Middle East: Theater of the Absurd

To celebrate my return on the grid (yes I know you've missed me during my well-deserved holiday), a wonderfully absurd headline:

Lebanon files UN complaint against Israel
Officials in Beirut say IDF artillery response to Katyusha rockets was a violation of UNSC Res. 1701 and of international law.

Because Katyusha rockets are the very opposite of a violation of international law, right?

They don't even deny that Katyusha rockets were launched, they're just getting pedantic with the actual amount of them.

The Lebanese report claimed that only one rocket was fired from Lebanon into Israel and that the IDF fired six artillery shells.

Yes, tit for tat, that's what they're trying to get the UN to believe.

The sad part is really the fact that Lebanon knew it could lodge such a craptastic complaint at the UN without getting laughed at. It really shows that the UN has become completely irrelevant.

Who actually has legal rights to Palestine? Part 2

Now that we've established the legal framework in place before the creation of the State of Israel, we can discuss the agreements, rights and obligations which followed it, particularly UN Security Council Resolution 242.
(If you haven't read Part 1 yet, I highly recommend it, it's good for your health)

Is Israel always in the UN's cross hairs?

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 does not call for the return to 1967 borders

I assume most of you were already familiar with this concept. Still, it never hurts to be reminded of the context around this resolution. There are many points of discussion in regards to this resolution:

• Does every single word matter?
• Which version actually counts, the English or the French version?
• Is this resolution legally binding?

Who actually has legal rights to Palestine? Part 1

With all this media frenzy about the Palestinian unilateral state bid at the UN this coming week, does anyone ever stop to think whether this move will have any legal ramifications? What's more, does anyone even care what previous commitments state and what they oblige their parties to uphold?

Well, the Mainstream Media (MSM) sure doesn't. Furthermore, President Abbas knows very well that the MSM has a selective amnesia when it comes to these subjects, and he exploits that to the max.

Why yes, contracts are legally binding. Unless you signed a contract with Israel obviously.

Points to keep in mind which we'll be developing in this post:

• United Nations General Assembly Resolutions are not legally binding.
• Rights in regards to Jews and Arabs in Palestine were created in International law during the British Mandate of Palestine (in other words, a long time ago)
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 does not call for the return to 1967 borders
• Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed legal agreements, or contracts, which give both parties not only rights but also obligations.

United Nations General Assembly Resolutions are NOT legally binding.

Wait, what? No way.

Abbas congratulates Kuntar's family

Abbas congratulates Kuntar's family. Isn't it lovely that Abbas is the person we're counting on to make peace with? Excuse me while I retch...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday sent his regards to the families of Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar and the other four Lebanese prisoners scheduled to be transferred to Hizbullah.

Abbas praised the prisoner swap and congratulated the Kuntar family.

Praised them for what? Raising such a good little murderer?

His whole village can't wait for him to get back

In Kuntar's home in Abey, streets were decorated with banners welcoming the return of the former member of the radical Palestine Liberation Front. "Samir Kuntar is the conscience of Lebanon, Palestine and the Arab nation. Abey welcomes the hero, prisoner Samir Kuntar," reads one sign.

Samir Kuntar is the conscience of Palestine. I have an idea, let's give them a country!

If someone in my village had murdered a little Palestinian or Lebanese four-year-old girl, I would never want them anywhere near me. I would hope my government puts this kind of murderer in jail, where such scum belong.

Meanwhile, while they are all celebrating for their precious child killer, in Israel the Goldwasser and Regev families are mourning. Until the last minute they had still hoped.

It is a sad sad day

It is a sad day today. Today Samir Kuntar is freed. In exchange for the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. I won't even start about how unfair it is, that two reservists kidnapped in Israel are being exchanged for a cold blooded murderer who does not regret what he has done. I won't even comment on the danger that this puts Israel in, we all understand that there will be future kidnappings and that there is no more incentive to keep Israeli prisoners alive, and that Gilad Shalit's life may depend on this. I'll try to avoid talking about this piece of crap government which allowed this to go through, because otherwise I will just end up cussing and cursing.

I will talk of Peres' pardon. He has granted pardon to Samir Kuntar. My first thought was "WTF???". Why pardon such a beast? Why give him the pleasure of feeling that he has been forgiven? He belongs in jail for the rest of his life, even if it's not an Israeli jail. (Zero chance of that happening). From what I read in the comments of every news site allowing talkback, just about everybody feels the same, and is outraged at Peres for pardoning Kuntar.
Then I thought, what difference does it make? Kuntar is being released, all the rest is just words. He is going to be hailed a hero on the other side no matter what we say.

That's the second thing. He is being hailed a hero in Lebanon. The world barely notices. Shouldn't Amensty care about this? Shouldn't they make sure that, murdered that he is, he is returned to Lebanon, but in a prison?? Shouldn't the UN care? On CNN, I actually heard his brother say that Kuntar "didn't mean to kill Danny Haran and his daughter, it was an accident."
No, an accident is when I spill tomato juice on my white shirt. Killing Danny Haran in front of his 4 year old daughter, so that his death would be the last thing she sees, and then smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt is no mistake. It is a heinous, cold-blooded, intentional murder.

How would the world react if the tables were turned? If we had kidnapped Samir Kuntar, who just patrolling along the border, in order to free a convincted murderer? How would they react if we gave back a dead Samir Kuntar in order to have the convicted murderer walk free in our streets??




Samir Kuntar's brother is saying "it happens all the time, they [the Israelis] say he's a terrorist, for us he's a hero", making the average CNN viewer think the usual, wrong, paradigm. "One side's terrorist is the other side's freedom fighter".

The real truth is that Samir Kuntar is a murderer, but for Hezbollah/Lebanon (is there a difference nowadays?), since he is only the killer of Israelis, he's a hero. Heck, they'll probably ask him to run for government.

It's a sad day for the world. It has sunken to new lows. Not that this wasn't predictable.

Katyusha rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon - World yawns

Rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon

Two Katyusha rockets were fired into northern Israel from Lebanon on Monday night, an Israeli police spokesman said.
It's the first time in more than six months that such a rocket has been fired from Lebanon into Israel.
Israeli munitions experts have examined the rockets, which landed in the northern city of Shlomi, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
One rocket landed on a house patio and the other near a road, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
Katyusha rockets have a range of up to 25 km (15 miles) -- much longer than the more crude Qassam rockets, which are more commonly fired from Gaza into Israel.

"more commonly fired" is a euphemism for "fired every single day".

What kind of terrorists are being held in Israeli prisons?

I showed you a few days ago that people are trying to compare abducted Israeli soldiers to the Palestinian terrorists being held in Israeli prisons.

From an article on Jerusalem Post:

Jailed Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar, whose release has been sought by Hizbullah, was also visited by the group, which included Paz-Pines and Gafni as well as MKs Nadia Hilou, Moshe Kahalon, Ibrahim Sarsour and Ya'akov Margi.

Samir Kuntar told the committee members that "the IPS treatment is humane and is based on a relationship of mutual respect." But in answer to Gafni's question as to whether he regrets his actions, he responded: "I do not regret. The question isn't personal. It's a matter of a conflict that is collective."

Samir Kuntar says that he does not regret his actions. He believes his actions were justified and served the collective purpose of his side of the conflict.

What were his actions exactly?

The World Should Know What He Did to My Family
By Smadar Haran Kaiser
Sunday, May 18, 2003

Abu Abbas, the former head of a Palestinian terrorist group who was captured in Iraq on April 15, is infamous for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. But there are probably few who remember why Abbas's terrorists held the ship and its 400-plus passengers hostage for two days. It was to gain the release of a Lebanese terrorist named Samir Kuntar, who is locked up in an Israeli prison for life. Kuntar's name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kuntar's mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas. And my wish now is that this terrorist leader should be prosecuted in the United States, so that the world may know of all his terrorist acts, not the least of which is what he did to my family on April 22, 1979.

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought. As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt.
That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The next day, Abu Abbas announced from Beirut that the terrorist attack in Nahariya had been carried out "to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty" at Camp David the previous year. Abbas seems to have a gift for charming journalists, but imagine the character of a man who protests an act of peace by committing an act of slaughter.
Two of Abbas's terrorists had been killed by police on the beach. The other two were captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Despite my protests, one was released in a prisoner exchange for Israeli POWs several months before the Achille Lauro hijacking. Abu Abbas was determined to find a way to free Kuntar as well. So he engineered the hijacking of the Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt and demanded the release of 50 Arab terrorists from Israeli jails. The only one of those prisoners actually named was Samir Kuntar. The plight of hundreds held hostage on a cruise ship for two days at sea lent itself to massive international media coverage. The attack on Nahariya, by contrast, had taken less than an hour in the middle of the night. So what happened then was hardly noticed outside of Israel.

One hears the terrorists and their excusers say that they are driven to kill out of desperation. But there is always a choice. Even when you have suffered, you can choose whether to kill and ruin another's life, or whether to go on and rebuild. Even after my family was murdered, I never dreamed of taking revenge on any Arab. But I am determined that Samir Kuntar should never be released from prison. In 1984, I had to fight my own government not to release him as part of an exchange for several Israeli soldiers who were POWs in Lebanon. I understood, of course, that the families of those POWs would gladly have agreed to the release of an Arab terrorist to get their sons back. But I told Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, that the blood of my family was as red as that of the POWs. Israel had always taken a position of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. If they were going to make an exception, let it be for a terrorist who was not as cruel as Kuntar. "Your job is not to be emotional," I told Rabin, "but to act rationally." And he did.

So Kuntar remains in prison. I have been shocked to learn that he has married an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of terrorist prisoners. As the wife of a prisoner, she gets a monthly stipend from the government. I'm not too happy about that.

In recent years, Abu Abbas started telling journalists that he had renounced terrorism and that killing Leon Klinghoffer had been a mistake. But he has never said that killing my family was a mistake. He was a terrorist once, and a terrorist, I believe, he remains. Why else did he spend these last years, as the Israeli press has reported, free as a bird in Baghdad, passing rewards of $25,000 from Saddam Hussein to families of Palestinian suicide bombers? More than words, that kind of cash prize, which is a fortune to poor families, was a way of urging more suicide bombers. The fortunate thing about Abbas's attaching himself to Hussein is that it set him up for capture.
Some say that Italy should have first crack at Abbas. It had already convicted him of the Achille Lauro hijacking in absentia in 1986. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now wants Abbas handed over so that he can begin serving his life sentence. But it's also true that in 1985, the Italians had Abbas in their hands after U.S. fighter jets forced his plane to land in Sicily. And yet they let him go. So while I trust Berlusconi, who knows if a future Italian government might not again wash its hands of Abbas?

In 1995, Rabin, then our prime minister, asked me to join him on his trip to the White House, where he was to sign a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat, which I supported. I believe that he wanted me to represent all Israeli victims of terrorism. Rabin dreaded shaking hands with Arafat, knowing that those hands were bloody. At first, I agreed to make the trip, but at the last minute, I declined. As prime minister, Rabin had to shake hands with Arafat for political reasons. As a private person, I did not. So I stayed here.

Now I am ready and willing to come to the United States to testify against Abu Abbas if he is tried for terrorism. The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer have said they are ready to do the same. Unlike Klinghoffer, Danny, Einat and Yael were not American citizens. But Klinghoffer was killed on an Italian ship in Abbas's attempt to free the killer of my family in Israel. We are all connected by the international web of terrorism woven by Abbas. Let the truth come out in a new and public trial. And let it be in the United States

[Abu Abbas died of natural causes in March 2004 while in U.S. custody and never faced a trial.]

This is one of the terrorists that are being held in Israeli prisons. Compare this to our missing soldiers.
Pfffffff.

In Bercy park in Paris, people protest a poster supporting our three missing soldiers.



What do you make of this? The protesters are not capable of putting their posters next to the one standing, no, they need to completely remove the Israeli one in order to make a pathetic little point. Just like in real life, they can't even conceive putting a Palestinian country next to Israel, they need to completely wipe Israel off the map to exist. They can't stand hearing another point of view other than their own, which is exactly the problem in the Middle East.

The mairie of Paris has put up this poster in support of three abducted soldiers. On June 25th 2006 Gilad Shalit was abducted from Israel proper by terrorists who built a tunnel to enter Israel from Gaza. In this terrorist attack, the terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers. Israel had completely disengaged from Gaza about 10 months prior to this incident. During these ten months, Kassam Rockets from Gaza into Israel proper never ceased. Less than a month later, on July 12th, on the northern border, Hezbollah launched Katyusha rockets into Israel as a diversion, then attacked two IDF Humvees with anti-tank rockets, and abducted Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. During this unprovoked attack, four Israeli soldiers were killed. Israel had completely disengaged from southern Lebanon more than 6 years prior to this incident, in May 2000.
A year after Gilad's abduction, a voice recording of him was given by the military wing of Hamas, asking that the Israeli government proceed with a prisoner swap.
We haven't heard anything from Hezbollah about Udi and Eldad.

200 people in Paris protested the fact that this poster has been put up in the Bercy Park. As you can see in the video, the three faces are covered with an appeal for the Palestinian prisoners, as if there is some sort of moral equivalent between them, and some injustice has been done by showing support for the Israelis.
First of all, why not put up your protest next to the missing Israeli soldiers? Why is it that pro-Palestinian ALWAYS has to equal virulent anti-Israel?
Second of all, do you really believe that there's some sort of moral equivalent? Our three soldiers were abducted from inside Israel, by terrorists who live in areas which have no reason to target Israel any longer*, in order to later have the upper hand in some sadistic negotiation. We have no news from them, they have no medical treatment, access to them by the Red Cross is denied, we don't know their whereabouts or even if they are still alive, how they are treated, or rather, how they are tortured, or when this will all come to an end. Talking from experience though, how many abducted Israeli soldiers have come back home?
Their prisoners are, in fact, prisoners. They were not abducted, they are not MIA. They were caught during a terror attempt, or during a raid on a terrorist source, or arrested, or whatever. Their families know where they are, how they are doing, they can even go visit them (since they always seem to complain that the ride to the prison is so long. Pfff), they get regular doctor visits, Amnesty International and the Red Cross are ever present when it comes to non-Israeli prisoners, they get three HALAL meals a day, they get to pray whenever they wish (confirmed by the fact that they once complained that they had to pray in the direction of the toilet, the poor dears), they even get to have cellphones (with which they took pictures to complain about their treatment). Most importantly, they have contact with their families and they know how long their sentence is.

In the video you can see a poster of a young man, Salah Hamouri, who the protesters say is a French-Palestinian student. The truth, it turns out, is slightly different. But why should they care about itty bitty details like the truth?
Salah Hamouri is an Arab-Israeli, not a Palestinian, who also has a French nationality (as does Gilad Shalit, incidentally). He was arrested with two other Arab-Israelis for suspicion of plotting to kill Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Belonging to the PFLP, they were convicted of assisting the enemy at a time of war. That's quite different from the image they try to paint to the audience.

The protesters managed to get the Israeli poster removed last week.

Yesterday on the radio I heard that the mairie de Paris decided to put the poster back up, though I can't find any mention of it online.


*There never *is* a legitimate reason to target Israel, but your average terrorist-Joe will always be able to complain that they only target Israel because of some unjust occupation. But seriously, what do people in Gaza want more from Israel after they completely disengaged from Gaza? What do Hezbollah in southern Lebanon want after Israel completely disengaged from southern Lebanon? Oh right, they want complete annihilation of Israel.

Amnesty, at the height of hypocrisy

A few months ago, Amnesty International declared that "Last summer's war criminals must be punished". When you read that article a little more deeply, you see that they feel Israel, Lebanon and the international community haven't done enough to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and other grave violations.
Absurdly enough, in the same document, AI calls for Hezbollah to give more information about the abducted soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Absurd, because AI, who generally fights for the unconditional release of illegally abducted prisoners, does not ask Hezbollah for the release of our soldiers in this document, only for Hezbollah to give information about them. Bunch of hypocrites.

But in any case, the whole concept of addressing any parts of this document to Hezbollah or Lebanon is a moot point. Do they even care what pseudo-do-good-organizations like Amnesty International think?

Israel is capable of judging its own military activities, without the need of an external 'international community' who wouldn't know the first thing about the situation in the Middle East. Lebanon is not capable of that (reminder: Rafik Hariri). Hezbollah doesn't care to be capable of that.
In fact, Israel will do just that, following this absurd AI document.

Winograd Commission to address 'war crimes'

Chairman of commission probing Second Lebanon War tells MK
Gal-On committee will examine Israel's actions in context of
international law, following allegations of war crimes.

Just like in the past, where Israel judged whether Ariel Sharon was a war criminal (he was not), whether there was a massacre in Jenin (there was no massacre in Jenin), whether the Anti-Terrorist fence was illegal (is was not, however parts of its path were revised in order to better accommodate 'Palestinians'), Israel will judge its own military of whether any war crimes were committed.
Does anyone think Hezbollah will do the same?
Does anyone think Lebanon will do the same?

Back to Amnesty's document, the double standards it employs are completely ridiculous.
It laments the 'indiscriminate killing of civilians' and wants to hold those responsible accountable.
Let's compare the Israeli side to the 'other' side.

Hezbollah abducted two and killed three soldiers on our side of a UN recognized border. This was followed by Katyusha rockets fired randomly (and not especially towards military targets) into Israel. All this was an unprovoked attack.
Israel responded by sending helicopters over southern Lebanon.

Here already started the world's echoing call for Israel to stop using this disproportionate force. This would mean that they expected Israel to randomly fire Katyusha rockets back towards Hezbollah.
Who thinks that by doing this Israel would have avoided the world's wrath about 'indiscriminate killing of civilians'?
No one?
Didn't think so.

As the war drew on, we saw a regular pattern of events. Katyushas being fired into northern Israel, at one point getting as far as Hadera. Hezbollah would fire these rockets indiscriminately into Israel, with the hope of creating as many casualties as possible. Hezbollah would listen to Israeli news reports about recent Katyusha landings in order to better orient the next rockets and to create more casualties. It was impossible to know where the next Katyusha would be aimed at. I doubt anyone thinks they were the least worried about their human rights record.

In contrast, Israel preceded every one of the IAF's attacks by distributing thousands of pamphlets asking the civilian population to leave the area. Israel addressed every accidental civilian casualty with deep regret, and reiterated their call for the civilians to leave the areas that were being attacked. Does this sound like a country whose aim is to 'indiscriminately kill the civilian population'?

In some places the Lebanese civilian population was blocked from leaving these places where they knew Israel would attack. Hezbollah had placed launching pads for the Katyusha rockets near civilians' homes, sometimes inside them. Hezbollah counted on the civilian population in order to hide among them. This, for the terrorists was a win-win situation. Either the Israelis would avoid attacking them because of the high civilian population, and thus have the terrorists free to do as they wish, or Israel would attack them and then obviously harm the civilian population meant to 'protect' them, making Israel seem as a vicious killer to the world and ultimately have Israel retreat in order to retain a certain level of conscience. They therefore needed the civilians to stay there as their shield. This is forbidden according to the Geneva Convention (Article 37 outlaws the use of civilian populations as a shield for military actions. It explicitly prohibits "the feigning of civilian, noncombatant status; and the feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict."), and in the even that it does happen, it is solely the responsibility of the side who hid among the civilian population. But again, I doubt anyone thinks Hezbollah were the least bit worried about their human rights record.

In contrast, Israeli civilians hid in underground shelters built years ago for their security by the Israel government. Some Israeli civilians from the north left the north in order to find shelter with family living in the center or the south, and were free to do so without having Israeli soldiers block their way, in order to make sure that Israel was correctly portrayed as the victim on CNN when the number of casualties would be compared.

It is absurd that Amnesty International should treat Israel in the way it does, given the obvious respect Israel has for human rights.
It is even more absurd when compared to the way Hezbollah is being treated with silk gloves, given its obvious disregard for anything remotely attached to human rights.

We Will Not Capitulate

Last year I found this article, a proposed text for a speech by the Prime Minister that would explain to the world exactly what it is we’re fighting...

We Will Not Capitulate

Ladies and gentlemen, leaders of the world. I, the Prime Minister of Israel, am speaking to you from Jerusalem in the face of the terrible pictures from Kfar Kana. Any human heart, wherever it is, must sicken and recoil at the sight of such pictures. There are no words of comfort that can mitigate the enormity of this tragedy. Still, I am looking you straight in the eye and telling you that the State of Israel will continue its military campaign in Lebanon.

The Israel Defense Forces will continue to attack targets from which missiles and Katyusha rockets are fired at hospitals, old age homes and kindergartens in Israel. I have instructed the security forces and the IDF to continue to hunt for the Katyusha stockpiles and launch sites from which these savages are bombarding the State of Israel.

We will not hesitate, we will not apologize and we will not back off. If they continue to launch missiles into Israel from Kfar Kana, we will continue to bomb Kfar Kana. Today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Here, there and everywhere. The children of Kfar Kana could now be sleeping peacefully in their homes, unmolested, had the agents of the devil not taken over their land and turned the lives of our children into hell.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time you understood: the Jewish state will no longer be trampled upon. We will no longer allow anyone to exploit population centers in order to bomb our citizens. No one will be able to hide anymore behind women and children in order to kill our women and children. This anarchy is over. You can condemn us, you can boycott us, you can stop visiting us and, if necessary, we will stop visiting you.

A voice for six million citizens

Today I am serving as the voice of six million bombarded Israeli citizens who serve as the voice of six million murdered Jews who were melted down to dust and ashes by savages in Europe. In both cases, those responsible for these evil acts were, and are, barbarians devoid of all humanity, who set themselves one simple goal: to wipe the Jewish race off the face of the earth, as Adolph Hitler said, or to wipe the State of Israel off the map, as Mahmoud Ahmedinejad proclaims.

And you - just as you did not take those words seriously then, you are ignoring them again now. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaders of the world, will not happen again. Never again will we wait for bombs that never came to hit the gas chambers.

Never again will we wait for salvation that never arrives. Now we have our own air force. The Jewish people are now capable of standing up to those who seek their destruction - those people will no longer be able to hide behind women and children. They will no longer be able to evade their responsibility.

Every place from which a Katyusha is fired into the State of Israel will be a legitimate target for us to attack. This must be stated clearly and publicly, once and for all. You are welcome to judge us, to ostracize us, to boycott us and to vilify us. But to kill us? Absolutely not.

Four months ago I was elected by hundreds of thousands of citizens to the office of Prime Minister of the government of Israel, on the basis of my plan for unilaterally withdrawing from 90 percent of the areas of Judea and Samaria, the birth place and cradle of the Jewish people; to end most of the occupation and to enable the Palestinian people to turn over a new leaf and to calm things down until conditions are ripe for attaining a permanent settlement between us.

The Prime Minister who preceded me, Ariel Sharon, made a full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip back to the international border, and gave the Palestinians there a chance to build a new reality for themselves. The Prime Minister who preceded him, Ehud Barak, ended the lengthy Israeli presence in Lebanon and pulled the IDF back to the international border, leaving the land of the cedars to flourish, develop and establish its democracy and its economy.

What did the State of Israel get in exchange for all of this? Did we win even one minute of quiet? Was our hand, outstretched in peace, met with a handshake of encouragement? Ehud Barak's peace initiative at Camp David let loose on us a wave of suicide bombers who smashed and blew to pieces over 1,000 citizens, men, women and children. I don't remember you being so enraged then. Maybe that happened because we did not allow TV close-ups of the dismembered body parts of the Israeli youngsters at the Dolphinarium? Or of the shattered lives of the people butchered while celebrating the Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya? What can you do - that's the way we are. We don't wave body parts at the camera. We grieve quietly.

We do not dance on the roofs at the sight of the bodies of our enemy's children - we express genuine sorrow and regret. That is the monstrous behavior of our enemies. Now they have risen up against us. Tomorrow they will rise up against you. You are already familiar with the murderous taste of this terror. And you will taste more.

In a loud and clear voice

And Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza. What did it get us? A barrage of Kassam missiles fired at peaceful settlements and the kidnapping of soldiers. Then too, I don't recall you reacting with such alarm. And for six years, the withdrawal from Lebanon has drawn the vituperation and crimes of a dangerous, extremist Iranian agent, who took over an entire country in the name of religious fanaticism and is trying to take Israel hostage on his way to Jerusalem - and from there to Paris and London.

An enormous terrorist infrastructure has been established by Iran on our border, threatening our citizens, growing stronger before our very eyes, awaiting the moment when the land of the Ayatollahs becomes a nuclear power in order to bring us to our knees. And make no mistake - we won't go down alone. You, the leaders of the free and enlightened world, will go down along with us.

So today, here and now, I am putting an end to this parade of hypocrisy. I don't recall such a wave of reaction in the face of the 100 citizens killed every single day in Iraq. Sunnis kill Shiites who kill Sunnis, and all of them kill Americans - and the world remains silent. And I am hard pressed to recall a similar reaction when the Russians destroyed entire villages and burned down large cities in order to repress the revolt in Chechnya. And when NATO bombed Kosovo for almost three months and crushed the civilian population - then you also kept silent. What is it about us, the Jews, the minority, the persecuted, that arouses this cosmic sense of justice in you? What do we have that all the others don't?

In a loud clear voice, looking you straight in the eye, I stand before you openly and I will not apologize. I will not capitulate. I will not whine. This is a battle for our freedom. For our humanity. For the right to live normal lives within our recognized, legitimate borders. It is also your battle. I pray and I believe that now you will understand that. Because if you don't, you may regret it later, when it's too late.


By Ben Caspit, July 31st, 2006
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/457/743.html

A Whole Year and Still Nothing About Our Boys

Unfortunately I haven't got much time to blog these days, but I would like to mark the fact that a year ago today, Hezbollah terrorists penetrated Israel, crossed a UN approved border, killed three Israeli soldiers, abducted two Israeli soldiers, fired Katyushas into Israel, and all this in an unprovoked attack. Israel had completely withdrawn from southern Lebanon in 2000.

According to Bibi Netanyahu, not in the smartest of ways:

"The Barak government's irresponsible withdrawal from Lebanon brought
Hizbullah to the fence, paved the way for Nasrallah and caused the problems
in Lebanon in 2006,"

In the next few weeks, I'll post flashbacks to things that marked last year's war and the world reaction to it. Here's a start.

A year ago today, Dan Gillerman made some informal comments at the Security Council Media Stakeout.


To watch the video click here.
(Real Media, requires Real Player... Maybe I'll find a way to embed these type of videos into blogs one day, until then, you'll have to click... sorry.)

Two days later he made an excellent speech at the UN Security Council, during a meeting about the "Situation in the Middle East". The full video is almost two hours long. I'll spare you the suspense, it's a lot of Israel bashing and incoherence about victims and restraint and fallacies.

In the midst of this room full of darkened opinions, there is one candle of intelligence and enlightment. Dan Gillerman. You can see his contribution in the next two youtube clips.

Part I of Dan Gillerman's Speech at the UN's Security Council

Part II of Dan Gillerman's Speech at the UN's Security Council

As brilliant as his speech is, there is a drawback. His audience is the UN. His words fell on deaf ears. Just like Herzog's speech after the UN's ridiculous decision to equate Zionism with racism. In a movie, or in an Ayn Rand novel, speeches like these would wake up the dormant neurons in the audience, they would realize what the "big picture" is, they'd get up and give a standing ovation (in the movie), or nod in silent agreement and act accordingly (in the Ayn Rand novel), and the world's intelligence level would have increased a notch.
Not here.


In the days following the start of the war, Cox and Forkum had some excellent comic strips made.



This one is actually from right after Gilad Shalit was abducted, but I discovered it on July 13th. I like this image so much. For me it represents the whole situation of the Middle East.

The media world exploded. Countless staged pictures of dead children on the Lebanese side, the now infamous Green Helmet Guy, incredible exaggerations in captions which have nothing to do with either the picture or reality, photoshopped pictures on Reuters exposed by LGF, objects meticulously placed in order to ignite reader disapproval against Israel, pictures showing what Hezbollah wanted the world to see, pictures wrongly identified, debris of same building shown over and over again to insinuate constant Israeli destruction and contempt for Lebanese civilians... And the list goes on...

And in all this, world condemnation of Israel, excessive force, Israel should use restraint, blahblah. And where are our boys? Geneva convention anyone? Has Amnesty done anything in order to know anything at all about them? Has the Red Cross condemned anyone because the illegally abducted Israeli soldiers haven't been given access to their services?

www.banim.org

Useless resolution 1701

There's so much I want to write about that when I do start writing about something, it goes all over the place and doesn't make much sense to anyone but me. I will try to stay focused on one subject at a time. Though you'll have to admit, it's complicated. Everything has an implication on everything else. For example, I still haven't gotten around to writing about the 1967 Six Day War. It's not *that* important right now, especially since you have all the other blogs talking about it, what with the 40 year anniversary and all. (And they're all doing such a good job of it, anything I'd write would really be horse manure in comparison, but I've got so much I've always wanted to say about that subject...)

But there is something important about the Six Day War which strikes me as important today.
Depending on where you learned your history, your version of the Six Day War might be different. People like to think that because I am Israeli, I have the subjective "Israeli" version. I tend to think that this is not so true. Though I grew up in Israel until my early teens, I later moved to Europe, and had a very non-Israeli, non-Jewish education. I never had a history lesson in Israel or in an Israeli school. My mother often wondered how I turned so pro-Israeli despite the fact that nothing in my education was ever in that direction. My education taught me to think rationally and to question everything and to base everything on facts.

The Six Day War is largely considered a war imposed on Israel by a few Arab countries (depends on whether you count just the countries that really participated, or the countries which helped the participating countries, but at that point in time it was quite clear, Israel had no Arab friends). Even though the first shot came from Israel, it is justified as a defensive attack because of a few "minor" details, to name a few: Egyptian naval blockade of the Straits of Tiran, military buildup in the Sinai Peninsula and expulsion of the United Nations Emergency Force from there, as well as Syrian support for Fedayeen incursions into Israel.

All these, as well as clear statements and intelligence documents, pointed to a clear danger for Israel and her citizens. And danger to Israel from Arab countries doesn't mean slight loss of territory or an economic embargo or something "survivable" like this. Nonono. Just like Hamas, Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah make it crystal clear today, Arab countries were very open with their intentions back then as well. The intention always was, and still is, total annihilation of the State of Israel. Push the Jews to the sea. Israel will not survive. Israel will be wiped off the map.
What would any country responsible for her citizens do in such a situation? What did Israel do in the face of this threat? Israel made a preemptive attack against a threatened Arab invasion.

And the world applauded this. Israel was the underdog back then. Arab countries all around showed hostile intentions, and Israel took action. The world could only speak well of this tiny young country which managed to ground the Egyptian Air Force before it even started flying. They congratulated Israel for making a preemptive attack and a short war and in this way saving countless lives, rather then waiting until the Arabs started a full fledged war which would have brought on a much longer battling period.

Now 40 years later, I am astounded by the headlines I see all around me. While the 1967 Time's article about the war is full of awe for the swift Israeli victory, today's articles have a distorted vision of the past and seem to ignore the facts. Israel was threatened. It had every right to defend herself. I don't know how much clearer I can make it.

Now the parallel with today.
It started already last summer. On one side of the border, Israel withdrew from the disputed territories in Gaza and hoped that calm would ensue. It didn't. Kassam rockets were fired regularly into israel, and on June 25th, terrorists abducted Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier from inside the State of Israel. What where they protesting? What more is Israel supposed to give to them so that they stay calm? More land? But I thought all they wanted was the "occupied territories", not Israel itself? Anyway, drifting off. So Kassam rockets and Israeli soldier abduction on that side. Ceasefirese have been made since, but I'm not quite sure what they mean by ceasefire, seen as they haven't ceased to fire Kassam rockets, but have intensified instead.

On the northern border, where every last Israeli soldier left the area in May 2000 (Ehud Barak's decision), Hezbollah had been rearming itself for the previous six years. This included creating Katyusha launching pads inside civilian homes and creating an arsenal of hundreds of thousands of Katyusha rockets to be launched indiscriminately on the Israeli civilian population. On July 12th, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, two Israeli reservist soldiers, were abducted by Hezbollah under the nose of the UN (again), because Katyusha rockets were fired as a diversion elsewhere.

Israel was under attack and needed to defend herself. For once the world wasn't completely against Israel. Nations were disagreeing on the disproportionate force (that's a whooooole other story...), were quite wimpy about their support for Israel, and towards the end of the war they were getting quite impatient (as were we all), but generally the world agreed that Israel was attacked for "no real reason". It was quite a flying pig moment.
Then came resolution 1701.

The Resolution demands:

• Full cessation of hostilities
• Israel to withdraw all of its forces from Lebanon in parallel with Lebanese and UNIFIL soldiers deploying throughout the South
• Hezbollah to be disarmed
• Full control of Lebanon by the government of Lebanon
• No paramilitary forces, including (and implying) Hezbollah, will be south of the Litani River

The Resolution at the same time also emphasizes:

• The need to address urgently the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers, that have given rise to the current crisis.

Now let's go over the list bulletpoint by bulletpoint.

• Full cessation of hostilities? Well Katyushas have stopped raining on the north, that's true. But have you ever heard of the Muslim concept of a Hudna?
  "if Muslims are weak, a truce may be made for ten years if necessary, for the Prophet made a truce with the Quraysh for that long, as is related by Abu Dawud"
  It is not a ceasefire, but a pause in battle so that one side can re-organize itself.
• Israel withdrawal? Done. (Again.)
• UNIFIL deployment? In theory, yeah. They don't patrol at night because of the danger involved. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at this. They spend time building a giant Sauna for the Finnish delegation. They accept Muslim countries which don't recognize Israel to watch over Israel's border. I can't stress this enough times, the UN is a bunch of Useless Nobodies.
• Hezbollah disarmed? Not yet, not ever.
• Full control of Lebanon by the Lebanese government? Uhhh, nonono, south of Lebanon is still Hezbollah territory.
• No paramilitary (koffkoff Hezbollah) south of the Litani? Well, what have we learned from the last three bulletpoints? This is an obviously useless resolution point.
• Now the last point is emphasized. Bring our boys back home. Not only are they nowhere near home, but we haven't gotten any signs of life from them. International law (you know, Geneva conventions and things like that which you always keep waving at Israel) requires that prisoners of war be given contact with the Red Cross. Unless the prisoners are Israeli of course. Amnesty moves heaven and earth in order to ensure the fair treatment of prisoners. Unless the prisoners are Israeli of course.

So you see, all these points mean that were Israel to attack now, it would be justified. It was justified 40 years ago, even if now people don't agree anymore.
But if Israel were to attack now, you wouldn't have to wait 40 years for the condemnations.

And you see, I'm talking all over the place. Too many thoughts in my head and I'm too angry at this world to make sense.

A cute animation from the Second Lebanon War