Nasrallah in English

As soon as the halt to the air strikes ended and the Israelis started attacking our cities and villages and infrastructure and civilians, the resistance launched more than 300 rockets on settlements in one day, having in mind that what they had gotten used to was between 100 and 150, or 179, or 190, whatever number we wanted or asked for from our brothers; but this number today was deliberate, and the resistance also hit Afula and Beit She’an, and the resistance can – and I assure you of this, based on yesterday’s and today’s performance – launch as many rockets as it wants -

[Unfortunately, I have lost the link to the blogger who sweated over this ten-page translation.]

It seems amazing that Nasrallah has the gift of making even war stories dull and tedious. Maybe he sounds better in Arabic?

Bernard Henri-Levi's Verdict

"As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore.

"I find myself thinking that if this war has to last...as distressed as we may be by the suffering of the Lebanese civilian population, the terrible deaths of hundreds, you cannot conclude that the Israelis have the strategic intention or the will to harm civilians."

We Already Discussed It!

I'd like to call everyone's attention to MJT's pre-kidnapping post from May 31st, 2006, Leave Beirut Out of It, which seems to have triggered the definitive Get-rid-of-Hezbollah discussion.

Snippets include:

MJT: "Hezbollah's capital is Tehran. Its sidekick capital is Damascus...

"Israel needs to bomb Hezbollah villages."

Perpetual Refugee: "The source for all those rockets is Syria.
The source for all their money ($100 million/year) is Iran.
The source for their ideology is Iran & Syria.

"Hit the source. And the dynamics will change."

maor: "Probably it is more "legal" for Israel to retaliate against Lebanon rather than Syria.
International law is bad at grasping situations such as that in Lebanon."

Carol Herman: "...while I don't think Israel will bomb residential areas, what is sad is that the Lebannese wouldn't even know what to do with the gift of watching the Israelis wound the "martyrs." These goons are just bums."

Omega80: "if the Army were used against Hezbollah, all hell would break loose because of the fact that in Lebanon for the most part, Hezbollah is concentrated in Shia areas. Thus, it would be the Army against the Shias basically which would be a disaster. However, by the same token, eventually the patience of other Lebanese groups and communities will wear out in regards to Hezbollah not disarming, and may see that their only way of self defense against a stronger Hezbollah is to arm themselves in return, which is something that Hezbollah can't stop.

"Therefore, the hope is that because Hezbollah realizes this, they WILL eventually disarm, because once all the other groups are armed again, they will become nothing more than a militia among many."

I wonder what Omega80 is up to nowadays?

The Choice for Lebanese to Make

I now ask you to signI now ask you to sign this electronic petition set up by Amnesty International addressed to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister..."I urge you to take urgent steps to put an immediate end to deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian and civilian property and infrastructure in Lebanon. These attacks constitute collective punishment. I call on you to end the use of excessive and disproportionate force, and to ensure that Israeli forces respect the principle of proportionality when targeting any military objective or civilian objective that may be used for military purposes."

Not until someone explains to me what, exactly, "the principle of proportionality" is.

Roa said...

Solomon2, I believe I speak for a significant number of Ramzi's readers when I say your contribution to this forum is getting tedious. You've already treated us to a healthy dose of willful blindness, double standards, and pathetic insight into the issue at hand. Now it’s plain stupidity or worse, malice. What part of 400 Lebanese dead, to say nothing of the infrastructure and an evolving environmental disaster on our shores secondary to the leakage of 15,000 tons of fuel oil from the bombarded Jieh power plant, don’t you get?
And can you for the love of God spare us the silly refrain along the lines of “you reap what you sow” for not disarming Hizbollah? For all its military might the US is still unable to stem the insurgency in Iraq after three bloody years. Did you seriously expect a multi-confessional society fresh from its precariously won independence from Syria (no less than 15 prominent journalists and politicians died in that single year); did you seriously expect it to disarm Hizbollah in less than a year? Listen, you’re welcome to live in a fantasy world where most Arabs are feckless or worse evil and most Israelis are God fearing citizens of peace. I’m sure there are many who will share it with you. Likewise, we are plagued “on the other side” with unilateral visions of the world. But if you’re serious about this, I suggest you adopt a more mature attitude towards this tragedy. Our hearts are full with the news of the dead and the destruction so have the decency, if not for the Lebanese casualties then at least for the Israeli ones, to say something constructive and humane.

It's more like "plain stupidity". Please don't mistake wilful blindness for real blindness. I really don't understand this "proportionality" bit. I suppose if Hezbollah hadn't been so competent at hiding away the soldiers they kidnapped and killing the squad that tried to retrieve them the soldiers would have been rescued quickly without a single bomb dropping or artillery shell fired. But Hezbollah has more resources than that so efforts to retrieve them have to be involve more intensive. To accept the principle of trading the kidnapped soldiers for convicted felons sets back international law for hundreds of years and accepting Hezbollah's right to bombard Israel in "peacetime" essentially creates the conditions that make it O.K. to destroy Israel, slowly or quickly, without international repercussions and with great loss of Israeli life. So for Israel this is a struggle for its very existence.

People who accuse other people of "double standards" may themselves simply be insufficiently informed of the complexity of the situation, so always be specific about these things, please.

No, I wouldn't have expected Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah in a year. Things were starting to return to normal, and Hezb saw that very fact as a threat to its power over the country and its citizens, as well as its relevancy to jihad. Yet Hezb knew that all diplomatic avenues to restrain them had been exhausted. So once they kidnapped the soldiers Israel had no choice but to respond militarily and drag most of Lebanon into the current mess. Didn't Nasrallah say that Lebanon is in a war whether it wishes to or not? Is it not true that all that has to be done to stop the war is for Nasrallah to give back the kidnapped soldiers and stop the rockets?

Nasrallah could thus stop the war in an instant, yet he considers Hezbollah's "honor" proportionately more important than the lives of hundreds of Lebanese citizens. Hezb fighters get to stay in bunkers while citizens above them take the punishment. I always expected that Hezb would have to start up the fight again. But I didn't think that after March 14th the Lebanese would be so craven as to fall for this kind of trick.

Tragedy? Decency? Were there mass demonstrations after the kidnappings denouncing Hezbollah or in sympathy to Israel? It is difficult to have sympathy for people who display no sympathy for the sufferings of others.

You can take to the streets en masse or by yourself and make a statement, even at the risk of your life by Hezbollah goons. Is it not better to risk death for a return to a better life than to cower in the shelter, knowing that if you don't act, a miserable existence under Hezbollah rule (with the occasional Israeli bomb thrown in) is certain? That's the choice for you to make.

Michael Totten's Gloom

I spent a total of seven months in Lebanon recently, and I never could quite figure out what prevented the country from flying apart into pieces. It barely held together like unstable chemicals in a nitro glycerin vat. The slightest ripple sent Lebanese scattering from the streets and into their homes. They were far more twitchy than I, in part (I think) because they understood better than I just how precarious their civilized anarchy was. Their country needed several more years of careful nurturing during peace time to fully recover from its status as a carved up failed state...

Lebanese are temporarily more united than ever. No one is running off to join Hezbollah, but tensions are being smoothed over for now while everyone feels they are under attack by the same enemy. Most Lebanese who had warm feelings for Israel -- and there were more of these than you can possibly imagine -- no longer do.

This will not last.

My sources and friends in Beirut tell me most Lebanese are going easy on Hezbollah as much as they can while the bombs are still falling. But a terrible reckoning awaits them once this is over.

Some Lebanese can’t wait even that long -

Although Totten anticipates that the Lebanese will initiate their own War on Hezbollah, he still plans to return to Lebanon before the conflict is over - he's just waiting for the airport to re-open, and financial support from his readers. If you check out his blog, you'll see he's earned such trust and deserves our support, so hit his PayPal button, people!

CNN Interview with Former PLO Terrorist

A little background on the terrorist mentality over at Seraphic Secret:

PHILLIPS: Well, I mean, I'm going to ask you the obvious. Why were you involved in terrorism and who recruited you?

SHOEBAT: Well, you have to understand the recruitment doesn't start at recruitment centers, basically. They start from the mosque. You go daily to pray or to the Friday prayers, whether you go to the Temple Mount, whether you go to the local mosque. And this is not only in the Palestinian areas, this is all throughout the Middle East. It has been going on from the eons of time...

PHILLIPS: Tell me how you were able to carry on terrorist activities and how did you do it here in the U.S.?

SHOEBAT: Well, in the U.S., we didn't -- I didn't do any terrorist activities, but the recruitment of the preparation for jihad in America. My recruiter was -- his name is Jamal Sayid (ph). He's a colleague of Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden.

Ironically speaking, Jamal Sayid is freed, in a mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois. The IAP started, as a result -- Islamic Association of Palestine. And after that I left that organization. And then after that, there was training. The head of the IAP was caught in training with car -- how to manufacture car bombs and things like that. So it was -- I have clips, homemade videos that if I show your audience, it will come out of Gaza or it will come out of Iran. I mean, this stuff was happening in the heartland of America, all over in Chicago, and DeKalb and Georgia. All over the United States, it was going on in the mosque and it's going on right now...
I started my first mission in 1993, speaking in churches and synagogues. And people didn't want to believe me when I said, they're going to blow up your buildings, these people are interested in decapitating Americans. And this was too much for us to fathom. Nobody was listening. After September 11, I started getting more phone calls.

PHILLIPS: Did you ever feel guilty?

SHOEBAT: Yes...the denial of the Holocaust is the premise of this education...we denied the Holocaust ever exited. So when we're seeing the -- if we see the footage of the Holocaust in the Middle East, we say, well, how did they have such scrawny bodies?...So the moment I started getting a good grip that the Holocaust was a historical reality, I started to understand that evil cloaks itself in nice, fabricated fashions. Evil cloaks itself, just like Nazism does, that it's a good cause. And Israel becomes a vermin. The Jews are vermin.

This is why Nasrallah doesn't apologize for killing Jewish children. He only apologizes when Arab children are dying in Israel, proper (ph) by his rocket launchings. Why is that? Why does Nasrallah apologize for killing all the Arab children? And the answer is very simple. The problem is racism. Racism on a pandemic scale all throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world, all the way to Pakistan, all the way to Indonesia, all the way to the Philippines, all the way in Jordan, all the way in Cairo, all the way in Syria, all the way to the...

We have to understand, terrorism is a cult-like education to convert masses of people to become remorseless killers. And it's like a drug addiction. It feeds on frenzy-like speeches. It galvanizes people in a euphoric fashion, where an Israeli, when he's killed, they come out with the blood and thy carry guts and hearts and kidneys and, you know, parade them in the streets of Ramallah.

This is a drug addiction that is permeating the teenagers of the Middle East. We have to treat it as such...

Read it all!

Hezbollah Knows it is Losing

Not just territory, but the propaganda war as well, as Tigerhawk explains:

Hezbollah is dissembling, or at least being disingenuous, when it says it is surprised by the intensity of the Israeli retaliation. Why would it insincerely confess that it screwed up? Sure, Israel led Hezbollah down the garden path by undermining the credibility of its own threat to retaliate over a period of years, but ultimately Hezbollah's admission reveals its own stupidity, incompetence and folly. Who would brag about that? The only reason to do so would be to avoid the alternative explanation -- that Hezbollah triggered this fight on purpose -- because it was too unpopular. But war with Israel is Hezbollah's raison d'etre, so if it is now denying that it launched the war on purpose it must be because it believes it is losing the propaganda battle. So, the alternative explanations for Hezbollah's statement today are (i) Hezbollah is sincere in its admission, thereby confessing tomfoolery and incompetence, or (ii) Hezbollah is insincere, and only claiming "miscalculation" because the truth -- that it started the war intentionally -- has turned out to be far less popular among Arabs who count than Hezbollah must have predicted in its planning.

Furthermore, expatriate Lebanese groups are gearing up. The Lebanese Foundation for Peace claims that

the majority of the silent Lebanese in Lebanon who are fed up with Hizbullah and are powerless to do anything out of fear of terror retaliation." The LFP also said that "thousands of volunteers in the Diaspora" are "willing to bear arms and liberate their homeland from [Islamic] fundamentalism," with the logistical support of Israel.

Not particularly peaceful, are they? Do the Lebanese want a return to civil war? Remember, if Lebanon just leaves things up to Israel there is no guarantee that Lebanon's interests will be protected. Best to ally with Israel and the U.N. Security Council today so everyone can work together to create a better tomorrow.

Update, 7/27

Here a Christian mob smashes a car in Beirut for displaying a Hezbollah logo. My friend Carine says the atomosphere reeks of impending sectarian conflict like never before.

Has the civil war been rekindled already?