanese from their land and destroying the fabric of our country," explained Samah Idriss, writer and co-organizer of this campaign.

"An international civilian presence in Lebanon is not only an act of solidarity with the Lebanese people in the face of unparalleled Israeli aggression, it is an act of moral courage to defy the will of those who would seek to alienate the West from the rest and create a new Middle East out of the rubble and blood of the region," said Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and campaign co-organizer. "After having witnessed the wholesale destruction of villages by Israel's air force and navy and having visited the victims (so-called displaced) of Israel's policy of cleansing Lebanese civilians from their homes," continued Arraf, "it is imperative to go south and reach those who have stayed behind to resist by steadfastly remaining on their land."

If you are in Lebanon and want to sign up and join the convoy, contact either:
Rasha Salti. Email: convois.citoyens.sud.liban@gmail.com Tel:+961 3 970 855
Rania Masri.Email rania.masri@balamand.edu.lb. Tel: +961 3 135 279 or+961 6 930 250 xt. 5683 or xt. 3933

If you are outside Lebanon and want to sign up and join the convoy, you should know:
1) You need to obtain a visa for Lebanon and for Syria if your plan is to enter Lebanon from Syria.
2) We don't have the funds to cover for the cost of your travel, however we can help with finding accomodations.

For questions and help for all internationals please contact Adam Shapiro at: adamsop@hotmail.com
You can also sign up on our website: www.lebanonsolidarity.org.

This campaign is thus far endorsed by more than 200 organizations, including: The Arab NGOs Network for Development (ANND), InternationalSolidarity Movement (ISM), Cultural Center for Southern Lebanon, Norwegian People’s Aid, Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections, Frontiers, Kafa, Nahwaal-Muwatiniya, Spring Hints, Hayya Bina, Lebanese Transparency Association, Amam 05, Lebanese Center for Civic Education, Let’s Build Trust, CRTD-A, Solida, National Association for Vocational Training and Social Services, Lebanese Development Pioneers, Nadi Li Koul Alnas, and Lecorvaw.

Houla

2006-08-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Another massacre: 40 dead in Houla, Lebanon. What do they hope to accomplish by the wholesale slaughter of civilians?

"The mainstream left is no longer left."

2006-08-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Waving colorful banners and singing protest songs, a tireless band of Israeli demonstrators is trying to end the war in Lebanon.

Few are taking notice.

"We understand we don't represent the consensus. Everyone is asleep," said Uri Even-Chen, 36, a computer programmer from the town of Ranana, during a weekend street march in Tel Aviv. Opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of Israelis back the war against Hizbollah, sparked when the guerrillas abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.

The death, damage and panic caused by Hizbollah's rockets have only hardened attitudes -- more than 2,700 missiles have slammed into northern Israel, killing 48 people. Those views have been reflected in the tiny street protests.

By contrast, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated at the height of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when the army sought to cripple Palestinian militants living there.

In one of the biggest rallies to date, around 2,000 people turned out in Tel Aviv at the weekend. Many carried communist and anarchist flags and banners belonging to Arab Israeli movements -- hardly the Israeli mainstream.

"The majority who support opposition to the war are from the radical left," said protester Amit Ramon, 42, a high-tech worker. "The mainstream left is no longer left."

Anti-war groups have demanded an immediate ceasefire and negotiations with Hizbollah over prisoners.

At the weekend rally in Tel Aviv, veteran peace campaigner Yael Dayan was booed off a stage for urging the safe return of all of Israel's soldiers fighting in Lebanon, underscoring how far removed protesters remain from most Israelis.

"There is no mainstream political opposition (to the war)," Israeli analyst Mark Heller said. "This is basically seen as a legitimate response to a serious challenge from somebody else."

Anti-war activists remain frustrated that protest groups such as Peace Now have not opposed the government.

The group, at the forefront of opposition to the previous war in Lebanon, insists Israel had the right to respond to attacks on its soil. Other dovish bodies such as political party Meretz have been virtually silent in opposition to the war.

Many in the protest camp have turned on Defense Minister Amir Peretz, a former labor union leader and avowed supporter of negotiations with the Palestinians.

"Peretz wants to be a hero and we are suffering because of it," said demonstrator Yoav Bar, 51, an electrician from Haifa.

Many traditional supporters of bodies such as Peace Now find it difficult to identify with the current anti-war groups.

"I supported the anti-war rallies in the 1980s but this is different," Shmuel Adar, 71, from Tel Aviv said.

"This is a defensive war and it is clear that there is an intention to attack and destroy Israel -- just look at the amount of rockets fired."

With Israel possibly set to expand its offensive in Lebanon, opposition still looks feeble but protesters are not giving up. In the northern city of Haifa, one of Hizbollah's favorite targets, sporadic protests have been held, with very little backing from the city's embattled residents.

"We remain distant voices but what Israel is doing in Lebanon is shocking ... Opposition will build up," said Yoni Yeheskiel, 23, a student at one Haifa rally.

-Jonathan Saul, Reuters

*********

For some worthwhile comment on the Israeli radical left, check out ODA Action.

Qana.

2006-08-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

I was on vacation this week, and when I returned to the news... Qana. If you are not outraged by this massacre of innocent human beings, perhaps you are not human yourself.

Charles Krauthammer, apparently, doesn't have a problem with it:

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

To get a more detailed idea of what those "collateral" humans experience, read Robert Fisk:

"We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"

Q&A: What's going on?

2006-07-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following Q&A as a brief introduction to a study group discussion at an ISO meeting. I don't go too much into the history of the region because the readings covered it, and I was trying to limit my introduction to ten minutes. Because it's just a brief introduction, it's also not footnoted or anything. However, you still may find some of this useful.

Q. The devastation in Lebanon is awful, but isn't Israel just reacting to the kidnappings of its soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon?

A. The short answer is no. It's becoming increasingly clear, even in the Israeli media, that this war isn't about the kidnapped soldiers at all.

On the Lebanese side, even Hezbollah was shocked at Israel's response, because this kidnapping wasn't a particularly unusual event. Hezbollah and Israel routinely make cross-border raids and then exchange prisoners, although Israel usually kidnaps Lebanese civilians rather than Hezbollah fighters. This is routinely the case in Gaza as well; many Palestinian teenagers, as well as a sizable chunk of Hamas's elected leadership, are in Israeli jails. Israel's outrageously disproportionate response indicates that this offensive, particularly in Lebanon, had been in the works for a while. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that this war was planned at least a year ago:

"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.

What this, along with Israel's behavior, indicates is that Israel has been looking for a reason to launch this offensive. Just as the US seized the 9/11 attacks as a rationale for the attack they'd long planned on Afghanistan, Israel had business in Lebanon. If they can dismantle Hezbollah and install, with the US's help, a client state in Lebanon, they can stop worrying about one of their borders, use that client state's influence in dealing with other Arab states, and generally expand their power in the region. Israel also faces domestic pressure to increase its "deterrent power," its ability to act as the neighborhood bully. If it strikes as hard and as quickly as possible against any threat at all, no matter how disproportionate the reaction, it can keep its neighbors running scared, and do as it pleases.

Q. But Hezbollah is a terrorist organization taking orders from Syria and Iran. Doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself against terrorists who just want to drive the Jews into the sea?

A. First of all, the US Congress designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization despite the fact that they had not carried out a single terrorist attack in over a decade, and when they did it was in response to Israeli occupation. Hezbollah is a major political party in Lebanon. It runs candidates for office and generally wins a respectable minority of seats. It operates schools, charities, ambulance companies and social services, often picking up the slack for Lebanon's weak government. And it operates a relatively small armed wing, which is now, thanks to Israel, undoubtedly growing. Hezbollah was born out of resistance to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and it has become a legitimate, organic resistance movement. It is an Islamist party, like many in the region. I could give a whole other talk about the roots of Islamism, but all I'll get into here is that Islamist parties do not spring from some Jew-hating gene that all Arabs are born with, which is what Israel's mythology would have us believe. The reality is that in 1948, during the war that created the state of Israel, the Arabs who had lived for centuries in Palestine were forced from their homes, massacred and "ethnically cleansed" by people who wanted the land for a Jews-only state, and they've been rightfully pissed off about it ever since. That anger has taken the form of secular left-wing resistance groups at some points, and of radical Islamism most recently.

It's also important to note that Islamism is not a monolithic ideology. There are of course major schisms between Sunni and Shia Muslims; there's also plenty of internal politicking. Iran and Syria share a basic ideology with Hezbollah, they'll sell them weapons, they're generally more likely to support Hezbollah if things get out of hand, but each group has its own aims within the region. The recent media reports that liken Iran to the Comintern of the Islamic world fail to take any of those factors into account. It's just not as simple as Hezbollah taking direct orders from Tehran.

Q. So how much support does Hezbollah have among the Lebanese people?

Certainly more than it did before the bombings began. I'm going to broadly oversimplify here for the sake of time. Most of the Lebanese ruling class supported Hariri, the Bush-backed "Cedar Revolution" leader who rebuilt much of Lebanon, revived its tourism industry and began to improve the country's image abroad before he was assassinated last year, most likely by agents of Syria. His supporters, many of whom are part of the country's conservative Maronite Christian minority, are not fans of Hezbollah, and blame it for provoking Israel. This is an attitude that Israel wants to promote, and its bombings, particularly in Beirut, have been strategically planned. Jim Quilty of Middle East Report Online writes,

Israel has blithely played upon Lebanon's sectarian divisions with the patterns of bombing and with leaflets asserting that Nasrallah [the leader of Hezbollah] is beholden to foreign masters... [Some air strikes] are aimed at accentuating domestic antagonism against Hezbollah, indeed the Shi'a generally, without explicitly targeting the constituencies of the Bush administration's Lebanese allies... Through strangulation and anxiety about what will next be targeted, Israel hopes to provoke simmering resentment against Hezbollah rather than shocked nationwide anger at an external enemy.

How well this strategy will work remains an open question. Most Lebanese, particularly among the roughly 60% of the population that is Shi'ite Muslim, have shifted toward support for Hezbollah. That pattern is likely to continue, especially given that much of the food, water, medicine and other relief coming to the more than 700,000 displaced Lebanese is coming not from the Lebanese government, but from social service agencies run by Hezbollah.

If Israel launches a full-scale ground war, and there is a lot of debate right now about whether that is going to happen, it's likely that support for Hezbollah will skyrocket. We learned from Vietnam, and we're learning again from Iraq, that if you bomb and invade a country whose citizens are dead set against you, you can kill as many resistance fighters as you want. There will always be more. They will keep fighting you and fighting you. Hezbollah will establish new headquarters. They'll get new rockets. And they will have no shortage of volunteers.

Q. So why won't Israel just agree to a prisoner exchange and put an end to this? And why is the US refusing to call for a cease-fire? Why are they so determined to wade deeper into this mess?

Here's what the left-wing Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has to say about this war:

Retaliating to such a low-key operation with a total war and destruction indicates clearly that what matters is the grand design, not the pretext...the wider Israel's military might expands, the easier it is to complete the unfinished business of the 1948 [founding of Israel]: the total de-Arabization of Palestine.

Israel wants dominance in the region. And so does the US. Israel has always demanded the right to re-draw borders, relocate civilian populations, and throw its military weight around as it sees fit-- although it couches its justifications in terms of innocent self-defense, it is the most belligerent state in the Middle East. It wants a client state in Lebanon, the death of Hezbollah, and nothing less than complete submission from the Palestinians. And the US has a larger project going on as well, the one that started in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wants control of the Middle East. It wants to install puppet regimes, quell any uprisings or demands for real democracy or self-determination, drill for oil and lay pipelines anywhere it pleases.

Syria and Lebanon don't have any oil, but they're key players in the region, and it seems somewhat likely that the current offensive is meant to lay the groundwork for an attack by the US and or Israel on Iran as well as Syria. Calling for a prisoner exchange or a cease-fire now would stop that process in its tracks. Israel and the US want to press forward with this war. And other Arab regimes around the region have their own interests at stake-- Egypt wants to strangle any potential for a resistance movement that might affect the Mubarak regime, and the Saudis benefit from the inevitable rise in oil prices.

Q. Is this World War Three?

Not yet, although it's hard to say what will happen. Syria has made it clear that it will jump into the war if Israel gets too close to the Syrian border, particularly if there is a full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon. The US is stretched to capacity in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it seems likely that it will continue to support Israel in non-military ways. However, some conservatives in the US are calling for full-scale war. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, for example, calls for immediate massive air strikes by the US on both Syria and Iran, and writes that the West's reaction to any terrorism from now on should be

Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst. Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan , Iraq , Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

The US is not at a point militarily or politically where strikes on Syria and Iran are a serious option, let alone nuclear war, but another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil could change that. Israel has more to lose from a world war-- it's within easy striking distance of Iran, for starters-- and it is already starting to lose popular support at home for its increasingly bloody war on Lebanon. However, Israel's dependence on the US cannot be overstated-- without American aid, the ultramodern, militarized Israeli state would have approximately the economic power of Guatemala. The US can draw Israel into a major war if it decides that's the best way to pursue American interests in the region.

But that's speculation; so far, it's not World War Three, no matter what Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly have decided. If the US had any desire to stop the conflict and the slaughter of Lebanese civilians, it could do so with a single phone call; so far it has decided that the bloodshed has been worth it, but if the costs become too high or there are unforeseen political consequences, the war could stop now. Our job, then, as socialists in the US, is to raise the political costs of this war to a point where it no longer makes sense for Bush to continue on this insane and bloody path.

Paola's story: Evacuation from Beirut

2006-07-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

I know this is kind of long...
Our plane landed at Philadelphia International Airport at 7 am on July26th. I have never been so happy to be back in the states. Part of the reason why my heart was filled with so much joy was because we were NOT on a military airbase in turkey (more on that *lovely* ordeal later). I am really looking forward to seeing all of you in the days and weeks to come. Again, I have the best bunch of friends and comrades in the world. I don’t know what we would have done without your love, support, insight, offers for financial help, offers of housing, food, etc. We were really touched and are so glad that we have all of you in our lives. If you ever need the same, we’ll be there.

I would think twice about wishing the evacuation on my worst enemy. Never in my life have I seen such ad hoc arrangements and such gross incompetence. We started out on July 25th. Luckily, some of our friends took us to the departure point near Dubayeh. If they weren’t able to do so, it would have cost us probably over 60$ (US!) because the cost of benzene was rising. In addition, cabbies were more reluctant to take customers from Beirut to other areas because of the danger factor involved. Getting to Dubayeh wasby no means a terribly dangerous journey but the risk factor has been multiplied since the Israeli Army started its bombing campaign. At 6 am, we got on line. Or rather, there was just a group of people and a bunch of Lebanese Army soldiers and some Lebanese police officers. We realized that they were letting people pass a checkpoint in batches, at a really slow rate. We finally had our turn to pass them and stand on yet another line closer to embassy personnel. By the looks of it, there were only a handful of embassy workers. It figures; many of them fled after day one or two leaving us to deal with the consequences of war on our own. By the way,the UN folks were just as bad or worse though we expected this of them because of their history in Lebanon. I heard that on day three or so they took all of the jeeps that they could find and fled. They drove like bats out of hell to the Syrian border and never looked back (fearing that they might get turned into a pillar of ashes like those in the South?). Classic, just classic.

Anyhow… This was about two hours into the whole ordeal. We had to put down our bags so several dogs could sniff at them. Then we could go to the porta potties and wait in yet another long line. Luckily, they set up tents so we didn’t have to collapse from heat stroke. However, the tents didn’t cover all areas so there were chunks of time that we were out in the sun, which was absolutely wretched. We were thankful for the water that we received, though it is really sad that we had to cross our fingers and hope for such basic necessities (i.e. food, shelter, bathrooms, water). We were on line for three or more hours. Then we were directed out of that line and onto the next one. We had more shade but less bathroom options and it became really stuffy underneath the tents. A mother and her family were in front of us. They fled the south with garbage bags and nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their house was destroyed.

Our bags were opened up and inspected by customs officials and then we were placed into yet another line. At least we got to sit down this time. Waited probably around an hour and then we had to haul our stuff across part of a beach to get to the military transport vessel. I was glad that the Marines were at least helping people carry their stuff. I had a full hiking pack, a bag full of food and two other bags so it was getting a bit difficult for me. We were loaded onto a small transport ship. It was clearly made to hold tanks, cars, weapons, etc but not people. Everything was metallic and it was hot enough to be one of Dante’s levels of hell. It was nearly unbearable to sit on the floor and they kept on packing more people in. I have a pretty good stomach but the movement of the ship made me a bit nauseous. Then we floated away to meet the USS Trenton out at sea. The Israeli Gov’t had an air and sea blockade on Lebanon but they were making exceptions for evacuees. The USS Trenton was also a transport vessel. They had to import cots, blankets and other supplies that were necessary for giving 1,800 people a place to rest. We sat in the cargo hold on cots for a couple of hours. We ate some food that I cooked the daybefore and drank all the water that they would give us. Then we were escorted row by row to the upper decks of the ship. We saw several helicopters come in, probably with people who were told to meet at the embassy. The ship floated around for ten hours. We saw several explosions. I think that they were cell phone towers and electrical plants though I am not 100% sure. It was a bit surreal; the war was already fading into something abstract. I was ambivalent about taking it all in; I felt even more hopeless and removed. Lebanon was burning and from that ship, there was really nothing I could do. I couldn’t do relief work, it was hard to call my friends, etc. I had to sit down and tear my eyes away from the skyline because it was just a bit much to watch.

Then we tried to find a place to rest. They were handing out cots and blankets but somehow nothing was getting to us. I kept asking and they kept on saying they would look into it. Then one of the officers told me to go downstairs because that was where they were finally handing out somemore supplies. They were doing it Titanic style (i.e. women and children first) and then everything was gone anyway so I went back upstairs, fuming and empty handed. The sun was really hot and we were already out in it all day. The ship floor was hot and metallic so sitting without anything was really quite uncomfortable.

Part of me can understand the reasons why families were taken care of first but I was angry nonetheless. I felt like as a childfree couple we didn’t matter and that we were a non entity that wasn’t even worthy of a thin sheet (I don’t think that there was a plot to convey such a message but it certainly felt that way after waiting for hours on end). Their concept of families of course was limited to the nuclear family (mom-wife, dad-husband and kids) which was became problematic especially later on when they didn’t take into consideration all of the aunts, cousins, grandmas, who would refuse to be separated (more on this later) and shuttled off on different flights. Never mind what it would be like for other families that don’t fit neatly into that schema. After some time I realized that it was pretty much every person for himself or herself so I grabbed up two blankets from a spot that had three because I hadn’t seen the guy return for a long time and he had three blankets (as one person) and we had none.

I went to sleep as soon as I could only to have a terrible wake up call. It was pitch black on the upper deck and windy like you wouldn’t believe. We tried our best to keep the sheets and our some of our lighter belongings from blowing away. I hunted around for a flashlight but seeing didn’t necessarily make the sheet business any better because it was still like wrestling with an octopus. Getting below the deck for water or the bathroom was insane because of the wind, lack of proper light and steep ladders.

We arrived in Turkey early in the morning, only to wait on the ship in the hot sun for five more hours. We didn’t even bother trying to get something to eat in the mess hall; it was always absolutely clogged with people and their screaming children (who drove me absolutely insane! Annoying anklebiters, arrrrrgh!)

I decided to be out cold for the time on the ship because it was simply too hot to be awake. A long line of evacuees who were waiting to get off snaked around the flight deck. We decided to grab a cot and wait it out. We timed our descent to the line just in time. They were still doing it Titanic style but I said that I wasn’t going to leave Rafy on a military ship so we left together about 10 minutes later which approaches the speed of light by their standards.

There were several embassy people shouting promises of a bed, a shower and hot food, saying that “the nightmare was over.” Whatever. I would rather take my chances with the war in a relatively safe neighborhood in Beirut (Hamra). At least I know that I will have a bed, food and will know what I am in for. The nightmare was just in its early stages, actually. We went through yet another line (this time, more customs) and then we were put on buses that were going to Incirlik Airbase which is near the city of Adana. We were given MREs, which are absolutely hilarious and kind of gross (they are highly processed and several steps above airplane food). They had a heating element which told us to prop the device upright using “a rock or something.” Or something, I kid you not. Then other packages talked about how “nutrition was a force multiplier.”

It took us three hours to enter the base. They had us waiting in buses for about two. The AC was terrible and it got unbearably hot. It really sucked but at least we’re young and relatively healthy; I can only imagine how bad it was for the elderly.

Then they took us in and briefed us, which was another two hours. At least the AC was working. Then they had us line up for room assignments and meal cards. They segregated us all by sex (except for children) but at least Rafy and I were in buildings that were next to each other. We tried to use the phone/internet facility. We had to wait for at least an hour because it was overrun with people. At least I got an email or two through and called my parents.

Then we saw what our rooms were like. At least we had real beds this time, which was a plus and real AC. The downside was that each room had 6 or 8 people on bunk beds. Of course, I was in the women’s building and many children were with their mothers so they were all running around and there was always some kid screaming so sleeping was a bit difficult. All of this made me dislike children even more, if you haven’t noticed.

I woke up when soldiers pounded on the door at 5:30am. They wanted us all to look at flight lists in order to see if our names were posted. Ichecked and neither one of us were on them so I went back to sleep. We woke up, checked our email and looked into breakfast. Luckily, things weren’t as crowded. We decided to make Rafy’s room the base because it had fewer children and people were generally quiet. I regretted the trip back to my room to get a few things because it was swarming with children who were building forts and blocking the door with mattresses.

We sat around and read until we were so bored that we couldn’t read anymore. We were confined to a small area of the base and there wasn’tmuch to do except to read, email, pace and get annoyed. I overheard many interesting conversations. Some people assumed that I knew Arabic and others didn’t. One family was basically doing a cost benefit analysis of the evacuation versus trying to get to places in Syria. They decided that doing the latter, as risky as it is, might have been better than sitting around like sheep. Some were thinking that since they were in relatively safe areas, it might have been better taking a chance with the war.

Then we saw that a new flight list was posted. Rafy’s name was on it but mine wasn’t. We agreed that we wouldn’t leave the other at Incirlik, it was just too absurd. We were given the run around for a bit and then were told to talk to the state department. Naturally, they were overwhelmed. Other people had been split up too because they just weren’t all that organized. Parents were separated from children, cousins were split, grandparents, etc. If they were smart, they would realize that splitting up families was just asking for trouble. Then I realized that they hastily posted a standby list with my name on it. They said that if Rafy didn’t want to go, he could be placed on standby with me or we could both wait for a later flight. We agreed that it was the best course of action. We threw our stuff into our bags in less than five minutes and proceeded to yet another line. We were there for at least an hour. Oddly enough, we met another Rutgers student! They’re everywhere!

Rafy and I were the last people to get on a bus to the airfield. Once we were inside the mini military airport, we waited for another five hours for our flight to arrive. We learned that it was a civilian aircraft (a huge ATA plane) that would take us from the airbase to a civilian airport in Ireland (Shannon) to refuel for two hours and then we would land in Philly intn’l. Meanwhile, we were thinking “Ireland?!” Sigh…

I saw that they had phones and called my parents. Once again, I was glad that I knew some Arabic because I had no idea how to use the phones and the woman next to me saw that I was having trouble and she saved the day.

I tried to sleep for most of the flight but I couldn’t because I was freezing (as usual!). I wrapped my head in a scarf and blanket, put on two shirts and that didn’t really help. I was also glad that we grabbed some extra MREs because they will always beat airplane food.

We arrived absolutely exhausted (or well… I was because I couldn’t sleep properly!) at around 7am and breezed through customs.

Looking fwd to hearing from all of you and seeing you too! I will start to send replies to your personal emails in a few days. Sorry I couldn’t get to it sooner…

Love, solidarity and SAMIDOUN!
Paola

Israel and the future of the antiwar movement

2006-07-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Israel and the future of the antiwar movement
By Sharon Smith July 28, 2006 Page 9
from Socialist Worker

ISRAEL’S SLAUGHTER of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians should be a moment of truth for the U.S. left. The fact that “about 55 percent of all casualties at the Beirut Government University Hospital are children of 15 years or less,” according to journalist Dahr Jamail, should dispel the myth that Israel’s latest incursions are acts of “self-defense,” as Israel’s many apologists claim.

The Bush administration’s rush shipment of precision bombs to aid Israel’s onslaught last weekend should be a wake-up call for those on the U.S. left who purport to follow antiwar principles, yet until now have failed to take a clear stand against the Israeli manifestations of the U.S.’s so-called “war on terror.”

To do so would require acknowledging that the U.S.’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were meant to be mere stepping-stones in a strategic plan aimed at establishing U.S. dominance over the entire Middle East.

With the U.S. occupation of Iraq rapidly descending into bloody civil war, Israel is providing an alternate route toward achieving those shared goals--for U.S. domination over the Middle East ensures Israel’s domination as well.

Look no further than the mainstream media to verify this revelation. The Washington Post argued on July 16, “For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, U.S. officials say.”

This requires crushing Arab organizations fighting for self-determination in Gaza and Lebanon.

Acknowledging this simple fact, however, also requires admitting the crucial role played by Israel as the U.S.’s historic regional partner in enforcing its Middle East policy.

Yet United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest national antiwar coalition, argued in a July 18 “action alert”: “We condemn Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli civilians, and we condemn the Israeli assault in Gaza and Lebanon.”

The statement repeated the mainstream media’s depiction of Hezbollah’s seizure of Israeli soldiers and firing rockets into Israel as “irresponsible acts.” Echoing liberal commentators, UFPJ criticized Israel for its “disproportionate” response--as if Hezbollah started the conflict and Israel is guilty only of over-reacting.

In reality, the conflict is many decades old and intricately tied to Israel’s historic role as the U.S.’s watchdog/attack dog in the Middle East.

Israel’s ridiculous claim that it attacked Lebanon to get its soldiers back is belied by Hezbollah’s repeated attempts to exchange the two Israeli soldiers for Lebanese and Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel (a common practice in the past). But Israel has no interest in a prisoner exchange because the captured soldiers provide the excuse for using its full military might against Hezbollah.

Israel’s plan to attack Hezbollah has been in place for well over a year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the Chronicle, “In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal...By 2004, the military campaign...had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board.”

Israel’s goal was clearly articulated on July 22--by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who stated that the United States opposes a ceasefire until Hezbollah has been destroyed as a significant fighting force in southern Lebanon. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Rice scoffed.

Democrats have been vocal cheerleaders for Israel, taking turns with Republicans at pro-Israel rallies across the country. At one such rally, Sen. Hillary Clinton condemned the “unwarranted, unprovoked attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah and their state sponsors,” calling them “the new totalitarians of the 21st century.”

These accusations are absurd. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982--the last of its troops pulling out only in 2000. Hezbollah gained its legitimacy as a resistance movement by finally driving Israel out of Lebanon.

The violence of an occupying force cannot be equated with the resistance of an occupied population, as if both sides are equally responsible for the bloodshed.

But over the last two weeks, the antiwar movement has been reviving on a principled basis, despite the gaping absence of its largest national coalition.

Ten thousand came out to protest Israel’s war on Lebanon and Palestine in Dearborn, Mich. Two thousand came out on a weekday afternoon in New York City. Four thousand came out in Chicago on Saturday. One thousand came out in Boston. In each case, the demonstrators were predominantly Arabs and Muslims.

For these directly affected immigrant communities, no hand-wringing debate was needed to support genuine resistance against U.S. or Israeli war and occupation.

The connection between the U.S. war on Iraq and Israel’s war on Lebanon and Palestine was repeatedly made clear--at the Chicago protest, for example, with chants such as “Free, free Palestine; free, free Lebanon; free, free Iraq”; “Occupation is a crime, from Iraq to Palestine!” and “No justice, no peace, U.S. out of the Middle East!”

The weakness of the mainstream U.S. antiwar movement toward Israeli war crimes is not a temporary aberration, but a long-standing phenomenon.

As journalist Laura Flanders observed, “On June 12, 1982, American activists massed in New York City to call for peace and nuclear disarmament. But the Central Park rally made no mention of the week’s own bombing--Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had just sent Israeli forces into Lebanon two days earlier.” She continued, “A message sent then might have saved a generation of Palestinians and Israelis from 20 years of occupation, fury and fear.”

There are principles--and thousands of civilian lives--at stake again today.

Two more protests in Philadelphia

2006-07-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

On Friday, July 28th - at Israeli Consulate, 15th & Locust, support weekly demonstration from noon - 1:30pm; continue protests from 1:30pm - 6:pm on consulate side of street. Bring your own signs, banners, literature. Please respond if your organization can take responsibility for set time slot. Primary demands: Immediate Cease Fire; Open borders for humanitarian aid to Gaza and Lebanon.

On Friday, Aug. 4th (As part of nationally coordinated weekend of local actions) - Protest starting at Federal Building, 6th & Market Sts. at 4:30 to demand U.S. Out of Middle East. Focus on U.S. role in wars in Middle east from Iraq to Lebanon and danger of expansion to Syria and Iran. Focus on profits of oil and weapons manufacturers. March to nearby media outlet to oppose dehumanization of Arabs and Palestinians by media.

Israel deliberately hits UN observation post

2006-07-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

How UN Lebanon post was bombed
BBC News

There was fierce fighting in the Khiam area for six hours
Details of the circumstances in which the Israeli air force bombed a United Nations observation post in south Lebanon, killing four UN peacekeepers have begun to emerge.

According to diplomats familiar with the UN's initial report into the incident, the post in the town of Khiam was hit by precision-guided munition, says the BBC's Paul Adams in Jerusalem.

The report says there was fierce fighting in the area for about six hours before the post was hit, during which time UN personnel contacted the Israel military 10 times, urging them to stop firing.

Our correspondent says the UN claims that after each call, it was assured the firing would stop.

The Irish foreign ministry said one of its officers in the UN's Unifil peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, placed six warning calls to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) prior to the attack.

"On six separate occasions he was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff in South Lebanon," Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed foreign office spokesman as saying.

"He warned: 'You have to address this problem or lives may be lost'," the spokesman said.

The Associated Press news agency named the officer as Lt Col John Molloy.

The bomb which killed the unarmed peacekeepers - Canadian, Austrian, Finnish and Chinese soldiers - hit the building and shelter of the observation post, near the eastern end of the Lebanese-Israeli border, UN spokesman Milos Struger said.

Israel has launched an investigation.

The UN post was on high ground, in an area once occupied by Israel.

Robert Fisk: Elegy for Beirut

2006-07-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

Note: I linked to this a few days ago, but since it's been moved to a pay section, so I'm reposting the text here.

Paradise Lost:
ROBERT FISK'S ELEGY FOR BEIRUT

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 faade 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? I

n 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 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 checkthe 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?
'Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate'

Antiwar rally in Tel Aviv, and some more useful articles

2006-07-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

A few more links:

Another Tikkun grab bag, comprised of several articles from across the spectrum. It ranges from some excellent critiques of the war to absolute racist garbage from David Horowitz. (Horowitz is better known for CampusWatch, the witch-hunt web site that targets professors critical of Israeli policy, as well as the full-page ad he published in college newspapers across the country arguing against paying reparations to African Americans.) I’m hoping to write a longer response to some of these articles as soon as I get a free minute. There’s a fairly surprising one in there from an Israeli who is quite sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but rabidly anti-Lebanese to the point of equating ordinary Lebanese people with Hezbollah. I like Tikkun's approach generally, but I do have a problem with giving right-wing racist viewpoints more of a forum than they already have. You can find "Arabs are evil and deserve to die" all over the mainstream press; it's in giving less ubiquitous and more useful viewpoints a forum that publications like Tikkun really shine. They're particularly good about publishing left-wing Jewish and Israeli critiques of Israel, which I think is incredible valuable.

The United States in Lebanon: A Meddlesome History. This article from Foreign Policy In Focus is one of the most useful I’ve found in terms of clearly laying out the history of American (and, of course, Israeli) intervention in Lebanon. It’s fairly long, but well worth reading.

And from Ha’aretz (though other reports indicate closer to 10,000):

First major anti-war rally draws 2,500 in Tel Aviv

By Lily Galili

More than 2,500 people yesterday attended the first major demonstration against the war, marching from Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to a rally at the Cinemateque plaza. The rally differed from protests that accompanied previous wars. This is the first time that major Arab organizations in Israel - among them Hadash and Balad - arrived in large numbers from the Galilee for a demonstration in Tel Aviv in the midst of a war. They were joined by the left flank of the Zionist Left - former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni and Prof. Galia Golan, alongside the radical left of Gush Shalom, the refusal to serve movement Yesh Gvul, Anarchists Against the Wall, Coalition of Women for Peace, Taayush and others. These Jewish and Arab groups ordinarily shy away from joint activity. They couldn't come up with a unifying slogan this time either, except for the call to stop the war and start talking. However, protest veterans noted that in the Lebanon War of 1982 it took more than 10 days of warfare to bring out this many protesters, marking the first crack in the consensus. The protest drew some new faces, like Tehiya Regev of Carmiel, whose two neighbors were killed in a Katyusha attack on the city. "This war is not headed in the right direction," she told Haaretz; "the captured soldiers have long since been forgotten, so I came to call for an immediate stop to this foolish and cruel war." The rally, which received wide international press coverage, had an unfamiliar theme. Beside the usual calls for the prime minister and defense minister to resign, this was a distinctly anti-American protest. Alongside chants of "We will not kill, we will not die in the name of Zionism" there were chants of "We will not die and will not kill in the service of the United States," and slogans condemning President George W. Bush.

You can see pictures here.

Some Sunday morning updates: will Syria jump in the ring?

2006-07-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

Syria issues a statement that it will intervene if the conflict continues: "If Israel invades Lebanon over ground and comes near to us, Syria will not sit tight. She will join the conflict. We have cooperation forces on alert. If Israeli troops provoke us, Damascus will act to guarantee the national security of Syrian territory."

"But It's Israel!" A Fox News reporter in the Gaza Strip was shot at by Israel. Check out the footage-- and the anchors' reaction. By the way, Electronic Intifada and Electronic Lebanon are great resources-- both bring together news analysis and on-the-ground reports with an emphasis on the voices of Palestinian and Lebanese people.

And the San Francisco Chronicle reports on Israel's extensive advanced planned for this operation and explains why Hezbollah's kidnappings were an excuse.

Barbaric.

2006-07-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

The UN estimates that one third of the Lebanese casualties so far have been children.

US rushing bombs to Israel, and other "surprises"

2006-07-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

I found Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut in the London Independent incredibly moving.

Tikkun Magazine's site has some interesting stuff, including this very mixed, but informative, grab bag of four reactions to the war by left-wing Jews. Gila Sversky, an Israeli peace activist, writes about antiwar demonstrations in Israel being forced to have the same sort of police protection in Nahariya that racist groups get from the police here. (Same reasoning-- the vast majority would bash their heads in otherwise. The war has 95% support in Israel.)

Here's a fun article from the NY Times about how the US is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel.

Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

...the appearance that the US is actively aiding the bombing campaign?

...it could be compared to Iran's efforts?

Um. About that... where exactly does the ambiguity come in here? If any other country did the same thing, I really doubt the Times would hesitate to delete the qualifiers that pepper that sentence. And why not compare it to Iran? After all, we know for sure that the US continues to rush arms to Israel, and we don't know if Iran has gotten, or is attempting to get, arms to Hebollah yet.

Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

This brings up another question. Clearly, the US wants to avoid having to put its own troops into play in this mess, given the other messes it's currently trying to contain. Iraq continues to heat up-- the death toll has now risen to over 100 Iraqis a day in a cycle of violence the US is powerless to stop. And remember Afghanistan? I know, I know, we're not supposed to have thought about Afghanistan since 2002, but US troops are still there, and Afghans and Americans are still dying. And the National Guard couldn't do much during Hurricane Katrina because so many of its helicopters, amphibious vehicles and people were overseas. It's hurricane season again, and the National Guard has already been called out to assist in mass power outages in Missouri and New York. The military is desperately trying to recruit more soldiers. Despite its threats against Iran, the US military is, as Bilbo Baggins would have it, "stretched thin-- like butter scraped over too much bread."

So the US is going to do everything in its power to help Israel finish what it started without committing troops. This is no surprise-- Germany and Russia have indicated that they'd at least be willing to send troops as part of an "international peacekeeping force" after a cease-fire, but Condoleeza Rice said the US was "unlikely to." They'll use other tactics if possible. So far that's meant arms shipments, a sharp increase in the pro-Israel tilt the US encourages in its media, and of course lots of stalling and equivocation on the diplomatic front. What next? Sanctions on Syria, maybe? Veiled economic threats against Arab nations that don't cooperate in pressuring Hezbollah, Syria and Iran? It may eventually be the case, if this starts looking like World War III (like, if Iran gets actively involved) that the US will have to get involved militarily. But in the meantime, it'll keep claiming to be evenhanded while doing everything it can to aid and abet this crime against the Lebanese people and (as always) the Palestinians.

Emergency meeting for Philadelphia activists

2006-07-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Help form a network of groups and individuals in the Philadelphia area to organize against Israel's war against Lebanon and Gaza, and the U.S. government support for this offensive.

Emergency Meeting: Tuesday, July 25th, 7pm.

Basement - Calvary Church, 48th &Baltimore (in Phila)

Parking in area, easy to reach on #34

Subway Surface line from Center City

Since calling for the emergency response demonstration last Friday, the Phila. International Action Center has heard from a number of people interested in forming a network to be able to respond to the growing crisis in the Middle East brought on by U.S. and Israeli offensives. Some of the suggestions are to have round-the-clock vigils and to build locally for the August 12th demonstration in Washington. The July 25th meeting would take up these ideas and more. Please pass on this information.

Everything else is noise and propaganda...

2006-07-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Taxi drivers in the south were charging up to $400 per person for rides to Beirut — more than 40 times the usual price. In remote villages of the south, cut off by strikes, residents made their way out over the mountains by foot. The price of food, medical supplies and gasoline rose as much as 500 percent in parts of Lebanon as the bombardment cut supply routes. The World Food Program said estimates of basic food supplies ranged from one to three months. The U.N. estimated that a half-million people have been displaced, with 130,000 fleeing to Syria and 45,000 believed to be in need of assistance. -Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press

How do you mess with a civilian population, I mean really mess with them? Israel has an idea: bomb their supply routes, their airports, bridges, ports and highways, their food factories and hospitals and water mains, and then issue a warning for them to get out. Then watch the fun: will they try to drive on bombed-out highways? Will they attempt to walk through the mountains with their children, their grandparents and whatever belongings they can carry? If they're trying to transport their families in trucks or vans, you can bomb those as they leave their villages, since the IDF has declared all civilian trucks to be legitimate targets.

It's also worth noting that if the attempt is to rout Hezbollah entirely from the region, this is beyond counterproductive. Israel may be succeeding in destroying much of Hezbollah's stash of rockets (which also dwindles rapidly as Hezbollah launches them at Israeli civilians). But think London in the Blitz, think of Tokyo, think of the Iraqi resistance: aerial bombardment brings the citizens of the bombed area together. Hezbollah already had a great deal of support in Lebanon, largely because of its many non-terror-related activities, like the wide-ranging charities, ambulance services, and other social services that provide the sort of support the weak Lebanese government doesn't supply. Now the Lebanese people are under attack, a bloody and indiscriminate attack, and their government is doing nothing-- not fighting Israel, not bringing food and water to the shelters, nothing. Who's doing something? Hezbollah.

There's certainly a large chunk of the Lebanese population that blames Hezbollah for bringing this bombing onto their heads, but there's little doubt that Hezbollah's support is wide and growing. And now Israel is launching a ground invasion. Have they learned nothing from Vietnam and Iraq and for that matter the British Empire? If you bomb and invade a country whose citizens are dead set against you, you can kill as many resistance fighters as you want. There will always be more. They will keep fighting you and fighting you. Hezbollah will establish new headquarters. They'll get new rockets (despite the publicity about getting them from Iran, many of Hezbollah's rockets have turned out to be from China). And they will have no shortage of volunteers.

So yeah, this war's clearly not about rescuing two kidnapping soldiers. (Incidentally, isn't anyone worried that if the soldiers are being hidden in Lebanon, they might die in the bombing raids? If this were a movie, that would be a continuity error.) It's not about getting rid of Hezbollah. So what is it about? Tariq Ali argues that "[Israel and Washington] want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model." Israeli activist Uri Avnery agrees: "The real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government... That's the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda."

Where does that take us? What would that mean for the region? Would Iran take it lying down? Will the US, which at the moment appears confused and directionless, attempt to step in? Is this World War Three, or will it stay localized the way it did when the Israelis pulled the same damn thing in Lebanon in 1982? Stay tuned...

Dispatch from Saida, Lebanon

2006-07-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

The following was sent to me by my friend in Beirut who is still awaiting evacuation. She received this from her friend Darine Zaatari in Saida, Lebanon, who requested that she circulate it. I've edited a bit for typos.

Thursday, July 20th

Jumped out of bed at 2:00 am Thursday morning to an airstrike right here in Saida. Great explosion shaking the whole building. It was close, but we could not figure out where exactly. Another airstrike shortly after. Now it sounds a bit further. We rush out onto the balcony. The glass door to the balcony, like every glass window and door at home, slightly left open to prevent them from shattering due to explosion pressure. We cannot see much.

We sit out for a while. It is completely quiet. Even bats are too scared to fly around. Then a noisy buzzing sound in the air. This time it is an MK, a pilotless spy jet, usually smaller in size and flies low, takes photos. It is not to be feared in itself, but what usually follows it does, a new airstrike. It takes photos and explores locations to target. Twenty minutes later, an airstrike. Later we go to bed.

We wake up around 4:30, yet another attack. This time it is a gas station. Anythingto deplete resources and people's will to strife. At 5:00 am, the phone rang. I raced to the phone contemplating every single possibility of who might have gotten hurt from the family and friends in the raid. I hear an automated recording, a voice speaking formal Arabic, "To the residents of south Lebanon, you have to evacuate thesouth. The State of Israel." I was stunned, lost my ability to move or feel anything. Of all the different kinds of direct and indirect threats I have received throughout my life from the Israelis, this is the first time I get it right in my home.Two days ago, they threw flyers with the same text. But, do you think people care? Do you think people respond to these threats? A phone call, a very ersonalized terrorizing message right in my ear and in Arabic, yet insufficient to drive me out of my home. I am only one of many. But I am not a mother and I do not live further south.

According to government estimates Tuesday night, half a million Lebanese have been displaced. Most are staying with relatives or friends or in rented apartments. Over 70 thousand in Beirut and north registered in government centers, particularly public schools. Over eight thousand in Saida are distributed over 30 centers.They are turning abandoned government buildings into refugee centers. They continue to destroy the country's infrastructure and cutting off villages from one another. The two biggest cheese and Labneh factories in the Beqaa bombed to the ground. Hundreds of cows and sheep farms in Beirut attacked from the sky. Trucks with red cross signs on it or not, carrying first aid supplies and food essentials to refugees bombed by jets killing drivers and other people around. Continuous bombing of houses and residential buildings. If the war ends today, 60, 000 people will be homeless.

Yesterday we visited two refugee centers. One had 150 and the other had 310 and was expecting at least 40 more. Resources are scarce, medication, infant formula, food. We rang door bells looking for an extra pillow, sheet, mattress, extra anything. There are 100 mattresses for 310 people in the center. My heart turns into a raging fist as we drive around the city. People looking for their relatives. They know they fled together, but now no word from the other car. Same stories come outof southern Beirut. People leaving their bombed homes and cannot find a child, a husband. In Saida, refugees are sitting on the streets or in street roundabouts, with nowhere to go. Nowhere. Barely made it safe to Saida and then nowhere to go. A family, a mother and four children, surviving one airstrike killing twenty five people right there in the same house they were staying, got attacked by sky shortly before reaching Saida. Nowhere to escape; we are all targets.

More cars with white rags tied on radio antennas. Some cars had flags. Flags, of the many supporters of the German soccer teams, now come to use. They are tied to cars, huge flags, implying someone in the car carries the German nationality and hoping being German is worth something in this war. How ironically tragic, these flags were carried around by people every time Germans won a game, flying up in the air, with horns blowing and people cheering. Flags of victory and joy. So many Brazilian Lebanese around, so many supporters of the Brazilian soccer team, yet no Brazilian flags on any car to be seen. People's values vary with nationality.

At least sixty-one people died yesterday in different areas in Lebanon,the biggest death toll per day since the start of this war. Only one fighter and the rest arecivilians. Families all together killed. Many people believed to be still under destroyed houses. The situation is getting worse by the day. We fear that once the foreigners are evacuated, things will get even worse. According to the media, this is the biggest evacuation in the world since WWI. There are 20,000 Americans being evacuated. Not only with nationality, people's value also varies with place of birth. The US embassy is openly setting evacuation priorities of 20,000 Americans according to place of birth. There is one position lower in the hierarchy to being born in Lebanon and that is Palestine.

So many battles on so many fronts. The battle to survive, the battle to survive strong, the battle with the enemy, the battle with dispelling all the lies from the western media, the battle to stay unified, the battle to hold on to anger, the battle to stay focused and help out, the battle to get out of bed in the morning not just to an airstrike. So many battles. One battle we have won so far, the battle to survive strong. You hear it in people's voices: we do not care about the destruction, we persist and we resist.

A sampling platter of useful articles.

2006-07-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now!, interviews Beirut-based independent journalist Robert Fisk.

"If Israel has the right to use force in self defence, so do its neighbours": Ahmad Khalidi in the Guardian.

Israel as an extension of American empire: from Tikkun Magazine's blog.

What Does Israel Want? Israeli professor Ilan Pappe on the goals of this war.

Why Is Israel Back in Gaza? Ramsy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle.

The Angry Arab News Service

US Middle East Policy: Democratic Illusions: Lance Selfa in the International Socialist Review-- from 2005, but a useful tour of the Middle East.

like a mini-Katrina...

2006-07-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid cosigned a letter expressing anger at the US's glacial pace at evacuating citizens from Beirut. "This is being treated like a mini-Katrina," he commented in the Washington Times. The Marines landed in Beirut today to help evacuate US citizens, some of whom spent the day sipping free cocktails on the deck of the rented luxury liner Orient Queen.

The comparison is striking. Yes, several thousand US citizens, including two of my dearest friends, are trapped in hotels, dorms and apartments around Beirut as I write this. It's a terrifying situation for them, particularly if the US decides to force them to pay thousands of dollars for their transport, and my sympathies are certainly with them. Reid compares their position to Hurricane Katrina, when many more thousands of US citizens were left to die on their rooftops as the fetid floodwaters rose. There is a Katrina comparison to be made here, but it's not about stranded Americans this time. A more apt comparison would be the Katrina-like displacement of over half a million Lebanese now taking place.

With roadways destroyed, and Israel's planes bombing milk bottling plants and medical convoys, Lebanon's already weak and inept government relief effort would be a joke, if there were any humor to be found in the situation. Beirutis are crowding into makeshift shelters in schools and parks, and attempting to stretch what food and water supplies they have, since no food and water is forthcoming from the government. Volunteers (including my stranded friends) and Lebanese left-wing organizations are working frantically to raise money and deliver supplies to the ordinary people who have suddenly become refugees. (For more information, or to donate to their relief effort, click here.) The groups' requests are telling: they are asking for sanitary supplies and anti-diarrheal medicines, as Israel's indiscriminate bombings turn polished, metropolitan Beirut back into the war zone of two decades ago. Like Londoners during the Blitz, Lebanese families are taking one another in and remaining in resolutely high spirits. But the world is watching, quietly and unapologetically, as Israel responds to the kidnapping of two soldiers by obliterating a city of millions. Will they step in and make an attempt to stop the assault? Will dispossessed Beirutis, like their brothers and sisters in New Orleans, be forgotten and left to fend for themselves?