The Final Push of the Pathocracy

I can’t say it better than Joe Quinn, so here is most of his latest essay:

Is It Really About Defence?

As an explanation for the murder of 300 Lebanese civilians over the past 7 days and the murder of over 3,000 Palestinian civilians and 800 Israeli civilians over the past five years, Bush and Olmert repeatedly state that "Israel has a right to defend itself". When the facts are analysed, this claim is nonsensical and an outright lie. The Israeli military has been occupying Palestinian, Lebanese (the Chebaa Farms area) and Syrian (Golan heights) for almost 40 years. In the Palestinian land that it occupies, the Israeli government had reduced the Palestinian population therein to little more than slaves. Israel holds these lands in defiance of international law. This is the major source of Palestinian and Hezbollah resentment towards and attacks on Israel. The continuation of an enforced occupation of the sovereign territory of another people and nation simply cannot be described as "defence". If a person comes and throws you out of your home and occupies it by force of arms, he may claim that he is "defending" it, but it is a defence of something acquired through illegal means and is therefore an unlawful and aggressive act. It is not defence.

The history of Israeli tactics in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past 50 years make it very clear that the ultimate goal of the Israeli power brokers has always been the removal, in one way or another, of all Palestinians from their land.

…The Israeli government began building the illegal settlements in 1967, they same year that it annexed Lebanese and Syrian land. Today, Israeli settlers live in plush comfortable houses with all amenities on 40% of Palestinian land in the West Bank, while Palestinians regularly have their meager houses destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. All crossings out of Gaza and the West Bank are strictly controlled by Israeli troops, with most Palestinians being denied the right to leave. Poverty in Gaza and the West Bank is rife with 65% of the population living below the poverty line i.e. on less than $2 per day.

What is very clear to Palestinians, and has been for a very long time, is that the Israeli government never intended to allow the Palestinians to have a state of their own. Palestinians are painfully aware of the fact that, since 1967, the Israeli government has been preparing what was left of Palestinian land for a final annexation into Israel, with the only impediment to the fulfillment of this plan being the Palestinians living there. With the recent staged crisis, Israel hopes to find the opportunity to deal with this last 'obstacle' to Greater Israel, once and for all. Clearly then, it is the Palestinians, and now the Lebanese, who are, and have always been engaged in defence against a long-term and ongoing Israeli plot to dispossess them of their land and homes forever.

How do you feel about this?

When you look at the bodies of Lebanese babies, their little bodies lying mangled, scattered around the ground beside the burnt-out van they were travelling in only minutes before, what do you feel? Is this a just end to this child's life?! Did he deserve it?!

When you realise that these children were ordered to leave their homes by the Israeli military in a deliberate ploy to "flush them out" in order to blow them to pieces with their bombs, what do you feel?

When you see the once beautiful brown curls of a 5 year old Lebanese girl, now matted with her own blood, her clothes torn, her head hanging lifeless, what do you feel?

When you look at the image below of another Lebanese "terrorist" girl 'taken out' by Israeli war planes, do you think of your own children? Do you imagine how you would feel if this were your child?

Imagine for a moment that you are the President of America, or a member of his administration, or the Israeli Prime Minister, or a member of his administration. Having seen these pictures, would you, as "Commander in Chief", continue to order more air strikes on civilian targets? If you retained even an ounce of your own humanity - your ability to empathise with the suffering of another - you most definitely would not. You could not. Bush and Olmert see these pictures and they remained unmoved, supremely detached from any emotion at the sight of a dead child, and they give the order to continue the bombing.
Apparently, they want to see more dead children.

Am I being inflammatory when I say this? Am I exaggerating? Can it really be possible that our leaders are so inhuman, so different from you and I?

No one wants to consider such a concept, but what else are we to conclude when the bombing continues? When 270 of 300 Lebanese killed in the past week were innocent civilians, are you going to tell me that Israeli (and therefore American) war technology is so crude that it repeatedly hits the wrong target? In which case, why do they keep using such devices? Are you trying to tell me that missiles that hit the fleeing civilians were not deliberate? How far can your credibility be stretched?

The Real Enemy Of Mankind

The 'crisis' in Palestine and Lebanon comes at a bad time for the alternative media. Up until a few weeks ago, we could still entertain the idea that we were making a difference. The dogged blogging and posting of articles and editorials on web sites seemed to be having an effect. We felt we had a voice and that it was being listened to by an ever increasing number of people. We thought the pressure we were bringing to bear would surely stay the hand of the war mongers, that they would 'see the light', that we could 'bring them to their senses'. But we were wrong it seems.

If there is one glaring problem with the alternative media today it is that they do not know the true nature of the enemy. In fact, no one seems to realise that we are fighting an enemy at all. Most still believe that we are dealing with a few misguided political leaders who just seem to have a really hard time realising that their actions are causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. If they could only be made aware of this, the world would turn the corner towards peace and prosperity for all, right?

Unfortunately, there is a serious problem with this assumption.

If we, the information-deprived masses, are able to get a glimpse of the carnage that our political leaders are causing, is it not a certainty that these same political leaders are significantly more aware of the results of their actions? After all, they are in possession of detailed intelligence reports on demographics, details of targets selected and the nature and destructive power of the weapons they employ against those targets. When we hear of an Israeli or American bomb scoring a direct hit on a residential house that kills dozens of innocent men women and children, our lack of knowledge of military affairs and planning allows us to believe that maybe it was a mistake, that they didn't really mean to kill civilians. Indeed, we need to believe this, because to believe otherwise is to face ourselves into a very frightening scenario indeed - that our political leaders, the men and women who sit in almost absolute power over us, are fully conscious of their actions and therefore lack the one characteristic that defines a person as truly human: empathy for the suffering of another human being.

So we force ourselves to believe that the men and women with the power to kill millions would never take delight in exercising that power. We think that because we recoil in horror and grief at the sight of the lifeless body of a small child lying beside the burnt out shell of the car she was travelling in before it was hit by an Israeli or American missile, that the men who fired the missile, or those who ordered them to fire it, are also deeply moved by such a tragic scene. Yet we run into a problem the very moment that a second missile, then a third and then a fourth, extinguishes more innocent lives. How many more bodies of dead children, how many more weeks of Israeli military bombing campaigns on civilian targets are needed before we come to the conclusion that the members of the Israeli, American and British governments who, in full knowledge of their actions continue to sanction or order such attacks, simply do not, cannot, feel the same way about the massacring of innocent children as you and I?

Understandably, this is a hard one for many people to accept. To accept it heralds the end of our cozy world-view where basically good and decent leaders, people just like you and I, are at least striving to do what is best for the world and its people. In its place, we find ourselves in a world where the global power brokers, the people who control every aspect of our material lives, appear not to care about human life at all, save their own.

How long might an impala on the serengeti expect to survive if, despite all evidence to contrary, it continues to believe in the innate benevolence of a lion towards its species?

This is an appropriate analogy. Scientific studies have shown that when normal human beings are presented with a disturbing image of human suffering, an area of the brain associated with emotion and empathy "lights up". Similar studies carried out on known psychopaths show that they appear to lack the normal range of human emotion. When a psychopath is shown a picture of a car, followed by a picture of a dead child and a grieving mother, there is no difference in brain response. There is no feeling it seems.

Psychopathy

Dr Hervey Cleckly spent years studying psychopaths up close and personal. His book, The Mask of Sanity, shows that, outwardly, the average intelligent psychopath bears no resemblance, neither in appearance nor actions, to Hannibal Lecter or Ted Bundy. Neither is he in jail. On the contrary, the average psychopath appears to be conscious of the fact that he lacks the basic human ability to feel deep emotion and empathy for another. Early on in his life, the psychopath learns that displays of complete indifference to the suffering of others are reacted to with concern and sometimes anger by his family and peers. So he learns to conceal it. At the same time, he recognises and gravitates towards others who share his deficiency.

It is not hard to imagine that psychopaths do very well in business and politics where the promotion of self-interest and the accrual of personal and group power is the name of the game. Where you or I, in possession of a conscience, would surely balk at, for example deliberately getting a work colleague fired for no reason other than facilitate our own ascent of the corporate ladder, no such impediment to success exists for the psychopath who simply cannot put himself in the place of another human being and therefore feel empathy. While it has been estimated that approximately 6% of the global population falls into the category of psychopath (about 360 million people), their extreme self-interest and the fact that such "ambition" is a key ingredient of success in the world of politics and business, we assume much more than 6% of top level corporate, government and military positions are held by people who possess no ability to empathise with the needs or suffering of another human being.

A perusal of the last few thousand years of the history of our world quickly reveals to us that, more than anything else, war has defined our 'evolution' (if it can be called that). Equally obvious is the fact that, in war, soldiers and civilians die while the men and women responsible for waging war (on both sides) generally neither fight in the war nor are punished for their part in it encouraging it.

Does that tell you anything?

Throughout history, small groups of people have risen to power over the masses, and by the promotion of religious, ethnic or political divisions, they have set large groups of ordinary human beings against each other in order to further their personal goals. More often that not, ideologies such as 'freedom' are used to rally the masses to fight. But history testifies that the only real net result of war is the consolidation of power into the hands of an 'elite' few. After the allies were victorious in WWII, Stalin went on to murder 50 million Russians. World War II led to the creation of the state of Israel and the ongoing persecution of Middle Eastern Arabs. World War II also facilitated the USA's rise to a position of global preeminence, a situation which has caused more death and suffering over the past 60 years than at any other time in our recent history.

Now more than ever, there is an opportunity for each of us to recognise who the true enemy is. Why should we or our sons and daughers continue to fight and kill each other on the command of a small group of people whose only contribution has been to enrich themselves at our expense, at the expense of our very lives?

Are we stupid? Or are we just misinformed? The reality of our world has always been a very clear case of Us and Them, yet we have failed to see it. We fail to see the predatory, unfeeling nature of these people because we ourselves lack such a nature. We project on to them our own human values of empathy and conscience when, time and again, they have proven that they possess no such qualities. We have allowed them to divide us, and set us at each others throats in the name of freedom, a value that we hold dear, not they (save for their usefulness in manipulating us).

Now more than ever, the very real yet hidden phenomenon of psychopathy needs desperately to be uncovered. We need to avail ourselves of the evidence that suggests that many of our political leaders are clinical, yet very smart and careful psychopaths. There is no other plausible explanation for their smug brutality, their deadly lies, their utter indifference to the pitiful sight of the lifeless body of small child for whose death they are responsible.

Lest anyone begin the process of rationalising what I have said, realise that to do so is evidence that your own humanity is being robbed from you by the propagation of our 'leaders' psychopathic values and ideologies. "War is peace", "Black is White" "Muslims are Terrorists" "Our government is protecting us". Before you fall for such paramoralisms, know this; psychopaths feel no empathy for any other human being.

Race or creed does not figure into the equation. There is significant evidence that the psychopaths in power in the US and Israel knowingly murdered 3,000 American citizens on September 11th 2001, few were Muslim. At present the Israeli government is placing the lives of Israeli Jews in clear danger precisely because they simply cannot care about the life of any other human being, Christian, Muslim, Jew they are concerned for none but themselves.

'Armgaeddon' Approaches

As a conclusion, I would like here to present a theory for your consideration, and while you may immediately reject it as implausible, I suggest you watch events in the Middle East and notice the direction they take. My suggestion is that the ultimate goal of the plan that is being currently implemented in Lebanon and Palestine is the destruction of a majority of the population of the modern-day Middle East.

Far from attempting to rid the world of a previously more or less non-existent anti-Semitism, the policies pursued by successive Israeli governments have gone a long way to increasing ill-feeling towards Jews and Israel. By repeatedly condemning anyone who speaks out against the increasingly brutal actions of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic, Israeli leaders and lobbyists are coming close to making the word anti-Semitism respectable. When that happens, the demise of Israel, the Jews and the Arabs of the Middle East will be all but assured. That day is closer than any of us realise.

We have but one hope to prevent what appears to be an approaching major war in the Middle East that will not be limited to that region and which will result in the deaths of millions of innocents: we must understand the truth about the men and women that call themselves our 'leaders', yet who offer nothing but war, suffering and death. We must realise the that they are not like you and I, they do not feel as you and I feel, they do not love as you and I love. They are psychopaths, and under their stewardship death and destruction is 100% assured.

The Horrible Crimes that Started World War III

Wow. Stop blogging for a few weeks and it’s hard to get started again. Blogging on current events lately is like trying to drink from a firehose. A series of extremely fake terrorism scares followed by a series of suspicious deaths and suicides by people involved with Enron and the wholesale theft of billions in Iraq facilitated by Bush, and now Israel being given the green light to start World War III.

The brutal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon have to rank as some of the worst crimes against humanity in recent history. Israel is revealing its true nature to the world, but most of the world is saying nothing, having been intimidated by Zionist threats or by thousands of years of Yahwehistic propaganda. Here is Wayne Madsen:

Our U.S. intelligence sources in Lebanon have exclusively reported to us the extent of Israel's Blitzkrieg attack on Lebanon, which has destroyed most of the country's critical infrastructures. Beirut International Airport's newly-restored terminal, where many passengers, including Americans, were stranded after the Israelis carpet bombed the runway during flight operations, was bombed in the latest Israeli attack. Israel has turned Lebanon into another Iraq -- there is no electricity and airports, roads, and bridges have been knocked out across the country. Israel has even bombed small ports preventing civilians from escaping to Cyprus. CNN and other Israeli lobby-influenced broadcasters are understating the number of civilian casualties in the repeated Israeli attacks. CNN's Washington bureau is editorially controlled by Wolf Blitzer, a one time employee of the Jerusalem Post and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to our U.S. intelligence sources, the numbers of dead are in the hundreds. In south Lebanon, Israeli planes bombed three vans carrying families after they were turned away from a UN outpost while seeking protection. A total of 23 people were killed, including nine small children. The Israeli attacks have been described by various sources in Lebanon as "sub-human," "monstrous," and "animalistic." Our intelligence sources phoned us before what they believe will be the targets of the next wave of Israeli attacks against the nation's telecommunications networks, including cell phone towers and exchanges.

The Israel regime is acting with the full approval of the Bush administration, both regimes that are totally beholden to neo-con interests intent on throwing the entire Middle East into a firestorm of destruction and death.

No one should be surprised. Here’s the World Socialist Web Site:

The Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, with bombings and missile strikes and the imposition of an air and sea blockade, has brought the Middle East to the brink of all-out war. The attack on Lebanon, fully endorsed by the Bush administration, coincides with Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinian population of Gaza, 1.5 million people who are enduring the fourth week of a siege, with electricity cut off and food supplies running low.


…There is a long history of Israel using such events as the excuse for carrying out military actions that have a far broader strategic purpose—going back to 1978, when a full-scale invasion of Lebanon was launched using the shooting of the Israeli ambassador to Britain by Palestinian militants as a pretext. Only much later did it emerge that the invasion had been long planned, awaiting only the proper incident to provide a suitable official justification.

The same pattern is repeated in Gaza and Lebanon today. The Israeli regime has made no secret of its desire to smash up the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. The economic blockade imposed in January, after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, has been escalated into a full-scale military blockade of Gaza, where Hamas has its main political support.

In Lebanon, the goal of Israel is, at a minimum, the physical destruction of Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic movement which dominates the southern third of the country. A full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon by Israeli ground forces is more than likely. Israeli Defense Minister Peretz said, “If the government of Lebanon fails to deploy its forces, as is expected of a sovereign government, we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel.” In other words, if the Lebanese army does not suppress Hezbollah—and no one expects it too—then the Israeli army will do so.

US military intervention in Lebanon is also likely. US media reports Friday suggested that the initial planning for such an intervention was well advanced, with 2,200 Marines to be deployed as a helicopter-borne force that would land near Beirut on the pretext of protecting the 25,000 American citizens now trapped in Lebanon by the Israeli blockade.

Separate or joint US and Israeli air strikes against Syria and Iran, and even a ground invasion of Syria, are also possible. Certainly the main focus of the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media has been to blame Syria and Iran for the crisis, claiming that those regimes were pulling the strings in Hezbollah

The United States is already losing two wars; its military is severely overstretched as are its finances. How can it possibly see widening the regional war into a global war as being in its interest? WSWS continues,

The Bush administration will not retreat from Iraq and cannot maintain the status quo, as the country slides deeper into civil war and popular opposition to the war mounts among the American people. A sizeable section of the US ruling elite, frustrated by the quagmire in Iraq, believes that the only hope of military success lies in “expanding the problem,” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has put it. They believe that Iran is using its growing influence on the Iraqi Shiite parties and militias to undermine US control of the puppet regime established in Baghdad, and that a military confrontation with Tehran is inevitable.

The neocons have been stopped in their drive to bomb Iran by opposition from Russia, China and U.S. generals. So now Israel is going to set a match to the kerosene in an attempt to draw Syria, then Iran in. As Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition put it:

America's Countdown: Tehran has been stuck at 20 minutes and holding for a couple of months now, derailed by Iran's rational posture regarding its nuclear ambitions and the ongoing thwarting of anything approaching even the Bush administration's benchmark for a casus belli. Israel's hawks, by smashing in the back door, are baiting Iran to action, which would goad the US to crash through the front. Israeli military claims, trumpeted by FoxNews, that the Haifa rockets were fired by Iranian Guard units, and the absurd suggestion that Hezbollah intends to transport their captured soldiers to Iran, say forcefully that this isn't about Lebanon, though for now it will be mostly the Lebanese who perish.

…This is a war crime of opportunity, calculated to at last draw out Iran and draw in American arms to finish what they began in Iraq. Madness is the method, and Death was never going to take a holiday this summer.

Can anyone doubt that the neocons are both insane and evil? When I told people this week that Israel and the United States just started World War III and that the war could easily turn nuclear, they ask: why?

It’s not easy to explain the reasonings of the criminally insane, but here goes. The neocons have argued since at least the Reagan administration that it is a mistake to think that no one can win a nuclear war. Saying that no one can win a nuclear war meant, to them, saying that the U.S. (or Israel) would never use them. They thought it was dumb for the United States to take their main advantage off the table. They think they can sit in their underground cities for a while then come back up and rule the world.

Back to the situation at hand, Israel invading Gaza is like beating a sick man in a hospital with a baseball bat. What they are doing to Lebanon is like beating a man within an inch of his life, letting him go to the hospital, get cared for and rehabilitated, sent home to do years of recovery and then, the moment when the victim has just regained health, beaten him again. Here’s Kurt Nimmo:

In fact, Israel has messed with Lebanon for decades. “Without the elixir of history, it is impossible to fully digest the story of Israel’s ongoing interest in Lebanon and the reasons why Israeli governments have repeatedly both interfered with this country’s internal politics and provoked ‘incidents’ at its border since the 1940’s,” writes Edward R. Miller. “The intimate details of Israel’s manipulations in Lebanon are detailed in the diary of Moshe Sharett, who shared the Prime Ministership of Israel with Ben Gurion only to be forced out of the cabinet because Sharett would not tolerate what he considered Ben-Gurion’s immoral and clandestine methods.” As the late Livia Rokach, daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett, notes in Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, “Sharett’s diary provides the entire documentation of how in 1954 Ben Gurion developed the diabolic plans to ‘Christianize’ Lebanon, i.e., to invent and create from scratch the inter-Lebanese conflict, and of how a detailed blueprint for the partition and subordination of that country was elaborated by Israel more than fifteen years before the Palestinian presence became a political factor.”

As far back as 1918, Zionist leaders meeting in Europe with a committee of the British Palestinian Mandate discussed stealing Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, emphasizing the “vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources.” From the early 1950s onward, Israel threatened to invade Lebanon and take control of the Litani, denying the Lebanese use of the river, and in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon (Operation Peace for Galilee, or maybe Operation Steal Water), the entire length of the river came under Israeli control.

“In May 1955 Sharett in his dairy described Israel’s plans to destabilize Lebanon’s government, a diabolic enterprise that eventually produced the 1978 Lebanese War,” writes Miller. Ben Gurion’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, suggested finding a malleable Lebanese military officer and “either win his heart or buy time with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Marionite [Christian] population. Then the Israel army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be alright,” Dayan is quoted as declaring in Sharett’s diary. Years later, in 1979, Major Sa’d Haddad declared a Maronite State in Lebanon and civil war became inevitable.

In essence, the current rape of Lebanon is a repeat of Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. “With President Clinton safely in Japan, Israel, obviously with a green light from the U.S. administration, felt free to carry out ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ her fifth major terrorist attack on her old killing fields in southern Lebanon. Using as an excuse a few Katyusha rockets aimed at her military (who have been illegally occupying and threatening the southern Lebanese people since 1978), Israel’s army on the anniversary of the Holocaust, bent on murder and mayhem, is presently destroying millions of dollars in property, killing civilians and creating chaos as she stampedes populations as far north as Beirut. On the morning of the 18th, Israeli shells plunged directly into a UN refugee camp south of Tye where thousands fleeing Israeli fire sought shelter and food. The latest figures reported over 60 deaths and hundreds wounded. Most victims were women and children. This is Israel’s fifth major terrorist assault on her northern neighbor.”

This last bit is a reference to the shelling of civilians in Qana, Lebanon, a village located southeast of Tyre. Israel bombarded a Fijian UNIFIL compound in the village with M-109A2 155 mm guns, killing 106 civilians. According to Amnesty International, “the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound, although the motives for doing so remain unclear. The IDF have failed to substantiate their claim that the attack was a mistake. Even if they were to do so they would still bear responsibility for killing so many civilians by taking the risk to launch an attack so close to the UN compound.”

Of course, the reasons do not “remain unclear,” as Israel has consistently attacked Arab civilians and has a long and sordid history of massacres and atrocities, from Dair Yasin, the Semiramis Hotel, at Baldat al-Shaikh, in Yehiday, Khisas, Qazaza, Beit Daras, at the Dawayma mosque, in Houla in southern Lebanon, at Qibya, at Kafr Qasem, Khan Yunis, al-Sammou, Aitharoun, Kawnin, Hanin, Bint Jbeil, Abbasieh, Adloun, Saida, Fakhani, Beirut, at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, at Jibsheet, Sohmor, Seer al-Garbiah, Maaraka, Zrariah, Homeen al-Tahta, Jibaa, Yohmor, Tiri, al-Naher al-Bared, Ain al-Hillwee, up to Qana and beyond, terminating in the latest outrage.

Naturally, the sordid and criminal record of wanton murder of civilians—tens of thousands of them—is never mentioned by the pro-Israel corporate media in this country. Instead, we endure hours of televised babble about Qassam rockets (a technology invented by Russia in the late 1930s) inaccurately falling on Safed and Nahariya in northern Israel. Meanwhile, we hear little of the residential buildings in southern Beirut blasted with the latest state-of-the-art murder technology (courtesy of you and me, complicit U.S. taxpayers). “The overnight death toll brought to 61 the number of people killed since Wednesday when Israel began retaliating for the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas in a raid across the southern Lebanese border. One of the fatalities was a Hezbollah guerrilla, according to the militant group,” reports the Hindu. In short, in order to bag one Hezbollah “guerrilla” (an absurd appellation), the Israelis kill a few dozen civilians.

In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Tom Segev of Ha’aretz toured the killing ground. John Rose writes:

[Segev] saw “refugees wandering amidst swarms of flies, dressed in rags, their faces expressing terror and their eyes bewilderment … the women wailing and the children sobbing”. Here and there people were walking “as in a nightmare”. “A terrible smell filled the air”—of decomposing bodies, he learned … “This is what the cities of Germany looked like at the end of the Second World War.” He saw “mounds of ruins”, tens of thousands of people at the shore where they remained for days, women driven away by soldiers when they attempted to flee….

[Chris Giannou, a Canadian surgeon working in Lebanon] reported that “he was witness to four prisoners who were beaten to death.” That he witnessed “the total devastation of residential areas and the blind, savage, indiscriminate destruction of refugee camps by simultaneous shelling and carpet bombing from aircraft, gunboats, tanks and artillery,” leaving only “large blackened craters filled with rubble and debris, broken concrete slabs and twisted iron bars and corpses”; “hospitals being shelled”, one shell killing 40-50 people … He saw “the entire male staff” of the hospital being taken into custody, leaving patients unattended, and “savage and indiscriminate beatings” of prisoners with fists, sticks, ropes with nuts and bolts tied to them. He saw a Palestinian doctor hung by his hands from a tree and beaten and an Iraqi surgeon “beaten by several guards viciously, and left to lie in the sun with his face buried in the sand” – all in the presence of an Israeli Colonel who did nothing about it. He watched prisoners “being rehearsed by an Israeli officer to shout ‘Long Live Begin’”….

As the battering of Beirut reached new heights of savagery, the popularity of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin soared to record heights. A mid- August poll showed that 80 per cent of Israelis supported the invasion of Lebanon (it was supported by the Labour opposition in the Israeli parliament) and 64 per cent approved the decision to go beyond the 25-mile zone – at which the early propaganda had said the Israelis would stop.

Now why would the popularity of a political leader climb to new highs after that leader committed the most horrible of crimes? Gilad Atzmon, the Israeli-born jazz musician and writer explains:

Israel is a racially orientated democracy. Its leaders are engaged in one thing only, i.e. maintenance of the their political power. As far as the Israeli political game is concerned, the rule is very simple, the more Arab blood you have on your hands the more you are suited to get on with your governing job. This rule obviously was in favour of Rabin, Sharon, Barak and Netanyahu. Olmert and Peretz are still quite far behind. Both the prime minister and his defence minister lack some real experience in military and security matters. Hence they have a lot of catching up to do.

In other words, Peretz and Olmert have to provide the Israeli people with a glorious spectacle of merciless retaliation. They have to prove to their keen voters that they have internalised the real biblical meaning of 'an eye for an eye'. Looking at the carnage in Beirut today it somehow seems as if they even try to give the old Hebraic say a new meaning. As devastating as it may sound, this is exactly what the Israelis want them to do. Within democratic Israel the biblical call "pour out your fury upon the goyim" is translated into a Jewish secular pragmatic political practice. This isn't sad. This is a real tragedy. And I wonder whether there is anyone out there who is still overwhelmed with the Israeli unilateral peace agenda?

Kurt Nimmo again:

If things go off as planned, thousands of Lebanese—and Syrians, Iranians—will need die horrible deaths and hospitals, food warehouses, sanitation plants, water treatment plants, the entire civilian infrastructure will need be inoperable, reduced to flaming ruins.

… It appears World War Three, otherwise known as World War Four (neocons count differently than most people), is on schedule.

…“The next Middle East war—Israel against genocidal Islamism—has begun,” writes Yossi Klein Halevi, described as a foreign correspondent for the neocon New Republic and senior fellow of the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem. “The first stage of the war started two weeks ago with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim. Now, with Hezbollah’s latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon…. Ultimately, though, Israel’s antagonists won’t be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites.”

In other words, we are experiencing the opening salvo of World War Four, according to the Israelis and their neocon acolytes. No doubt they are jumping for joy.

The goals of the war should be the destruction of the Hamas regime and the dismantling of the Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot coexist with Iranian proxies pressing in on its borders. In particular, allowing Hamas to remain in power—and to run the Palestinian educational system—will mean the end of hopes for Arab-Israeli reconciliation not only in this generation but in the next one, too….

The ultimate threat, though, isn’t Hezbollah or Hamas, but Iran. And as Iran draws closer to nuclear capability, an Israeli-Iranian showdown becomes increasingly likely.

According to a very senior military source, Israel is still hoping that an international effort will stop a nuclear Iran. If that fails, then Israel is hoping for a US attack. But if the Bush administration is too weakened to take on Iran, then, as a last resort, Israel will have to act unilaterally.

For Israelis, that is the worst scenario of all. Except, of course, the scenario of nuclear weapons in the hands of the patron state of Hezbollah and Hamas.

In effect, regardless of the platitudes of Zionists such as Mr. Halevi, the “ultimate threat” to Israel is a unified Muslim world and Arab nationalism.

It should not be surprising this war will “go on for months, perhaps several years” (the neocons envision it as a multi-generational “long war”) as it will take some time to kill the millions of Muslims opposed to Israel’s long-standing plan to balkanize the Middle East, or short of mass murder subject them to groveling subservience, as many Israelis consider Arabs and Muslim little more than “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” as the ancient Israelites reduced their Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite neighbors.

The sick part is, the neocon, Jabotinsky-zionist leadership of Israel is also endagering the lives of the Jews. With each atrocity carried out by Israel, the security of the Israeli people and of Jews across the world is lessened. Here is Joe Quinn:

Zionist Israel - The True Enemy Of The Jewish People

A recent Time magazine report on the effects of the current Gaza crisis on the many Palestinians whose family members are being held in Israeli prisons, many on no charge, quite clearly shows (as if we needed any confirmation), that the Israeli government, in refusing to end the crisis, cares nothing for the suffering of the Palestinian population.

From the report:

Ghalia Baroud's every emotion is on display when she speaks of her son, Ibrahim. Sitting in her tidy home in Gaza's Jabaliya refugee camp, surrounded by pictures of Ibrahim - jailed since 1986, at the age of 21, for taking part in attacks on Israeli troops - she is by turns furious and woeful. She doesn't deny her son's actions; what almost all Israelis see as terrorism, she sees as justified resistance. But when asked about the parents of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Palestinian militants since June 25, she is instantly empathetic. "We know Israelis love their children just as we do," she says softly.

Very importantly however, the Time magazine report also deals with the effects of the crisis on the family of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the alleged reason for the current crisis, and in doing so shows just as clearly, that the Israeli government is in no way concerned for the suffering, or the will, of the Israeli population either.

The Shalit family's love for Gilad is indeed palpable in the northern Israeli town of Hila, where his parents, Noam and Aviva, live and where a banner hangs reading gilad: we are waiting for you at home. Noam, a compact man with close-cropped white hair and blue eyes, has no sympathy for the actions of the militants of Hamas or the Popular Resistance Committee, but he is keenly aware that the current military operation in Gaza - launched with the stated intent of freeing his son, but since greatly expanded to counter Palestinian rocket fire into Israel, and to make a political point - is imposing extraordinary hardships on noncombatants there. "Thousands of ordinary Palestinians are suffering for this issue," he said last week.

Olmert continually claims that his goal is to stop the firing of rockets into Israel by Palestinian militants, yet, at every turn, Olmert, like Sharon before him, has sought to exacerbate the conflict with the Palestinians.

Consider the fact that, when elected to power in Palestine in January this year, Hamas had been holding to a year-long unilateral ceasefire with Israel i.e. while Israel continued to attack and kill militants and civilians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, Hamas did not respond. Despite this, on their election, Olmert immediately sought to isolate Hamas internationally and he successfully convinced most Western governments into agreeing to cut off all international aid, effectively crippling the fledgling Hamas government. To add insult to injury, Olmert announced that newly and democratically-elected Hamas officials would be subject to assassination attempts by Israeli forces. Olmert also began a policy of preventing essential supplies from entering Gaza, including food and medicine - a clear attempt at collectively punishing the entire Gaza population for electing, from Israel's point of view, the 'wrong' leaders. In the midst of this complete control that Israel wielded over the lives of the 1.3M people of Gaza, Olmert has the gall to claim that, following the withdrawal of Israeli settlers last year from Gaza, Gazans were now a free people in their own land!

While Israel (and Condi Rice) have attempted to lay the blame for the current crisis at the door of Hamas, important facts about recent events in Israel and Palestine have been conspicuously absent from the mainstream press.

The first of these is the already-mentioned fact that, up until the current impasse, Hamas had been holding to a 16 month unilateral ceasefire with Israel.

The second is the report that a large-scale Israeli army incursion into Gaza had been in the planning many months prior to the capture of Gilad, an event which appears to have been seized upon at justification for the incursion to begin.

The third is that the day before the Hamas-led attack on the Israeli army post that led to the capture of Israeli soldier Shalit, Israeli agents had infiltrated Gaza and abducted and imprisoned two Hamas politicians, while Hamas was still holding to its ceasefire.

The fourth is that, in the two weeks prior to the Hamas attack, Israeli forces had murdered 23 Palestinian civilians.

Hamas captured one Israeli soldier. 10,000 Palestinians are languishing in Israeli prisons, many of them women and children. Hamas has asked that the women and children be released in exchange for the release of Shalit. Olmert has refused, point blank.

What we conclude from all of this is that the Israeli government, under the leadership of PM Ehud Olmert, abides by its own version of law and justice and it expects the international community to turn a blind eye to Israeli brutality, while at the same time expecting to be treated as "the only democracy in the Middle East". Olmert is following his own agenda, or rather, he is continuing the 100+ year-old Zionist agenda that was responsible for the creation of the state of Israel on stolen Palestinian land. It is an agenda that not only spurns all consideration for the welfare or lives of Palestinian civilians, but shows a similar contempt for the safety and well-being of the Israeli Jewish population.

Olmert's agenda, conscious or not, seems destined to push the Israeli-Palestinian conflict past boiling point, and in doing so, ignite a major conflict in the wider Middle East. Out of such a war, no group of people will emerge unscathed (if at all), regardless of their religious affiliation or what their "God" promised them 2,000 years ago.