War in The Middle East

[Illuminator]

Re: War in The Middle East

Which post are you talking about, because I can point to quite a few that weren't anything more than rants.

This one that I just had to repost.

[Կարմիր Բ]

Re: War in The Middle East

I love it how the americans threaten the world with their version of 'democracy', while their rulers are being elected by leaking the votes. Heck, they don't even have a parliamentary 'democracy', like here in Europe.

[Otto3]

Re: War in The Middle East

he was not elected i think... someone put him there for the second round... americans had an election no better than iraqis... even their puppet of puppet media covered the incident

[friend]

Re: War in The Middle East

at least we dont have to worry about haveing him our president again!

[Sip]

Re: War in The Middle East

I'm pretty sure Bush will go down as by far the worst president up to his time (maybe ever). I don't think the true ramifications of all the crap he has done, including the skyrocketting national debt will be realized till long after he goes away.

[friend]

Re: War in The Middle East

If george bush was smarter he would end the war not help it to become more dangerous for the other's. I mena look remeber we never had this much problem back in the day's. Ya once a while we had little problem's but i mena look at wth is going on now. look how much sh*t has happened sence george bush has been president.

[Sip]

Re: War in The Middle East

If you had any brains, you would have realized that such destruction actually helps Allah and his earth bound agents

That's ok. I already know EVERYTHING that happens is bad for Israel and Good for Allah. I have been glancing over your posts. Don't worry I know ... People get killed, cities and towns get destroyed, Allah wins and you get to use "". Great. And yah I don't have any brains yet you somehow feel the need to reply to my idiotic posts and anger the moderators.

If I'm so stupid, how come you get so touchy about my posts feeling the need to reupdate your insults? But don't worry bud. I'll be traveling in the next few weeks with almost no internet access so you'll be uninterrupted in your glorification of muslims and Allah.

[D3ADSY]

Re: War in The Middle East

An interesting article I came across, it's worth reading it all and difficult to just highlight specific points for people to skim through, but I tried.

Israel, Not Hizbullah, is Putting Civilians in Danger on Both Sides of the Border



War of Media Deception



By JONATHAN COOK in Nazareth

Counterpunch

August 3, 2006



Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ... among women and children'. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side represents a kind of victory."



You probably did not read far before realising that I had switched "Israel" for "Hizbullah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah". The paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at deception was futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the kind expressed above can be levelled against Israel.



Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hizbullah is using the Lebanese population as "human shields", hiding its fighters, arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. "Cowardly" behaviour rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the spiralling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of Hizbullah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in the face of the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human Rights Watch.



Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians indiscriminately in Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians. Our research shows that Israel's claim that Hezbollah [sic] fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."



HRW has analysed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air strikes and found that more than 40 per cent of the dead are children: 63 out of 153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the civilian death toll so far at over 500. Lebanese hospital records suggest the figure is now well over 750, with potentially many more bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble of buildings obliterated by Israeli attacks.



Giving the lie to the "human shields" theory, HRW says its researchers "found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army] launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians."



In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could find no evidence that Hizbullah was operating in or near the areas that were attacked by the Israeli air force. Roth states: "The image that Israel has promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of so high a civilian death toll is wrong. In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."



The impression that Hizbullah is using civilians as human shields has been reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli statements that have "blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, arguing that only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all are legitimate targets of attack."



Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan Egeland, he says Hizbullah fighters are "cowardly blending" with Lebanon's civilian population. It is difficult to know what to make of this observation. If Freedland means that Hizbullah fighters come from Lebanese towns and villages and have families living there whom they visit and live among, he is right. But exactly the same can be said of Israel and its soldiers, who return from the battlefront (in this case inside Lebanon, as they are now an invading army) to live with parents or spouses in Israeli communities. Armed and uniformed soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in trains, queuing in banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that mean they are "cowardly blending' with Israel's civilian population?



Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more than blaming Hizbullah fighters for not standing in open fields waiting to be picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That, presumably, would be brave. But in reality no army fights in this way, and Hizbullah can hardly be criticised for using the only strategic defences it has: its underground bunkers and the crumbling fortifications of Lebanese villages ruined by Israeli pounding. An army defending itself from invasion has to make the most of whatever protection it can find -- as long as it does not intentionally put civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly that Hizbullah is not doing this.



So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value government and army statements that Hizbullah's strikes into Israel are targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more serious investigation?



Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not be quick to demonise it either -- unless there is convincing evidence suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules governing both its domestic media and visiting foreign journalists to prevent meaningful discussion of what Hizbullah has been trying to hit inside Israel.



I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young brothers. The attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hizbullah was indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was happy to kill Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be easily dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilisations" philosophy not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah, Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.



But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake -- something Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a military weapons factory and a large military camp. Hizbullah knows the locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.



One of Hizbullah's first rocket attacks after the outbreak of hostilities -- after Israel went on the bombing offensive by blitzing targets across Lebanon -- was on a kibbutz overlooking the border with Lebanon. Some foreign correspondents noted at the time (though given Israel's press censorship laws I cannot confirm) that the rocket strike targeted a top-secret military traffic control centre built into the Galilee's hills.



There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or inside Israel's northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth, for example, Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on top of an Arab town -- so close to it, in fact, that the factory's perimeter fence is only a few metres from the main building of the local junior school. There have been reports of rockets landing close to that Arab community.



How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the Israeli and foreign media was highlighted recently when it was widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket had landed "near a hospital" in a named Israeli city, not the first time that such a claim has been made over the past few weeks. I cannot name the city, again because of Israel's press censorship laws and because I also want to point out that very "near" that hospital is an army camp. The media suggested that Hizbullah was trying to hit the hospital, but it is also more than possible it was trying to strike -- and may have struck -- the army camp.



Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to misrepresent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an indiscriminate strike against civilian targets.



Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any reports touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted to the country's military censor, but few media are pointing this out in their reporting. Most justify this deception to themselves on the grounds that in practice they never run their reports by the censor as it would delay publication.



Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by self-censoring their reporting on security issues or by relying on what has already been published in the Israeli media on the assumption that in these ways they are unlikely to contravene the rules.



An email memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a week ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the organisation's reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems noted above, observing that "the more general we are, the free-er hand we have; more specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The editor says the channel will notify viewers of these restrictions in "the narrative of the story". "The teams on the ground will make clear what they can and cannot say -- and if necessary make clear that we're operating under reporting restrictions." In practice, however, BBC correspondents, like most of their media colleagues, rarely alert us to the fact they are operating under censorship, and self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the full picture of what is happening.



Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions that cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his article that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one". He is right, but does not seem to know who is really winning the propaganda offensive.

Source

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

Missiles neutralizing Israeli tanks

Hezbollah's sophisticated anti-tank missiles are perhaps the guerrilla group's deadliest weapon in Lebanon fighting, with their ability to pierce Israel's most advanced tanks. Experts say this is further evidence that Israel is facing a well-equipped army in this war, not a ragtag militia. Hezbollah has fired Russian-made Metis-M anti-tank missiles and owns European-made Milan missiles, the army confirmed on Friday. In the last two days alone, these missiles have killed seven soldiers and damaged three Israeli-made Merkava tanks — mountains of steel that are vaunted as symbols of Israel's military might, the army said. Israeli media say most of the 44 soldiers killed in four weeks of fighting were hit by anti-tank missiles.

"They (Hezbollah guerrillas) have some of the most advanced anti-tank missiles in the world," said Yossi Kuperwasser, a senior military intelligence officer who retired earlier this summer. "This is not a militia, it's an infantry brigade with all the support units," Kuperwasser said. Israel contends that Hezbollah gets almost all of its weaponry from Syria and by extension Iran, including its anti-tank missiles. That's why cutting off the supply chain is essential — and why fighting Hezbollah after it has spent six years building up its arsenal is proving so painful to Israel, officials say. Israel's Merkava tanks boast massive amounts of armor and lumber and resemble fortresses on tracks. They are built for crew survival, according to Globalsecurity.org, a Washington-based military think tank. Hezbollah celebrates when it destroys one.

"A Zionist armored force tried to advance toward the village of Chihine. The holy warriors confronted it and destroyed two Merkava tanks," the group proclaimed on television Thursday. The Israeli army confirmed two attacks on Merkava tanks that day — one that killed three soldiers and the other killing one. The three soldiers who were killed on Friday were also killed by anti-tank missiles, the army said. It would not say whether the missiles disabled the tanks.

"To the best of my understanding, they (Hezbollah) are as well-equipped as any standing unit in the Syrian or Iranian armies," said Eran Lerman, a retired army colonel and now director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American xxxish Committee. "This is not a rat-pack guerrilla, this is an organized militia." Besides the anti-tank missiles, Hezbollah is also known to have a powerful rocket-propelled grenade known as the RPG29. These weapons are also smuggled through Syria, an Israeli security official said, and were previously used by Palestinian militants in Gaza to damage tanks.

On Friday, Jane's Defense Weekly, a defense industry magazine, reported that Hezbollah asked Iran for "a constant supply of weapons" to support its operations against Israel. The report cited Western diplomatic sources as saying that Iranian authorities promised Hezbollah a steady supply of weapons "for the next stage of the confrontation." Top Israeli intelligence officials say they have seen Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers on the ground with Hezbollah troops. They say that permission to fire Hezbollah's longer-range missiles, such as those could reach Tel Aviv, would likely require Iranian go-ahead. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060805/...lah_s_missiles

Some of Hizbollah's Anti-Tank Arsenal

Sagger Anti-Tank Missile: http://warfare.ru/?lang=&linkid=2202&catid=261



Milan Anti-Tank Missile: http://www.army-technology.com/projects/milan/



Metis-M Anti-Tank Missile: http://naoruzanje.paracin.co.yu/metis.html



Kornet Anti-Tank Missile: http://www.army-technology.com/projects/kornet/

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

Seems like another HORRIBLE day for Allah

If you had any brains, you would have realized that such destruction actually helps Allah and his earth bound agents