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Indybay Feature
Photos: The Massacre at Qana
Today, when Israeli war planes attacked Qana, at least 51 civilians, including at least 22 children, were killed. It is the deadliest single strike since Israel unleashed its war on Lebanon.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, using the latest and most sophisticated US weaponry, the human and material cost was devastating. Tens of thousands civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands were made homeless. Over 80 percent of the casualties were civilians, Lebanese and Palestinian.
Today, when Israeli war planes attacked Qana, at least 51 civilians, including at least 22 children, were killed. It is the deadliest single strike since Israel unleashed its war on Lebanon. Israel, the US and several European governments are in no rush to reach a ceasefire. Dozens of other villages in the region around the southern port city of Tyre were also bombarded for two hours overnight with fire from the Israeli navy, air force and artillery. Israeli planes also tore up the Masnaa border crossing into Syria, leading to the closure of the main Damascus-Beirut route.
Israel's attack on Qana's residents came shortly after rejecting a UN call for a 72-hour humanitarian truce to allow the delivery of relief items to Lebanon. UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland had appealed for a truce to allow casualties to be removed and food and medicine to be sent into the war zone, saying one third of the casualties were children.
The Israeli military says Hizbollah bore responsibility for using the town to fire rockets at Israel. "We were attacking launchers that were firing missiles," said Captain Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman. However, the principle of military necessity cannot excuse the massive destruction of buildings and the number of civilian casualties which result from Israel's assault on Qana.
Diplomats must wonder at what point do the number and catastrophic consequences of 'mistakes' allow for the conclusion that Israel has been indiscriminate in its acts of violence. Israeli bombardments have been directed at targets regardless of the consequences for civilians. There can be no doubt that Israel uses fragmentation weapons in Lebanon. The use of these weapons in an environment where there is a high concentration of civilians, the widespread impact and destructive effects of these weapons and thir delayed-action nature also point to the total disregard of human lives.
It is not the first time Israel attacked Qana. Ten years have passed since 105 Lebanese civilians were killed by an Israeli artillery barrage on a UN compound in Qana. As such Israeli attacks on UN posts are not new. Two Indian UN peacekeepers were wounded and four UN military observers were killed last week in an Israeli strike on their observation posts.
On April 18, 1996, when Shimon Peres was Israel's Prime Minister, approximately 800 civilians were sheltering in the UN base. Most residents of Qana and neighboring villages had fled north a week earlier seeking refuge in Beirut. Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk reported:
"It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their heads or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. there were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong."
The absence of precautions prior to the attack in close proximity to the town of Qana and the UN base located there, as well as the means and methods of attack chosen by the Israeli army (a sustained artillery barrage without lines of sight to the target), put Israel in violation of international humanitarian law.
Like Israel's assaults today, the US administration gave the green light to Israel's 1996 campaign against Southern Lebanon. The Clinton administration tried unsuccessfully to suppress a UN report blaming Israel for the massacre. On April 25, 1996, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, characterising Israel's actions during the "Grapes of Wrath" offensive as "grave violations of international laws relating to the protection of civilians during war." The US and Israel vigorously contended that the attack had been an unfortunate mistake, and the story gradually disappeared from all but the memories of those civilians, UNIFIL personnel and journalists who had witnessed the carnage at Qana.
Leading up to the Qana massacre, 17 villages had been flattened, over a half million people had been rendered homeless, more than 200 had been killed, and hundreds were wounded.
The tragedy at Qana today is that this is not unique in its general features. Israel's wars on Lebanon have been attended by violence, death and destruction of enormous proportions. Israel does not have any grounds to rely on the provision of the Charter of the United Nations concerning self-defence, while the means used to effect Lebanon's invasion totally lack proportionality.
Israel's kind of war effort obliterates the very idea of innocence as fully in its own way as does nuclear war. The irony here is very great because it is in these conflicts where the need for law is the greatest - that is, where battlefield tactics often tend to concentrate their firepower on civilians, civilian sanctuaries (hospital, churches, schools) and cultural centres, and to ignore the distinction between military and non-military. Governments that designate their enemies as 'terrorists' or 'criminals' treat their conflicts as outside the law.
In 1948 the nations of the world adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, human rights should be protected by the rule of law'.
Israel's use of terror has been qualitatively and quantitatively much higher than that of the Lebanese and Palestinians. The number of civilians killed as the result of actions by Israel, both before its creation and after, has far exceeded the number of Israeli civilians killed by others.
Dehumanization by way of political language has an anaesthetizing effect and it paralyses normal human empathy and disrupts moral inhibitions. The predominant terminology employed by Israeli spokespersons, the American administration (and Foxnews for that matter) is an additional factor in creating conditions in which human rights violations and gross violations of humanitarian law, including war crimes are tolerated.
The level of what has been tolerated has been moved a step again. Every minute the world remains silent and inactive the level has been set further. More is tolerated. Someone has to stop this. Someone has to take action. Before it is too late.
- Arjan El Fassed is one of the co-founders of the Electronic Intifada and Electronic Lebanon.
- Images reposted from As'sad Abukhalil's Angry Arab News Service
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Noone else is to be blamed than Arab leaders themselves. They play in the hands of US as puppetes. They have lost their spines and crawl like insects. If they unite, Isreal can't dare even a bit.
Shame on you Arab leaders.
Shame on you Arab leaders.
This incident is so very unfortunate and really shows the horror of war. After reading this, I couldn't help but feel I was reading an editorial rather than a real news article. I didn't see mentioned that whole affair started after an Israeli soldier was kidnapped, and that by Hezbulla's own admission, they didn't think that Israel would react this way. Nor did I see any indication of the deaths in Israel of the 1000+ rockets that have been launched into their territory, or, the 1 million plus people who crowd into bomb shelters.
This article is truely a propoganda piece. I feel sorry for news organizations that have such a bias for the news that they publish it.
This article is truely a propoganda piece. I feel sorry for news organizations that have such a bias for the news that they publish it.
Israel dropped leaflets and warned Hizbollah to evacuate Qana, so why didn't this happen? Anybody with half a brain knows it happened because Hizbollah uses dead women and children as trophies to advance its cause. And you've just obliged them by showing the trophy pictures here.
There are websites where the mangled bodies of hundreds of Israeli suicide bombing victims can be seen. They are usually much more disgusting than the pictures here. Typically, there are only arms and legs and torsos left over after one of those attacks. Any particular reason why Indybay never chooses to show THOSE gruesome photographs? Too inflammatory, I suppose.
This week, I've seen video of Hizbollah gunmen using UN AMBULANCES as transport in this war. I've seen video of women and children milling about in streets interspersed with Hizbollah gunmen who are in the act of firing in the direction of Israeli forces. What other purpose could there be in doing this than to draw fire on women and children?
The idea that Hamas, Hizbollah and Muslim terrorists in general care about women and children is laughable. MUSLIM Women and children are being executed in Iraq IN THE HUNDREDS by these same monsters -- Sunni and Shiite -- on a daily basis, in their nihilistic effort to provoke a religious war there just to make George Bush's war a failure, and for no other discernible reason.
I wonder how long the fair residents of San Francisco would put up with random bus bombings and missiles being lobbed at them from Oakland before they would be screaming for military action.
There are websites where the mangled bodies of hundreds of Israeli suicide bombing victims can be seen. They are usually much more disgusting than the pictures here. Typically, there are only arms and legs and torsos left over after one of those attacks. Any particular reason why Indybay never chooses to show THOSE gruesome photographs? Too inflammatory, I suppose.
This week, I've seen video of Hizbollah gunmen using UN AMBULANCES as transport in this war. I've seen video of women and children milling about in streets interspersed with Hizbollah gunmen who are in the act of firing in the direction of Israeli forces. What other purpose could there be in doing this than to draw fire on women and children?
The idea that Hamas, Hizbollah and Muslim terrorists in general care about women and children is laughable. MUSLIM Women and children are being executed in Iraq IN THE HUNDREDS by these same monsters -- Sunni and Shiite -- on a daily basis, in their nihilistic effort to provoke a religious war there just to make George Bush's war a failure, and for no other discernible reason.
I wonder how long the fair residents of San Francisco would put up with random bus bombings and missiles being lobbed at them from Oakland before they would be screaming for military action.
Hizbollah are noble and courageous people. They can fight a huge and sophisticated army to free Libanon, including Shebaa farms, and to liberate libanese prisoners.
So, if they hide among the civilians, why there is no picture of dead militants among the babies and the civilians?
Rice, the zionist-occupied US's slave, said that the bombing is giving birh to a new Middle-East. I suggest that it is giving birth to the next Hitler.
So, if they hide among the civilians, why there is no picture of dead militants among the babies and the civilians?
Rice, the zionist-occupied US's slave, said that the bombing is giving birh to a new Middle-East. I suggest that it is giving birth to the next Hitler.
anyone who could claim that the state of israel has a right to commit these horrific atrocities has lost their humanity
Human life is a human life.. Whether in Auswitchz or in Lebonan. How quickly do nations and people forget the suffering they endured when are in the other side of the power play..
Shame on Israel..
Shame on Israel..
My pro-Israel reader was giving me a history lesson. He had most of his facts right but, like many of Israel’s defenders, he was putting the events of the current Middle Eastern crisis in the historical order that fits his biased position.
Hamas and Hezbollah, according to him, started this war by capturing three Israeli soldiers. “Hamas” he asserts, “conducted a cross-border raid which resulted in the death of three soldiers and the capture of one. Israel then responded to them and only them. Then Hezbollah conducted a cross-border raid that resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers and the capture of two. Are these not acts of war?”
In my response I said: This is exactly our problem with Israel’s allies and supporters. They choose the most convenient point of history to start from. No, please, let us start from the beginning of the episode.
In the case of Hezbollah, there are more than ten thousand Arab abductees rotting in Israeli prisons, most without trial for twenty-seven years. Five hundred of them are women. Some were born in prison.
In the case of Hamas, thousands of Palestinians have been killed, not to count the injured; all of them, except a few are civilians. More are imprisoned, many without trial, including ministers and legislators in the Palestinian government. All this is forgotten history, thank you very much, what is remembered is one Israeli hostage in Gaza and two in Lebanon. For them millions in Lebanon and Palestine had to be collectively punished. How much cheaper could we go before we could respond in kind?
Another reader asked me if I have Jewish friends, and went on to declare: “A basic assumption these days is that it is preventable to have civilian casualties. This is stupid and inane, especially when Hezbollah chooses to use their populace as shields. You should be writing an article on the restraint the Israelis have had so far.”
I e-mailed him back assuring him that I do have Jewish friends. Some are writers and journalists; others are teachers and classmates during my graduate studies in America. Many are against Israeli aggression and ashamed of its recent actions.
Israel is targeting civilians after failing to find soldiers in the hope of using the tragedy to force a political solution. Hezbollah’s soldiers are underground on the border area, not in children’s schools, hospitals, mosques and refugee buses heeding Israeli warning to leave. To find soldiers, Israel must invade with ground troops. Now that they have done, they are finally finding Arab soldiers — the hard way.
A third reader wrote: “I think you have been caught up in the Al-Jazeera hype. Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist organizations. They have been condemned by just about every civilized country in the world. The UN has called for the disarmament of Hezbollah, but Lebanon has been unable to do this. After weeks of random missile attacks and armed incursions into undisputed Israeli territory, Israel was forced to respond. Israel has no territorial ambitions in this conflict, but they are risking their citizens’ lives and security to clean up a mess that other Arab countries are powerless to address — terrorism.
“Granted, there have been civilian casualties. When Hezbollah hides in residential areas and launches missiles from apartment complexes, those are the consequences. Israeli bombs and shells have been carefully aimed at known hide-outs and launching sites of Hezbollah, but I don’t think the same can be said of the missiles launched by Hezbollah. Rather than condemn Israel, we should compliment them for doing what is right under the circumstances. Chris.”
I wrote back: Chris, I believe you are caught up in the Zionist hype. No civilization in the world regards freedom fighters as terrorists except Israel and its allies. Strange enough, your buddy, Britain, once regarded the American freedom fighters as terrorists. According to your standards, which I don’t agree with, they were right and we now have a terrorist “civilization”.
Please, check the latest count on who is with and against an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. Only the “civilizations” of US, UK and Israel are against. The rest of the world “civilizations” are for an immediate stop of the killing machine.
Four hundred were killed in Lebanon — only a handful are soldiers. The clearly marked and isolated UN base was shelled fourteen times, four observers were killed. Then their rescuers were shelled. All calls to Israeli Army didn’t help.
Inside Israel, those killed by Hezbollah’s primitive rockets number less than 20 — half were soldiers. No hospitals, schools or refugee buses were hit. How come a guerrilla group with no smart weapons or super intelligence can be more accurate than the world’s best-equipped army and the third best intelligence agency? Go figure.
Another problem with most comments I received so far is the lack of sympathy for Arab victims — like we don’t count — so much for civility and civilization, Chris.
Hamas and Hezbollah, according to him, started this war by capturing three Israeli soldiers. “Hamas” he asserts, “conducted a cross-border raid which resulted in the death of three soldiers and the capture of one. Israel then responded to them and only them. Then Hezbollah conducted a cross-border raid that resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers and the capture of two. Are these not acts of war?”
In my response I said: This is exactly our problem with Israel’s allies and supporters. They choose the most convenient point of history to start from. No, please, let us start from the beginning of the episode.
In the case of Hezbollah, there are more than ten thousand Arab abductees rotting in Israeli prisons, most without trial for twenty-seven years. Five hundred of them are women. Some were born in prison.
In the case of Hamas, thousands of Palestinians have been killed, not to count the injured; all of them, except a few are civilians. More are imprisoned, many without trial, including ministers and legislators in the Palestinian government. All this is forgotten history, thank you very much, what is remembered is one Israeli hostage in Gaza and two in Lebanon. For them millions in Lebanon and Palestine had to be collectively punished. How much cheaper could we go before we could respond in kind?
Another reader asked me if I have Jewish friends, and went on to declare: “A basic assumption these days is that it is preventable to have civilian casualties. This is stupid and inane, especially when Hezbollah chooses to use their populace as shields. You should be writing an article on the restraint the Israelis have had so far.”
I e-mailed him back assuring him that I do have Jewish friends. Some are writers and journalists; others are teachers and classmates during my graduate studies in America. Many are against Israeli aggression and ashamed of its recent actions.
Israel is targeting civilians after failing to find soldiers in the hope of using the tragedy to force a political solution. Hezbollah’s soldiers are underground on the border area, not in children’s schools, hospitals, mosques and refugee buses heeding Israeli warning to leave. To find soldiers, Israel must invade with ground troops. Now that they have done, they are finally finding Arab soldiers — the hard way.
A third reader wrote: “I think you have been caught up in the Al-Jazeera hype. Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist organizations. They have been condemned by just about every civilized country in the world. The UN has called for the disarmament of Hezbollah, but Lebanon has been unable to do this. After weeks of random missile attacks and armed incursions into undisputed Israeli territory, Israel was forced to respond. Israel has no territorial ambitions in this conflict, but they are risking their citizens’ lives and security to clean up a mess that other Arab countries are powerless to address — terrorism.
“Granted, there have been civilian casualties. When Hezbollah hides in residential areas and launches missiles from apartment complexes, those are the consequences. Israeli bombs and shells have been carefully aimed at known hide-outs and launching sites of Hezbollah, but I don’t think the same can be said of the missiles launched by Hezbollah. Rather than condemn Israel, we should compliment them for doing what is right under the circumstances. Chris.”
I wrote back: Chris, I believe you are caught up in the Zionist hype. No civilization in the world regards freedom fighters as terrorists except Israel and its allies. Strange enough, your buddy, Britain, once regarded the American freedom fighters as terrorists. According to your standards, which I don’t agree with, they were right and we now have a terrorist “civilization”.
Please, check the latest count on who is with and against an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. Only the “civilizations” of US, UK and Israel are against. The rest of the world “civilizations” are for an immediate stop of the killing machine.
Four hundred were killed in Lebanon — only a handful are soldiers. The clearly marked and isolated UN base was shelled fourteen times, four observers were killed. Then their rescuers were shelled. All calls to Israeli Army didn’t help.
Inside Israel, those killed by Hezbollah’s primitive rockets number less than 20 — half were soldiers. No hospitals, schools or refugee buses were hit. How come a guerrilla group with no smart weapons or super intelligence can be more accurate than the world’s best-equipped army and the third best intelligence agency? Go figure.
Another problem with most comments I received so far is the lack of sympathy for Arab victims — like we don’t count — so much for civility and civilization, Chris.
i doubt very much that these women and children ever killed anyone you war mongering @#%%$#@.
the government of canada is also giving israel its unconditional support in its war against the civilian populations of lebanon and palestine. shame on canada
"Israel dropped leaflets and warned Hizbollah to evacuate Qana, so why didn't this happen?"
The first thing Israel did in was bomb the roads and bridges to prevent people from leaving the area. Why do all the ambulances they've hit have a hole in the roof, dead center on the red cross?
The first thing Israel did in was bomb the roads and bridges to prevent people from leaving the area. Why do all the ambulances they've hit have a hole in the roof, dead center on the red cross?
This is not a war between Israel and Hezbollah. It is a war between the U.S. and the middle east. Every bomb dropped by Israel was aquired from the Americans. They have the power to stop the war, but they choose not to. Israel is just another America in the centre of the middle east. The blood is entirely on their hands and no one elses.
No one condones the actions of Hezballah. Isreal prides itself as being a democratic civilized society. Keep pointing the finger Michael. Pictures don't lie. This is not a film set. Wake up, look around you. Indiscrininate bombing of civilians is a crime in any war. If the images of dead children killed by Isreali missiles, sdigned by Isreali children, is not enough to make you STOP the finger pointing, if the children are the future, there is no future. We have all been reduced to acting like animals. I'm ashamed of Isreal.
Hizbollah you hide among civilians & fire / fight from civilian apartments, you are equally responsible for the massacre. If the world condemns Israel I ask all the people to strongly urge the terrorists to come out & fight in open & not like cowards keeping the civilians as shields. Hizbollah for what the people of Lebanon had done to you (providing shelter & running your organization they deserve this & now Hizbollah please get out of Lebanon.
FOR THOSE WHO DEFEND ISRAEL FOR KILLING THE CIVILIANS AND BABIES. YOU JUST DON'T GET IT AND YOU'LL NEVER GET IT. HIZBOLLAH IS LEBANON AND LEBANON IS SAMPLED BY HIZBOLLAH. DON'T BE STUPID AND ASK HIZBOLLAH TO LEAVE LEBANON, THEY ARE THE LEBANESE PEOPLE WEATHER YOU TAKE IT OR NOT. MORE BOMBING AND MORE KILLING ONLY INCREASE THE HATERD AND GAP BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES. JUST TELL ISRAEL TO LEAVE LEBANON ALONE AND MIND HER OWN BUSINESS. YOU DON'T NEED TO DEFEND ISRAEL, PEOPLE ARE WATCHING WHAT'S GOING ON. PEOPLE CAN TELL WHO ARE THE PATRIOTS OF THIER COUNTRY. KILLING CIVILIANS ONLY SHOWS HOW WEAK ISREAL IS RIGHT NOW. THEY ARE THE ONE WHO STARTED IT AND SHOULD BE REPONSIBLE FOR THE WORST.
The massacre of Qana is quite simply the ènième done by the Israeli managers. It results from the kindness of the occident towards a militarist State, founded on a racist ideology: Zionism. The collective massacres perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers against Arabic point out a tragedy which was played veiled more than one half century against another people, the Jewish people. Yes, the work of the Zionists who manage Israel does is not different of anything from what the Nazis done against the Juif people. This cruelty, these war crimes would have been worth the passage in front of the International Court Penal for any other person in charge in the world since it does not belong to what is called "the free and democratic world". The managers of Israel cannot survive peace.
Did Israel gain the right to practise the holocaust by making feel guilty the occident? Israel could not operated all these massacres (populations of which the third parties are children, infrastructures, bombardment of ambulances.) in Lebanon, classified war crimes, without the encouragements of the combined European countries with Bush who is true the coimmanditaire of this butchery?
Another question, the international community would be it satisfied to regret the massacre of children in Lebanon (more than 200 in 20 days) if these children were European or American or Israeli children? In other words, infra-humanity gains in the shade of that of gantanamo. A infra-humanity dedicated to the tribes émergeantes which do not have other ways to affirm their existence, their humanity that while pouring in the extremism.
Did Israel gain the right to practise the holocaust by making feel guilty the occident? Israel could not operated all these massacres (populations of which the third parties are children, infrastructures, bombardment of ambulances.) in Lebanon, classified war crimes, without the encouragements of the combined European countries with Bush who is true the coimmanditaire of this butchery?
Another question, the international community would be it satisfied to regret the massacre of children in Lebanon (more than 200 in 20 days) if these children were European or American or Israeli children? In other words, infra-humanity gains in the shade of that of gantanamo. A infra-humanity dedicated to the tribes émergeantes which do not have other ways to affirm their existence, their humanity that while pouring in the extremism.
The Israeli massacre of Lebanese civilians, mainly children, in the village of Qana is a colosal war crime for which the United States government bears full responsibility.
The repeated missile strikes, launched in the dead of night while the targeted victims were asleep, reduced a four-story apartment building and nearby houses to rubble, killing at least 57 residents, including 37 children.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called the Qana bombing a “heinous crime” committed by “Israeli war criminals.” Speaking in English, so as to make clear his message was addressed to the Bush administration, Siniora scotched a planned visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying he would not hold talks with her until a ceasefire had been called.
For millions of people around the world, the atrocity captured the essence of the US-backed war on Lebanon, epitomizing its brutality and inhumanity. While the broad mass of humanity reacted with horror at the tragic loss of innocent life, and outrage toward the governments of the United States and Israel, the official response from Washington was utterly banal and callous.
There were the standard expressions of “regret” and “sadness,” as though such empty phrases legitimized the policy that produced this latest crime and the countless others that preceded it.
President Bush reiterated the American mantra of a “sustainable peace” in the Middle East—a euphemism for giving Israel more time to destroy all resistance within Lebanon to American and Israeli domination. With the bodies of 37 Lebanese children, killed by US-supplied missiles and fired by Washington’s war ally, yet to be buried, Bush spoke of his “hope for peace for boys and girls everywhere... especially in the Middle East.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Jerusalem press conference that she was “deeply saddened” by the “terrible loss of life” and reiterated US “concern” over Israeli attacks on civilian targets.
She then said, “We are pushing for an urgent end to the current hostilities, but the views of the parties on how to achieve this are different.” The first part of that sentence was an obvious lie, and the second omitted the fact that the chief international actor whose “different views” are blocking a ceasefire is the United States.
Other US spokesmen offered cold-blooded apologies for Israel’s action. Undersecretary of State Nicolas Burns declared that Hezbollah “located its military forces among civilians” and repeated the canard that Hezbollah had provoked Israel’s massive assault by carrying out a border raid and capturing two Israeli soldiers on July 12.
As always after such atrocities, Israeli officials blamed their victims. Prime Minister Olmert declared, “The village and its surrounding areas were a source for launching hundreds of rockets.”
Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, charged that Hezbollah was responsible for the killings in Qana because it “used women and children as human shields.” He suggested that the Lebanese government and the Lebanese people were harboring Hezbollah and therefore reaping what they had sowed.
The “human shield” claim is the standard justification given by every imperialist military when it attacks civilian targets. In this case, it is an all-purpose excuse for continuing to bomb Lebanon’s Shiite population, which overwhelmingly supports Hezbollah—a mass political party with delegates in the Lebanese parliament and ministers in the current government.
Various Israeli spokesmen repeated the official line that Israel had dropped leaflets warning residents to evacuate towns and villages in south Lebanon—as if that relieved Israel of responsibility for dropping bombs and firing precision missiles on their homes! In any event, as is well known, Israel has destroyed roads and bridges to make flight nearly impossible, and bombed civilian convoys that were attempting to flee to the north.
If anything, the official responses from the United States and Israel to the massacre placed in sharper relief the chasm that separates them from the vast bulk of humanity.
The tide of international revulsion was so great that Washington felt obliged to pressure Israel to accept a 48-hour suspension of its air war in southern Lebanon. Nervous lest the opposition to the US-Israeli war spin out of control, the Bush administration decided it needed to make a gesture so as to buy time and review its joint war strategy with Israel.
US State Department official Adam Ereli announced Sunday night that Israel had agreed to the suspension, ostensibly to allow for an investigation into the Qana attack. Ereli added, however, that Israel had the right to “take action against targets preparing attacks against it,” a qualification that gives Israel ample license to continue its attacks on Lebanese civilian populations.
News reports cited Israeli authorities who insisted that the suspension was limited to attacks from the air on southern Lebanon only, was not a ceasefire, and did not apply to artillery attacks or assaults by Israeli ground forces.
Far from being an aberration or accident, the Qana massacre was a deliberate act of mass murder. It underscored that the target of the war is not only Hezbollah, but the entire Lebanese people. Its aim, worked out well in advance by the Bush administration and the Israeli government, is to destroy the infrastructure of the country and reduce most of its territory south of Beirut to rubble.
With Washington’s full and open support, Israel is determined to inflict sufficient death and destruction to drive the entire civilian population out of south Lebanon and make the region uninhabitable for years to come.
This is the fascistic strategy behind the rhetoric of President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert about establishing Israeli “security” and Lebanese “sovereignty.” It is why Rice, speaking in Jerusalem even as the bodies were being dragged from the smoking ruins in Qana, continued to reject the Lebanese government’s desperate calls for a ceasefire.
Washington and Jerusalem wish to continue the bloodbath, and escalate it, until the carnage has reached a sufficient level to reduce the entire country to the status of a US-Israeli protectorate. For the American ruling elite—including both parties of US imperialism—this criminal enterprise is only a means to an end: the removal of the Syrian and Iranian regimes, by means of diplomatic and economic blackmail, subversion, and war.
The ultimate aim is to transform the Middle East and Central Asia, with their vast deposits of oil and natural gas, into a virtual colony of US imperialism, with Israel serving as Washington’s junior partner and military attack dog.
The Israeli strike on helpless civilians—most of whom had made their way to Qana to seek refuge from the indiscriminate bombing of Tyre and other nearby towns—was not only brutal, it was utterly cowardly. It came one day after Israel withdrew its forces from the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil, where vastly outgunned Hezbollah fighters shocked the Israeli Defense Forces with their fierce and courageous resistance, forcing the Israeli military to retreat. The Israeli response was to escalate its killing of unarmed civilians.
That the destruction of homes in Qana was part of a deliberate strategy is clear both from Israel’s words and deeds. Only last Tuesday Israel destroyed a UN monitoring post in south Lebanon in order to force the withdrawal of UN observers from the area. And late last week, a member of Israel’s security cabinet was quoted as saying, “We should raze the villages in south Lebanon if needed. The Israeli army is a long way from having won, and we have to change the rules of the game...”
The British Observer newspaper carried a story on Sunday outlining the evidence of systematic violations by Israel of international laws of war. The newspaper suggested that the purpose of this policy was to depopulate the south of Lebanon.
The Observer wrote: “As Lebanese medical staff reported than an Israeli air strike had killed a woman and her six children in a house in the southern village of Nmeiriya, western diplomats in Beirut admitted they were ‘baffled’ by Israel’s targeting policy. Ambulances, refugee columns and civilian homes, infrastructure and UN posts have all been hit—and evidence has begun to emerge that civilians may have suffered phosphorus burns.
“Footage has also emerged of the increasingly widespread use of cluster munitions in areas with civilian inhabitants. Concern has been further heightened by the delivery to Israel by the US of at least 100 GBU-28 ‘bunker-buster’ bombs containing depleted uranium warheads for use against targets in Lebanon....
“Regarding reports that Israel was intentionally trying to depopulate a large swathe of territory in the south, Mair [Lucy Mair, a field researcher from the American-based Human Rights Watch] said: ‘It’s hard for us to speak about this. But given there is such a massive displacement, it’s difficult to imagine a situation where the population can come back.’”
The massacre of civilians is nothing new for the Israeli ruling elite. Ten years ago, during the last major Israeli incursion into Lebanon, Israeli artillery destroyed a United Nations base in the very same village as this weekend’s atrocity—Qana. More than 100 civilians who had taken refuge in the base were killed.
Such methods have been the stock in trade of the Zionist state from its foundation. Violence and terror against civilians have been repeatedly used to drive Arabs from their villages, farms and homes in order to increase the territory held by Israel. Following the November, 1947 United Nations General Assembly vote to partition Palestine, the Israeli political leadership and its military carried out a number of massacres of Palestinian villages in order to expel the inhabitants and expand Israeli territory beyond the borders laid down by the UN.
Within a short period, some 700,000 Palestinians had been turned into stateless refugees, and Israeli policy has ever since been grounded on a determination to prevent their return, while further extending Israel’s borders.
Far from seeking to rein in its chief ally in the Middle East, the American ruling elite under the Bush administration has concluded that its aggressive appetites in the region can be used to further Washington’s own imperialist designs for global domination. The main author of crimes such as Sunday’s massacre in Qana is US imperialism.
The repeated missile strikes, launched in the dead of night while the targeted victims were asleep, reduced a four-story apartment building and nearby houses to rubble, killing at least 57 residents, including 37 children.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called the Qana bombing a “heinous crime” committed by “Israeli war criminals.” Speaking in English, so as to make clear his message was addressed to the Bush administration, Siniora scotched a planned visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying he would not hold talks with her until a ceasefire had been called.
For millions of people around the world, the atrocity captured the essence of the US-backed war on Lebanon, epitomizing its brutality and inhumanity. While the broad mass of humanity reacted with horror at the tragic loss of innocent life, and outrage toward the governments of the United States and Israel, the official response from Washington was utterly banal and callous.
There were the standard expressions of “regret” and “sadness,” as though such empty phrases legitimized the policy that produced this latest crime and the countless others that preceded it.
President Bush reiterated the American mantra of a “sustainable peace” in the Middle East—a euphemism for giving Israel more time to destroy all resistance within Lebanon to American and Israeli domination. With the bodies of 37 Lebanese children, killed by US-supplied missiles and fired by Washington’s war ally, yet to be buried, Bush spoke of his “hope for peace for boys and girls everywhere... especially in the Middle East.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Jerusalem press conference that she was “deeply saddened” by the “terrible loss of life” and reiterated US “concern” over Israeli attacks on civilian targets.
She then said, “We are pushing for an urgent end to the current hostilities, but the views of the parties on how to achieve this are different.” The first part of that sentence was an obvious lie, and the second omitted the fact that the chief international actor whose “different views” are blocking a ceasefire is the United States.
Other US spokesmen offered cold-blooded apologies for Israel’s action. Undersecretary of State Nicolas Burns declared that Hezbollah “located its military forces among civilians” and repeated the canard that Hezbollah had provoked Israel’s massive assault by carrying out a border raid and capturing two Israeli soldiers on July 12.
As always after such atrocities, Israeli officials blamed their victims. Prime Minister Olmert declared, “The village and its surrounding areas were a source for launching hundreds of rockets.”
Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, charged that Hezbollah was responsible for the killings in Qana because it “used women and children as human shields.” He suggested that the Lebanese government and the Lebanese people were harboring Hezbollah and therefore reaping what they had sowed.
The “human shield” claim is the standard justification given by every imperialist military when it attacks civilian targets. In this case, it is an all-purpose excuse for continuing to bomb Lebanon’s Shiite population, which overwhelmingly supports Hezbollah—a mass political party with delegates in the Lebanese parliament and ministers in the current government.
Various Israeli spokesmen repeated the official line that Israel had dropped leaflets warning residents to evacuate towns and villages in south Lebanon—as if that relieved Israel of responsibility for dropping bombs and firing precision missiles on their homes! In any event, as is well known, Israel has destroyed roads and bridges to make flight nearly impossible, and bombed civilian convoys that were attempting to flee to the north.
If anything, the official responses from the United States and Israel to the massacre placed in sharper relief the chasm that separates them from the vast bulk of humanity.
The tide of international revulsion was so great that Washington felt obliged to pressure Israel to accept a 48-hour suspension of its air war in southern Lebanon. Nervous lest the opposition to the US-Israeli war spin out of control, the Bush administration decided it needed to make a gesture so as to buy time and review its joint war strategy with Israel.
US State Department official Adam Ereli announced Sunday night that Israel had agreed to the suspension, ostensibly to allow for an investigation into the Qana attack. Ereli added, however, that Israel had the right to “take action against targets preparing attacks against it,” a qualification that gives Israel ample license to continue its attacks on Lebanese civilian populations.
News reports cited Israeli authorities who insisted that the suspension was limited to attacks from the air on southern Lebanon only, was not a ceasefire, and did not apply to artillery attacks or assaults by Israeli ground forces.
Far from being an aberration or accident, the Qana massacre was a deliberate act of mass murder. It underscored that the target of the war is not only Hezbollah, but the entire Lebanese people. Its aim, worked out well in advance by the Bush administration and the Israeli government, is to destroy the infrastructure of the country and reduce most of its territory south of Beirut to rubble.
With Washington’s full and open support, Israel is determined to inflict sufficient death and destruction to drive the entire civilian population out of south Lebanon and make the region uninhabitable for years to come.
This is the fascistic strategy behind the rhetoric of President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert about establishing Israeli “security” and Lebanese “sovereignty.” It is why Rice, speaking in Jerusalem even as the bodies were being dragged from the smoking ruins in Qana, continued to reject the Lebanese government’s desperate calls for a ceasefire.
Washington and Jerusalem wish to continue the bloodbath, and escalate it, until the carnage has reached a sufficient level to reduce the entire country to the status of a US-Israeli protectorate. For the American ruling elite—including both parties of US imperialism—this criminal enterprise is only a means to an end: the removal of the Syrian and Iranian regimes, by means of diplomatic and economic blackmail, subversion, and war.
The ultimate aim is to transform the Middle East and Central Asia, with their vast deposits of oil and natural gas, into a virtual colony of US imperialism, with Israel serving as Washington’s junior partner and military attack dog.
The Israeli strike on helpless civilians—most of whom had made their way to Qana to seek refuge from the indiscriminate bombing of Tyre and other nearby towns—was not only brutal, it was utterly cowardly. It came one day after Israel withdrew its forces from the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil, where vastly outgunned Hezbollah fighters shocked the Israeli Defense Forces with their fierce and courageous resistance, forcing the Israeli military to retreat. The Israeli response was to escalate its killing of unarmed civilians.
That the destruction of homes in Qana was part of a deliberate strategy is clear both from Israel’s words and deeds. Only last Tuesday Israel destroyed a UN monitoring post in south Lebanon in order to force the withdrawal of UN observers from the area. And late last week, a member of Israel’s security cabinet was quoted as saying, “We should raze the villages in south Lebanon if needed. The Israeli army is a long way from having won, and we have to change the rules of the game...”
The British Observer newspaper carried a story on Sunday outlining the evidence of systematic violations by Israel of international laws of war. The newspaper suggested that the purpose of this policy was to depopulate the south of Lebanon.
The Observer wrote: “As Lebanese medical staff reported than an Israeli air strike had killed a woman and her six children in a house in the southern village of Nmeiriya, western diplomats in Beirut admitted they were ‘baffled’ by Israel’s targeting policy. Ambulances, refugee columns and civilian homes, infrastructure and UN posts have all been hit—and evidence has begun to emerge that civilians may have suffered phosphorus burns.
“Footage has also emerged of the increasingly widespread use of cluster munitions in areas with civilian inhabitants. Concern has been further heightened by the delivery to Israel by the US of at least 100 GBU-28 ‘bunker-buster’ bombs containing depleted uranium warheads for use against targets in Lebanon....
“Regarding reports that Israel was intentionally trying to depopulate a large swathe of territory in the south, Mair [Lucy Mair, a field researcher from the American-based Human Rights Watch] said: ‘It’s hard for us to speak about this. But given there is such a massive displacement, it’s difficult to imagine a situation where the population can come back.’”
The massacre of civilians is nothing new for the Israeli ruling elite. Ten years ago, during the last major Israeli incursion into Lebanon, Israeli artillery destroyed a United Nations base in the very same village as this weekend’s atrocity—Qana. More than 100 civilians who had taken refuge in the base were killed.
Such methods have been the stock in trade of the Zionist state from its foundation. Violence and terror against civilians have been repeatedly used to drive Arabs from their villages, farms and homes in order to increase the territory held by Israel. Following the November, 1947 United Nations General Assembly vote to partition Palestine, the Israeli political leadership and its military carried out a number of massacres of Palestinian villages in order to expel the inhabitants and expand Israeli territory beyond the borders laid down by the UN.
Within a short period, some 700,000 Palestinians had been turned into stateless refugees, and Israeli policy has ever since been grounded on a determination to prevent their return, while further extending Israel’s borders.
Far from seeking to rein in its chief ally in the Middle East, the American ruling elite under the Bush administration has concluded that its aggressive appetites in the region can be used to further Washington’s own imperialist designs for global domination. The main author of crimes such as Sunday’s massacre in Qana is US imperialism.
As the news broke Sunday morning of the Israeli massacre in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, the American media swung into action to provide alibis and excuses for the horrific war crime.
The basic modus operandi of the US media has been well established over the past two-and-a-half weeks. The war cannot be mentioned without claiming that Hezbollah, always referred to as a terrorist organization, ignited the Israeli onslaught by seizing two soldiers.
Journalists worthy of the name have a responsibility to probe beneath the official version of events, to question the government’s claims, to hint at possibilities that the powers-that-be would prefer not be discussed. In the present conflict that would mean at least raising the possibility that the US and Israel have definite geopolitical ambitions.
The American media investigates none of this. It simply repeats the trite formulae of the Bush administration (a “sustainable ceasefire,” a “robust” mandate to disarm Hezbollah, and the deployment of an equally “robust” international peacekeeping force, etc.) ad infinitum.
The efforts of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has given Israel the green light to carry out its attacks, are inevitably referred to as a “peacekeeping mission.” Israel’s wanton violence is described as “self-defense.”
In the morning following the massacre at Qana, the US media scrambled to provide explanations for the horrible event. In the first place, American television refused to show images of the mangled, bloody bodies that television audiences in the rest of the world were seeing. “We cannot show this,” they said.
Why not? The level of US government censorship is staggering. A decision was reached during the night that the American public simply could not be allowed to see the reality of the Qana massacre.
Reports of the deaths of dozens of women and children were immediately followed by “Israeli officials say ...,” “the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) points out ...,” “the government in Tel Aviv explains that ...”
A mass murder is committed, and the US media rushes first to interview the murderer and get his side of the story.
The Israelis obligingly made a series of officials available for the American networks to interview. Every news program routinely begins and ends with the Israeli positions. Arab and Lebanese voices are squeezed in here and there, the more respectable and ‘pro-Western’ the better, without the slightest concern for a balanced presentation of a complex political situation, much less its historical background.
In this, the American media simply deludes itself and the public. The outrage felt for the US government and military in the Middle East and throughout much of the world is reaching a boiling point.
A few examples of the media coverage Sunday will suffice. This is from the New York Times: “Israel said the Qana strike was aimed at Hezbollah fighters firing rockets into Israel from the area, but an explosion caused a residential apartment building to collapse, crushing Lebanese civilians who were spending the night in the basement, where they believed they were safe. The Israelis raised the possibility that munitions stored in the building blew up hours after the air strike, destroying the building.”
In other words, the Lebanese blew themselves up. This scurrilous claim was not repeated elsewhere, as far as this writer could make out.
The Washington Post presentation is more typical: “Israeli warplanes blasted a group of buildings in this southern Lebanese village Sunday, killing dozens of people, most of them women and children, according to Lebanese officials. The Israeli military said the air strike was aimed at destroying Hezbollah rocket launchers nearby and that civilians were not being targeted.”
With some 800 Lebanese dead since the beginning of the war, 90 percent of them civilians, a semi-honest media would not leave such claims unchallenged. If Israel, with its surgically precise missiles and bombs, continues to kill civilians in large numbers, perhaps one should draw the logical conclusion that their strikes are, in fact, hitting their targets.
The unsubstantiated claim that Hezbollah fighters were launching missiles from the immediate vicinity of the building that collapsed is simply taken as good coin by the American media. Why should the Israeli government and its military be given the benefit of the doubt? Fox News, the right-wing voice of the Murdoch interests, was most forthright in passing off IDF claims as fact, but none of the networks or major newspapers cast any serious doubt on the Israeli military’s justifications.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Tim Russert opened his program, on the morning after the bloodiest episode in the 19 days of the war, with Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman. Russert provided Gillerman a platform for the defense of Israel’s actions. He did not begin by expressing his horror at the massacre, but by politely asking as to whether Israel would now agree to a ceasefire.
Gillerman responded in the predictable, cold-blooded manner. “First of all, Tim, this is a horrible, devastating, bloody Sunday, and it’s a horrible morning, and we grieve the deaths of those civilians and children. But it is very, very important to stress that they may have been hit by an Israeli bomb, but they are victims of the Hezbollah. If Hezbollah wasn’t there, this would never have happened.
“And I wouldn’t put it beyond that vicious, brutal, cynical terrorist organization to have held those people there against their will after we’d repeatedly asked them to leave, so that they would actually be used as human shields, and maybe even, as farfetched as this may sound, for this to happen, because this serves nobody’s purpose, except Hezbollah and Iran.”
‘The dead made us do it!’ Russert made no comment in response to this filthy allegation.
On CNN’s early morning program, anchors Tony Harris and Betty Nguyen took pains to put a good face on the Israeli actions. After reporting the facts of the attack, Harris continued: “Israel says the site was used by Hezbollah to launch rockets into Israel. An Israeli spokesman called the area a war zone and said Lebanese civilians were warned to leave. Even so, the Israeli defense minister has ordered an investigation.”
Over images of the bombing, Nguyen commented, “It is just hard to stomach this morning. We’ve seen the protests as well. But, on the flip side, Israel says that it has sent out warnings. It dropped flyers. It also made a radio announcement telling people to get out of the area.”
Harris then introduced Jacob Dalal, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force, who was interviewed from Jerusalem. Harris was immensely sympathetic to the difficult situation in which the IDF finds itself: “Give us some insight,” he said to Dalal, “if you would, help us understand the IDF’s strategic approach to this conflict right now. On the one hand, you clearly are trying to wipe out Hezbollah, which is your stated objective, but on the other hand, you have to balance that against the possibility of killing civilians. So help us understand strategically how you’re approaching this conflict right now.”
To this friendly query, Dalal replied, “That’s an excellent question and that indeed is the dilemma. That’s the dilemma of the war on terror. How, on the one hand, you attack terrorists and terrorist targets, and on the other hand, you spare civilian lives, because terrorists operate from within the civilian environment. Now, this balancing act is a very difficult balancing act for any army, and we’re trying to do the best we can.”
The Israeli claim, that it acts with concern for Lebanese civilians and is engaged in this so-called balancing act, Harris takes as given and makes the starting point for a friendly chat with a representative of the Israeli military.
Advertisement for the Israeli state
CNN’s “Late Edition” with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday was little more than an unpaid advertisement for the Israeli state and its operations. Speaking to one correspondent on the ground in Lebanon, Blitzer made his position in regard to Qana—the culpability of the civilians themselves—quite clear: “The Israelis say they gave plenty of warning to all the individuals living there, dropping leaflets. They showed us some of those leaflets that they say they dropped. Among other things, it said to civilians in villages located south of the Litani River, ‘Because of the terrorist acts that have been executed against the Israeli state from inside your villages and houses, the IDF had to react immediately against these actions, even inside your own villages.’”
Blitzer had filmed segments for his “Late Edition” program intended to underscore the hardships endured by Israelis during the current fighting. A lesser man might have thought that images of young children killed by Israeli bombs had made his footage somewhat unseemly, but Blitzer went right ahead.
Beginning his special report near Haifa, at an Israeli air force base, Blitzer took a tour by automobile through the port city, commenting, that the ride was “bleak—not many cars on the streets; not many people either. As I take a look at this port and this Haifa bay, it’s pretty depressing to see there aren’t many ships at all docked at Haifa right now.”
Later in the program, Blitzer showed a ride he took aboard a US Blackhawk helicopter with Israeli air force Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan. They flew north along Israel’s Mediterranean coastline. Blitzer commented: “Haifa, a city of some 300,000 under normal circumstances, is drained. ... The huge port area, usually full of cargo ships from around the world, is largely empty. So are the beautiful Mediterranean beaches nearby.”
Lebanon bleeds from every pore. But near Haifa “the beautiful beaches are empty”!
Blitzer went on to conduct an interview with Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a know-nothing ignoramus, and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, an ardent pro-Zionist. McConnell could not bring himself to express regret over the massacre in Qana, remarking instead, “Unfortunately, Hezbollah uses civilians as shields. The Israelis don’t do that.”
Schumer, asked how Bush and Rice were doing in the Middle East crisis, replied, “Well, I have no criticism of the president on this issue because I think he is doing the right thing.” This is the opposition party in the US.
A Syrian cabinet minister, Bouthaina Shaaban, was met with the usual American media arrogance. Blitzer’s first question: “Is Syria ready to stop facilitating weapons shipments to Hezbollah, as alleged by the US and Israeli governments as well as other governments?” Blitzer failed to note that the word ‘alleged’ undermined the premise of his question. How can someone stop doing something you haven’t proved they are doing in the first place?
At one point, Shaaban made the following point, “Remember, Nazi Germany was claiming that it was fighting terrorism. And then the whole world had to stop that. We are facing something very similar to what happened as a result of the actions of Nazi Germany against civilians.”
Blitzer ignored this. His program ended with a special segment revealing that Hezbollah’s rockets weren’t “the only thing posing a real danger. In this exclusive report I prepared earlier in the week, I found out that there are also some new threats from the Mediterranean Sea,” including exploding jet skis and life rafts. Meanwhile the broken bodies of women and children continued to be discovered in the rubble in Qana.
The basic modus operandi of the US media has been well established over the past two-and-a-half weeks. The war cannot be mentioned without claiming that Hezbollah, always referred to as a terrorist organization, ignited the Israeli onslaught by seizing two soldiers.
Journalists worthy of the name have a responsibility to probe beneath the official version of events, to question the government’s claims, to hint at possibilities that the powers-that-be would prefer not be discussed. In the present conflict that would mean at least raising the possibility that the US and Israel have definite geopolitical ambitions.
The American media investigates none of this. It simply repeats the trite formulae of the Bush administration (a “sustainable ceasefire,” a “robust” mandate to disarm Hezbollah, and the deployment of an equally “robust” international peacekeeping force, etc.) ad infinitum.
The efforts of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has given Israel the green light to carry out its attacks, are inevitably referred to as a “peacekeeping mission.” Israel’s wanton violence is described as “self-defense.”
In the morning following the massacre at Qana, the US media scrambled to provide explanations for the horrible event. In the first place, American television refused to show images of the mangled, bloody bodies that television audiences in the rest of the world were seeing. “We cannot show this,” they said.
Why not? The level of US government censorship is staggering. A decision was reached during the night that the American public simply could not be allowed to see the reality of the Qana massacre.
Reports of the deaths of dozens of women and children were immediately followed by “Israeli officials say ...,” “the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) points out ...,” “the government in Tel Aviv explains that ...”
A mass murder is committed, and the US media rushes first to interview the murderer and get his side of the story.
The Israelis obligingly made a series of officials available for the American networks to interview. Every news program routinely begins and ends with the Israeli positions. Arab and Lebanese voices are squeezed in here and there, the more respectable and ‘pro-Western’ the better, without the slightest concern for a balanced presentation of a complex political situation, much less its historical background.
In this, the American media simply deludes itself and the public. The outrage felt for the US government and military in the Middle East and throughout much of the world is reaching a boiling point.
A few examples of the media coverage Sunday will suffice. This is from the New York Times: “Israel said the Qana strike was aimed at Hezbollah fighters firing rockets into Israel from the area, but an explosion caused a residential apartment building to collapse, crushing Lebanese civilians who were spending the night in the basement, where they believed they were safe. The Israelis raised the possibility that munitions stored in the building blew up hours after the air strike, destroying the building.”
In other words, the Lebanese blew themselves up. This scurrilous claim was not repeated elsewhere, as far as this writer could make out.
The Washington Post presentation is more typical: “Israeli warplanes blasted a group of buildings in this southern Lebanese village Sunday, killing dozens of people, most of them women and children, according to Lebanese officials. The Israeli military said the air strike was aimed at destroying Hezbollah rocket launchers nearby and that civilians were not being targeted.”
With some 800 Lebanese dead since the beginning of the war, 90 percent of them civilians, a semi-honest media would not leave such claims unchallenged. If Israel, with its surgically precise missiles and bombs, continues to kill civilians in large numbers, perhaps one should draw the logical conclusion that their strikes are, in fact, hitting their targets.
The unsubstantiated claim that Hezbollah fighters were launching missiles from the immediate vicinity of the building that collapsed is simply taken as good coin by the American media. Why should the Israeli government and its military be given the benefit of the doubt? Fox News, the right-wing voice of the Murdoch interests, was most forthright in passing off IDF claims as fact, but none of the networks or major newspapers cast any serious doubt on the Israeli military’s justifications.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Tim Russert opened his program, on the morning after the bloodiest episode in the 19 days of the war, with Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman. Russert provided Gillerman a platform for the defense of Israel’s actions. He did not begin by expressing his horror at the massacre, but by politely asking as to whether Israel would now agree to a ceasefire.
Gillerman responded in the predictable, cold-blooded manner. “First of all, Tim, this is a horrible, devastating, bloody Sunday, and it’s a horrible morning, and we grieve the deaths of those civilians and children. But it is very, very important to stress that they may have been hit by an Israeli bomb, but they are victims of the Hezbollah. If Hezbollah wasn’t there, this would never have happened.
“And I wouldn’t put it beyond that vicious, brutal, cynical terrorist organization to have held those people there against their will after we’d repeatedly asked them to leave, so that they would actually be used as human shields, and maybe even, as farfetched as this may sound, for this to happen, because this serves nobody’s purpose, except Hezbollah and Iran.”
‘The dead made us do it!’ Russert made no comment in response to this filthy allegation.
On CNN’s early morning program, anchors Tony Harris and Betty Nguyen took pains to put a good face on the Israeli actions. After reporting the facts of the attack, Harris continued: “Israel says the site was used by Hezbollah to launch rockets into Israel. An Israeli spokesman called the area a war zone and said Lebanese civilians were warned to leave. Even so, the Israeli defense minister has ordered an investigation.”
Over images of the bombing, Nguyen commented, “It is just hard to stomach this morning. We’ve seen the protests as well. But, on the flip side, Israel says that it has sent out warnings. It dropped flyers. It also made a radio announcement telling people to get out of the area.”
Harris then introduced Jacob Dalal, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force, who was interviewed from Jerusalem. Harris was immensely sympathetic to the difficult situation in which the IDF finds itself: “Give us some insight,” he said to Dalal, “if you would, help us understand the IDF’s strategic approach to this conflict right now. On the one hand, you clearly are trying to wipe out Hezbollah, which is your stated objective, but on the other hand, you have to balance that against the possibility of killing civilians. So help us understand strategically how you’re approaching this conflict right now.”
To this friendly query, Dalal replied, “That’s an excellent question and that indeed is the dilemma. That’s the dilemma of the war on terror. How, on the one hand, you attack terrorists and terrorist targets, and on the other hand, you spare civilian lives, because terrorists operate from within the civilian environment. Now, this balancing act is a very difficult balancing act for any army, and we’re trying to do the best we can.”
The Israeli claim, that it acts with concern for Lebanese civilians and is engaged in this so-called balancing act, Harris takes as given and makes the starting point for a friendly chat with a representative of the Israeli military.
Advertisement for the Israeli state
CNN’s “Late Edition” with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday was little more than an unpaid advertisement for the Israeli state and its operations. Speaking to one correspondent on the ground in Lebanon, Blitzer made his position in regard to Qana—the culpability of the civilians themselves—quite clear: “The Israelis say they gave plenty of warning to all the individuals living there, dropping leaflets. They showed us some of those leaflets that they say they dropped. Among other things, it said to civilians in villages located south of the Litani River, ‘Because of the terrorist acts that have been executed against the Israeli state from inside your villages and houses, the IDF had to react immediately against these actions, even inside your own villages.’”
Blitzer had filmed segments for his “Late Edition” program intended to underscore the hardships endured by Israelis during the current fighting. A lesser man might have thought that images of young children killed by Israeli bombs had made his footage somewhat unseemly, but Blitzer went right ahead.
Beginning his special report near Haifa, at an Israeli air force base, Blitzer took a tour by automobile through the port city, commenting, that the ride was “bleak—not many cars on the streets; not many people either. As I take a look at this port and this Haifa bay, it’s pretty depressing to see there aren’t many ships at all docked at Haifa right now.”
Later in the program, Blitzer showed a ride he took aboard a US Blackhawk helicopter with Israeli air force Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan. They flew north along Israel’s Mediterranean coastline. Blitzer commented: “Haifa, a city of some 300,000 under normal circumstances, is drained. ... The huge port area, usually full of cargo ships from around the world, is largely empty. So are the beautiful Mediterranean beaches nearby.”
Lebanon bleeds from every pore. But near Haifa “the beautiful beaches are empty”!
Blitzer went on to conduct an interview with Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a know-nothing ignoramus, and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, an ardent pro-Zionist. McConnell could not bring himself to express regret over the massacre in Qana, remarking instead, “Unfortunately, Hezbollah uses civilians as shields. The Israelis don’t do that.”
Schumer, asked how Bush and Rice were doing in the Middle East crisis, replied, “Well, I have no criticism of the president on this issue because I think he is doing the right thing.” This is the opposition party in the US.
A Syrian cabinet minister, Bouthaina Shaaban, was met with the usual American media arrogance. Blitzer’s first question: “Is Syria ready to stop facilitating weapons shipments to Hezbollah, as alleged by the US and Israeli governments as well as other governments?” Blitzer failed to note that the word ‘alleged’ undermined the premise of his question. How can someone stop doing something you haven’t proved they are doing in the first place?
At one point, Shaaban made the following point, “Remember, Nazi Germany was claiming that it was fighting terrorism. And then the whole world had to stop that. We are facing something very similar to what happened as a result of the actions of Nazi Germany against civilians.”
Blitzer ignored this. His program ended with a special segment revealing that Hezbollah’s rockets weren’t “the only thing posing a real danger. In this exclusive report I prepared earlier in the week, I found out that there are also some new threats from the Mediterranean Sea,” including exploding jet skis and life rafts. Meanwhile the broken bodies of women and children continued to be discovered in the rubble in Qana.
MAN PLANS AND GOD PLANS GOD IS THE BEST OF PLANNERS........
EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD BE HURT BY THIS BECAUSE OUR TAX DOLLARS PAID FOR THIS MASSACRE IN LEBONAN AND PALESTINE.....
PRAY THAT WE CAN CALL FOR A DAY OF PRAYER OF ALL OF THE VICTIM OF THIS MODERN DAY HOLCAUST.....
6 Haiku ( distorted by hot tears )
New Century
in the falsely promised land,
flesh fuses into stone.
Beneath a crushed home
children lie broken, silenced
in the name of ‘peace‘.
From the stretcher
hangs you daughter’s broken arm -
she’s waving goodbye.
Qana’s miracle,
how technology can turn
water unto blood.
Goliath’s reply
to David’s impudent stone,
raining cluster bombs.
The six pointed star
destroys itself, in frenzy
forms a crooked cross.
New Century
in the falsely promised land,
flesh fuses into stone.
Beneath a crushed home
children lie broken, silenced
in the name of ‘peace‘.
From the stretcher
hangs you daughter’s broken arm -
she’s waving goodbye.
Qana’s miracle,
how technology can turn
water unto blood.
Goliath’s reply
to David’s impudent stone,
raining cluster bombs.
The six pointed star
destroys itself, in frenzy
forms a crooked cross.
I am ashamed to be an American. They wouldn't side with the UN to put an end to this and innocent life is taken. I hope someone out there is sending these pictures to CNN.com and Headline News. They need to get their stories straight and no dehuminanize the arabs. God bless the innocent victims of Lebanon and Palestine.
All is based on relgion...All hate,no respect and understanding.Im ashamed beeing a human.why can't we yust get along?we live all on the same rock people!Base relgion on peace,not hate!too world relgions:go and spread your stupidness somewhere else!! (too israel: take land becouse a 6000 year old book tells you too,is not right!use your fucking brain!)
The Israeli government has responded to its massacre of almost 60 civilians, including 37 children, in the Lebanese village of Qana with a barrage of brazen lies, falsifications and slander against the innocent victims of the bombing.
Without even trying to be consistent, Israeli government and military spokespeople have variously claimed that: the building’s destruction was caused by Hezbollah explosives; Israeli missiles, aimed at Hezbollah rocket launchers, accidentally hit the residential building, in which the Lebanese civilians were taking shelter; the Israeli air force did target and destroy the building, but was justified in doing so because the civilians killed had been warned to leave Qana; and the women and children were being held as “human shields” in the building by Hezbollah.
All these lies are intended to cover up the reality that the Qana massacre was a calculated and criminal attack designed to terrorise the Lebanese people and permanently remove the largely Shiite population from the country’s southern regions. With the full backing of the Bush administration, the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert aims to reduce Lebanon to the status of a degraded protectorate.
Israel has committed countless war crimes in its three-week assault on Lebanon. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands wounded, while more than three-quarters of a million people have been forced from their homes and turned into refugees. The massacre at Qana is only the worst atrocity in a campaign which has seen civilian convoys bombed, ambulances targeted, and United Nations workers murdered.
As news of the civilian deaths in Qana emerged early Sunday, the Israeli government quickly mobilised what the Jerusalem Post described as an “all-star team” of civilian and military spokespeople to “handle the foreign press”. The propaganda campaign followed the standard Israeli modus operandi after any Israeli Defence Force atrocity—no lie is too big, and no admission of guilt is allowed.
Government spokeswoman Miri Eisen was interviewed on CNN shortly after the images of woman and children being pulled from the rubble were first broadcast. “This is definitely a mistake,” she declared. “We did not target this building... The building itself was not targeted, as I said. The building itself was next to the rocket launcher sites and we are targeting all of those rocket launcher sites. This was a mistake, Israel deeply regrets this.”
The claim of an accidental strike is absurd. The Israeli air force is equipped with US-supplied precision missiles that hit targets with devastating accuracy. This has been demonstrated in recent weeks in the West Bank and Gaza, where numbers of Palestinians have received phone calls from Israeli military personnel warning them that their homes would soon be bombed as punishment for alleged militant activity. Minutes after these calls are made, the air force drops a bomb destroying the targeted houses, which are often located in densely populated areas. Moreover, in recent years, Israeli missiles have been used to assassinate scores of Palestinian militants in moving vehicles.
In Qana, at least five residential homes were destroyed on Sunday night as a result of a sustained Israeli artillery and missile attack. That many more civilians were not killed is solely due to the fact that almost all of the town’s 12,000 residents had fled in fear for their safety.
More evidence has emerged that the Israelis knew that children and other civilians were using the bombed building as a refuge. Survivors of the bombing have told the Los Angeles Times that their children played near the residential building as Israeli reconnaissance drones flew overhead. “For sure, the drones must have recognised that there were children playing in the area,” Mohsen Hashem, a 30 year-old resident, said.
After Eisen’s appearance on CNN, Israeli military spokespeople further embellished the story. Brigadier General Amir Eshel told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv that Israeli planes hit the building between midnight and 1 a.m. but that it had not collapsed, killing those inside, until 8 a.m. “The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear,” he declared. “It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack and maybe remained there.”
This so-called “gap” was immediately seized upon by Israel’s most shameless apologists. One popular right-wing Zionist web site, Israel Insider, described the Qana massacre as “Hezbollywood”, and accused Lebanese resistance fighters of planting the dead bodies in the building and then conducting a controlled demolition in order to blame the Zionist state.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, echoed this grotesque claim when he spoke to NBC’s “Meet the Press”. “I wouldn’t put it beyond that vicious, brutal, cynical terrorist organisation to have held those people there against their will after we’d repeatedly asked them to leave, so that they would actually be used as human shields, and maybe even, as farfetched as this may sound, for this to happen, because this serves nobody’s purpose, except Hezbollah and Iran,” he declared.
Tel Aviv’s attempt to deny responsibility for the building’s destruction was, however, quickly refuted by the facts on the ground. All of the survivors and Qana residents angrily rejected Israel’s claims, and insisted that the building’s collapse immediately followed the Israeli missile attack. The director of the Red Cross in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre also reported that he received news of the atrocity at 7 a.m., that is at least an hour before the building collapsed according to the Israeli military. Ambulances and medical crews took about an hour to reach the area due to ongoing Israeli air strikes and the destruction of roads and bridges.
By late Sunday evening it was clear that Israeli disavowals of responsibility for the deaths in Qana were falling flat—producing what one Tel Aviv newspaper described as a “public relations disaster”. The government and military then adopted another defence, to which they have since stuck, namely that the bombing was justified because Hezbollah rockets had been fired from Qana and civilians had been given prior warning to leave the area.
Israel released video footage purportedly showing Hezbollah rockets being fired from Qana and trucks allegedly transporting arms into civilian buildings. This footage was later revealed to have been taken on July 28—two days before the deaths of the civilians. Israel also admitted that none of the video material was of the building bombed on July 30. Officials have still not explained any connection between the footage and the building. Moreover, no evidence was later found in the rubble indicating that it had been used for military purposes.
“The footage we’re seeing, it doesn’t tie in,” Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told Britain’s Channel 4 news. “We see a truck here, we’ll see a missile firing there. But again we don’t see any mechanism for saying, well that relates to this pile of debris, this relates to the terrible catastrophe over there where people are lying maimed and killed. We don’t see any remains of missile trucks blown sky high, we see no evidence whatsoever of a missile capability.”
Tel Aviv’s defence of its attack on Qana is testament to the unabashed criminality of the Israeli government. Even if it were true that Hezbollah was firing rockets from the civilian building, the Israeli missile strike remains an atrocity and a war crime.
“Just because the Israeli military warned the civilians of Qana to leave does not give it carte blanche to blindly attack,” noted Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area as a combatant who is fair game for attack. Such consistent failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians is a war crime.”
Beirut-based journalist Robert Fisk told Democracy Now!: “Is it the case now that if you happen to live in a house next to where someone launches a missile, you are to be sentenced to death? Is that what Israel thinks this war is about? I’m sitting here, for example, in my house tonight in darkness—there’s no electricity—next to a car park. What if someone launches a missile from the car park? Am I supposed to die for that? Is that a death sentence for me? Is that how Israel wages war? If I have children in the basement, are they supposed to die for that?”
One can only imagine the outrage in Tel Aviv and Washington if Hezbollah, or Palestinian militants, were to issue a warning to a million Israelis to flee their homes, then justify random civilian deaths on the basis that the victims had received due notification.
Moreover, Israel’s claim that Hezbollah was using civilian areas in Qana to fire rockets cannot be accepted at face value. Local residents and Red Cross workers told the IPS news agency that no rockets had been fired before the Israeli bombing raid.
“We found no evidence of Hezbollah fighters in Qana,” Kassem Shaulan, a Red Cross medic and training manager said. “When we rescue people or recover bodies from villages, we usually see rocket launchers or Hezbollah fighters if they are there, but in Qana I can say that the village was 100 percent clear of either of those.”
No other nation-state is as well versed in the practice of the “big lie” as Israel. Unable to publicly admit the criminal nature of its geo-strategic ambitions in Lebanon and the Middle East, Tel Aviv is forced to resort to blatant cover-ups and falsifications in the aftermath of each atrocity. The Olmert government’s Qana propaganda campaign follows a long tradition of such operations in the history of the Zionist state.
Without even trying to be consistent, Israeli government and military spokespeople have variously claimed that: the building’s destruction was caused by Hezbollah explosives; Israeli missiles, aimed at Hezbollah rocket launchers, accidentally hit the residential building, in which the Lebanese civilians were taking shelter; the Israeli air force did target and destroy the building, but was justified in doing so because the civilians killed had been warned to leave Qana; and the women and children were being held as “human shields” in the building by Hezbollah.
All these lies are intended to cover up the reality that the Qana massacre was a calculated and criminal attack designed to terrorise the Lebanese people and permanently remove the largely Shiite population from the country’s southern regions. With the full backing of the Bush administration, the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert aims to reduce Lebanon to the status of a degraded protectorate.
Israel has committed countless war crimes in its three-week assault on Lebanon. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands wounded, while more than three-quarters of a million people have been forced from their homes and turned into refugees. The massacre at Qana is only the worst atrocity in a campaign which has seen civilian convoys bombed, ambulances targeted, and United Nations workers murdered.
As news of the civilian deaths in Qana emerged early Sunday, the Israeli government quickly mobilised what the Jerusalem Post described as an “all-star team” of civilian and military spokespeople to “handle the foreign press”. The propaganda campaign followed the standard Israeli modus operandi after any Israeli Defence Force atrocity—no lie is too big, and no admission of guilt is allowed.
Government spokeswoman Miri Eisen was interviewed on CNN shortly after the images of woman and children being pulled from the rubble were first broadcast. “This is definitely a mistake,” she declared. “We did not target this building... The building itself was not targeted, as I said. The building itself was next to the rocket launcher sites and we are targeting all of those rocket launcher sites. This was a mistake, Israel deeply regrets this.”
The claim of an accidental strike is absurd. The Israeli air force is equipped with US-supplied precision missiles that hit targets with devastating accuracy. This has been demonstrated in recent weeks in the West Bank and Gaza, where numbers of Palestinians have received phone calls from Israeli military personnel warning them that their homes would soon be bombed as punishment for alleged militant activity. Minutes after these calls are made, the air force drops a bomb destroying the targeted houses, which are often located in densely populated areas. Moreover, in recent years, Israeli missiles have been used to assassinate scores of Palestinian militants in moving vehicles.
In Qana, at least five residential homes were destroyed on Sunday night as a result of a sustained Israeli artillery and missile attack. That many more civilians were not killed is solely due to the fact that almost all of the town’s 12,000 residents had fled in fear for their safety.
More evidence has emerged that the Israelis knew that children and other civilians were using the bombed building as a refuge. Survivors of the bombing have told the Los Angeles Times that their children played near the residential building as Israeli reconnaissance drones flew overhead. “For sure, the drones must have recognised that there were children playing in the area,” Mohsen Hashem, a 30 year-old resident, said.
After Eisen’s appearance on CNN, Israeli military spokespeople further embellished the story. Brigadier General Amir Eshel told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv that Israeli planes hit the building between midnight and 1 a.m. but that it had not collapsed, killing those inside, until 8 a.m. “The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear,” he declared. “It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack and maybe remained there.”
This so-called “gap” was immediately seized upon by Israel’s most shameless apologists. One popular right-wing Zionist web site, Israel Insider, described the Qana massacre as “Hezbollywood”, and accused Lebanese resistance fighters of planting the dead bodies in the building and then conducting a controlled demolition in order to blame the Zionist state.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, echoed this grotesque claim when he spoke to NBC’s “Meet the Press”. “I wouldn’t put it beyond that vicious, brutal, cynical terrorist organisation to have held those people there against their will after we’d repeatedly asked them to leave, so that they would actually be used as human shields, and maybe even, as farfetched as this may sound, for this to happen, because this serves nobody’s purpose, except Hezbollah and Iran,” he declared.
Tel Aviv’s attempt to deny responsibility for the building’s destruction was, however, quickly refuted by the facts on the ground. All of the survivors and Qana residents angrily rejected Israel’s claims, and insisted that the building’s collapse immediately followed the Israeli missile attack. The director of the Red Cross in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre also reported that he received news of the atrocity at 7 a.m., that is at least an hour before the building collapsed according to the Israeli military. Ambulances and medical crews took about an hour to reach the area due to ongoing Israeli air strikes and the destruction of roads and bridges.
By late Sunday evening it was clear that Israeli disavowals of responsibility for the deaths in Qana were falling flat—producing what one Tel Aviv newspaper described as a “public relations disaster”. The government and military then adopted another defence, to which they have since stuck, namely that the bombing was justified because Hezbollah rockets had been fired from Qana and civilians had been given prior warning to leave the area.
Israel released video footage purportedly showing Hezbollah rockets being fired from Qana and trucks allegedly transporting arms into civilian buildings. This footage was later revealed to have been taken on July 28—two days before the deaths of the civilians. Israel also admitted that none of the video material was of the building bombed on July 30. Officials have still not explained any connection between the footage and the building. Moreover, no evidence was later found in the rubble indicating that it had been used for military purposes.
“The footage we’re seeing, it doesn’t tie in,” Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told Britain’s Channel 4 news. “We see a truck here, we’ll see a missile firing there. But again we don’t see any mechanism for saying, well that relates to this pile of debris, this relates to the terrible catastrophe over there where people are lying maimed and killed. We don’t see any remains of missile trucks blown sky high, we see no evidence whatsoever of a missile capability.”
Tel Aviv’s defence of its attack on Qana is testament to the unabashed criminality of the Israeli government. Even if it were true that Hezbollah was firing rockets from the civilian building, the Israeli missile strike remains an atrocity and a war crime.
“Just because the Israeli military warned the civilians of Qana to leave does not give it carte blanche to blindly attack,” noted Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area as a combatant who is fair game for attack. Such consistent failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians is a war crime.”
Beirut-based journalist Robert Fisk told Democracy Now!: “Is it the case now that if you happen to live in a house next to where someone launches a missile, you are to be sentenced to death? Is that what Israel thinks this war is about? I’m sitting here, for example, in my house tonight in darkness—there’s no electricity—next to a car park. What if someone launches a missile from the car park? Am I supposed to die for that? Is that a death sentence for me? Is that how Israel wages war? If I have children in the basement, are they supposed to die for that?”
One can only imagine the outrage in Tel Aviv and Washington if Hezbollah, or Palestinian militants, were to issue a warning to a million Israelis to flee their homes, then justify random civilian deaths on the basis that the victims had received due notification.
Moreover, Israel’s claim that Hezbollah was using civilian areas in Qana to fire rockets cannot be accepted at face value. Local residents and Red Cross workers told the IPS news agency that no rockets had been fired before the Israeli bombing raid.
“We found no evidence of Hezbollah fighters in Qana,” Kassem Shaulan, a Red Cross medic and training manager said. “When we rescue people or recover bodies from villages, we usually see rocket launchers or Hezbollah fighters if they are there, but in Qana I can say that the village was 100 percent clear of either of those.”
No other nation-state is as well versed in the practice of the “big lie” as Israel. Unable to publicly admit the criminal nature of its geo-strategic ambitions in Lebanon and the Middle East, Tel Aviv is forced to resort to blatant cover-ups and falsifications in the aftermath of each atrocity. The Olmert government’s Qana propaganda campaign follows a long tradition of such operations in the history of the Zionist state.
just spent an hour trying to find info on adnan hajj, does no one else smell an israeli frame up? where is adnan what does he have to say?
one of the community that i hate most are israilies....they are the bloody-bastards...killing innocent people there...who are fighting for there rights....actually the real terrorist are they....and their father America....
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