Ken O'Kefee is working on behalf of David Ike on a new international television broadcast that has the potential to revolutionize the world and the foundation of news reporting. I wanted to share this excellent premiere of Ken's new program, "The Middle East Show."
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Bandar ibn Israel
By Sharmine Narwani
The recent acts of political violence in the Middle East’s Levant are not unrelated.
Car bombings in the predominantly Shia southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh; twin bombings targeting Sunni mosques in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli; an alleged chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus blamed on the Syrian government; a secret IDF operation across the Lebanese border foiled by Hezbollah; rockets lobbed by an Al Qaeda-related group into Israel; an IDF airstrike on a pro-Damascus Palestinian resistance group base in Lebanon…
From one perspective, the common thread is the crisis in Syria, where a 29-month conflict has cemented divisions in the rest of the region and set the stage for an existential fight on multiple battlefields between two highly competitive Mideast blocs.
From another perspective, the common thread drawing these disparate crimes scenes together is the “culprit” – one who has strong political interest, material capabilities and the sense of urgency to commit rash and violent actions on many different fronts.
In isolation, none of these acts are capable of producing a “result.” But combined, they are able to instill fear in populations, stir governments into action, and in the short term, to create the perception of a shift in regional “balances.”
And no parties in the Mideast are more vested right now in urgently “correcting” the regional balance of power than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel – both nations increasingly frustrated by the inaction of their western allies and the incremental gains of their regional rivals Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and now Iraq.
Worse yet, with every passing month the “noose of multilateralism” tightens, as rising powers Russia, China and others offer protective international cover for those foes. Israel and Saudi Arabia are keenly aware that the age of American hegemony is fast declining, and with it, their own regional primacy.
Common foes, common goals
At the helm of efforts to “correct” the imbalance is Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the US’s longtime go-to man in Riyadh – whose 22-year reign as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington provided him with excellent contacts throughout the Israeli political and military establishments.
Like Israel, Bandar has long been a vocal advocate of curtailing the regional influences of Iran and Syria and forging a neocon-style “New Middle East” – sometimes to his detriment.
When he all but disappeared from public view in 2008, one of the reasons cited for Bandar’s “banishment” from the royal circle of influence was that he had “meddled in Syrian affairs, trying to stir up the tribes against the Assad regime, without the king’s approval.”
The frustrated Bandar, who at the time officially headed Saudi’s National Security Council, was also notably absent when Saudi King Abdullah paid a highly visible visit to the Syrian president in late 2009 to renew relations after four years of bitter tensions.
All that changed with the Arab uprisings in early 2011. Regime-change in Syria – according to an acquaintance who visited various prominent Saudi ministers (all key royals) in 2012 – suddenly become a national priority for the al-Saud family. According to this shocked source, the Saudis had come to believe that if the battle for control over Syria “is lost,” the kingdom would lose its Shia-dominated Eastern Province where its vast oil reserves are concentrated.
That year marked Bandar’s return to influence in the kingdom, and within short order he was promoted to head the powerful Saudi Intelligence Agency, known for its myriad links into the underworld of global jihadis.
But the kingdom’s once-reliable western powerhouse ally, the United States, appeared to be withdrawing from the region. Highly sensitive to the fall-out over its aggressive interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was shying away from the kind of overt leadership that the Saudis desperately needed to re-establish their equilibrium in the region.
Which is where Bandar comes into the picture. The former ambassador to Washington has the kind of relationships that go deep – no Saudi knows how to twist American arms better than he. But to push western allies in the desired direction, the Saudis were in need of an influential and opportunistic ally that was also passionately fixated on the same set of adversaries. That partner would be Israel.
Says a 2007 Wikileaks cable from the US embassy in Riyadh:
“We have also picked up first hand accounts of intra-family tension over policy towards Israel. Some princes, most notably National Security Advisor Bandar Bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, are reportedly pushing for more contact with Israel. Bandar now sees Iran as a greater threat than Israel.”Bandar’s ascendancy to his current position suggests more than ever that the Saudis, at least for now, have put aside their reservations over dealing with Israel. And Iran’s election of a moderate new President Hassan Rouhani has brought urgency to the Saudi-Israeli relationship – both fearing the possibility of a US-Iranian grand bargain that could sink their fortunes further.
Putting wheels into motion
For Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Syria is the frontline battle from which they seek to cripple the Iranians in the region. None have been as ferocious in lobbying Washington on the issue of Syrian “chemical weapons use” and “red lines” as this duo – perhaps even setting up false flag operations to force its hand. Since last Winter, says the Wall Street Journal:
“the Saudis also started trying to convince Western governments that Mr. Assad had crossed what President Barack Obama a year ago called a “red line”: the use of chemical weapons. Arab diplomats say Saudi agents flew an injured Syrian to Britain, where tests showed sarin gas exposure. Prince Bandar’s spy service, which concluded in February that Mr. Assad was using chemical weapons, relayed evidence to the US, which reached a similar conclusion four months later.”
The following Spring, it was Israel’s turn. In an article entitled “Did Israel Ambush the United States on Syria,” Alon Ben David says:
“By stating that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons, Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, the director of Israel’s Military Intelligence Research Department, cornered the Americans. Washington finally — and very tentatively — admitted that such weapons had been used. If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu planned to ambush the Americans, it was a phenomenal success. From an Israeli standpoint, this was a chance to test America’s supposed “red line.”The Russians, however, have stood in the way of every effort to draw the US into intervening directly in Syria. In the past year, the Saudis and Israelis have tag-teamed Moscow, by turns cajoling, threatening and dangling incentives to shift the Russians from their immovable position.
Just last month, Bandar beat a path to Moscow to test Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite for compromise. According to leading Lebanese daily As-Safir, a private diplomatic report on the Saudi prince’s visit claims that Bandar employed a “carrot-and-stick” approach to wrest concessions from Putin on Syria and Iran.
In what has to be the most delusional statement I’ve heard in a while, Bandar allegedly told the Russian president: “There are many common values and goals that bring us together, most notably the fight against terrorism and extremism all over the world.” He continued with a threat:
“I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us, and they will not move in the Syrian territory’s direction without coordinating with us. These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria’s political future.”According to the report, Putin responded to Bandar thus: “We know that you have supported the Chechen terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common objectives of fighting global terrorism that you mentioned. We are interested in developing friendly relations according to clear and strong principles.”
Bandar ibn Israel: a terror Frankentein
Chechen jihadis have, of course, turned up in Syria to fight alongside their brethren from dozens of other countries against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the past two years.
The Saudi links go beyond jihadis though. Seventeen months ago in Homs – and barely a month after the battle over Baba Amr – 24 Syrian rebels groups sent an email to the externally-based Syrian National Council, complaining about the rogue behavior of the Saudi-funded Al Farouq Battalion. This is the group to which the infamous lung-eating Syrian rebel once belonged.
Alleging that Al Farouq was responsible for killing at least five rebels and fomenting violence against civilians and other fighters, the group wrote:
“The basis of the crisis in the city today is groups receiving uneven amounts of money from direct sources in Saudi Arabia some of whom are urging the targeting of loyalist neighborhoods and sectarian escalation while others are inciting against the SNC. They are not national, unifying sources of support. On the contrary, mature field leaders have noted that receiving aid from them [Saudi Arabia] entails implicit conditions like working in ways other than the desired direction.”In a reprisal of his role in Afghanistan where he helped the CIA arm the Mujahedeen – who later came to form the backbone of the Taliban and Al Qaeda – Bandar is now throwing funding, weapons and training at the very same kinds of Islamist militants who are establishing an extreme version of Sharia law in territories they hold inside Syria.
Says an analyst at a Beirut-based think tank:
“These fighters, many of whom are ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda, are much more pragmatic today. They are ready to take funding, facilities and arms from the Saudis (who previously they targeted). There is no concept of a main enemy – it could be the US, Russians, Iranians, Saudis, Muslim Brotherhood. Their only priority is to use the new situation of instability in the region to form a core territorial base. They now think in Syria they have a real opportunity to regenerate Al Qaeda that they didn’t have since their defeat in Iraq. In the Sinai too. Through a central Syrian base they are ready to converge with other regional actors from which they will move into Lebanon, Iraq and other places.”“Some of them know Bandar for a long time,” says the analyst. “There have always been Saudi intelligence officers dedicated to oversee jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya.”
Though the Saudis tell Washington that their goal is to keep extremists out of power in Syria, elements in the US administration remain uncomfortable about where this could end. Says the Wall Street Journal, quoting a former official concerned about weapons flowing into jihadi hands: “This has the potential to go badly” – an understatement, if ever there was one.
Using Lebanon as a lever
Whereas western powers have sought to maintain stability on the Lebanese front, the Saudis – who lost influence in the Levantine state when Hezbollah and its allies forced the dissolution of a Riyadh-backed government in early 2011 – are not as inclined to keep the peace.
Paramount for Bandar’s Syria plans is halting the battlefield assistance Hezbollah has provided for the Syrian army in key border towns which had become supply routes for rebels.
To punish Hezbollah and weaken its regional allies, the Saudis have used their own alliances in Lebanon to hammer daily at the Shia resistance group’s role in Syria. One easy route is to sow sectarian tensions in multi-sect Lebanon – a tactic at which the conservative Wahhabi Saudis excel.
Pitting Sunni against Shia through a series of well-planned acts of political violence is child’s play for Saudis who have decades of expertise overseeing such acts – just look at the escalation of sectarian bombings in Iraq today as example.
This does not necessarily mean that Riyadh is involved in planning these operations though.
Says the Beirut analyst: “The escalation may be Saudi-run, but not necessarily the deed itself. (When they back these Islamist extremists in Lebanon), they know the software of these people. They know they will attack Shia and moderate Sunni, use rockets, car bombs, etc. They empower these groups being conscious of the consequences. These guys are predictable. And the Saudis also have some trusted men among these groups who will act in a way that will conform to Saudi interests and projects.”The diplomatic report on the Bandar’s Moscow visit concludes: “It is not unlikely that things [will] take a dramatic turn in Lebanon, in both the political and security senses, in light of the major Saudi decision to respond to Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian crisis.”
Two bombings: one, targeting a Shia neighborhood, the second aimed at Sunni residents. On another front, the IDF launches a secret mission across the Lebanese border, swiftly thwarted by a Hezbollah counterattack. Soon after, an Al Qaeda linked group called the Abdullah Azzam Brigades (AAB), which last year acknowledged its fight against the Syrian state, launches four rockets into Israeli territory. Israel does not retaliate against this Salafist militia though. The IDF choses instead to strike at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group that supports the Resistance in Lebanon and Syria.
It appears that Israel, like the Saudis, has a message to relay to Lebanon: Hezbollah should stay out of Syria or Lebanon will bear the consequences.
The escalation of violence in the region – from Lebanon to Iraq – is today very much a Bandar-Israel project. And the sudden escalation of military threats by Washington against the Assad government is undoubtedly a result of pressures and rewards dangled by this duo.
While Putin may have told Bandar to take a hike when the he offered to purchase $15 billion in weapons in exchange for a compromise on Syria and Iran, the British and French are beggars for this kind of business. Washington too. With $65 billion in arms sales to the kingdom in process, the Obama administration is prostituting Americans for cold, hard cash.
Let there be no mistake. Bandar ibn Israel is going for gold and will burn the Middle East to get there.
This article was first published by Al Akhbar English on August 28, 2013.
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Thursday, October 11, 2012
Hezbollah confirms sending drone into Israeli airspace
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Hezbollah Secretary-General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah (file photo) |
Hezbollah Secretary-General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah confirms the Lebanese resistance movement has sent a drone deep into the Israeli airspace evading radar systems.
The operation code-named Hussein Ayub saw Hezbollah’s drone fly hundreds of kilometers into the Israeli airspace and getting very close to Dimona nuclear plant without being detected by advanced Israeli and US radars, Nasrallah said during a televised speech late on Thursday.
"This is only part of our capabilities," he stressed, adding that Israelis have admitted to their security failure despite being provided with the latest technologies by Western powers.
Hezbollah secretary-general stated that Hezbollah’s drones are made in Iran but assembled by the resistance movement.
Hezbollah plans to send more drones over Israel in the future, he added, adding that the operation shows the resistance movement is ready to defend Lebanon.
The resistance leader further dismissed Western accusations of Hezbollah's intervention in the Syrian unrest, describing the allegation as "sheer lie."
"Hezbollah has not fought alongside Syrian forces.... It is not true that Hezbollah is going to take some land from Syria," Nasrallah stated.
Hezbollah's leader also rejected allegations that Abu Abbas was the movement's commander in Syria, and condemned insurgents in Syria for threatening Lebanon.
"Threatening Hezbollah is of no use," he emphasized.
Source
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Fatima Hajj: Every Palestinian Woman
By: Louisa Lamb
I woke up early that Sunday morning last May to attend the Nakba Day at Kass-Kass Park, just outside of Shatila Palestinian refugee Camp in Beirut. I made a promise to Doha Abou Jamous—a young Palestinian resident of the Shatila Camp who I interviewed earlier in the week—that I would attend the festival to see her perform her dance recital.
This festival war organized by Palestinian camp committees to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the Nakba Catastrophe. The Palestinian Pride festival proved to be especially significant, because in addition to attending the inspiring Kaas-Kass event I accompanied my friend Zeinab to join her on a trip to Saida, where we would interview her grandmother, a 1948 Nakba survivor, in the Mieh Mieh Camp, one of 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
I’d met Fatima Hajj once before at Zeinab’s home in Shatila when she was visiting her children and grandchildren and the trip to her home in Mieh Mieh turned out to be an exciting adventure considering that it was my first visit to that particular Camp where approximately 7000 refugees mainly from northern Palestine resided. It was the third Palestinian Refugee Camp I visited during my visit to Lebanon. When we arrived, Fatima greeted us with kisses, hugs, handshakes and tea. After we finished our proper Arab-style greeting, we settled in and I began asking Fatima some questions as Zeinab interpreted for us.
Born January 1st 1937, Fatima seemingly remembered everything about her life and the Nakba. When I asked about her childhood, Fatima said she remembered going to the gardens as a little girl and picking flowers and fruit. The village where she lived, Daishoum, was located in Northern Palestine in the town of Safad and Fatima recalled a village of many happy families. Her father was a farmer who worked the fertile soil and provided for his family without ever needing to sell their produce. The family owned the farm and had many cows and goats in addition to their bountiful gardens.
Fatima is the oldest in her family and had four brothers and one sister. She lived on her parent’s farm with her siblings and her husband and baby. Fatima was married at fifteen to a thirty-five year old man from Safad and gave birth to her first child at eighteen years old. I asked her if she knew any Jewish people in Palestine and she responded that while she didn’t personally know any Jews, they would often visit the village to picnic and trade goods with some of the Muslim farmers in her village but there was never any conflict. She was unaware with the conflict with the Jews until they attacked her village on May 15th, 1948.
Fatima explained that she didn’t know outsiders invaded her country, because she was from a small village and news didn’t travel fast; given the roles of women and the fact that she was a twenty-year old woman with a two-year old child, she didn’t pay attention to politics—the men were more involved with community—women generally stayed at home to cook, clean and raise children. She had no idea that the British and Jews clashed with the Palestinians—it was only when there was a sudden attack on her village that she knew about the Zionists. Bombs seemed to drop from planes and suddenly explode with no indication, and hostile Zionist soldiers stormed through Daishoum and started killing people at random without explanation. Her neighbors fled for their lives—Fatima’s family included—leaving all their possessions and seeking a safer place. Fatima described leaving her home as chaos—violence was around every corner, and the fear of being killed motivated the Palestinians to move quickly. In this frantic rush, Fatima’s ten-year old brother was left behind. She told me that her family never knew what happened to him and they never saw him again.
Her family walked from Daishoum, Palestine to Aitroun, South Lebanon, a distance of roughly 40 miles, where they rested for five days. Travelling was a struggle for Fatima, because while she already faced so much stress and fear she was also carrying a small child while pregnant with her second baby (my friend Zeinab’s mother.) After five days in Aitroun, the Zionist soldiers attacked inside Lebanon too and her family fled to Bint Jbeil where they stayed for two days. Given the uncertainty and awareness of what was happening, her family moved as quickly as they could away from the killing in Palestine.
A week after being forced from their home in Palestine, Fatima and her family finally arrived in Tyre, South Lebanon where they stayed at the new camp, Bourj Al Shemali. The United Nations provided shelter (tents) for these Palestinian refugees, and Fatima stayed in Tyre for thirty years until 1978. During this time she established a home and had several more children, but after the Israeli’s attacks in 1978 on the Palestinian Refugee Camps at Ein el-Hilweh, Nabatiyeh, Mieh Mieh, El Buss, Rashidiyeh and Bourj el-Shemali, she moved to Shatila camp and stayed for seven years. When the Syrian backed Amal militia attacked Shatila and Bourj Al Barajneh in the 1985 “Wars of the Camps”, ( they were massacres not wars—the camps had been virtually defenseless since the September 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre at Sabra-Shatila and the new Amin Gemayal government’s military intelligence (Deuxieme Bureau) targeted Palestinians across Lebanon). Fatima Hajj fled again to Mieh Mieh, where she’s lived ever since.
After hearing all of this, I was astonished by how one person could endure such violence and still be one of the most pleasant and hopeful individuals I’ve ever met. When I asked her about the future of Palestine, she replied hopefully that one day her family will be able to return to their homeland. After living in Lebanon for sixty-four years, Fatima insisted that she too would like to return to her country, before she died. I asked her how she felt about the efforts of the resistance group Hezbollah, and she replied the she doesn’t know much about them, but she hopes that the Palestinians, forced to live in refugee camps, will return home regardless.
When it comes to the future of Palestine, Fatima hopes that the Muslims and Jewish people can live in peace. She explained that there were many Jews in Palestine before the Nakba, and that they lived peacefully. “They are good people,” she said, “and the problem with Israel has nothing to do with the people of Jewish faith, but rather with the Zionists who use religion and the claimed territorial history of the land as a self-entitled right to occupy Palestine and to establish a Jewish-only country.”
While the Israelis reign over Palestine and occupy her homeland, Fatima Hajj reiterated her wish that one day the Palestinians will return and together all people—regardless of religion or ethnic background—will live in peace in Palestine.
Fatima’s story affected me in a way I cannot compare to anything else. The passion of an old woman, who, despite the struggles of her tumultuous life, believed in the best of humanity even in a terrible situation, was awe-inspiring. I admired her good nature especially considering most of her life was spent feeling anxiety—the kind that I, as a privileged American student, perhaps can never understand.
Fatima Hajj died three days after our meeting, and while I am not a particularly spiritual individual, she instilled in me some mercy for all people, regardless of the propaganda we’re exposed to. I felt an honest connection between us, and the opportunity I have to write this is a remarkable experience for me as an aspiring writer as well as a human residing on this planet. Fatima was the quintessential Palestinian woman, and her story—which parallels so many others—makes the quest for Palestinians to return to their ethnically cleansed homes in Palestine much greater.
Louisa Lamb studies at Salisbury University in Maryland. She is reachable at louloulovesyou37@yahoo.com
Source
I woke up early that Sunday morning last May to attend the Nakba Day at Kass-Kass Park, just outside of Shatila Palestinian refugee Camp in Beirut. I made a promise to Doha Abou Jamous—a young Palestinian resident of the Shatila Camp who I interviewed earlier in the week—that I would attend the festival to see her perform her dance recital.
This festival war organized by Palestinian camp committees to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the Nakba Catastrophe. The Palestinian Pride festival proved to be especially significant, because in addition to attending the inspiring Kaas-Kass event I accompanied my friend Zeinab to join her on a trip to Saida, where we would interview her grandmother, a 1948 Nakba survivor, in the Mieh Mieh Camp, one of 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
 |
The author with Fatima Hajj at Mieh-Mieh Palestinian refugee camp in Saida, Lebanon. Three days before the Nakba survivor’s death. Photo: Zeinab Hajj |
Born January 1st 1937, Fatima seemingly remembered everything about her life and the Nakba. When I asked about her childhood, Fatima said she remembered going to the gardens as a little girl and picking flowers and fruit. The village where she lived, Daishoum, was located in Northern Palestine in the town of Safad and Fatima recalled a village of many happy families. Her father was a farmer who worked the fertile soil and provided for his family without ever needing to sell their produce. The family owned the farm and had many cows and goats in addition to their bountiful gardens.
Fatima is the oldest in her family and had four brothers and one sister. She lived on her parent’s farm with her siblings and her husband and baby. Fatima was married at fifteen to a thirty-five year old man from Safad and gave birth to her first child at eighteen years old. I asked her if she knew any Jewish people in Palestine and she responded that while she didn’t personally know any Jews, they would often visit the village to picnic and trade goods with some of the Muslim farmers in her village but there was never any conflict. She was unaware with the conflict with the Jews until they attacked her village on May 15th, 1948.
Fatima explained that she didn’t know outsiders invaded her country, because she was from a small village and news didn’t travel fast; given the roles of women and the fact that she was a twenty-year old woman with a two-year old child, she didn’t pay attention to politics—the men were more involved with community—women generally stayed at home to cook, clean and raise children. She had no idea that the British and Jews clashed with the Palestinians—it was only when there was a sudden attack on her village that she knew about the Zionists. Bombs seemed to drop from planes and suddenly explode with no indication, and hostile Zionist soldiers stormed through Daishoum and started killing people at random without explanation. Her neighbors fled for their lives—Fatima’s family included—leaving all their possessions and seeking a safer place. Fatima described leaving her home as chaos—violence was around every corner, and the fear of being killed motivated the Palestinians to move quickly. In this frantic rush, Fatima’s ten-year old brother was left behind. She told me that her family never knew what happened to him and they never saw him again.
Her family walked from Daishoum, Palestine to Aitroun, South Lebanon, a distance of roughly 40 miles, where they rested for five days. Travelling was a struggle for Fatima, because while she already faced so much stress and fear she was also carrying a small child while pregnant with her second baby (my friend Zeinab’s mother.) After five days in Aitroun, the Zionist soldiers attacked inside Lebanon too and her family fled to Bint Jbeil where they stayed for two days. Given the uncertainty and awareness of what was happening, her family moved as quickly as they could away from the killing in Palestine.
A week after being forced from their home in Palestine, Fatima and her family finally arrived in Tyre, South Lebanon where they stayed at the new camp, Bourj Al Shemali. The United Nations provided shelter (tents) for these Palestinian refugees, and Fatima stayed in Tyre for thirty years until 1978. During this time she established a home and had several more children, but after the Israeli’s attacks in 1978 on the Palestinian Refugee Camps at Ein el-Hilweh, Nabatiyeh, Mieh Mieh, El Buss, Rashidiyeh and Bourj el-Shemali, she moved to Shatila camp and stayed for seven years. When the Syrian backed Amal militia attacked Shatila and Bourj Al Barajneh in the 1985 “Wars of the Camps”, ( they were massacres not wars—the camps had been virtually defenseless since the September 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre at Sabra-Shatila and the new Amin Gemayal government’s military intelligence (Deuxieme Bureau) targeted Palestinians across Lebanon). Fatima Hajj fled again to Mieh Mieh, where she’s lived ever since.
After hearing all of this, I was astonished by how one person could endure such violence and still be one of the most pleasant and hopeful individuals I’ve ever met. When I asked her about the future of Palestine, she replied hopefully that one day her family will be able to return to their homeland. After living in Lebanon for sixty-four years, Fatima insisted that she too would like to return to her country, before she died. I asked her how she felt about the efforts of the resistance group Hezbollah, and she replied the she doesn’t know much about them, but she hopes that the Palestinians, forced to live in refugee camps, will return home regardless.
When it comes to the future of Palestine, Fatima hopes that the Muslims and Jewish people can live in peace. She explained that there were many Jews in Palestine before the Nakba, and that they lived peacefully. “They are good people,” she said, “and the problem with Israel has nothing to do with the people of Jewish faith, but rather with the Zionists who use religion and the claimed territorial history of the land as a self-entitled right to occupy Palestine and to establish a Jewish-only country.”
While the Israelis reign over Palestine and occupy her homeland, Fatima Hajj reiterated her wish that one day the Palestinians will return and together all people—regardless of religion or ethnic background—will live in peace in Palestine.
Fatima’s story affected me in a way I cannot compare to anything else. The passion of an old woman, who, despite the struggles of her tumultuous life, believed in the best of humanity even in a terrible situation, was awe-inspiring. I admired her good nature especially considering most of her life was spent feeling anxiety—the kind that I, as a privileged American student, perhaps can never understand.
Fatima Hajj died three days after our meeting, and while I am not a particularly spiritual individual, she instilled in me some mercy for all people, regardless of the propaganda we’re exposed to. I felt an honest connection between us, and the opportunity I have to write this is a remarkable experience for me as an aspiring writer as well as a human residing on this planet. Fatima was the quintessential Palestinian woman, and her story—which parallels so many others—makes the quest for Palestinians to return to their ethnically cleansed homes in Palestine much greater.
Louisa Lamb studies at Salisbury University in Maryland. She is reachable at louloulovesyou37@yahoo.com
Source
Friday, June 29, 2012
Israeli forces abduct Lebanese shepherd in Shebaa
Youssef Mohammad Zahra was apprehended by the Israeli forces on Friday, Andrea Tenenti, spokesman for UNIFIL said.
"We were informed by the Lebanese army that a shepherd has been apprehended in the area of the Shebaa farms," he said.
"We got in touch with the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) and they confirmed that. Now we are in touch with the IDF to try to secure his early release."
Tenenti said he was not able to provide further details about the abduction, nor explain the Israeli motive in arresting the shepherd.
"At the moment we are still investigating why and how it happened. Our troops are on the ground and the force commander is in touch with the IDF," he added.
Lebanon claims the Shebaa Farms as its territory currently under occupation by Israel. The Jewish state says the area is Syrian territory, captured by Israel during the 1967 war.
Source
Friday, May 25, 2012
Resistance And Liberation Day: Fleeing With Israel
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An unidentified fighter scouts the surrounding area at the southern Lebanese border. (Photo: Hassan Bahsoun) |
A sad tune emanated from a car parked on the main road of Ain Ebel in Lebanon’s deep South.
“Lebanon is a tear in my eye. For children whose laughs have faded. For men whose cries have diminished. Through martyrdom they paid the price for you. To become a home for freedom. Approaching, I carry a candle. For eyes longing to be free...In a land protected by soldiers. Our soldiers, O Lebanese,” a woman’s voice sings.
At first, one might think the song was new, recorded in solidarity with the Lebanese army after the latest clashes in Beirut and North Lebanon. That thought is reinforced after seeing a large portrait of Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim Salloum Rifaat, a resident of the village.
The poster had been hanging in the church’s courtyard since his death five years ago in the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp war along with a number of portraits of General Francois al-Hajj, the former Lebanese army operations chief who was assassinated in 2007.
But it did not take long to discover that the song is part of a campaign around the “Day in Solidarity with the Lebanese Forcibly Deported to Israel,” scheduled to be held on June 2. This year, the slogan “Lebanon Is a Tear in My Eyes” commemorates 12 years of “displacement.”
The townsfolk are organizing a Mass and gathering in the pine forest, where the families of the deported will be speaking. Also on the occasion, Ain Ebel will light candles and ring its church bells, along with 12 other towns, to salute the families “exiled” to Israel.
Presiding over Mass will be Cardinal Boulos Sayyah who is expected to be appointed by the Maronite Patriarch Bishara Rai as General Patriarchal Deputy in a few days.
The event is the first of its kind and comes a few months after parliament passed a law regulating the affairs of those who fled to Israel. However, the town residents aren’t too eager to talk about the upcoming event.
Many are very cautious and prefer to remain silent. They defer to the priests. “We delegated them to speak in our name and follow up on our cause,” they say.
In this framework, Patriarch Rai held a congregational visit to the nearby village of Alma al-Shaab a few months ago. It was an opportunity for the families to discuss the issue of the approximately 100 men – many with their families – who fled during the liberation of the South in 2000 and remain in Israel.
Today, the village remembers the occasion, praying for its son Nassif al-Haddad who returned home a corpse through the Ras Naqoura crossing. He was not the first to return in a coffin. His relatives pray he will be the last.
On the other hand, some women and children have been returning, leaving behind husbands, brothers, fathers, and mothers. Two sisters returned before the July 2006 Israeli assault.
“They barely made it,” says a relative, pointing to the “repercussions of that war and the discovery of networks of collaborators. It impacted negatively the Lebanese in Israel and sustained the animosity towards them back home.”
One of the sisters tried to break the isolation from her surroundings imposed by her “profile” and enrolled in an academy in Sour to continue her studies.
She reintegrated in her original home as a young woman living in multireligious and multicultural environment after spending 6 years growing up in hostile surroundings.
She does not tell the new friends she made that she is “the daughter of a collaborator and that her family is still in the occupied land.”
While this young woman was able to settle in her home environment, many who return “do not have the courage” to do so.
Last March, four women returned. One was from Adaisseh and three from Jezzine. They went directly to Beirut to stay with relatives and did not even pass by their villages.
Before that, a woman from al-Bayyada returned after four years and joined her family who live between Sour and Beirut.
On the Adaisseh–Kfar Kila road, along the separation wall being built by Israel, people get tongue-tied when asked whether they will participate in the solidarity day called by Ain Ebel.
Collaboration with Israel, before and after liberation, transcends sects and towns. Fifteen of Adaisseh’s residents are still on the other side of the border. Ten of them had fled following the July 2006 war. Kfar Kila has ten also, and from the southern district of Marjayoun, there are more than a hundred.
Villages in the districts of Sour and Bint Jbeil, such as Naqoura, Rmeish, Dibil, Aytaroun, on the borders with Israel, also have their share.
An old man sits across from a sculpture unveiled recently to commemorate the martyrs of the battle between the Lebanese Army and Israeli occupation forces in Adaisseh. He sighs and takes his time elaborating that a “lifetime of resistance and collaboration will not be erased in 12 years.”
His neighbor ponders the issue for a while. “Only a few will dare participate, even from the Christian villages. Even if many of them remain nostalgic for the time of occupation due to the state of bliss they lived in compared to the era after liberation.”
At a local cafe popular with residents, visitors, the army, and international peacekeepers alike, a local resident points at the owner of the cafe and says, “He is a former collaborator and comes from a family rooted in the field.”
When asked about the manner in which he is treated by people here, he replies that “people forget and forgive as they wish.”
Referring to some wealthy individuals and members of parties and security forces, he says, “people blocked out their past and opened a new page for them. They integrated them in the country following liberation, as if blood was never spilled.”
Source
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
In Defense of Helen Thomas: What’s Wrong With History?
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| Helen Thomas; Americas last great journalist |
Helen Thomas’s recent request to purchase a table at the upcoming White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) annual dinner has been rejected.
by Tony Phillip
In a comment on that story I said, “It’s hard to imagine anything more wrong than this.”
I base my opinion on the fact that the 91-year-old Thomas, a former WHCA president, is unique among American journalists, having covered 10 different presidential administrations in a career stretching back to Dwight Eisenhower.
It is because of Thomas as much as anyone else that women were first included at the WHCA dinner since, as the WHCA’s website mentions:
“Until 1962, the dinner was open only to men even though the membership included women. That changed when, at the prodding of Helen Thomas of UPI, President John F. Kennedy said he would not attend the dinner unless the ban on women was dropped.”Thomas’s letter to the WHCA requesting a table was written as a past president and specifically mentioned her desire to attend with family and friends to mark the 50th anniversary of women’s inclusion at the event. A representative of the WHCA explained to The Huffington Post that no matter her past standing within the association, Thomas is only entitled to purchase two tickets to the event as a past president and another said it would be “logistically impossible” to allow every past president to get their own table. That, to me, misses the point. Not every past president covered the White House for half-a-century and not every past president is a living emblem of the advancement of women in journalism. For what it’s worth, I bet no other past president asked to buy a table in the first place.
Because of Helen Thomas’s unique place in American journalistic history, because of her many contributions to the WHCA and because she’s a woman in her 10th decade of life who would like the chance to share something meaningful, something she helped to bring about, with her nearest friends and family, I stand by my assertion that it’s hard to imagine something more wrong than the WHCA denying her request. I was prepared for some people to disagree with me. What I was not prepared for was the rancor of that disagreement or its basis in events from 2010, events that as far as I’m concerned remain ill-told.
I’ll risk stirring up an old brouhaha for the sake of telling a side of that story that I think got short-shrift at the time.
You probably recall the incident. In May 2010 Thomas was questioned briefly by Rabbi David Nesenoff who was at the White House for American Jewish Heritage Celebration Day. A slightly condensed version of that questioning follows.
Nesenoff: “Any comments on Israel?”
Thomas: “Tell them to get the hell out of Israel.”
Nesenoff: “Where should they go?”
Thomas: “They can go home.”
Nesenoff: “So you’re saying the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?”
Thomas: “And America and everywhere else? Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?”
Click here to watch the full two-minute video from RabbiLIVE.com on Youtube. Whether or not her remarks were indelicate I leave to you to decide.
I received a reply to my comment on the Huffington Post article that read in part:
“Do you have any idea what got Helen Thomas in so much trouble it effectively ended her career?”
Yes I do.
I heard from another commenter who wrote:
“Arabs are . . . colonial invaders. Jews have always been a majority in Jerusalem, until the ethnic cleansing by the Hashemites of Trans Jordan.”
That’s not true. Not by a very long stretch.
The same commenter added this particularly vitriolic feedback:
“Helen Thomas is a racist Arab. No nice way of saying that!”
I suppose there is no nice way of calling someone a racist, whether that person is an Arab a Greek or a Finn. Nice or not nice, it’s not accurate.
Helen Thomas is the daughter of Lebanese immigrants. She was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. On the subject of whether she’s an Arab, Hugh Downs quoted her in his 2002 book My America: What This Country Means to Me by 150 Americans from All Walks of Life:
“We were never hyphenated as Arab-Americans. We were American, and I have always rejected the hyphen and I believe all assimilated immigrants should not be designated ethnically. Or separated, of course, by race, or creed either. These are trends that ever try to divide us as a people.”So as for whether she’s a racist, I think probably not.
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"I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive," Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM |
That’s the part of the story that I think bears clarification and as if I’m not already chastened under the acerbity engendered by a mere comment, I’m probably about to get very unpopular very quickly with some people, but the thing about the truth is this; I think it bears telling though it anger the multitudes because a blissful ignorance is still ignorance.
Most Jews living in Israel today were born there but most of their grandparents were not. Jewish out-migration from the Middle East dates to the start of the Diaspora with the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th Century B.C. The Jewish dispersion to regions outside the area of ancient Judeah and modern Israel accelerated in the 1st and 2nd Centuries of the modern era under Roman Occupation. Jews have represented a sizeable minority in Europe since Biblical times.
In 1948 there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and only 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Today there are about 7.8 million Israelis, roughly 1.6 million of whom are Arabs and 5.9 million of whom are Jews. Only about 2 million of those Jews are of Palestinian ancestry. An equal 2 million are of European origin. Jews did not outbreed their Arab neighbors in the past 64 years – they immigrated. I doubt Helen Thomas, who is 27 years older than the nation of Israel, misremembers history. The one thing she remembers that most of us can’t is that Jews were effectively forced to seek a home far from Europe by the unthinkable atrocities of the Holocaust and the attitudes that outlasted it. Arabs were effectively pushed out of the modern boundaries of Israel by the arrival of those Jews and the one people who never really paid the price for the tragedy that befell Europe’s Jews were Europeans. To that extent if no further, Thomas’s comments reference historical facts that meant bad news for one people to redress the tragedy of another.
The history of Palestine is to say the least a contentious subject. But the events in that region over the past century are fairly well established. Those events have led to a current state of affairs in which there are roughly 10 million Palestinian Arabs in the world, more than half of whom live in exile outside of Palestine. Most Palestinians alive today have never seen the homes of their grandfathers.
Meanwhile, since 1948, Israel has had 12 prime ministers. David Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres were born in Poland. Moshe Sharett and Yitzhak Rabin were from Ukraine. Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Menachem Begin were Russian. Yitzhak Shamir was from Belarus. Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert were born in Palestine under British rule. Their parents were refugees from Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, respectively. Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who speaks the English of a Boston Brahmin, is the country’s first head of state actually born an Israeli and he spent half his boyhood in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. He subsequently spent several more years in America earning BS and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean was definitely the birthplace of Judaism, but it is not the homeland of most modern Jews, not ethnically and not numerically. In fact, of the five cities in the world with the largest population of Jews, two are in the United States, New York with nearly two million, and Los Angeles with 655,000. Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and South Florida are home to another 1.5 million, meaning a population of US Jews in just seven metropolitan areas roughly equivalent to all Jews living in Israeli. Paris is home to another 310,000, Buenos Aires to 244,000.
The fact is that Jews, like Muslims and Christians, are a feature of the world’s population, spread across every continent, represented among many national cultures and histories. Israel is no more their home than Moscow or Skokie.
Nonetheless, the modern nation of Israel has entered into the community of nations as the world’s only Jewish-majority state. How it came to be such is a tale of woe for the Palestinian Arab majority that preceded the country’s birth.
In his magnificent book To the Ends of the Earth (1993), David Yallop wrote:
“On April 10, 1948, the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, was destroyed. Its inhabitants, 260 men, women and children, were slaughtered; some were shot, some hacked to death. The attack was a combined operation by two Jewish groups, the Irgun, whose commander in chief was Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang, one of whose leaders was Yitzhak Shamir. In 1980, Begin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1983, when Begin resigned from office, he was succeeded as prime minister of Israel by Yitzhak Shamir. History is written by winners.”
Deir Yassin today, part of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, an Israeli psychiatric hospital
One of the first dramatic statements in advocacy of an independent Israel was the blowing up of the British headquarters in Palestine at the King David Hotel in 1946. In 1947, 30 years after the Balfour Declaration had set British policy that Palestine was to be a homeland for the Jews subject to the rights of Arabs, Great Britain called on the United Nations to resolve the Palestinian issue. The original UN solution involved the partition of Palestine into a Jewish zone and an Arab zone. But with the departure of British forces, leaders at the head of groups like the Irgun and Stern Gang joined in declaring an independent Israel and launched an offensive aimed at extending the area under Jewish control. Between May 1948 and January 1949, 370 Palestinian villages in the coastal strip from Tel-Aviv to Haifa were obliterated. And thus was born the original modern-day Israel.
The tactics of Israeli militia in those early days were appalling. In 1948, reacting to the events at Deir Yassin, Albert Einstein wrote to Shepard Rifkin, executive director of American Friends for Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, a fundraising force for the Stern Gang. In response to Rifkin’s solicitation of funds, Einstein wrote:
“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”
Aftermath of massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. (wiki)
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharone is shown during a press conference at his office in Jerusalem, on November 21, 2005. (UPI Photo/Emilio Morenatti/POOL/Files)
Eighteen years later, Sharon was elected Prime Minister. Perhaps surviving war criminals write history.
One of Israel’s subtler tactics to continue dispossessing Palestinian Arabs of their lands in any possible future state of Palestine is massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, all taken during the 1967 Six-Day War.
More than 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone.
Yigal Palmor, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman
I have never met Helen Thomas, although it would be my very great honor to do so. I have never read any treatise by Helen Thomas regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, I don’t know if she has ever written or spoken on the topic at length. All I know is what she told one Rabbi one day on the grounds of the White House and I know that from what she said a lot of people seem willing to infer a lot of ugly things. I’m not willing to do that. But I am willing to consider why she might have said what she said and so far, I can’t really find anything wrong with it.
Actually I know one other thing that Thomas had to say about the matter, to wit, what she posted on her website a few days after her interview with Nesenoff:
“I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”Indeed, Helen. Indeed.
Source: open.salon.com
It would be wonderful if you would all contact the WHCA about this matter — and please let us know if you have done so. We will be pleased to tell Helen how many people phoned and emailed on her behalf. Pro-Israel organizations have been known to organize 6,000+ emails in a single day — we should be able to do at least as well! — Alison Weir, Executive Director, If Americans Knew website. You can write WHCA online, phone them at 202-266-7453, and/or fax them at 202-266-7454.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Land Day in Lebanon 2012: Overlooking Palestine in Pictures
Photo Blog by Hassan Bahsoun
On the 36th commemoration of Land Day, a symbolic Global March to Jerusalem was called for by Palestinian and international activists around the world. The march demands freedom for Palestine and its people and an end to the Apartheid and ethnic cleansing practices of the Israel.
In Lebanon, hundreds answered the call by gathering at Beaufort Castle in Nabatiyeh, South Lebanon which overlooks Occupied Palestine.
On the 36th commemoration of Land Day, a symbolic Global March to Jerusalem was called for by Palestinian and international activists around the world. The march demands freedom for Palestine and its people and an end to the Apartheid and ethnic cleansing practices of the Israel.
In Lebanon, hundreds answered the call by gathering at Beaufort Castle in Nabatiyeh, South Lebanon which overlooks Occupied Palestine.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Sayyed Nasrallah: Arabs, Muslims, Christians All Entitled to Defend al-Quds
Following the recitation of verses of the Holy Quran, and the singing of the Lebanese and Palestinian National Anthems, Hizbullah Secretary General appeared via video link to deliver his word on this event.
Sayyed Nasrallah, at the beginning of his speech, noted that "The cause of al-Quds with all its different aspects remains to be a unique cause to all Muslims and Christians worldwide, as it is the holy land that brings all monotheistic religions together, and holds within its folds the sanctities of Muslims and Christians embodied in al-Quds holy mosque and the Holy Sepulture."
"Israeli" Theft of al-Quds
Sayyed Nasrallah stressing the necessity of defending al-Quds, pointed out that this holy city has been under occupation since decades and has been declared by the Zionist usurping entity as the capital of its manmade artificial entity it calls "Israel"; he also pointed out that the Zionist entity studies a draft-law in the Knesset to declare the holy city of Muslims and Christians as the capital to the Jewish People.
His Eminence added that the region has been divided in Sykes-Picot agreement [the secret agreement that took place in 1916 for the dismemberment of the region back then] in order to take control of al-Quds, and that other schemes to divide the region have come to light, the last of which was the New Middle East Scheme that was foiled by the resistance movements.
Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized that al-Quds is the heart of the region, "Tell me where al-Quds is, I tell you where the region would be," he said. His Eminence went on to say "al-Quds is subject to judaization and desecration by the settlers, and its original [Palestinian] people have been exiled and displaced so that al-Quds becomes of a one 'known' color."
Defending al-Quds Our Duty
Sayyed Nasrallah then underscored the duty of each and every Arab, Muslim, and Christian towards the holy land that has been taken up by the "Israeli" occupier since 1948.
"We are before a unique reality in al-Quds. Each and every Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Christian holds national, ethical and religious responsibility before this holy city, before its future, identity, and fate," Sayyed Nasrallah said, stressing that "we all believe in judgment's day, and we will all be asked in the hereafter what have we done for the sake of liberating al-Quds since the time it was occupied."
Defending Islamic and Christian sanctities in al-Quds as well as confronting the attempts of Judaizing this holy city through a well-studied and calculated project is our duty, also serious effort and work is required, Sayyed Nasrallah assured.
As for the so-called negotiations concerning retrieving al-Quds as the Palestinian capital, Sayyed Nasrallah explained that such a choice is not realistic, especially that the "Israelis" consider al-Quds as their ultimate capital and in light of the Western and American support to the state of "Israel" and its security, which was described by the US president Barack Obama as ‘sacred' a few days ago.
Sayyed Nasrallah criticized leaders in the region, as none of them had voiced opposition to Obama's stance. [Reiterating his continuous support for the Zionist entity, US President Barack Obama described Thursday his US support for "Israel" as "sacrosanct". During a re-election campaign fundraiser in New York, Obama stated that he wanted "Israel" to maintain its military superiority as he prepares to meet with "Israeli" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.]
Sayyed Nasrallah, hence, reiterated that the only remaining choice is resistance, especially that there have been major changes in the region and the world, which indicate the liberation of al-Quds has become even closer. One of the indications, Hizbullah leader noted, is the steadfast of the Palestinian peoples throughout the past years despite all the violations that took place against them. He reiterated that the Palestinian cause has been alive all the way until this day.
Liberation of al-Quds Near
Hizbullah Secretary General said there are important elements that play a major role in the struggle of liberating al-Quds, including the toppling of the Shah regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which ultimately supports the Palestinian righteous cause, the declaration of leader of the Islamic Revolution His Eminence Imam Ali Khamenei the last Friday of every Month of Ramadan as "al-Quds" Day, the accomplishments of the resistance in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, also the dramatic change that took place in Egypt and Iraq.
Furthermore, Sayyed Nasrallah also said that among the important elements of winning this struggle is the weakness of the United States and "Israel", also the failure of the settlement and normalization project, as well as readiness of the people to adopt the choice of resistance as they have proved throughout the past years. "All these are factors that imply the liberation of al-Quds has become so near," Sayyed Nasrallah assured. On this note, Sayyed Nasrallah hailed the Islamic republic of Iran for the role it has been playing in supporting the Palestinian cause as it has been a role model in supporting and backing just causes of the Arabs and Muslims.
Hizbullah Secretary General said also that forty years have already passed to the beginning of the Zionist occupation of this Holy land, and now comes the beginning of its end. He stressed that from the very womb of suffering and major challenges, new generations that believe in jihad [struggle] came to light.
Sayyed Nasrallah criticized leaders in the region, as none of them had voiced opposition to Obama's stance. [Reiterating his continuous support for the Zionist entity, US President Barack Obama described Thursday his US support for "Israel" as "sacrosanct". During a re-election campaign fundraiser in New York, Obama stated that he wanted "Israel" to maintain its military superiority as he prepares to meet with "Israeli" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.]
Sayyed Nasrallah, hence, reiterated that the only remaining choice is resistance, especially that there have been major changes in the region and the world, which indicate the liberation of al-Quds has become even closer. One of the indications, Hizbullah leader noted, is the steadfast of the Palestinian peoples throughout the past years despite all the violations that took place against them. He reiterated that the Palestinian cause has been alive all the way until this day.
Liberation of al-Quds Near
Hizbullah Secretary General said there are important elements that play a major role in the struggle of liberating al-Quds, including the toppling of the Shah regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which ultimately supports the Palestinian righteous cause, the declaration of leader of the Islamic Revolution His Eminence Imam Ali Khamenei the last Friday of every Month of Ramadan as "al-Quds" Day, the accomplishments of the resistance in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, also the dramatic change that took place in Egypt and Iraq.
Furthermore, Sayyed Nasrallah also said that among the important elements of winning this struggle is the weakness of the United States and "Israel", also the failure of the settlement and normalization project, as well as readiness of the people to adopt the choice of resistance as they have proved throughout the past years. "All these are factors that imply the liberation of al-Quds has become so near," Sayyed Nasrallah assured. On this note, Sayyed Nasrallah hailed the Islamic republic of Iran for the role it has been playing in supporting the Palestinian cause as it has been a role model in supporting and backing just causes of the Arabs and Muslims.
Hizbullah Secretary General said also that forty years have already passed to the beginning of the Zionist occupation of this Holy land, and now comes the beginning of its end. He stressed that from the very womb of suffering and major challenges, new generations that believe in jihad [struggle] came to light.
His Eminence noted that the first signs of liberation were the South Lebanon 2000 liberation, following the July 2006 victory in Lebanon and then the "Israeli" assault on the Gaza Strip that reaped only failure. Again, Sayyed Nasrallah reiterated that the era of victories has arrived while that of defeats has come to an end.
Source: moqawama.org
Friday, March 2, 2012
Netanyahu: No ‘Lebanon’ will be on the map
Israel what was that about MAPS?
by Lisa Karpova
For years, the paranoid Israelis have been screaming bloody murder that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that “Israel should be wiped from the map.” Of course, the man said no such thing, it was a deliberate mis-translation meant to serve their purposes: to demonize Ahmadinejad and Iran and to justify an unprovoked attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:
“Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”
The full quote translated directly to English:
“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”
Word by word translation:
Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).
So that should settle the disinformation campaign being waged in order to set the stage for an aggressive attack against Iran and their paranoid delusions that Iran is building a nuclear weapon in order to “wipe them off the map.”
If they are nothing, they are constantly hysterical, while collecting billions annually in American taxpayer money to feed the hysteria and the lust for war and to take out those governments they don’t like, preferably by proxy in the form of NATO or the US Armed Forces.
But it’s ironic. There was no fuss or screaming when Netanyahu actually told an interviewer that when Israel is done with them, there will be NO Lebanon on the new world map.
At a news conference in Switzerland, on the occasion of the building an Israeli railway there, the German newspaper Die Zeit interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“Congratulations Mr. Netanyahu, my first question is that does the beginning of the large train line’s construction confirm the announcement of the dissident Syrian Intelligence Office that you will strike Lebanon?”
In reply, Netanyahu stated:
“Yes, and it is not a secret that it will happen with U.S.-Gulf support and that is why they have been warned, but before you ask, you have a look at the new map of the world and see that there is no nation with this name.”
Given that the UN Security Council has listed 388 Israeli airspace violations by Israel against Lebanon, there is no doubt what Israel is planning regarding Lebanon.
President Michel Suleiman condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statements on Lebanon, saying that its existence will not be affected by his remarks. Odd that no one else, no big mouth, big talking, big stick western nations voiced the slightest concern that this nuclear armed, racist apartheid state, that has used weapons of mass destruction against Lebanon in the past, committing a genocide against the Lebanese people, was threatening them yet again.
He added in a statement: “Lebanon is the only country to have defeated Israel militarily and the Jewish state is still recovering from it.”
Indeed, the only thing that stopped Israel in 2006 from wiping Lebanon off the map was the defense against them provided by Hezbollah, who sent them crying with their tails between their legs.
“Lebanon’s diversity is the complete opposite of Israel’s racist system, which has no place in the world,” stressed the president.
Odd, isn’t it, that all of the countries attacked by the west, enemies of Israel, can all say the same thing. That they were the models of tolerance, brotherhood, prosperity and human rights, unlike the western allies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar. etc. that are horrid feudal examples of barbaric practices and backwardness.
“Lebanon is one of the founders of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Netanyahu’s statements reflect his contempt for humans,” Suleiman added.
Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon are on high alert in anticipation of an Israeli attack on Lebanon, the London-based A-Sharq al-Awsat daily reported recently. According to the report, Hezbollah has been monitoring with caution the reinforcement of IDF troops along the Lebanon border.
It is also interesting to note that the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, admitted that the Israeli train line is funded by Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Asked if he was not afraid of his people, he affirmed the close friendly relations between the two countries. Qatar, the one that has had a vested interest in formenting terrorism and and ‘regime change” in Libya, Syria and elsewhere.
Isn’t it odd that Israel is allowed to wave the stick at anybody it feels like with impunity, while they maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East? The same country that has threatened all the capitals of Europe.
Pravda.Ru
Monday, February 27, 2012
Israel’s Levant Basin—a new geopolitical curse?
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| The Tamar natural gas field off the coast of northern Israel is expected to begin yielding gas for Israel’s use in late 2012. |
by F. William Engdahl
A recent major oil and gas find is bound to change dramatically the geopolitical equation in the Eastern Mediterranean region and beyond. To start with, it has sent Israel from rags to riches in terms of energy independence and security. However, Lebanon contends that part of the gas field lies within its territorial waters, and Washington happens to agree. Engdahl explores the implications of this key development, which have already rippled into the U.S. electoral scene, with Netanyahu betting on Republican race horses against Obama.
Long-standing Middle East conflicts could soon be paled by new battles over rights to oil and gas resources beneath the eastern Mediterranean in the Levant Basin and Aegean Sea. Here we explore the implications of a gigantic discovery of gas and oil in offshore Israel. In a second article we will explore the implications of gas and oil discoveries in the Aegean between Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Lebanon.
An Israeli Leviathan
The game-changer was a dramatic discovery in late 2010 of an enormous natural gas field offshore of Israel in what geologists call the Levant or Levantine Basin. In October 2010 Israel discovered a massive “super-giant” gas field offshore in what it declares is its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
The find is some 84 miles west of the Haifa port and three miles deep. They named it Leviathan after the Biblical sea monster. Three Israeli energy companies in cooperation with the Houston Texas Noble Energy announced initial estimates that the field contained 16 trillion cubic feet of gas—making it the world’s biggest deep-water gas find in a decade, adding more discredit to “peak oil” theories that the planet is about to see dramatic and permanent shortages of oil, gas and coal. To put the number in perspective, that one gas field, Leviathan, would hold enough reserves to supply Israel’s gas needs for 100 years. [1]
Energy self-sufficiency had eluded the state of Israel since its founding in 1948. Abundant oil and gas exploration had repeatedly been undertaken with meager result. Unlike its energy-rich Arab neighbors, Israel seemed out of luck. Then in 2009 Israel’s exploration partner, Noble Energy, discovered the Tamar field in the Levantine Basin some 50 miles west of Israel’s port of Haifa with an estimated 8.3 tcf (trillion cubic feet) of highest quality natural gas. Tamar was the world’s largest gas discovery in 2009.
At the time, total Israeli gas reserves were estimated at only 1.5 tcf. Government estimates were that Israel’s sole operating field, Yam Tethys, which supplies about 70 percent of the country’s natural gas, would be depleted within three years.
With Tamar, prospects began to look considerably better. Then, just a year after Tamar, the same consortium led by Noble Energy struck the largest gas find in its decades-long history at Leviathan in the same Levantine geological basin. Present estimates are that the Leviathan field holds at least 17 tcf of gas. [2] Israel went from a gas famine to feast in a matter of months.
With the Tamar and now Leviathan discoveries, Israel was beginning to discuss how to become a major natural gas export nation as well as whether to significantly tax gas and oil revenues and place it into an Israeli Sovereign Wealth Fund that would make long-term investments in the Israeli economy as China and many Arab OPEC nations do. [3]
“The Levant Basin Province is comparable to some of the other large provinces around the world,” noted a spokesperson from the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) Energy Resources Program. “Its gas resources are bigger than anything we have assessed in the United States.” [4]
Perhaps sensing that major oil and gas discoveries were being confirmed with potential to change the geopolitics of the entire region, the USGS launched its first-ever estimate of the total reserves of oil and gas in the broad region encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean including the Aegean Basin offshore Greece and Turkey and Cyprus, the Levant Basin offshore Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and the Nile Basin offshore Egypt. Their conclusion was impressive to put it mildly.
The USGS, using all data from previous drilling and geologic surveys of the region concluded, “undiscovered oil and gas resources of the Levant Basin Province amount to 1.68 billion barrels of oil, and 122 tcf of gas. Additionally, according to USGS estimates, “undiscovered oil and gas resources of the Nile Delta Basin Province (bounded by the Nile Cone to the west, by Strabo to the north, by the Pytheus and Cyprus Trenches to the east and by the Levant Basin to the south) are estimated to be approximately 1.76 bbl (of oil), and 223 tcf of natural gas.” [5]
The USGS calculated the total for the eastern Mediterranean as a whole currently at 345 tcf of gas and 3.4 billion barrels of oil. Suddenly the entire region is facing completely new geopolitical challenges and conflict potentials.
To put the numbers into perspective, the USGS estimates that Russia’s West Siberian Basin, the world’s largest known gas basin, holds 643 tcf of gas. As well, the Middle East and North Africa regions have several natural gas-rich areas, including the Rub Al Khali Basin (426 trillion cubic feet) in southwestern Saudi Arabia and Northern Yemen; the Greater Ghawar Uplift in eastern Saudi Arabia (227 tcf) and the Zagros Fold Belt (212 tcf) along the Persian Gulf and into Iraq and Iran. [6]
Just months earlier, securing foreign gas was a national security priority of Israel as existing domestic gas supplies dwindled dangerously low. Further adding to the energy crisis were the so-called Arab Spring protests sweeping across Egypt into Libya in early 2011. The revolts toppled Mubarak, under whose regime Egypt had supplied some 40% of Israeli natural gas. With Mubarak toppled and the ban lifted on Egypt’s Islamic parties, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and the radical Salafist Al-Nour Party, the gas pipeline delivering Egypt’s gas to Israel was target of repeated sabotage and disruptions, the most recent February of this year in northern Sinai. Israel was becoming more than nervous about its future energy security. [7]
Lebanon reaction fuels new frictions
Discovery of Leviathan by Israel in the waters offshore immediately triggered a new geopolitical conflict as Lebanon claimed that part of the gas field lay in Lebanese territorial waters in Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Lebanon delivered maps to the UN to back its claim, to which Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman retorted, “We won’t give an inch.”
The fly in the Mediterranean energy soup is the fact that Israel, like the USA, has never ratified the 1982 UN Convention on Law of the Sea dividing world subsea mineral rights. The Israeli gas wells at Leviathan are clearly within undisputed Israeli territory as Lebanon affirms, but Lebanon believes the field extends over into their subsea waters as well. The Lebanese Hezbollah claims that the Tamar gas field, which is due to begin gas deliveries by the end of this year, belongs to Lebanon.
Washington has lost no time adding political gasoline to the natural gas dispute between Lebanon and Israel. In July of 2011 as Israel prepared to submit its own proposal to the UN as to where the offshore demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel should run, Frederick Hof, US diplomat responsible for special affairs regarding Syria and Lebanon, told Lebanon that the Obama Administration endorsed the Lebanese document, adding to the growing tensions reported since outbreak of the Arab Spring between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Obama. [8]
Netanyahu has reportedly recently urged America’s eighth wealthiest person, his close friend Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson to pour millions directly into the campaigns of Republicans, including Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. It represents an unprecedented direct Israeli intervention into US presidential candidates’ campaigns, in order to try to defeat a second Obama term. [9] New issues of control of the vast energy reserves being discovered off Israeli and Lebanese, Cypriot, Turkish and Greek shores will clearly play a growing role in one of the most entangled political regions on Earth.
In our next piece the added complication of oil and gas discoveries in the Aegean Sea will be examined.
Recent discoveries of not just significant, but huge oil and gas reserves in the little-explored Mediterranean Sea between Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Israel, Syria and Lebanon suggest that the region could become literally a “new Persian Gulf” in terms of oil and gas riches. As with the old Persian Gulf, discovery of hydrocarbon riches could as well spell a geopolitical curse of staggering dimension.
An Israeli Leviathan
The game-changer was a dramatic discovery in late 2010 of an enormous natural gas field offshore of Israel in what geologists call the Levant or Levantine Basin. In October 2010 Israel discovered a massive “super-giant” gas field offshore in what it declares is its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
The find is some 84 miles west of the Haifa port and three miles deep. They named it Leviathan after the Biblical sea monster. Three Israeli energy companies in cooperation with the Houston Texas Noble Energy announced initial estimates that the field contained 16 trillion cubic feet of gas—making it the world’s biggest deep-water gas find in a decade, adding more discredit to “peak oil” theories that the planet is about to see dramatic and permanent shortages of oil, gas and coal. To put the number in perspective, that one gas field, Leviathan, would hold enough reserves to supply Israel’s gas needs for 100 years. [1]
Energy self-sufficiency had eluded the state of Israel since its founding in 1948. Abundant oil and gas exploration had repeatedly been undertaken with meager result. Unlike its energy-rich Arab neighbors, Israel seemed out of luck. Then in 2009 Israel’s exploration partner, Noble Energy, discovered the Tamar field in the Levantine Basin some 50 miles west of Israel’s port of Haifa with an estimated 8.3 tcf (trillion cubic feet) of highest quality natural gas. Tamar was the world’s largest gas discovery in 2009.
At the time, total Israeli gas reserves were estimated at only 1.5 tcf. Government estimates were that Israel’s sole operating field, Yam Tethys, which supplies about 70 percent of the country’s natural gas, would be depleted within three years.
With Tamar, prospects began to look considerably better. Then, just a year after Tamar, the same consortium led by Noble Energy struck the largest gas find in its decades-long history at Leviathan in the same Levantine geological basin. Present estimates are that the Leviathan field holds at least 17 tcf of gas. [2] Israel went from a gas famine to feast in a matter of months.
With the Tamar and now Leviathan discoveries, Israel was beginning to discuss how to become a major natural gas export nation as well as whether to significantly tax gas and oil revenues and place it into an Israeli Sovereign Wealth Fund that would make long-term investments in the Israeli economy as China and many Arab OPEC nations do. [3]
Perhaps sensing that major oil and gas discoveries were being confirmed with potential to change the geopolitics of the entire region, the USGS launched its first-ever estimate of the total reserves of oil and gas in the broad region encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean including the Aegean Basin offshore Greece and Turkey and Cyprus, the Levant Basin offshore Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and the Nile Basin offshore Egypt. Their conclusion was impressive to put it mildly.
The USGS, using all data from previous drilling and geologic surveys of the region concluded, “undiscovered oil and gas resources of the Levant Basin Province amount to 1.68 billion barrels of oil, and 122 tcf of gas. Additionally, according to USGS estimates, “undiscovered oil and gas resources of the Nile Delta Basin Province (bounded by the Nile Cone to the west, by Strabo to the north, by the Pytheus and Cyprus Trenches to the east and by the Levant Basin to the south) are estimated to be approximately 1.76 bbl (of oil), and 223 tcf of natural gas.” [5]
The USGS calculated the total for the eastern Mediterranean as a whole currently at 345 tcf of gas and 3.4 billion barrels of oil. Suddenly the entire region is facing completely new geopolitical challenges and conflict potentials.
To put the numbers into perspective, the USGS estimates that Russia’s West Siberian Basin, the world’s largest known gas basin, holds 643 tcf of gas. As well, the Middle East and North Africa regions have several natural gas-rich areas, including the Rub Al Khali Basin (426 trillion cubic feet) in southwestern Saudi Arabia and Northern Yemen; the Greater Ghawar Uplift in eastern Saudi Arabia (227 tcf) and the Zagros Fold Belt (212 tcf) along the Persian Gulf and into Iraq and Iran. [6]
Just months earlier, securing foreign gas was a national security priority of Israel as existing domestic gas supplies dwindled dangerously low. Further adding to the energy crisis were the so-called Arab Spring protests sweeping across Egypt into Libya in early 2011. The revolts toppled Mubarak, under whose regime Egypt had supplied some 40% of Israeli natural gas. With Mubarak toppled and the ban lifted on Egypt’s Islamic parties, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and the radical Salafist Al-Nour Party, the gas pipeline delivering Egypt’s gas to Israel was target of repeated sabotage and disruptions, the most recent February of this year in northern Sinai. Israel was becoming more than nervous about its future energy security. [7]
Lebanon reaction fuels new frictions
Discovery of Leviathan by Israel in the waters offshore immediately triggered a new geopolitical conflict as Lebanon claimed that part of the gas field lay in Lebanese territorial waters in Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Lebanon delivered maps to the UN to back its claim, to which Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman retorted, “We won’t give an inch.”
The fly in the Mediterranean energy soup is the fact that Israel, like the USA, has never ratified the 1982 UN Convention on Law of the Sea dividing world subsea mineral rights. The Israeli gas wells at Leviathan are clearly within undisputed Israeli territory as Lebanon affirms, but Lebanon believes the field extends over into their subsea waters as well. The Lebanese Hezbollah claims that the Tamar gas field, which is due to begin gas deliveries by the end of this year, belongs to Lebanon.
Washington has lost no time adding political gasoline to the natural gas dispute between Lebanon and Israel. In July of 2011 as Israel prepared to submit its own proposal to the UN as to where the offshore demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel should run, Frederick Hof, US diplomat responsible for special affairs regarding Syria and Lebanon, told Lebanon that the Obama Administration endorsed the Lebanese document, adding to the growing tensions reported since outbreak of the Arab Spring between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Obama. [8]
 |
| Sheldon Adelson donates millions to support Republican candidates. |
In our next piece the added complication of oil and gas discoveries in the Aegean Sea will be examined.
[1] Charles Levinson, Guy Chazan, "Big Gas Find Sparks a Frenzy in Israel," The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2010.
[2] "Israel: Leviathan Holds More Gas Than Previously Estimated," Offshore Energy Today, December 19, 2011.
[3] "Israel has enough gas ’to become exporter,’" AFP, 29 December 2010.
[4] US Department of the Interior, "Levant basin holds 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2010–3014, March 2010-April 10, 2010.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Avi Bar-Eli and Itai Trilnick, "Forecast Blackout Israel is about to run out of natural gas: Shortage expected to last at least until next year, when the Tamar gas field starts production," Haaretz, February 2, 2012 . See also Reuters, Blast Hits Gas Pipeline Between Egypt, Jordan, Israel, 4 February 2012.
[8] Barak Ravid, "US Backs Lebanon on Maritime Border Dispute with Israel," Haaretz, July 10, 2011.
[9] "Sheldon Adelson Probe: Donations From Casino Owner Could Embarrass Republican Candidates," Reuters, February 8, 2012. For more on the Adelson-Gingrich-Romney-Netanyahu connection see, Max Blumenthal, "The Bibi Connection", Al-Akhbar.com, January 12, 2012.
http://www.voltairenet.org/Israel-s-Levant-Basin-a-new
[2] "Israel: Leviathan Holds More Gas Than Previously Estimated," Offshore Energy Today, December 19, 2011.
[3] "Israel has enough gas ’to become exporter,’" AFP, 29 December 2010.
[4] US Department of the Interior, "Levant basin holds 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2010–3014, March 2010-April 10, 2010.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Avi Bar-Eli and Itai Trilnick, "Forecast Blackout Israel is about to run out of natural gas: Shortage expected to last at least until next year, when the Tamar gas field starts production," Haaretz, February 2, 2012 . See also Reuters, Blast Hits Gas Pipeline Between Egypt, Jordan, Israel, 4 February 2012.
[8] Barak Ravid, "US Backs Lebanon on Maritime Border Dispute with Israel," Haaretz, July 10, 2011.
[9] "Sheldon Adelson Probe: Donations From Casino Owner Could Embarrass Republican Candidates," Reuters, February 8, 2012. For more on the Adelson-Gingrich-Romney-Netanyahu connection see, Max Blumenthal, "The Bibi Connection", Al-Akhbar.com, January 12, 2012.
http://www.voltairenet.org/Israel-s-Levant-Basin-a-new
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