Three weeks after launching massive air strikes on Lebanon and attempting several ground offensives, the Terrorist State of Israeli apartheid state has failed to achieve any tangible military results. But the widespread destruction it has wreaked has generated world outrage!! The continued opposition by the lightly armed but highly organised Hezbollah has shown the world that Israel, even with its endless supply of Criminal Bush high-tech weapons, is no longer invincible. But this hated proxy for U.S. imperialism is very murderous. It has called up thousands of additional troops and is intensifying its offensive using U.S.-supplied tanks, planes, armored earth movers and bunker-buster bombs.This ruthless all-out war, which is against both the Lebanese and Palestinian people, is not due to the capture of one Israeli soldier in Gaza or two in Lebanon, as Tel Aviv says. Nor was the massacre perpetrated by Zionist missiles in the Lebanese town of Qana due to a targeting error or faulty intelligence on the part of the Israeli command. Israel had launched a U.S. missile that destroyed a well-marked, well-known United Nations observation post in southern Lebanon, killing four UN personnel. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan charged the targeting of the post by Israeli forces was "apparently deliberate." The direct hit on the UN observation post took place after eight hours of phone calls from UN headquarters in New York to the Israeli command, telling them to cease its shelling in the area. As in past Israeli invasions, the attack on the post forced the UN to withdraw forces it had stationed to mark a cease-fire line. It is important to understand that this is the way Israel has fought every war. It has invaded Lebanon five times in the past 30 years. It has also invaded Jordan, Egypt and Syria and bombed Iraq—all with full U.S. diplomatic, political and military support. Since the creation of this illegitimate Child aka Zionist state of Israel, well-publicised, targeted massacres of hundreds of civilians have been used to force the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians and to empty out wide areas of their land. The destruction of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin is only the most infamous of the 33 massacres that forced 75 percent of the Palestinian people off their land in 1948. In the 60 years since then, Terrorist Israel has continued to seize more land and expel more Palestinians while refusing to allow any of them the right to return. Israel has a history of using massacres to intimidate a population under occupation. In 1982 after Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon all the way up to Beirut to force the withdrawal of Palestinian resistance fighters, it sent death squads into the disarmed Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of defenseless refugees were executed. Ariel Sharon’s role in this massacre was so well known that even the Kahan Commission set up by the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, found him guilty of war crimes. He was then dismissed as Israeli defense minister. This hardly hurt his support among hard-core Zionists. He never served a day in prison and went on to become prime minister. Zionist military policy has drawn on tactics, including massacres to drive out indigenous people, that have been used by the U.S. ever since its wars against the Native peoples in North America. Massacres of civilians who supported resistance to U.S. imperialism were used extensively in Washington’s wars in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam. In the 1991 U.S. war on Iraq, in an effort to break the people’s morale, the Pentagon fired two laser-guided "smart bombs" directly into the well-marked Amariyah bomb shelter in Baghdad, filled with civilian families. The number of people estimated to have been incinerated by the missiles ranges from 500 to 1,500.

Despite decades of U.S. sanctioned and financed aggression, Israel is always described in the corporate media as an army defending itself from attack. Both Gaza and Lebanon are portrayed as quiet until Hamas or Hezbollah initiate attacks. Nothing could be further from the truth. After the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah forced Israel to withdraw its occupying troops in 2000, Israel routinely bombed, raided and violated Lebanon and continued to occupy its Shabaa Farms area. This May, Israel again bombed Lebanon and assassinated two Palestin ian activists. As a further provocation, it bombed areas in the south that support Hezbollah. All this was barely mentioned in the U.S. corporate media. Israel also continued to hold hundreds of Lebanese prisoners in violation of a prisoner exchange agreement. Hezbollah made it clear that it captured the two Israeli soldiers in order to facilitate an exchange of prisoners with Israel. Claiming self-defense, Israel used the seizure of the two soldiers as a pretext to launch an all-out war that it and the U.S. had been planning for more than a year. It was only after Israel had bombed Lebanese cities, including the capital, Beirut, had smashed Beirut’s infrastructure of electricity, water and communications, had destroyed its port and airport, and had bombed convoys of fleeing civilians that Hezbollah responded by firing rockets at Israeli cities. Although Hezbollah’s rockets are far smaller than Israel’s missiles, not as accurate and do far less damage, this was one of the few times in all the decades of Zionist attacks on surrounding countries that major Israeli cities had themselves come under sustained attack. Never theless, Israel, with full U.S. backing, has refused to end its aggression despite calls from all over the world for a cease-fire. While Israel has tried to destroy the infrastructure of Lebanon in preparation for an invasion, for the first time it has had great difficulty moving beyond the border because of Hezbollah’s stiff resistance and careful preparation of tunnels and bunkers. To the south of Israel, in Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians are concentrated, Israeli aggression has never ended. When Hamas won a democratic election there in January, both the U.S. and Israel responded by attempting to starve and divide the entire population. Aid, credits and loans were cut off. Even Palestinian tax revenue was illegally withheld. Shipping and transport was halted. Work permits were denied en masse. On June 9, more than two weeks before an Israeli soldier was seized in a Pales tin ian commando operation, an Israeli missile attack had killed a Palestinian family of seven picnicking on a Gaza beach. On July 13 another Israeli missile killed nine Palestinian civilians and two activists. On June 24, the day before the soldier was captured, Israel captured a Palestinian doctor and his brother in Gaza. But after the capture of its soldier, Israel, claiming self-defense, kidnapped dozens of democratically elected parliamentary representatives and cabinet members. It destroyed the only power plant in Gaza and bombed apartment blocks, ambulances and schools. The corporate media continue in all news coverage to present these crimes as Israel’s justified response to totally unprovoked attacks.

A cornered beast can become more dangerous. The U.S./Israeli inability to defeat Hezbollah may lead them to commit even more desperate measures and greater crimes. With the U.S. unable to break the resistance in Iraq or create a stable puppet government there, the assault on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon may be the next stage in a far wider war: a full-scale military assault on Syria and Iran. The Bush administration has made it clear that it is supporting the Israeli offensive because imperialism is determined to shape a "new Middle East." Yet everywhere its plans are in deep disarray. In the face of such dire threats, what is called for is an aroused global movement that stands in full solidarity with all the peoples under attack—be they Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian or Iraqi.

Thanks for the report Kevin. Stay safe.

carizmatic123, to hear you say it in your fancy commentary, the Arabs are truly GOLDEN. You need to see a SHRINK. I guess bombing buses and cafes among other places is something you are blind to or chose to be blind to.

Once again, in predictably worthless fashion, there are charges about serious violations of international humanitarian law by Zionist Defense Forces in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. IDF have murdered more than 900 unarmed civilians. The Fake state of Israel claims it is taking all possible measures to minimise civilian harm, but the cases documented reveal a systematic failure by the this terrorist entity of Israel to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Just today it killed 40 un-armed men in cold blood-- all farmers working on their fields. It should be common knowledge this illegitimate State of Israel is an outlaw, criminal state and has violated every humanitarian law on the books since its inception in 1948. It should be, but in fact it isn’t, as the media whores continue to portray so called “Israel” as a poor besieged state, the only democracy in the Middle East, and increasingly the Arabs of the area are vilified as Hezbollah dupes deserving to be bombed and slaughtered. Some civilians are more innocent than others and there is little empathy for the Hezbollah babies and grandmothers of southern Lebanon. Human Rights Watch is up against the disgusting bulwark of the pro-Israel corporate media, but you have to hand it to them for banging their heads against the wall, screaming for us to notice Israel’s "indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives" and not finding any "cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack," although this fabrication is the daily mantra on Fox News, where proffered IOF nightvision videos are shown ad nauseam as decisive evidence. By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets. The pattern of attacks during the Terrorist Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes. These "war crimes" (actually crimes against humanity) are cours de rigueur, an established policy of the criminal and racist state of Israel. Not only killing Arabs but starving them, preventing them from obtaining medical assistance, demolishing their homes and orchards, locking Palestinians in a huge open-air prison, torturing prisoners, etc., is the very essence of the state, its raison d’etre, as should be obvious after reading a few paragraphs of Zionist literature, spanning back over more than a century!!

Thank you carizmatic for your very insightful viewpoints. Your dead on in what you say. At first I supported what Israel, with U.S. support, was doing to attack a terrorist agressor. Now after several weeks, I see the careless and senseless actions of the I.D.F. and it appalls me. All in the name of obtaining the return of a couple of kidnapped soldiers??? I think the U.S. is losing the battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.

carizmatic123, your summary of events leading up to the violence now is very accurate, but you need to tone down the rhetoric. Stuff like "Israeli apartheid state" and "Zionist" detract from your argument. Regardless, I think trying to put things in perspective unfortunately falls on deaf ears. Many Americans now form their opinions by literally being told what to think by commentary media. Ironically, it's packaged in such a way that it gives them the impression they are free thinkers. Sad state of affairs. Hope it changes, before the US falls off a cliff.

I love reading these forums. The "creative writing" and apparent lunacy of many posters is comedy at it's best. Funny, funny stuff...keep up the good work. hahaha

---- Stuff like "Israeli apartheid state" and "Zionist" detract from your argument ---- I think they are pretty accurate descriptions of Israel.