Fact sheet and flier for Protest against the War on Lebanon tomorrow

...annd not durign her speech on Sunday itself?

Isn't she in session in DC? Isn't this a pointless symbolic gesture?

I need to ask do you guys in the States actually get the international news of the terror that is happening right now in Beirut!.Cant understand how you can defend the actions of Israel when civilians have been targeted.How can killing children,women and men of all ages have any reflextion on distruction of Hammas?. How are those linked to the terrorist organisations that Israel say must be destroyed? Please tell me is this purley tit for tat!,just because Israel has the fire power does that mean it has the right to fire missle after missle against the civilian population of Lebanon.Yes Hammas must stop sending its own short range missles into Israel,again against civilian targets as this only gives Israel their self belief of sending more of its own missiles back into the Occupied lands of the West Bank or as is the case now Lebanon.
If Israel really wants to stop Hammas then send in a strike force and remove those leaders of Hammas who perpetuate the violence.Children are NOT collateral damage!!! how dare armies of any country( and i include the U.K as well in this) blow up children and say OOPS sorry but collateral damage!!that is disgusting!!!
Dont you think that by targeting the civilian population of Lebanon you are creating suicide bombers of future generations, the oppressed will only be oppressed for so long.Hammas like any twisted organisation will us the shattered bodies of babies as a mind weapon for recruiting new members of its terror campaign against Israel.You should be demonstrating to end the war,and to put pressure on Israel to stop its targeting of civilians before it really is too late!!!!.

There is no democracy in the world that should tolerate missiles being fired at its cities without taking every reasonable step to stop the attacks. The big question raised by Israel's military actions in Lebanon is what is "reasonable." The answer, according to the laws of war, is that it is reasonable to attack military targets, so long as every effort is made to reduce civilian casualties. If the objectives cannot be achieved without some civilian casualties, these must be "proportional" to the civilian casualties that would be prevented by the military action.

This is all well and good for democratic nations that deliberately locate their military bases away from civilian population centers. Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population. Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas.


While Israel does everything reasonable to minimize civilian casualties, Hezbollah and Hamas want to maximize civilian casualties on both sides.

While Israel does everything reasonable to minimize civilian casualties -- not always with success -- Hezbollah and Hamas want to maximize civilian casualties on both sides. Islamic terrorists, a diplomat commented years ago, "have mastered the harsh arithmetic of pain... Palestinian casualties play in their favor and Israeli casualties play in their favor." These are groups that send children to die as suicide bombers, sometimes without the child knowing that he is being sacrificed. Two years ago, an 11-year-old was paid to take a parcel through Israel security. Unbeknownst to him, it contained a bomb that was to be detonated remotely. (Fortunately the plot was foiled.)

This misuse of civilians as shields and swords requires a reassessment of the laws of war. The distinction between combatants and civilians -- easy when combatants were uniformed members of armies that fought on battle-fields distant from civilian centers -- is more difficult in the present context. Now there is a continuum of "civilianality": Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents -- babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.

The laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these realities. An analogy to domestic criminal law is instructive: A bank robber who takes a teller hostage and fires at police from behind his human shield is guilty of murder if they, in an effort to stop the robber from shooting, accidentally kill the hostage. The same should be true of terrorists who use civilians as shields from behind whom they fire their rockets. The terrorists must be held legally and morally responsible for the deaths of the civilians, even if the direct physical cause was an Israeli rocket aimed at those targeting Israeli citizens.

Israel must be allowed to finish the fight that Hamas and Hezbollah started, even if that means civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. A democracy is entitled to prefer the lives of its own innocents over the lives of the civilians of an aggressor, especially if the latter group contains many who are complicit in terrorism. Israel will -- and should -- take every precaution to minimize civilian casualties on the other side. On July 16, Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, announced there will be new "surprises" and the Aska Martyrs Brigade said that it had developed chemical and biological weapons that could be added to its rockets. Should Israel not be allowed to pre-empt their use?

Israel left Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. There are not "occupied" territories. Yet they serve as launching pads for attacks on Israeli civilians. Occupation does not cause terrorism, then, but terrorism seems to cause occupation. If Israel is not to reoccupy to prevent terrorism, the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority must ensure that these regions cease to be terrorist safe havens.

Alan Dershowitz

Did anyone see Alan Dershowitz (the above cut and paste job) get creamed by Noam Chomsky in debate?
Alan, a right wing frothing at the mouth putz, was humiliated by Chomsky's superior intellect, breadth of knowledge/facts. The dersh was stuttering, stammering and screaming.
It was embarrassing.

Isn't true that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East? Maybe if more countries as democratic as Israel, peace might happen in no time
(this is the zionist myth)


There is no denying of the fact that the Middle East is mostly ruled by autocratic, oppressive, and undemocratic regimes. On the other hand, the majority of these repressive regimes were mostly founded and funded based on Israeli and American wishes. It should be noted that the most popular revolts in the Middle East have been ruthlessly crushed by American puppet regimes (whom the West often refer to by "Moderate regimes") in the area. The regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Hashemite Kingdom, Lebanon (before the civil war), Arab Gulf States, Morocco, Iran (prior to the Islamic revolution), Turkey, ... etc., were all funded and directed by the United States of America; the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, many of the so called "moderate regimes" are ten times more accountable to Uncle Sam than to their own public. Ironically, if democracy truly shall serve Israel's national interests in the region, then maybe it should direct its powerful lobby in Washington, AIPAC, to start lobbying on behalf of the oppressed in the Middle East; after all promoting "democracy is the key" to a lasting peace in the Middle East?

It's worth noting that soon after the 1948 war, the undemocratic Arab regimes were the central factor in protecting the newly emerging "Jewish state". And any forms of organized local resistance against Israel, similar to Hizbullah's in southern Lebanon, was ruthlessly dealt with in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Actually, many of Israel's "moderate" Arab neighbors transplanted most Palestinian refugee camps inland away from the Israeli borders, to curb the so called Palestinian "infiltration" [ or return] back to their homes in Israel. The so called "Infiltration Problem", which faced Israel between 1949-1955, had become the most pressing and expensive challenge to face the newly emerging "Jewish state". In other words, it's not the presence, but the absence of democracy that greatly serves the Israeli interests in the region, and based on that the United States has systematically shored up these unpopular regimes against the wishes of the people (i.e. the Hashemite Kings in Jordan, the Saudi Kings in Arabia, Mubarak of Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq prior to the Gulf War, and the Emirates in the Gulf States), and undermined the popularly elected governments (i.e. toppling Musadiq in Iran in the early 1950s, invading Lebanon in the late 1950s, shoring up the Hashemites in Jordan in the late 1950s, and undermining Nasser in Egypt).

It's rarely questioned, by many Israelis and Zionists, how the Jewish minority in Palestine became a majority within few months in 1948. Since the inception of Zionism, its leaders have been keen on creating a "Jewish state" based on a "Jewish majority" by mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, primarily European Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. When a "Jewish majority" was impossible to achieve, based on Jewish immigration and natural growth, Zionist leaders (such as Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann) concluded that "population transfer" was the only solution to what they referred to as the "Arab Problem." Year after year, the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous people became known as the "transfer solution". David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, eloquently articulated the "transfer solution" as the following:

In a joint meeting between the Jewish Agency Executive and Zionist Action Committee on June 12th, 1938:

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims p. 144).

In a speech addressing the Central Committee of the Histadrut on December 30, 1947:

"In the area allocated to the Jewish State there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350,000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment, will be about one million, including almost 40% non-Jews. such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State. This [demographic] fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority .... There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176 & Benny Morris p. 28)

And on February 8th, 1948 Ben-Gurion also stated to the Mapai Council:

"From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood]. . . there are no [Palestinian] Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been Jewish as it is now. In many [Palestinian] Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single [Palestinian] Arab. I do not assume that this will change. . . . What had happened in Jerusalem. . . . is likely to happen in many parts of the country. . . in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180-181)

In a speech addressing the Zionist Action Committee on April 6th, 1948:

"We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area ..... I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)

Click here for more "Transfer" (Ethnic Cleansing) quotes from Zionist leaders.
It's not only that the Zionists deemed it necessary to practice ETHNIC CLEANSING to build their vision of "Jewish Democracy", they have also opted to keep many Israelis in the dark by directly censoring what they read, hear, and see in the Israeli media. Martin Van Creveld (the renowned Israeli military strategist, and historian) eloquently described Israeli controlled censorship as follows:

"The [Israeli military] censor exercises draconian power over the content in the media, licenses newspapers, and fines and suspends newspapers if, in his view, they have violated secrecy. He does not have to explain the reasons for his decision; indeed one paragraph in the law obliges newspapers to publish free ads by military censor denying or correcting information that papers themselves published. . . . Thus one of the [Israeli military] censor's main functions is to keep Israelis ignorant of what everybody else knows." (The Sword And The Olive, p. 110)

"By this time [referring to the period prior to the October war in 1973] Israel's system of media self-censorship had begun to backfire. .... the media, voluntarily refraining from publishing the news, helped the IDF in its own assessment [that Arabs are incapable of going to war] and put the public to sleep." (The Sword And The Olive, p. 223)

Click here to view a Real Movie depicting Israeli censorship on newspapers, radio, and TV networks.
For the moment, let's assume that the above facts, arguments, and quotes are nonsense to the average Israeli and Zionist, and let's ask the following questions:

Are you aware that 95% of Israel's lands are open for development for "Jewish people" only?
Are you aware that the Israeli-Palestinian minority (who are close to a quarter of Israel's citizens) are restricted to 3% of land?
The implementation of these apartheid policies resulted in disenfranchising a quarter of the Israeli population, who mostly continue to live in segregate, gated, and over crowded ghettos that are plagued with high unemployment rate and suffers from lack of basic services. In fact, there are over forty plus unrecognized Palestinian-Israeli villages (within the "Green Line") that receives no public services whatsoever , such as roads, sanitation, electricity, schools, ...etc.

Finally, it's worth emphasizing that "Israeli democracy" is an incarnation of Apartheid South Africa's democracy. It also could be argued that Apartheid South Africa was for a very long time the only democracy in Africa, however, it was a democracy for the White race only. Similarly, Zionist democracy in Israel was and still is designed to empower Jews only based on their religion. At one point, Israel has to choose between being a "Democratic Jewish State" or a "Democratic State" to all of its citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike. Eventually, such a facade to democracy will self-destruct, and until it changes, the talk about "Israeli democracy" is nothing but a propaganda that makes good sound bytes in the Western and Israeli medias.

Democracy- one person, one vote. People directly elect their depresentatives. Is there anything in the above cut and paste job that disputes this?

20 % of Israel's population is Arab- they have their own political parties and have 11 seats in the Israeli Parliament.

COVER STORY: Why Israel is not a democracy


NASHVILLE — Webster's New World Dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, “the principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this principle”. Keep this in mind, as we'll be coming back to it shortly.

Now, imagine that the United States abolished its constitution, or perhaps had never had one to begin with. No Bill of Rights. No guarantees of things like free speech, freedom of assembly and due process of law.

And imagine if Congress passed a law stating that the US was from this point forward to be legally defined as a “Christian nation”. As such, Christians would be given special privileges for jobs, loans and land ownership, and Christians from anywhere in the world would be given preference in immigration, extended automatic citizenship upon coming to America.

Furthermore, imagine if political candidates espousing certain beliefs — especially those who might argue that the US should be a nation with equal rights for all, and not a “Christian nation” — were no longer allowed to hold office, or even run for election.

Imagine that laws were passed that had the effect of restricting certain ethnic and religious groups from acquiring land in particular parts of the country, and made it virtually impossible for members of ethnic minorities to live in particular communities.

And imagine that in response to perceived threats to America's internal security, new laws sailed through Congress, providing for torture of those detained for suspected subversion. This, on top of still other laws providing for the detention of such suspects for long periods of time without trial or even a formal charge against them.

In such a scenario, would anyone with an appreciation of the English language, and with the above definition in mind, dare suggest that we would be justified in calling America a democracy?

Jewish state
Of course not: and yet the term is repeatedly used to describe Israel — as in “the only democracy in the Middle East”. This, despite the fact that Israel has no constitution; despite the fact that Israel is defined as the state of the Jewish people, providing special rights and privileges to anyone in the world who is Jewish and seeks to live there, over and above longtime Arab residents. This, despite the fact that Israel bars any candidate from holding office who thinks the country should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all. This, despite the fact that non-Jews are restricted in terms of how much land they can own, and in which places they can own land at all, thanks to laws granting preferential treatment to Jewish residents. This, despite that fact that even the Israeli Supreme Court has acknowledged the use of torture against suspected “terrorists” and other “enemies” of the Jewish state.

For some, it is apparently sufficient that Israel has an electoral system, and that Arabs have the right to vote in those elections (though just how equally this right is protected is of course a different matter). The fact that one can't vote for a candidate who questions the special Jewish nature of the state, because such candidates can't run for or hold office, strikes most as irrelevant — hardly enough for them to call into question Israel's democratic credentials.

If what we see in Israel is indeed democracy, then what does fascism look like?

I'm sorry, but I am over it. As a Jew, I am over it. And if my language seems too harsh here, that's tough. Because it's nothing compared to the sickening things said by Israeli leaders throughout the years. Like former prime minister Menachem Begin, who told the Knesset in 1982 that the Palestinians were “beasts walking on two legs”. Or former PM Ehud Barak, who offered a more precise form of dehumanisation when he referred to the Palestinians as “crocodiles”.

Speaking of Barak, in his April 14 op-ed in the New York Times, he insisted that democracy in Israel could be “maintained”, so long as the Jewish state was willing to set up security fences to separate itself from the Palestinians, and keep the Palestinians in their place. Calling the process “unilateral disengagement”, Barak opined that limiting access by Arabs to Israel is the key to maintaining a Jewish majority, and thus the Jewish nature of the state. That the Jewish nature of the state is inimical to democracy as defined by every dictionary in the world matters not, one supposes.

Barak even went so far as to warn that in the absence of such security fences, Israel might actually become an apartheid state. Imagine that — unless they institute separation they might become an apartheid state. The irony of such a statement is nearly perfect, and once again signals that words no longer have meaning.

Barak's `generous offer'
Interestingly, amidst the subterfuge, other elements of Barak's essay struck me as surprisingly honest — much more honest, in fact, than anything he had said while he was prime minister, during which time he supposedly made that “generous offer” to Yasser Arafat about which we keep hearing. You know, the one that would have allowed the maintenance of most Jewish settlements in the territories, and would have restricted the Palestinian state to the worst land, devoid of its own water supply, and cut off at numerous choke points by Israeli security. Yeah, that one. The one that has been described variously (without any acknowledgement of the inconsistency) as having offered the Palestinians either 93%, or is it 95% or maybe 96% or perhaps 98% of the West Bank and Gaza.

In the Times piece, Barak finally came clean, admitting that Israel would need to erect the fences in such a manner as to incorporate at least one-quarter of the territories into Israel, so as to subsume the settlements. So not 93%, or 96 or 98, but at best 75%, and still on the worst land. Furthermore, the fences would slice up Jerusalem and restrict Arab access to the Holy Basin and the Old City — a direct swipe at Muslims who seek access on a par with their fellow descendants of Abraham.

That this was Barak's idea all along should surprise no-one. And that such a “solution” would mean the final loss for the Palestinians of all but 17% of their pre-Israel territory will likely not strike many in the US media or political elite as being terribly unfair. If anything, we will continue to hear about the intransigence of the Arabs, and their unwillingness to accept these “generous offers”, which can only be seen as generous to a people who have become so inured to human suffering that their very souls are in jeopardy.

Or to those who have never consulted a dictionary — which defines generous as, “willing to give or share; unselfish; large; ample; rich in yield; fertile”. In a world such as this, where words have lost all meaning, we might as well just burn all the dictionaries.

Sometimes, the linguistic obfuscation goes beyond single words and begins to encompass entire phrases. One such example is the oft-repeated statement to the effect that “Jews should be able to live anywhere in the world, and to say otherwise is to endorse anti-Semitism”. Thus, it is asked, why shouldn't Jews be able to settle in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem?

Whoever says such a thing must know of its absurdity beforehand. The right to live wherever one chooses has never included the right to live in someone else's house, after taking it by force or fraud. Nor does it include the right to set up house in territories that are conquered and occupied as the result of military conflict. Indeed, international law expressly forbids such a thing. And furthermore, those who insist on the right of Jews to live wherever they choose, by definition deny the same right to Palestinians, who cannot live in the place of their choosing, or even in the homes that were once theirs.

Needless to say, many Palestinians would like to live inside Israel's pre-1948 borders, and exercise a right of return in order to do so. But don't expect those who demand the right for Jews to plant stakes anywhere we choose to offer the same right to Arabs. Many of these are among the voices that insist Jordan is “the Palestinian state”, and thus, Palestinians should be perfectly happy living there.

Since Palestinians are Semites, one could properly call such an attitude “anti-Semitic” — seeing as how it limits the rights of Semitic peoples to live wherever they wish — but given the transmogrification of the term “anti-Semitism” into something that can only apply to Jew-hatred, such a usage would seem bizarre to many.

Terrorism
The rhetorical shenanigans even extend to the world of statistics. Witness the full-page advertisement in the New York Times placed by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which ran the same day as the Barak op-ed. Therein, these supposed spokespeople for American Judaism stated their unyielding support for Israel, and claimed that the 450 Israeli deaths caused by terrorism since the beginning of the second intifada, were equal to 21,000 deaths in the US from terrorism, as a comparable percentage of each nation's overall population.

Playing upon fears and outrage over the attacks of September 11, the intent was quite transparent — get US readers to envision September 11 all over again, only with seven times more casualties!

Of course, if one were at all concerned with honesty, one might point out that the number of Palestinian non-combatant (that is to say civilian) deaths, at the hands of Israel in that same time period, is much higher, and indeed would be “equal to” far more than 21,000 in the US, as a comparable share of respective populations.

To be honest to a fault would be to note that the 900 or so Palestinians slaughtered with Israeli support in the Sabra and Shatilla camps during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, would be equal to more than 40,000 Americans. Even more, the 17,500 Arabs killed overall by Israel during that invasion would be roughly equivalent to some 800,000 Americans today — the size of many large cities.

In a world where words still had meaning, such things might even be considered “terrorism”.

Ariel Sharon once said, “A lie should be tried in a place where it will attract the attention of the world”. And so it has been — throughout the media and the US political scene, on CNN in the personage of Benjamin Netanyahu, and in the pages of the New York Times.

And in my Hebrew School, where we were taught that Jews were to be “a light unto the nations”, instead of this dim bulb, this flickering nightlight, this barely visible spark whose radiance is only sufficient to make visible the death-rattle of the more noble aspects of the Jewish tradition.

Unless we who are Jews insist on a return to honest language, and an end to the hijacking of our culture and faith by madmen, racists and liars, I fear that the light may be extinguished forever.

[Abridged from <http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorD=96>. Tim Wise is a US anti-racist activist, educator and writer.]

There is a theory in international relations that countires act in similar ways to human "personalities." One factor in social work is that abused children ofen become child abusers when they grow into adulthood.

In my opinion, Israel has now become the abuser. Abused by the NAZIs in the 1930's and 1940's now Israel has grown up to become the abuser. The bully on the block who roughs-up others in the neighborhood.

When you hear the term over and over again "Never Again!" Does this mean never again for Jews? Never again for Israel? Never again for humaity? If the latter is true, why didn't Israel send forces into Cambodia to put an end to the "killing fields"? Why didn't Israel fly into Rawanda to stop the genocide there? I mean they flew into Uganda to rescue the occupants of a hijacked El Al aircraft. I'm sure they could have extended their reach a bit to get into Rawanda. At least a symbolic gesture. Nothing...

Israel is the abuser. Israel is now the bully. Israel has become their former opressors - the NAZIs. The sooner this nation comes to grip for what they have become, the sooner there will be a true and lasting peace in the Middle East.