Thursday, August 17, 2006

The "Moral" Israeli Defense Force - a History

From Kurt Nimmo, another voice of sanity:

Israelis Plan to Steal Lebanese Food

Monday August 14th 2006, 5:48 pm

From the military of the only democracy in the Middle East: “If our fighters deep in Lebanese territory are left without food our water, I believe they can break into local Lebanese stores to solve that problem,” Brigadier General Avi Mizrahi, the head of the Israel Occupation Forces logistics branch, informs Haaretz. “If what they need to do is take water from the stores, they can take.”

Of course, this is nothing new, as the Israelis have stolen from Arabs for decades, regardless of what was supposedly inscribed on the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Obviously, the Israelis no longer consult Exodus 20:1-17.

Israelis have rarely expressed moral qualms over looting Arab property. During the 1948 “war” that drove more than 700,000 Palestinians off their land, thanks to a number of strategic massacres, such as Dair Yasin, David Ben-Gurion commented: “The only thing that surprised me, and surprised me bitterly, was the discovery of such moral failings among us, which I had never suspected. I mean the mass robbery in which all parts of the population participated.”

According to an article posted on the Palestine Remembered website, Israeli looters in Ramlah and Lydda took possession of “a total of 45,000 homes and apartments, about 7,000 shops and other places of business, some 500 workshops and industrial plants, and more than 1,000 warehouses,” massive thievery by any count. “ The urge to grab has seized everyone,” noted writer Moshe Smilansky. “Individuals, groups and communities, men, women and children, all fell on the spoils. Doors, windows, lintels, bricks, roof-tiles, floor-tiles, junk and machine parts.”

According to Amin Jarjouria, MK of the (Arabic) Nazareth Democratic List, marauding Israeli soldiers didn’t take kindly to complaining victims:

“Two days after the seizure of Jish, in the Safed district, the army surrounded the village and carried out searches. In the course of the search soldiers robbed several of the houses and stole 605 pounds, jewelry and other valuables. When the people who were robbed insisted on being given receipts for their property, they were taken to a remote place and shot dead. The villagers protested to the local commander, Manu Friedmann, who had the bodies brought back to the village. The finger of one of the dead had been cut off to remove a ring…”

In fact, the ill-gotten gains were collected and stored by the Israeli government under “the Custodian of Abandoned Property, as required by law.”

After a while the Custodian … began to distribute the I confiscated property. To begin with, [Dov Shafrir, a “Custodian”] later reported, goods, materials and equipment were turned over to the army, directly from the stores in the occupied towns. Merchandise which the army did not require was put up for sale. The sale was conducted by special departments instituted for the purpose, staffed, as much as war conditions allowed, by personnel trained in the principal branches of commerce. Other merchandise was sold through negotiation with merchants or industrialists, depending on the type of materials. “The army had the first choice of any goods and materials it might require,” Shafrir said. “Next were the government offices, the war disabled, the Jewish Agency, the local authorities and public bodies, such as Hadassah.” The army also needed most of the workshop equipment such as cabinet-making shops, locksmiths-works, turneries, iron-works, tin-works and the like. Industrial plants which could be operated on their existing sites were leased out by contract, “whenever possible,” according to Shafrir. Plants which no one wanted to lease were sold to the highest bidder.

During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis stole everything not nailed down, including antiquities. “Lebanese minister of higher education and culture Mahmoud Youssef Beidoun said that Lebanon has prepared a file to demand Israel for returning back antiquities its forces had stolen from Lebanon during the past years,” reported the Arabic News on January 1, 2000.

In addition to antiquities, the Israelis went so far as to “steal fertile Lebanese soil and transport it to settlements in northern Israel,” a brazen act investigated by UNIFIL’s leadership. “Israel has admitted the removing of Lebanese fertile soil from some areas inside the occupied border strip of South Lebanon to settlements in the occupied Galilee,” the Arabic News reported on November 11, 1998. “In its occupation of south Lebanon and destruction of many towns and efforts to loot Lebanese water resources, Israel has something new to steal, rich Lebanese top soil, and the Lebanese government has finally brought this issue to light,” the newspaper reported a few days later.

In the Marjyoun area of Lebanon during Israel’s occupation, the Zionists siphoned off spring water. “Lebanese Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss on Monday discussed with Lebanese Parliament member Nazih Mansour, who is also a member of the al-Wafa bloc for resistance, Israel’s theft of Lebanese waters in order to irrigate its settlements Following the meeting with al-Hoss, Mansour said Israel has started stealing al-Hammad spring’s water in the Marjyoun area. He added that pipelines between the spring and northern Israel were erected at a length of seven kilometers and a depth of one and a half meters,” the Arabic News reported on June 22, 1999.

In addition, the Israelis installed pumps to steal water from the al-Wazzani and Hasbani rivers. According to research conducted by David Paul, in “1982 one of the first acts of the Israeli invaders upon reaching Lake Qir’awn in Lebanon was to seize all the hydrographic data on the dam and the river and ship a complete set to Israel.”

Of course, the Israelis have long planned to steal land and water. In 1919, Chaim Weizman wrote David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister, stating the “minimum requirements essential to the realization of the Jewish National Home” required massive theft:

The whole economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water supply for irrigation and for electric power, and the water supply must mainly be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon, from the headwaters of the Jordan and from the Litany [sic] river [of Lebanon]… [We] consider it essential that the Northern Frontier of Palestine should include the Valley of the Litany, for a distance of 25 miles above the bend, and the Western and Southern slopes of Mount Hermon…”

It should come as no surprise the IOF, supposedly agreeing to a “ceasefire,” would steal Lebanese food. It should also come as no surprise this story was not covered by the corporate media in this country, as a Google News search returns results from Haaretz (linked above), the Jerusalem Post, and Stratfor (known as the “shadow CIA”), period.

Monday, August 14, 2006

How Does Olmert Sleep??

The Might Of Israel


Lebanese Abbas Wehbeh shouts while holding his 10 day-old niece Waad, 08 August, 2006

Signs of the Times for Mon, 14 Aug 2006

Jonathan Metcalfe
Signs of the Times
14/08/2006

The above picture says it all.

Can you feel his choking rage and grief, the sting of the tears streaming down? The dislocation of one reality into another?

Perhaps we remember a time when our grief consumed us to the point we were barely able to function; our arms were trembling, we could not see for the tears that obscured our vision, we could not think because all we wanted was our loved one back in our arms or to release the fire of revenge; when all we wanted was to vent our rage on the evil who took away our reason for living. Or perhaps we are those who would feel a dull numbness from the shock-wave that takes away all semblance of meaning, all the joy of what makes u human.

There is the kind loss that empties you of your sensibilities and rational thoughts, just tosses your identity away so that you are a husk of what you once were. Maybe you have experienced this acidic pain that flays your heart and hangs it from a sharp hook, raw and bloody. If so, then your reality is changed, your reality can also be shared in silent communion whatever the ideology and the nation. Pain is understood by some and the gnawing loss is known across the ridiculous need of boarder mentalities and cultural divides.

The Israeli government, its military and other pathocratic governments linked by the same will to deceive and destroy are scraping out the insides of those who can empathise with their fellow man. They are dehumanizing all those who can remember what it is to feel for another across the illusion of distance. They are destroying piecemeal all those who have the seeds of that humanity within them. Here now, in the hi-tec false sophistication of the 21st century, there are people -'leaders' - murdering fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, children and their grandparents, in this case, all for the Greater Israel; all for a violent, false ideology that is predicated on a monumental lie.

Just as those in China who shot dead the young student activist who had the temerity to act on her humanity; just as those in the U.S. justify democracy by genocide in Iraq; and just as Tony Blair has the astonishing audacity to talk of peace while being instrumental in the modern day success of U.K. and U.S. colonialism - these are all spawned from the same pathology that has oh, so cleverly insinuated itself into the heart of nations, that has distorted the very structures of our societies, until we have taken on their "normality."

For those of us who cannot ignore conscience, who are jarred into reality when we see that the world being inexorably shaped into the pathocrat's image, the time is coming to make a choice as to how best we can transmute that shared inner suffering that demands to be released.

Propaganda from the mind dross of Fox News; the terminal lies of the U.S. Government; the habitually lackluster performance of UN resolutions; to the results of formerly and officially sanctioned historical genocide for economic and corporate gain - it is as terminal as it is ubiquitous. The allure of apathy pretends that we have no part in such crimes. This serves to confirm the arrogance and audacity of those in power who use innocent human lives as literal fodder for their war games and deluded visions of totalitarian rule.

Little Waad a 10 day-old baby was a legitimate target for those "machines" that sit in smug certainty that their psychotic morality will shape the actions of every one o us. Behind mahogany desks, the shuffling of official documents and easy, comfortable chairs they direct their brain-dead troops to do their bidding. This psychopathology is what has led us to our current low point in what is euphemistically called 'human evolution'. The physical distance that exists between us and the abject suffering of our fellow human beings applies a temporary cerebral band-aid to the shock of seeing the truth of our reality and prevents us from entering fully into our own humanity. What is happening now in Lebanon and Palestine is not just a repeating pattern of the same old Middle Eastern turmoil, it is a prelude to a game-plan that will involve every single person on this planet, and that includes you.

Every single one of us. Wherever we are and whoever we maybe. How we react to the horror we see before us will determine all of our futures.

There is a vacuum being carefully created and we can get sucked into the propaganda of those who are whipping up the frenzy of conflict for a variety of deluded ideologies or self-aggrandising missions and visions, or we can simply say enough is enough and stake our own claim for truth. We stand up and when confronted with the umpteenth civilian death, innocent people who were living their lives with the same hopes and dreams as you and I, we use the fire of indignation and we mold it into our own personal outpost; our strategic enclosure which houses all the rage and grief, all the empathy that can so often turn back into itself and do us harm, so that we may then build such energy into a creative force.

This outpost resists the fear and the apathy that so often results daily atrocities in the guise of noble ideals and grounds us in our own humanity. From there we can re-affirm that we do in fact have a conscience, and that it is based on a firm foundation of our own making. We are able to express it through our actions however limited in their scope and perceived effects. We no longer yield to programs of required conformity that are both subtle and crude, we do not slip into complacency and compliance that will ultimately transform us into the living dead searching for their elusive essence that has long since been buried, extinguished by our own hand.

Once those who truly fear the networked ignition of conscience begin to sense its rise, perhaps hope can be justified. Until then, we can add our own voice to the chorus of outrage and build our outpost brick by brick, again and again to keep that faith alive and to emblazen on that wall the image of Waad and millions of others like her. Perhaps then, we can allow our conscience to at last taste the true freedom it has been seeking.

Isreali War Crimes