Now for the big question, is Hezbollah a "terrorist" organization? Most of the world does not think so. An interesting article in today's Guardian explains:

Interestingly, some of the earliest suicide bombings commonly attributed to Hizbullah, such as the 1983 attacks on the US embassy and marine barracks in Beirut, were believed by American intelligence sources at the time to have been orchestrated by the Iraqi Dawa party. Hizbullah barely existed in 1983 and Dawa cadres are said to have been instrumental in setting it up at Tehran's behest. Dawa's current leadership includes none other than the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, feted last week in London and Washington as the great hope for the future of the Middle East. As the old saying goes, today's terrorist is tomorrow's statesman - at least when it suits us.

and this very interesting comment on why the US calls organizations like Hezbollah terrorist:

The US state department's annual reports on terrorism also list operations carried out against the Israeli Defence Force as examples of terrorism. The US government justifies this conclusion by way of a logical contortion that defines Israeli troops as "non-combatants", despite the fact that Israel continues to occupy territory in Lebanon and Palestine with military force. The intention is not just to stamp out terrorism as commonly understood, but also to stigmatise perfectly legitimate acts of resistance.

The NYT can at times be comical. In an article entitled "From Carnage, U.S. Gains a Concession" we are told:

The contents of the diplomatic package are basically set, and Bush officials said Ms. Rice would lay out its terms on Monday. Under the proposal, Israel and Lebanon would agree to a cease-fire as part of a larger pact that would include installing 15,000 to 20,000 international peacekeepers throughout southern Lebanon, American and Israeli officials said. The Lebanese government would work to disband Hezbollah, and the United States and other countries would funnel money and send military officials to help train the Lebanese Army, so that it could work to prevent future attacks on Israel. Israel would agree to talks on whether it would withdraw from a disputed border area known as Shabaa Farms, a Hezbollah demand.

Where to start?

So the US needed carnage to “gain a concession”? The enormous aid the US gives the state of Israel gave it no leverage?

The Lebanese army will be trained “so that it could work to prevent future attacks on Israel”? I was under the impression that that was the role of the Israeli army, which already gets massive aid from the US. Surely the role of the Lebanese army should be to prevent attacks BY Israel.

Hezbollah should be disbanded. The force that was most fundamental in freeing Lebanon from decades of Israeli occupation should be disbanded? Why?

And Israel's "concessions" in all this? To "agree to talks on whether it would withdraw from a disputed border area known as Shabaa Farms". How painful. And while I know that the dispute about the Shabaa farms is about whether they are part of Lebanon or Syria. But the naive reader will think that the dispute is about whether these are occupied in the first place.

Bush/Blair/Olmert are helping to unify the Middle East. From a poll in Lebanon:

The survey showed 87 percent support for Hizbullah's retaliatory attacks on northern Israel.

The survey showed that a large majority of Lebanese do not consider the US to be an honest mediator (89.5 percent). A similar survey conducted by the Beirut Center for Research and Information published in As-Safir on January 31 showed 38.2 percent support for the US role in Lebanon. This drop is due to the close political cooperation between the US and Israel.

The war on Lebanon continues (bbc):

More than 54 civilians, at least 34 of them children, have been killed in a town in south Lebanon in the deadliest Israeli strike of the conflict so far.

As we all know, because Bush told us so, while explaining the lack of urgency in getting a cease fire:

And secondly, it's really important for people to understand that terrorists are trying to stop the advance of freedom, and therefore, it's essential that we do what's right and not necessarily what appears to be immediately popular.

and, as we all know, because we were told so by the Israeli minister of justice (!!!!), this is a perfectly justified step in the war on terror:

Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah.

If people remembered past last week, they would recall the name of the village where this happened, Qana

Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.

As usual, Rami G. Khouri makes interesting points in the Daily Star:

Two important markers of Arab public opinion emerged this week. The first is the Saudi Arabian royal court statement issued Wednesday warning against the "grave and unpredictable consequences" of the continued Israeli aggression against Lebanon. It simultaneously appealed to and warned the international community - with the US singled out by name - that if the Arab offer to live in peace with Israel fell victim to Israeli "arrogance," only the war option would remain. For the normally discreet, patient and peaceful Saudis to issue such a statement was about a strong a signal as we are ever likely to get of elite Arab concern with the consequences of the current mood among Arab publics.

The second important marker is a national public opinion poll of Lebanese, conducted this week by the respected Beirut Center for Research and Information with Lebanese-American University political science professor Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, measuring public attitudes to the current situation. The striking results showed 87 percent of all Lebanese supported Hizbullah's military response to the Israeli attacks (including, notably, 89 percent of Sunnis and 80 percent of Christians). Five months ago, just 58 percent supported the resistance movement's right to remain armed. And 89 percent of respondents said the US was not an honest broker and did not respond positively to Lebanon's concerns.
...
Most Arabs ignore their regimes and applaud or support those who actively resist Anglo-American-Israeli aggression. The face of Arab public opinion will continue to change in these directions, until legitimate grievances are redressed and people throughout the Arab world feel they are treated like dignified human beings rather than disposable animals.

How can Thomas Friedman be regarded as an expert on the Middle East?
From his latest diarrhoea:

And I mean madness. We've seen Sunni Muslims in Iraq suicide-bomb a Shiite mosque on Ramadan; we've seen Shiite militiamen torture Sunnis in Iraq by drilling holes in their heads with power tools; we've seen Jordanian Islamist parliamentarians mourning the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though he once blew up a Jordanian wedding; we've seen hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses; and we've seen Israel retaliating by, at times, leveling whole buildings, with the guilty and the innocent inside.

According to the wise man, the Israelis "retaliate", "at times", whereas the Moslems...

No doubt the 700 civilians killed by the Israelis in Lebanon are all accidents.

Friedman sees "hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses" but not the thousands of Palestinians killed during the same period by Israeli, US supplied weapons. He does not see the tens of thousands of Palestinians made homeless. He does not see the millions having their lives made hell by a 40 year occupation.

He forgets the tens of thousands killed in Lebanon in previous Israeli invasions.

He forgets to mention the 10s (maybe 100s) of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans killed by US and UK forces in Bush's war of terror.

No, all he sees is Moslem attrocities and Israeli accidents, all caused by lack of modernity of them thar Arbs.

From the daily star

Hizbullah has already agreed to a five-point package that can be quickly implemented once a cease-fire is in place: the exchange of prisoners, and end to Israel's occupation of the Shebaa Farms, maps of Israeli-laid mindefields in South Lebanon, an end to Israeli air, land and sea incursions into Lebanese territory, and the deployment of the Lebanese Army in South Lebanon. If Israel is actually serious about not returning to the previous status quo - or to an even worse future - these five points provide an excellent formula for reaching that objective.

Sir Stephen Wall, a former top foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair, writing in the New Statesman:

There are times, such as the past two weeks, when a British prime minister should have been thinking less about private influence and more about public advocacy. Could the Prime Minister really not speak up for the simple proposition that the slaughter of innocent people in Lebanon, the destruction of their country and the ruin of half a million lives were wrong and should stop immediately? "What kind of ceasefire?" Blair asks. One that stopped the horror, even for 24 hours, would be a start.

Fisk has been writing about Lebanon. Interesting little vignette:

The only civilian walking these frightening roads was a goatherd, shepherding his animals around the huge craters. Talking to him, it emerged that he was almost stone deaf and could not hear the bombs. In this, it seemed, he had a lot in common with Condoleezza Rice.

Lebanese Prime Minister Signora says:

"what future other than one of fear, frustration, financial ruin and fanaticism can stem from the rubble?" "Is the value of human life less than in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?" "Can the international community continue to stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted upon us?" "Is this what is called legitimate self-defence?"

The result of the summit:

For an immediate ceasefire: UN, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Jordan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Canada and Cyprus
Against: US and Britain.
Result: no immediate ceasefire

Israel's response:

"We received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world... to continue the operation," Justice Minister Haim Ramon said.

He said that in order to prevent casualties among Israeli soldiers battling Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon, villages should be flattened by the Israeli air force before ground troops move in.

"All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah," Mr Ramon said.

We have been warned. Let no one say "we did not know".

And remember that Dianne Feinstein's only statement on all this is: "we will not waver in our support", support for the Israeli government, whatever its policies, not support for civilians of any ethnicity killed in this conflict.

In the washington post we get this

The Rice delegation also hinted that it was exploring actions against outside governments subverting Lebanon's sovereignty, Welch said. The United States strongly believes that Iran in particular facilitated and encouraged the July 12 Hezbollah cross-border raid that seized two Israeli soldiers and sparked the crisis. The administration also holds Syria responsible for abetting the radical Shiite Muslim group."

The "amusing" part is that Condi does not see Israel's actions as "subverting Lebanon's sovereignty", as of course the US did not subvert Iraq's sovereignty. From a different perspective, see At the heart of the Lebanon crisis lie the lethal mistakes of George Bush:

As for complaints from Britain and Europe about the 390 civilians killed in Lebanon, those are a reminder of the more than 3,000 civilians killed in the 2001 onslaught against Afghanistan: how was that proportionate exactly? Kim Howells was right to be appalled by what he saw in Beirut. But he surely would have been just as shocked had he visited the Iraqi city of Falluja after the Americans had turned it to rubble.

Interesting too that the New York Times uses this title Israel to Occupy Area of Lebanon as Security Zone to inform us of the killing of UN observers by Israeli forces.

The BBC reports:
Israel troops 'ignored' UN plea

UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says.

but does not neglect to carry a long piece informing us how Israel is behaving completely correctly.

On Sunday Dianne Feinstein chose to attend a "Israel Solidarity Rally"

Stand Against Terrorism... Stand With Israel
Stand Together

Join Senator Dianne Feinstein in Supporting Israel THIS Sunday, July 23 at 12 NOON at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco!

Original invite here.


This is while the Israeli actions have led to some 400 civilian deaths and 500,000 refugees.

This morning, in the New York Times, in an article titled To Flee or to Stay? Family Chooses Too Late and Pays Dearly, we read:

An Israeli rocket, which Lebanese officials said was likely fired from a helicopter, slammed into the center of the Shaitos’ van as it sped round a bend a few miles west of their village, and the van crashed into a hillside. Three occupants were killed: an uncle, Mohammad; the grandmother, Nazira; and a Syrian man who had guarded their home. The missile also critically wounded Mrs. Shaito and her sister. Eleven others suffered less severe wounds.