Category Archive 'Hezbollah'
30 Jul 2006

Qana Bombing: Hezbollah Responsible

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The media, the Lebanese Red Cross, and the government of Lebanon are all playing Hezbollah’s game by pointing to civilian casualties and whining over the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana, a base used to fire hundreds of rockets at Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert inappropriately expressed “great sorrow” for the airstrikes, which could only have produced civilian casualties among Hezbollah supporters who deliberately ignored leaflets and other warnings from the Israeli Defense Forces to evacuate the war zone.

AP

At least one media voice is reporting the truth, the Australian Herald Sun has published a series of photographs of the cowardly insurgents deliberately hiding (with heavy weapons) in residential areas, titled Photos that damn Hezbollah .

29 Jul 2006

Best Song Since Hadji Girl

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Do not miss this Israeli war song with a catchy beat.

Chorus:

Yalla ya Nasrallah, we will screw you Inshallah
We’ll send you back to Allah with all the Hezbollah

video – (Hebrew, with English subtitles)

————————-
Hat tip to Sondra K, who gives it a 10.

28 Jul 2006

War Not Going Well For Hezbollah

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BREAKING NEWS

AP reports that the government of Lebanon has announced Hezbollah’s acceptance of a peace proposal:

Hezbollah politicians, while expressing reservations, have joined their critics in the government in agreeing to a peace package that includes strengthening an international force in south Lebanon and disarming the guerrillas, the government said.

Israel should finish the job.

27 Jul 2006

Dealing With The New Reality

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Dr. Demarche, at Austin Bay, identifies the problems attendant upon responses by states to attacks by non-state entities.

Israel is not at war with the state of Lebanon; it is at war with a “non-state actor” in the parlance (Hezbollah), which happens to be in Lebanon. This is a fairly new concept in the era of the modern state. Barbarians, for example, may have besieged ancient Rome, but at the time the “state” was a minority. Today the state system is firmly entrenched, and the “barbarians” are largely within. My question is this, now what?

Groups such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and others cross borders at will, their memberships are ideologically homogeneous, but diverse in nationality. Efforts to destroy these organizations are bound to cross multiple borders, as we have already seen, something for which international law and the so-called international community (which supported Israel’s withdrawal from the very territories that are now the launch points for cross border attacks by terrorists) are woefully unprepared. Should you have any doubt of this I offer the talks in Rome this week as proof. Those engaged in finding a solution to the current state of affairs should keep one thought in the back of their minds: this will not be the last time the world will have to face such an event.

Traditional methods of sanction appear to be non-applicable to entities such as these- how do states sanction organizations that transcend borders and are privately funded? No mechanism exists to hold non-state actors accountable for their actions, even though they now have the potential to cause the same, or even greater, level of destruction than do many states.

Global policy maker must shift their thinking. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the like are not organizations that can be “contained”, they do not field armies that can be squared off against and defeated. In a way they are reminiscent of Mao’s idea that “the people are like water and the army is like fish”, but these fish swim in every sea. The current battle may rage in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, but the bottom line is that this is a battle between a state and a non-state actor, and the world is not prepared to deal with this new reality, even today. Let’s hope those working to settle the current battle keep their eyes on this bigger picture, too.

27 Jul 2006

How To Destroy Israel

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At the Nav Log, ip568 compares Israel’s current situation with his own childhood experiences. The liberals apparenty have all led sheltered lives, and just don’t understand these things.

26 Jul 2006

The Muslim Way of War

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Cartoon comment from Cox & Forkum.

25 Jul 2006

Distinguishing the Decent From the Indecent Left

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Dennis Prager identifies a key benchmark.

I believe the Left has been wrong on virtually every great moral issue in the last 30 years…

In just about every instance, one could say that the Left was foolish, the Left was naive, the Left was wrong, even that the Left was dangerous. But in all of those cases, one could imagine a decent person holding any or even all of these positions.

But we now have a bright line that divides the decent — albeit usually wrong — Left from the indecent Left.

The Left’s anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the “cycle of violence” between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation…

Anyone on the Left who cannot see this is either bad, a useful idiot for Islamic terrorists, anti-Semitic or all three. There is no other explanation for morally condemning Israel’s war on Hezbollah.

Read the whole thing.

24 Jul 2006

UN Troops Previously Helped Hezbollah Kidnappers

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David Kopel, at the Volokh Conspiracy, in response to demands for UN peacekeeping, notes the case a few years back in which Indian members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were successfully bribed by Hezbollah to assist in an act of terrorism.

UNIFIL’s most notorious collaboration with terrorists involved the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers, and the subsequent cover-up.

On October 7, 2000, Hezbollah terrorists entered Israel, attacked three Israeli soldiers on Mount Dov, and abducted them Lebanon. The kidnapping was witnessed by several dozen UNIFIL soldiers who stood idle. One of the soldier witnesses described the kidnapping: the terrorists set of an explosive which stunned the Israeli soldiers. Clad in UN uniforms, the terrorists called out, “Come, come, we’ll help you.”

The Israeli soldiers approached the men in UN uniforms. Then, a Hezbollah bomb detonated—-apparently prematurely. It wounded the disguised Hezbollah commander, and three Israeli soldiers.

Two other terrorists in U.N. uniforms dragged their Hezbollah commander and the three wounded soldiers into a getaway car.

According an Indian solider in UNIFIL who witnessed the kidnapping, “By this stage, there was a big commotion and dozens of UN soldiers from the Indian brigade came around.” The witness stated that the brigade knew that the kidnappers in UN uniform were Hezbollah. One soldiers said that the brigade should arrest the Hezbollah, but the brigade did nothing.

According to the Indian soldier, the UNFIL brigade in the area “could have prevented the kidnapping.”

“I’m very sorry about what happened, because we saw what happened,” he said. Hezbollah “were wearing our uniforms and it was too bad we didn’t stop them.”

It appears that at least four of the UNIFIL “peacekeepers,” all from India, has received bribes from Hezbollah in order to assist the kidnapping by helping them get to the kidnapping spot and find the Israeli soldiers. Some of the bribery involved alcohol and Lebanese women.

The Indian brigade later had a bitter internal argument, as some members complained that the brigade had betrayed its peacekeeping mandate. An Indian government investigation sternly criticized the brigade’s conduct.

There is evidence of far greater payments by Hezbollah to the UNIFIL Indian brigade, including hundreds of thousands of dollars for assistance in the kidnapping and cover-up.

The UN cover-up began almost immediately.

22 Jul 2006

Israeli Source Claims Iran Has Assumed War Command and Is Airlifting Missiles To Lebanon

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Alleged Mossad-mouthpiece Depkafile reports:

Syria placed its army on war preparedness, pointed Scuds at Israel from Thursday, July 20, the day Tehran took control of Lebanon War… sources add Syrian fighter pilots are sitting in their cockpits.

These orders went out from Syrian president Bashar Assad July 20 when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards commander Brig.-Gen Yahya Rahim Safavi assumed command of the Lebanon war from Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Tehran’s direct military intervention in the conflict was accompanied by an Iranian weapons airlift which began landing Wednesday, July 19, at the Abu Ad Duhur military airfield north of Homs. The deliveries include large quantities of new missiles, including the long-range Zelzal and Fajr 3 and Fajr 5 missiles, Katyusha rockets, anti-tank and anti-air missiles sent out from RG HQ in Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf.

Assad acted on the assumption that Israel, whose air force and ground forces are already hammering the cross-border supply routes north of the Litani River to block the passage of Iranian hardware to Hizballah, will soon decide to go for Iranian military operations in Damascus and Abu Ad Duhur.

Gen. Safavi has set up two forward command posts which coordinate war operations with Hizballah chief of staff Ibrahim Akil.

One center is working out of a cellar of the Iranian embassy in Beirut to regulate Hizballah rocket fire against Israel and direct the groups of 3 or 4 RG officers taking part in every Hizballah face-to-face engagement with Israeli ground troops in the south.

The second, housed in the basement of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, is in charge of communications, intelligence and getting hardware into Lebanon.

The deliveries were made to the Abu Ad Duhur airfield because it belongs to the joint Iranian-Syrian Scud missile factory which employs a large number of Iranian
engineers and technicians.

(Last sentence edited for clarity -JDZ:)
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Hizballah in Lebanon (has received) some of the Iranian arms notwithstanding intense Israeli cutoff operations and (predict that) their impact will probably be palpable in the coming days.

20 Jul 2006

The Manchester Beobachter

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Martin Rowson, Britain’s answer to Ted Rall, in the Guardian yesterday published the above cartoon, expressing the left’s irrational view of the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah terrorist operating out of Lebanon: Israel, having been attacked, is a knuckleduster-wielding bully for defending her own people. The Hezbollah-sympathising, rocket-harboring civilian population of Southern Lebanon is a helpless child, beaten by Israel who is being egged on by Bush. Hezbollah is an elusive hornet, depicted as too agile for clumsy Israel.

The shamelessly anti-Semitic imagery did cause the Guardian some embarassment, provoking this rather farcical “Who, us?” denial:

That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.

19 Jul 2006

Hezbollah Using Pesticide-Coated Shrapnel Against Israeli Civilians

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Reuters reports that Human Rights Watch has actually protested Hezbollah’s use of ballbearings to modify its rocket warheads into antipersonnel weapons aimed deliberately at Israeli civilians.

Hezbollah’s attacks in Israel on Sunday and Monday were at best indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas, at worst the deliberate targeting of civilians. Either way, they were serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

Attacking civilian areas indiscriminately is a serious violation of international humanitarian law and can constitute a war crime…

.. the warheads used suggest a desire to maximize harm to civilians. Some of the rockets launched against Haifa over the past two days contained hundreds of metal ball bearings that are of limited use against military targets but cause great harm to civilians and civilian property. The ball bearings lodge in the body and cause serious harm.

Michael Kraft, posting at the Counterterrorism Blog, adds details of a revolting tactic.

There also have been reports that the metal fragments are sometimes dipped into a pesticide, in order to maximize the damage to the victims and make it more difficult for doctors to effectively treat their patients. However there has been little public reporting in the western media of this tactic, which causes torture to the victims who survive the original blast and additional agony for their families and friends.

Let’s hope Israel gets to apply “a proportionate response” to all those responsible.

18 Jul 2006

Exploiting the Gaps in the Westphalian System

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Austin Bay notes the way in which Iran and Syria take advantage of illusory concepts of nation-state sovereignty to hide behind “Lebanon” while using surrogates to make war on Israel.

When fired from positions in southern Lebanon or Gaza, the extended-range Katyushas place roughly sixty percent of Israel’s population in range. (That’s my estimate.) All of Israel’s major cities and towns may soon be a bull’s eye— Hezbollah leaders boast of striking beyond Haifa and “beyond beyond Haifa.” Indeed, there are indications that longer range rockets are being employed. These rockets are “FROG-type” — free rocket over ground. They lack guidance systems but have more reach. They may be able to carry chemical warheads (the Russian series of FROGs could carry chemical warheads).

But now for the layer complexity: Hezbollah hides these weapons among apartment houses and in villages— other words, nests of rockets in neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods and villages are controlled by Hezbollah, not the Lebanese government.

Israel is being fired upon from a Lebanon that “is not quite Lebanon” in a truly sovereign sense.The rockets, of course, come from “somewhere,” but Hezbollah’s “somewhere” is a political limbo in terms of maps with definitive geo-political boundaries. Lebanon is a “failed state”— a peculiar failed state (its not Somalia), but nevertheless failed. It will continue to fail so long as the Lebanese government cannot control Hezbollah—and control means disarm.

So Hezbollah attacks Israel with ever more-powerful, longer-range rockets, then hides behind the diplomatic facade of the greater Lebanese nation state.

Thus terrorists and terror-empowering nations, like Iran and Syria, abuse the nation-state system— or exploit a “dangerous hole” in the system..

Iran and Syria then appeal to the United Nations (a product of the Westphalian “nation state” system) to condemn Israel for attacking Lebanon— when Israel is attacking Hezbollah, which “is and is not Lebanon.”

H/t to Glenn Reynolds.

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