Israel Really Hates Lebanon!

Yep, Israel has yet to have second thoughts about their invasion of Lebanon. On Sunday they pushed even farther into the country as, slowly, the Arab world began to really speak out about it. See, According to ElectronicLebanon.Net, there was a shockingly long period of time where the rest of the Arab world didn't say much of anything against Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Now, at least in a small way, that seems to have changed. According to [http://english.bna.bh/?ID=47913|a July 23, 2006 post] at http://English.BNA.bh (the Bahrain News Agency) Kuwait has established a fund to help support Lebanese and Palestinians who have suffered due to the Israel attacks on both regions. Here's a quote from that post:

The Kuwaiti cabinet approved a donation of KD 20 million to the Lebanese and Palestinian people to alleviate the sufferings caused to them by Israel's persistent offensive. KD 15 million will be sent through the Kuwaiti Aid Committee and KD 5m will be dispatched through Kuwait Red Crescent.

"KD" stands for Kuwaiti Dinar and currently the exchange rate puts KD 20 million in at around USD 70 million. While this money isn't as huge as the money the US is spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a show of support from the Arab world (and from a US ally, in theory) that Palestinians and Lebanese will need help rebuilding.

Of course, no Arab country wants to get in on the war-fun because everyone knows that when Israel starts mixing up some shit, the US will come down hard on anyone that tries to stop them. Arab countries then clam up, back into the corner and offer to invest some more billions in America and everything is "cool".

Speaking of America, according to [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html|a July 23, 2006 article] at NYTimes.com and [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0722-02.htm|available ]at CommonDreams.Org the US has been asked to speed up bomb delivery to the Israelis.

They're in it for the long haul, it would seem.

Here's a clip from that NYT article:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. 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 munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But 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.

Taste the 5,000 pound pain, Lebanon!

Sheesh...

Meanwhile, here in the US, the media continues to get mass amounts of it all wrong. MediaMatters.Org pointed out in [http://mediamatters.org/items/200607210009|a July 23 2006 post] how all of the networks are stacking all of their shows with more Republican/conservative guests than Democrat/progressive ones. To me, though, I don't see much difference as I heard Dem Joe Biden on one of the Sunday morning news shows, two Sundays ago, defend Israel's right to defend herself. Of course, [http://thepete.com/israel-invades-lebanon-but-why/|I'm still wondering from what].

Back at CommonDreams.Org I found [http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0722-23.htm|a July 22, 2006 article] originally posted at CJRDaily.Org (the website of the Columbian Journalism Review Daily) that went into a nice amount of detail regarding what the mainstream US news sources are getting entirely wrong. Here are a few clips from the article written by Lawrence Pintak, who runs a center for television and new media at The American University in Cairo but finds himself on vacation in California during this latest chapter of the decades (centuries?) long Middle East Crisis:

...At times, the coverage has seemed as much a fantasy as Disney's Space Mountain, and the level of Middle East knowledge on the part of some television anchors only a few notches higher than that of the tattooed biker couple waiting in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Take, for example, a CNN interview with an American high school student who had been visiting his father's relatives in Lebanon when the conflict broke out. With his tearful American mother in the studio, he was asked by phone whether he was frightened. No big deal, he replied, explaining that he was north of the Christian port of Jounieh, far from the fighting. Betraying her woeful ignorance of Lebanon's geography and politics, the anchor replied that he sounded like a typical "macho" young man who didn't want to worry his mother.

The anchor might have looked at a map before going on air.

...

One CNN promo showed an unedited sequence in which a nameless photographer told Anderson Cooper, in northern Israel, that there was a rumor of rockets on the way. Cooper then turned to the camera and authoritatively reported, "The police say more rockets are coming."

So much for checking sources.

One example: CBS refugee John Roberts, now CNN's senior correspondent, eruditely pointed to pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Syria as evidence of a Sunni-Shiite split. The only weakness in that analysis is that Syria is a Sunni nation, so the demonstrations point to exactly the opposite -- Sunni-Shiite unity on the issue of Hezbollah's actions.

Over on Hardball, NBC correspondent Dawn Fratangelo's discussion of potential dangers to American evacuees quickly disintegrated into confused talk of Hezbollah rockets in northern Israel. That's the other direction, Dawn.

There was little effort to identify the politics of many of the pseudo-experts who were trotted into the studios. Right-wing Lebanese Christians and representatives of Israeli-backed think tanks -- both with axes to grind -- were offered up as independent analysts. Anchors and reporters, meanwhile, frequently wore their politics on their sleeve. When an American woman trapped in southern Lebanon decried Washington's failure to stop what she said was Israel's brutal killing of civilians, CNN anchor Tony Harris snapped back, "That's not the view over here," and cut her off, saying he didn't have time to debate the issue.

Isn't that just fucked? Tony Harris says that "over here" we're not viewing it as "Israel's brutal killing of civilians". He might as well be saying that we Americans see Israel's invasion of Lebanon as "happy fun killing." I can hear Governor Arnold's defense of Israel's killing of so many Arabs now: "But they were all bad..."

Uh-huh. If only there weren't so many True Lies going around right now. (See what I did there? ;) )

Speaking of lies, and more specifically avoiding them, through CNN.Com of all places, I found a blogger out of Bekaa, Lebanon who is maintaining LebanonLive.BlogSpot.Com. It's header describes the blog as:

A view from the Lebanese side of things with what's going on between Lebanon and Israel. Straight from the action, no middle man. I tell you how I see it without getting any lies from anyone else.

...I like it already. So, check it out for comparisons of what you're reading/seeing/hearing in the mainstream US news.

Now for my straight, honest opinon on this whole thing.

Killing is bad. In 99% of the instances, killing is wrong and can be avoided. I'm against capital punishment (except in the most extreme situations), abortion (except in extreme cases), and torture. I basically believe in being cool to as many people as possible. The only time killing is OK, in my book, is WHEN YOU'VE ALREADY BEEN ATTACKED.

So, you don't get to hurt someone else until they have killed a substantial number of you, FIRST. This attitude is multiplied times ten when the one feeling threatened is a bigger power than the one threatening.

So, in the case of Iraq and the US, Lebanon and Israel or, say, Poland and Germany, it's the latter that should actually take a hit before they attack the former. To do anything else would be a literal abuse of power.

To me these principles trump politics, economy and even my own life. I don't want to die for my principles, but I would if I had to. So, regardless of who is doing the aggressing, they'd better be doing it after they've lost some serious lives. Hell, even in the case of Afghanistan I think what America did was wrong. So, naturally, I believe that what Israel is doing is wrong.

This isn't about being anti-Jew--I don't care what religion anyone is. It's about being anti-killing. PERIOD.

Of course, if you're a pro-lifer and you're behind Israel's invasion of Israel or their occupation of Palestine, or for the US wars in Iraq or Afghanistan you're a hypocrite or at the very least uneducated. Which is worse? Killing an unborn baby or wiping out entire families "by accident"?

Oh and how's this for a new tag here at ThePete.Com: MECCA. It stands for the Middle East Crisis Created by America :D

I still find it wonderfully ironic that there's been buckets of bitching about Syria and Iran interfering in Lebanese and Israeli affairs by arming Hezbollah while the US has been arming all sorts of people in the ME for literal decades.