James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

Correspondence Regarding Israel & Lebanon

My paragraph about Israel and Lebanon in a prior posting stimulated some correspondence, which I felt was worthy of reproducing. This is a couple of days old and perhaps outdated, given the rapid deterioration of events in Lebanon, but speaks to the issues of how the whole thing got started. Go to the original items for additional informative weblinks. J.D.

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From P.M.

If someone had no access to any other news MEDIA and were only to learn what is happening in the world, by reading this paragraph in your blog:

"...And before the Hezbollah terrorists made a major attack in Northern Israel, launching rockets and killing many soliders in an additional unprovoked attack into Israel's territory..."

what do you think he would understand?

That one nice morning, the Hezbollah terrorists, having nothing better to do, decided to attack with Katusha rockets in the Israel territory and killed many Israeli soldiers.

Is that what really happened?

Because if he went to let's say to CNN he would read:

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/14/israel.lebanon.timeline/index.html

"July 2006: Hezbollah militants cross into Israel, kill three Israeli soldiers and kidnap two others in a bid to negotiate a prisoner exchange, a demand rebuffed by Israel. Another five Israeli soldiers are killed after the ambush. Israel responds with a naval blockade and by bombing hundreds of targets in Lebanon, including Beirut's airport and Hezbollah's headquarters in southern Beirut. Hezbollah responds with rocket attacks targeting northern Israeli cities. Fighting leaves dozens of Lebanese civilians dead and coincides with a two-week-old Israeli military campaign in Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants."

So, Hezbollah militants responded with rockets AFTER the Israel responded to their first attack with bombarding the whole Lebanon.

And what was going on before the"unprovoked" Hezbollah attack Mr.Demeo?

Perhaps another "disproportionate response by Israel" was going on in Gaza strip which Hezbollah itself claims it prompted them to attack Israel for solidarity to the Palestinian people?

Why this distortion of events Mr. Demeo? Again in CNN (which is far from anti-Israeli) we read today:

In six days of fighting, 165 people have been killed and 415 wounded in Lebanon, Lebanese internal security sources said.

Twenty-four Israelis have died in the conflict, including 12 soldiers , and more than 300 have been wounded, Israeli military sources said.

So who wants to kill everyone?

And why no comments about the "disproportionate response by Israel" Mr.DeMeo?

I know you have an agenda and your sympathies with Bush's. Neocons
and Israel but do you think that the readers of your blog are just plain stupid and eat what you feed them Mr. Demeo?


Dear P.M.,

There is no "distortion" in my paragraph, though certainly more along the same lines could be added. Your "news" sources are simply inaccurate. The very first Hezbollah strike included missile firings, mortar strikes, RPGs, machine-gun attacks and apparently also roadside bombs (which took out an Israeli tank on the Israeli side of the border) all at the moment of the initial strike. Here's a couple of news reports from Israel on the day of the first attacks.

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2006/07/hezbullah-claims-to-have-kidnapped-two.html
This morning, Hezbullah opened a second front in the north, firing Katyusha rockets and mortar shells into Israel. One shell scored a direct hit on a home in the town of Shtula, wounding four people, one moderately and three lightly. Residents of northern Israel have been told to go into their bomb shelters.

Both the Jerusalem Post and YNet are reporting that Hezbullah's Al-Manar television station claimed this morning that the organization has kidnapped two soldiers. The IDF is checking the report. According to YNet, Israel recently conveyed a harsh message to the Lebanese government through the Americans and other elements, following warnings on plans to "inflame" the northern border while Gaza is on fire. Israel blames the Syrians - for whom Hezbullah acts as a proxy - for the entire Gilad Shalit kidnapping, and it would not surprise me to see the IDF go after targets in Lebanon or Syria if this situation continues.

Update 11:08 AM
HaAretz is now carrying the kidnapping report.

Update 11:22 AM
The IDF is now confirming that two soldiers are missing and apparently kidnapped by Hezbullah.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/737634.html
The militants attacked two IDF armored Hummer jeeps patrolling along the border with gunfire and explosives, in the midst of massive shelling attacks on Israel's north. Three soldiers were killed in the attack and two were taken hostage.

More is found here, including discussion of prior kidnapping attempts by Hezbollah, which also were accompanied by mortar and rocket fire from across the border.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3274258,00.html#n
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3274356,00.html

In total, eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two were kidnapped in that initial attack, which was characterized by "massive shelling" by Hizbollah from Lebanon into Israel. All of this happened before the Israelis started to significantly return fire. And as noted Israeli civilians in the area were once again subjected to attempted murder by terror rockets and mortars, which have continued on and off from Muslim parts of Lebanon and Syria since 1948.

As you note, the IDF struck back hard, and there were additional massive Hezbollah rocket-launches, Katushas which they had been amassing by exports from Iran through Syria over the previous years. But those were in addition to what was launched, along with mortar shells, at the time of the initial attack.

The northern border of Israel is fortified, so once the Hezbollah launched their attacks, it escalated from there. Hezbollah gambled that the Israelis would not respond so strongly. It was a bad bet. Or, perhaps in their own twisted way, they wanted a major war.... if so, they got their wish.

The estimates are, Hezbollah has around 12,000 missiles, short to intermediate range, stationed across southern Lebanon including in civilian areas and even within the compounds of private homes, and presumably that is what the IDF is going after -- though they have not willy-nilly attacked every such rocket-launcher stationed in civilian areas. They have been forced to restrain their forces specifically to NOT injure Lebanese civilians indiscriminately.

This recent incident of Hezbollah followed nearly 1000 other rocket-launches from Gaza by Hamas over the prior months, of the more primitive but lethal Qassams. These terror groups and their Iranian sponsors have openly boasted of plans to wipe Israel off the map, to kill all the Jews, and towards this end their openly-stated goal is to equip both Katushas and Qassams with WMD material.

So, yes, the Hamas and Hezbollah have been engaging in unprovoked attacks, based upon who is greasing their palms with money (Iran), and providing them with weapons (Iran and Syria).

CNN is not a reliable source when reporting on Middle East issues, or anything with political implications. Like the BBC, their field reporters are largely liberal-left with Arab sympathies -- or sometimes they are outright Jew-haters -- having been influenced by all the "revised" false history which today is common fodder for the liberal-left news sources. I wonder if this might underlay your own perspectives. Chomsky? Zinn? Said? Esposito? New York Times? BBC? CNN? CBS? Where does one get information on history of the Middle East? Or current events? "Lies of Omission" abound -- the worst kind of lie, as the "reporter" can then bend your mind around his predetermined conclusions.

Just recently CNN and BBC reporters go to every bomb crater in Lebanon and tell genuinely sad stories about the local people who have been affected, but little or nothing is said about the rocket emplacements which were targeted by the Israeli strikes, the Hezbollah leadership's offices and facilities, or the homes of the Hezbollah leaders who launched such attacks against the Israeli homes. Nor do they report on the the context, of a 60+ year war of Jewish extermination carried out by multiple Muslim nations, or the more incidental issue of thousands of Hezbollah rockets pounding Israeli homes, deliberately targeting their civilians with high-explosive schrapnel Katusah rocket-bombs designed for attacking massed troops on a battlefield. Using such weapons against civilians constitutes a war crime for certain, but don't expect CNN or BBC, or any left-biased news source to report things in such a clear manner. I cannot recall one time that the term "war crime" was applied to any of the Muslim terrorists, in their hundreds of suicide bombings and car-bombings of clearly civilian targets...but the liberal Western press will inappropriately use those words, or the suggestions of them, when describing American or Israeli actions in these wars which were triggered by Islamofascist aggression.

The Left news sources never reported clearly on the incredible fire-and-brimstone hate-sermons being vomited from every Mosque in the Middle East over decades, calling for the extermination of the Jews and atom-bombing of America, and they report only superficially about the massive Muslim street-demonstrations where "death to Israel", "death to America", and "kill the Jews" have been constant refrains. Even on the Danish cartoons, they took the side of the threatening Muslim mobs, and refused to publish those cartoons, scolding the cartoonists even when dirty images of other religion's icons, or open Jewish genocide advocacy, were being celebrated by them as "art". (ie, the "Piss Christ" incident, the "cow-shit Madonna" incident, and the various celebrations of Muslim suicide bombers which appeared in European art museums) How many, for example, saw the incredible footage recently reported on Fox News, but nowhere else to my knowledge, of the leftist-Muslim street "protests" in San Francisco where the crowds roared "We Support Hezbollah's Fight" and "We Support Hamas". This may as well be 1942, and they would scream "We Support the Whermacht's Struggle in Poland and France", or "We Support the Death Camps". If you compare the reporting from CNN, BBC, the NY Times and other liberal sources to conservative news sources such as Fox news, NY Post, Jerusalem Post, or the information from internet sources such as Frontpagemagazine.com, jihadwatch.org, thereligionofpeace.org, you will be stunned at the differences. The liberal sources willfully are committing lies of omission on these deadly serious issues, reporting the most overt lies and propaganda from Arab-Palestinian sources without the slghtest effort at fact-checking, suggesting an emotional alliance with the worst of the Muslim terror fanatics. The tone of voice of their reporters, the facial sneers and gestures, also often give away their biases quite clearly. One must consider, that a simple Jew-hatred, and pro-Stalinist, pro-Muslim ideology is the underlying cause for a willful misreporting of events (even though they would passionately deny it, but one must judge on behavior, not claims). How many know, for example, that Peter Jennings, the highly-respected liberal ABC journalist who recently died of cancer, once dated Hannan Ashawri of the PLO when he was posted to Lebanon, one of the most clever of Stalinist-Palestinian propagandists. Literally, they are in bed with each other.

And if you want to cite casualty figures in Lebanon, how about the vast number of Christians, Druzes and other non-Muslims murdered by the various Muslim forces occupying Lebanon over the last years. Lebanon was created around the same time as Israel as a Christian state, a refuge for Christians from Islamic fascism, just as Israel was the refuge for the Jewish populations of that region from Islam. Hizbollah and Syria have been systematically murdering Lebanese Christian people and leaders over many years, including recently a democracy-supporting anti-Syrian Prime Minister. Their military actions against the Lebanese claimed nearly a quarter-million lives in the Lebanon Jihad wars which have been misidentified as the "Lebanese Civil War" -- it was created by the mass influx of Muslim settlers and tribes into Lebanon which paralleled a similar influx of Muslims into "Palestine" since the late 1800s. Later, the military forces of Arafat's PLO, and from Syria, pushed to gain political power and military control over Lebanon, and they killed anyone and everyone who got in their way, forcing themselves into Lebanese territory and society and now also into the Lebanese Parlaiment as well, where they push, push, push to make Lebanon into a Muslim Sharia-Law state. If a Jewish "settler" even walks on territory once designated as the Jewish homeland by the League of Nations, but which the Muslims misidentify as "Muslim land" even though that land was mostly barren wasteland before the Jews got there, it creates an international scandal. And if that Jew is murdered, it is somehow considered "the legitimate right for self-determination of the Palestinian people". But hundreds of thousands of Muslims can migrate freely across international borders, push out the existing populations (or just kill them), as happened in Palestine, and in Lebanon, and today in Sudan and elsewhere, and the world is basically silent about it! In fact, what happens today in Darfur happend in smaller scale against Jews and Christians in Israel and Lebanon since many decades, a gigantic Muslim migration and take-over, with much bloodshed. Except that the Jews and Christians have been more successful in defending themselves than the miserable natives of Darfur, or in Southern Sudan. So if you are concerned about sparing the lives of the Lebanese people, so concerned about women and children being killed in Lebanon, or concerned about preserving their freedoms and democracy, you might do what many Lebanese are doing, which is to support the Israeli actions against the Hezbollah killers. You certainly would never want to live in a Muslim Sharia-Law state, so why not support all efforts to prevent this from happening in Lebanon, and in Gaza and the West Bank as well!

I don't believe you are stupid, but merely misinformed and manipulated, and perhaps too overflooded with "Bush hatred" to have the necessary capacity to examine the situation from other perspectives. In the last month we have seen Islamofascists take over in Somalia, shooting children who dared to watch soccer games on TV and attacking wedding parties where music was played, threatening to kill anyone who missed their daily prayers, with Islamic bombings on trains in India killing hundreds, and hundreds more blown up by Jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere -- something like 5400 separate Muslim terror incidents since 9-11-2001 alone (see http://www.thereligionofpeace.com), with specific new Islamic genocides murdering hundreds of thousands of people of every non-Muslim ethnic and religious background around the world. I hope you don't intend to blame all of that on "Bush", the "neo-cons", or the Israelis! At one time genuine liberals were the champions of freedom and democracy around the world, of human rights, women's rights and such, things which most conservatives also supported, and still support. Sadly, today the liberal organizations and news sources follow the leadership of the Stalinist Left and champion the causes of the worst of the Islamo-fascist infidel-murdering, woman-hating, sex-hating fanatic totalitarians, and rely upon false history from the likes of Chomsky, Zinn and Moore to justify their political alliances. It is a reprehensible situation, and those of us who have made a serious study of the issues, and of the authentic history, have an obligation to not be silent.

Regards,

James DeMeo