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Tuesday, August 1, 2006 |
Published on Tuesday, August 1, 2006 by Inter Press Service
'No Hezbollah Rockets Fired from Qana'
by Dahr Jamail
QANA - Red Cross workers and residents of Qana, where Israeli bombing killed at least 60 civilians, have told IPS that no Hezbollah rockets were launched from the city before the Israeli air strike.
The Israeli military has said it bombed the building in which several people had taken shelter, more than half of them children, because the Army had faced rocket fire from Qana. The Israeli military has said that Hezbollah was therefore responsible for the deaths.
"There were no Hezbollah rockets fired from here," 32-year-old Ali Abdel told IPS. "Anyone in this village will tell you this, because it is the truth."
Abdel had taken shelter in a nearby house when the shelter was bombed at 1 am. When the bombings finally let up in the morning, he went back to the bombed shelter to search for relatives.
He found his 70-year-old father and 64-year-old mother both dead inside.
"They bombed it, and afterwards I heard the screams of women, children, and a few men -- they were crying for help. But then one minute after the first bomb, another bomb struck, and after this there was nothing but silence, and the sound of more bombs around the village."
Masen Hashen, a 30-year-old construction worker from Qana who lost several family members in the air strike on the shelter, said there were no Hezbollah rockets fired from his village. "Because if they had done that now, or in the past, all of us would have left. Because we know we would be bombed."
Qana had been a shelter because no rockets were being fired from there, survivors said. "When Hezbollah fires their rockets, everyone runs away because they know an Israeli bombardment will come soon," Abdel said. "That is why everyone stayed in the shelter and nearby homes, because we all thought we'd be all right since there were no Hezbollah fighters in Qana."
Lebanese Red Cross workers in the nearby coastal city of Tyre told IPS that there was no basis for Israeli claims that Hezbollah had launched rockets from Qana.
"We found no evidence of Hezbollah fighters in Qana," Kassem Shaulan, a 28-year-old medic and training manager for the Red Cross in Tyre told IPS at their headquarters. "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."
Another Red Cross worker, 32-year-old Mohammad Zatar, told IPS that "we can tell when Hezbollah has been firing rockets from certain areas, because all of the people run away, on foot if they have to."
While IPS was interviewing people in Qana at the site of the shelter Monday, Israeli warplanes roared overhead. Vibrations from nearby bombing rattled many buildings. At least three villages in southern Lebanon were attacked in Israeli air strikes Monday.
Following the international outcry over the air strike, Israel declared a 48-hour cessation of air strikes in order to carry out a military probe into the Qana killings.
Despite the false Israeli statement that it was halting its air strikes, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Army Radio that the stoppage "does not signify in any way the end to the war."
Israel has rejected mounting international pressure to end the 20-day-old war against Hezbollah. The United Nations has indefinitely postponed a meeting on a new peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon.
While defending the Israeli air strike on the civilians in Qana, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman told the UN Security Council that Qana was "a hub for Hezbollah", and said that Israel had urged villagers to leave.
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said in reply to questions in New York Monday that the bombing was "totally, totally its (Hezbollah's) fault.
Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service
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11:06:17 AM 
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Roundup: The War in the Middle East. August 1, 2006
CHILDREN AS ENEMY?
Ynet News, a big Israeli news net, reports: "The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that 'according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy."
"All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians,[base '][base '] the statement said.
WHO RULES ISRAEL?
Military commanders in northern Israel knew nothing about Olmert[base ']s deal with Rice for a short ceasefire. And it appears they paid Olmert little heed. The Israeli press is up in arms at what they take to be Olmert[base ']s weak-kneed leadership. Yedioth Ahronoth, a mass market paper wrote, "If Israel fails in this war, it will be impossible to continue to live in the Middle East."
The paper wrote a speech for the prime minister to make to world leaders: "Gentlemen, it is time for you to understand: The Jewish state will no longer be trampled underfoot ... I serve as a mouth today for six million bombed Israeli citizens, who serve as a mouth for six million annihilated Jews, who were burnt to dust by savages in Europe ... And you, just as you did not take the matter seriously at the time, you are ignoring it now."
DEEP SIX FOR LEBANON[base ']S ECONOMY
Economists estimate between 10 and 20 percent of the people who fled the country will never return. Many Lebanese companies will go offshore rather than risk another Israeli attack.
SHRUB ON QANA:
"And look, it's a terrible situation when innocent people lose their lives," Mr. Bush said. "And yesterday's situation was awful. We, I understand that. But it's also awful that a million Israelis are worried about rockets being fired from their, from their neighbor to the north."
[MotherJones.com | MoJo Blog - Social Issues and Political Commentary]
10:28:00 AM
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Nina Burleigh: Thanks for the Missiles, Mel. Mel Gibson's Hollywood career is over, and that's not a bad thing. I kind
of liked him in the Mad Max movies,
but it was all downhill after that. The worst thing to come of his
anti-Semitic outburst is that it will be used to
justify another expedited shipment of missiles to Israel.
In the course of my lifetime, American racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism
have diminished perceptibly. From
separate drinking fountains, we have had two black secretaries of state.
From separate job listings for females,
we have women in every echelon (okay, maybe not the CEO quarters) of
business. From country clubs that
routinely excluded Jews, we now have Jews sharing power with Gentiles
across the United States.
The question of course is whether race, religion and gender prejudice have
truly diminished or just been driven
underground, to bubble up out of the mouths of drunken millionaires. We
surely have not entirely eradicated
the sentiments, but we have succeeded in stigmatizing them. That is a big
step toward eradication.
Now when a real, frothing public racist or anti-Semite or misogynist
reveals himself among us, most of us are
appalled. Lynchings, rapes, ghettoes and Nazis come to mind. We ask
ourselves: How far have we advanced,
really?
The truth is that we kind of knew where Mel was coming from, did we not? To
have it confirmed this way, to see
him isolated and never work in Hollywood again, is hardly shocking, except
in the way it is always shocking to
see a famous person implode.
The fact of this one anti-Semite's existence in the entertainment industry
should not be seen as proof that
there's a Nazi groundswell in the United States, just waiting for the
opportune moment to rise up and erect gas
chambers. There's a big difference between the raging whack job that is Mel Gibson
and the notion of a kind of organized,
anti-Semitic sentiment so often used to silence debate about Israel, or
criticism of U.S. Middle East policy in
general.
Mel's an anti-Semite all right, but who is really paying the price right
now? According to the last report I saw, civilian deaths in the Lebanon war are
running 50 Israelis to 500 Lebanese. This was the death count before the recent expedited shipment of American
missiles had arrived at the Israeli
bases. Outside the United States, this lopsided kill toll has provoked almost
universal outrage. Here in Canada, where
I'm writing from today, the papers are full of condemnation and horror.
Inside the United States, however, the response is muted and at the higest
levels of government it's all tacit
approval. In the United States, Israel's policies toward the Arab people
are off the table. For merely suggesting
this, I risk getting tarred as an anti-Semite.
Plus ça change.
During the unimpeded run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, my husband had the
temerity to suggest that the New
York Times' curiously laissez-faire attitude about the impending folly had
something to do with the paper's
historical pro-Israel stance. Our dinner guest, an otherwise liberal member
of the journalism faculty at one of
the nation's premier colleges, looked him dead in the eye and called him an
anti-Semite for making that
suggestion.
Imagine for a moment, that the New York Times was owned by three
generations of a Lebanese family. Would
the paper not have had a reporter on staff more attuned to the Arab world's
realities than Judith Miller? Would
the suggestion that its pro-Lebanon stance had something to do with it's
owners' roots be seen as racist?
When a real anti-Semite rears his head, as Mel Gibson just did, we can all
see the sickness, which makes it that
much more offensive to be tarred with that ugly label for criticising
Israeli violence or American Middle East
policy. There is a big difference between the sickness and a reasoned
opposition to the policies of the United
States and Israel when it comes to the indiscriminate killing of Arabs.
Let's try to keep that difference in mind as
Mel stops getting taken to lunch in Beverly Hills.
 [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
10:22:13 AM
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Steve Young: L.A. TIMES BRINGS ON ANTI-SEMITE TO RAIL AGAINST GIBSON'S ANTI-SEMITISM. by Steve Young
I find it odd that the Liberal/Elite/Mainstream Mediaâ[greater equal]¢ Los Angeles Times dug up a far-right-wing politico to opine on Mel Gibson ("Slurring More Than His Words"), the former darling of the far-right. That Zev Chafets found Gibson's drunken anti-Semitism a platform with which to wield a twisted form of bigotry against liberals (who dislike the politics of Neocons) as anti-Semites was not so odd. It's what Neocons do.
Chafets, a New York Daily News columnist (need I say more), who has called those who want the Iraq war to end a "a bad peace movement," has made a living besmirching anyone to the Left of far-Right, wrote in reference to Gibson using the term "Jews," that "Even rookie anti-Semites know you never use the 'J' word. Correct euphemisms include 'Zionist,' 'Likudnik,' 'Israeli' and, in liberal circles, neocon. If Gibson had told the cops that Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were behind all the world's wars, he would have walked away from the incident in Malibu unscathed."
It's besides the fact the Wolfowitz and Perle have participated eagerly in U.S. war efforts, but the nerve that in the midst of writing of an attack on his religion Chafets chose to attack "liberals" as anti-Semitic for their use of the term "neocon."
This has been the tact of the Neocons when wishing to enlist Jews on the Right to select a ready scapegoat so they might vote against their best interests. That Jews themselves have been used as scapegoats for so many hate-instigated movements through history is insult enough, but for Chafets not to recognize that there may be more than a few self-loving Jewish liberals who are not anti-Semites, displays a deft ignorance of his subject. In fact, knowing so many in the liberal Hollywood community, "self-loving" would be far more accurate than "anti-Semite."
And perhaps the Jewish roots of neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush are known only to Chafets.
There are Jews of all make-up, but for one to feel the need to feed hate upon his own kind by playing victim, that is the worst kind of anti-Semitism and a shonda.
Steve Young is author of Great Failures of the Extremely Successful and his newest novel, "15 Minutes" (HarperCollins), hits the bookshelves TODAY.
 [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
9:52:06 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.
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