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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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| August 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #133 - 20th August 2006 [151]
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Arab Crimes Against
Palestinians Overlooked Conflicts in the Middle East frequently pose awkward questions. Rory Miller and Alan Shatter ask some more ... Now that a ceasefire in Lebanon has been agreed there will, no doubt, be numerous inquests and questions asked about the month-long Lebanon war. So here's some we would like to ask. Which country invaded its neighbour in mid-2006 in order to, as they put it, “crush” Islamists threatening regional stability? Which country killed an estimated 500 people in a week when its artillery began bombarding its long-time guerrilla enemy in late July 2006, causing mass displacement and suffering? If you think the answer is Israel, you guessed wrong.
So how come our politicians completely ignore these crises and instead choose to focus solely on Israel's campaign in Lebanon? Why have the same politicians hardly let out a whisper of criticism of those responsible for other such tragedies in Darfur, with its estimated 300,000 dead and at least 2.5 million refugees; or Chechnya, where an estimated 150,000-160,000 have died, where a third of the population has been displaced and the country has been left in rubble by the Russian army; or the war in the Congo, with over four million dead or driven from their homes? Why has the Lord Mayor of Dublin, for example, described the Israeli action as “probably one of the greatest scandals of the new millennium” but not seen it necessary to comment on any of these other conflicts? Why have supposedly apolitical cultural bodies - such as the Irish Film Institute and the Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire - decided to cancel sponsorship from the Israeli embassy because of Israel's actions in Lebanon, but never seen the need to act similarly regarding countries involved in other conflicts around the world? The truth is that Israel's use of military force, combined over the 60 years since its birth, has caused far fewer casualties and damage than war, conflict and oppression in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Chad, Chechnya, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Eritrea and Ethiopia (and that's only the beginning of the alphabet; if we go to countries beginning with "I", there's India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq). So why is it that people have taken to the streets of Dublin, Cork, Galway and Dundalk to protest at the Israeli campaign in Lebanon but have never felt the need to do the same to express anger over any of these more bloody conflicts? Why is it that, over the last few decades, successive governments have made numerous statements condemning Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, while TDs (members of parliament) and Senators have called for the economic boycott of Israel, but have felt no need to do the same in response to the mistreatment of Palestinians across the Arab world from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, a country which was condemned in a June 2006 Amnesty International report for its “long-standing discrimination and abuses of fundamental economic and social rights of Palestinian refugees”? Or, for that matter, why has there never been any Irish outcry when Arab countries have killed Palestinians on a grand scale? In 1970, King Hussein of Jordan ordered the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in the course of putting down the Palestinian uprising during “Black September”. This left between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinian refugees dead. Why was the fact that King Hussein killed more Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel managed to do in decades never held against him, or even raised, on his visits to this country? Again, more than two decades ago, Abu Iyad, the number two man in the PLO, publicly stated that the crimes of the Syrian government against the Palestinian people “surpassed those of the Israeli enemy”. Much of this took place in Lebanon, where Syria was responsible for approximately 100,000 deaths and for the flight of up to half a million civilians from their homes, as well as for mass executions, as occurred, according to one 1986 Amnesty International report, when Syrian troops entered the town of Tripoli and executed hundreds of civilians, including numerous women and children. How come in the 25 years that this was going on there was not one Dáil (parliamentary) debate or public statement by a politician on these Syrian atrocities in Lebanon? Where were the calls for boycotts, or the condemnations of Kuwait, when in the wake of its liberation in 1991, it embarked on the widespread slaughter of Palestinians living in the kingdom? This revenge against innocent Palestinian workers was so severe that Yasser Arafat himself acknowledged: “What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories”. Lastly, why, 60 years after its establishment, is Israel the only state in the world whose politicians are presented in Oireachtas (parliamentary) debates as war criminals, whose economy faces relentless calls for sanctions and boycotts, and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged in the letters pages of our newspapers? Maybe one of those who has felt the need to write such letters, or to call for a boycott, or to take to the streets against Israel, or to speak out in the Seanad (Senate), but has not seen the need to do the same in regard to any other country or conflict, could let us know why - because we just can't figure it out.
UNIFIL's Choice of Katyusha or Smart Bomb
If you go for the Katyusha, the contents of what looks somebody's toolbox are the kind of things that will end up embedded in your flesh and bones.
That is the choice that troops of UNIFIL will face in its currently-being-reconstituted form. Half-time was declared in Lebanon on 14th August in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Yes, I know the term cease-fire has been used, but in the absence of a clear victory by either side, hostilities will inevitably resume. Hezbollah will not go away or abandon their annihilate-Israel raison d'être, so Israel will not be able to ignore them when they go back to their customary hostile activities. Last week Italy, France and a number of other EU countries agreed to contribute some nine thousand troops to a beefed up UNIFIL force in Lebanon, designed to give effect to the UN's cease-fire resolution 1701, adopted unanimously on 11th August. 1701 is merely the eighth in a series of resolutions stretching back nearly three decades demanding that Lebanon be governed by the government of Lebanon, and not - as at present - have a big chunk hijacked by a bunch of terrorists accountable to foreign dictatorships. Up to now, not one of them has been enforced (much as successive Iraq disarmament resolutions went ignored for twelve years until America took 1441's “serious consequences” seriously). Resolution 1701 mandates UNIFIL to
In simple language, UNIFIL is supposed to disarm Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, prevent it from fighting and keep it from being re-supplied with weapons. To this end it is to use “all necessary action” which presumably includes shooting, if that is necessary. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predictably describes 1701 as “a Zionist document”. And in case of any doubt, Prof Bruce Thornton points out that “the French, the Lebanese, and other potential enforcers of the resolution 1701 have [already] stated explicitly that they will not disarm Hezbollah, which has made it clear it has no intentions of abiding by those terms of the resolution”. Turkey, another potential contributor, is also emphatic about not shooting fellow Muslims. Nevertheless, the mandate puts UNIFIL in an unenviable situation, because it has no choice but to take one side or the other, the consequence of which is to attract either Katyushas or smart bombs.
The last time the UN got into a shooting war specifically authorised as such was in Korea back in 1953. One way or another, it's clearly not going to get into one in Lebanon. So when the bullets, smart bombs and Katyusha rockets do start flying again, and the first blue helmets fall, you can be sure UNIFIL will be among the refugees fleeing for cover. Israel will have to do its own dirty work - as it has always had to.
Six Rules for America to Win its Wars According to the inimitable Victor Davis Hansen, there are six rules that America must follow if it is to win its wars in the current age of Western relativism coupled with media exposure and bias.
You gotta read the whole article to appreciate how he arrives at these extraordinary - but rational - conclusions. (The italics are my own interpretation.)
Most modern-day so-called anti-war types in the West are in fact pro-war pro the other side (eg “we are all Hezbollah now”). They don't want wars like the one in Lebanon to stop. They want Hezbollah (and any other militant Islamists whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or London) to fight and win them. They are quite unlike “The Religious Society of Friends”, founded in the 1650s and more commonly known as Quakers, a Christian sect that is truly pacifist. Quakers believe that war and the preparation for war are inconsistent with the spirit of Christ, and so devote effort toward mediation and reconciliation whilst resolutely refusing to bear arms or join the military, even when conscripted. However, like many other equally genuine pacifists - Ghandi springs to mind - the Quakers completely rely, unwittingly or not, on the morality and protection of the very non-pacifists they abhor. They live and thrive overwhelmingly in Western countries. There, their pacificism is accepted by everybody. Historically, refusal to bow to conscription has been punished with imprisonment, and indeed many Quakers have bravely paid this price, but very few were ever executed. Today the penalty for refusing conscription in the handful of Western countries that still practice it is more likely to be some form of community service rather than going to jail. Even in rough places like today's Russia, refusal to obey the call-up results in incarceration not death. Thus Quakers can continue with their way of life, doing good wherever and whenever they can, and practicing their religion. But this is not so, and would not be so, under a totalitarian or Sharia regime. Pacificism such as Ghandi's non-violent resistance to British imperial rule in India would have simply been met with death.
But seventy years ago, Europe was threatened by a totalitarian atheistic ideology that looked set to swamp it. Had it not been resisted by the British, and then defeated by the Americans and Russians, Nazism would have reigned supreme across Europe. Wherever Quakerism thrives today, its pacifism would not have been tolerated for one minute under Hitler's followers. Nazism was defeated by guns not dialogue. The same goes for the termination of the Japanese totalitarian model of imperialistic militarism, which by 1941 had effectively strangled the Quaker movement. The Japanese Quakers have never recovered, but after the effect of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no-one would have prevented them from doing their stuff in Tokyo should they have wished. Sixty years ago, once Nazism was vanquished, another totalitarian atheistic ideology threatened to engulf Europe and indeed did so in much of the eastern and central parts, to the misery of their inhabitants. This time it was Soviet Communism.
Who can doubt that without American arms Quakers would not today be permitted to live their pacifist lifestyle? Once again, it was guns not dialogue that removed a malign totalitarian ideology from (most of) the world. And to this day, 37,000 American troops are deterring the million-man army of the totalitarian (and Quaker-free) North Korean tyranny from overrunning democratic South Korea. In modern times, you would also be hard-put to find Quakers active in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, because these too are totalitarian regimes and while not atheistic are virulently anti-Christian. Yet were radical Islam to have its way, and an Islamic caliphate rule the world along the lines of Iran or the Taliban, there would be very few places indeed for Quakers to wave their flag. Yet who are doing most to prevent precisely such an outcome? Why, those annoying Cowboys again, with their damnable guns and their brave soldiers. So whilst Quakers are to be respected for their heartfelt anti-militarism (unlike the more vociferous, publicity-hungry anti-war crowd), they should recognize that they are, and have always been, effectively free-loading on the guns, blood and goodwill of others. Though they are not alone in this.
Before I went to live and work for a few years in Australia during the 1990s, I was familiar with the one-word epithet whingingpoms that the natives routinely employ to describe their former colonial masters. It was therefore with some surprise to find out how many whingers there actually were among the Ozzies themselves; in fact the whinge level (about everything and anything) was a lot more than I ever witnessed in England. I perpetually whinged about this.
But enough of my own whinging. Graham, my spy in Australia, alerted me to what happened on 19th August in Auckland. Australia and New Zealand played a crucial game in Auckland, in which the All Blacks eventually secured the coveted Tri-Nations trophy by defeating the Wallabies 34-27 in an especially rough-and-tumble fixture. In the course of this, Australia's Lote Tuqiri inflicted on New Zealand's iconic new captain Richie McCaw a highly dangerous spear tackle, lifting him up and dumping him heavily on his head, as this sequence of video-grabs shows. Fortunately no injury resulted. However, the assault, perpetrated in open-field play, went unpunished because, amazingly, the referee and two touch judges all failed to spot it.
Nevertheless, as you can see the cameras had caught it, so sometime
after the match, New Zealand were able to lodge an official Then New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark pitched in with one of her own. During a radio interview, she said -
When the no-nonsense Wallabies coach John Connolly, nicknamed Knuckles, heard Ms Clark's erudite remarks, he struggled to contain his laughter, saying “She has to be kidding, this is a wind-up, this is a wind-up”. No, just another Kiwi whinge!
Week 133's Letters to the Press Five letters since the last issue; I've got to try to break this habit. Only the one on Cuban health care was published; it exposes (on my second attempt) Castro's record of having killed 73,000 people, over which I am still engaged in a dispute.
- - - - - - - - - - L E B A N O N - - - - - - - - - - Quote: “The beauty of this war was that a force of just 6,000 or so members with light weapons superseded an organised army that all the Arab countries are scared of ... The point about Nasrallah is that he says something and then does it. And that is very unusual among leaders in the Arab world. Hezbollah doesn't just threaten, it achieves.”
Mohammed Sharak and
Saeed Nimur, - - - - - - Quote: “[We call on you our] troops to stand alongside your resistance and your people who astonished the world with its steadfastness and destroyed the prestige of the so-called invincible army after it was defeated.” A Lebanese army circular makes plain that it is allied to Hezbollah This is the force
that has been sent south of the Litani river When this war
resumes - as it surely will before long - - - - - - - Quote: “Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war? [I think he means worLd war!]” Poll question put by
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's The answer when I
voted was 30% Yes, 70% No,
Warning: According to
“Give
Israel Your Support” - - - - - - - - - - M U L T I C U L T U R I S M - - - - - - - - - - Quote: “Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen, its whole merely the sum of its parts. And so in the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide. Or in the superb summation of the American writer James C. Bennett, ‘democracy, immigration multiculturalism … pick any two’.” Mark Steyn,
lecturing in Sydney on
“It's not
‘Them’,
It's Us: Think carefully about Mr Bennett's three words. - - - - - - - - - - I R E L A N D - - - - - - - - - - Quote: “The tribunal has been staggered by the amount of indiscipline and insubordination it has found in the Garda [Irish police] force ...There is a small but disproportionately influential core of mischief-making members who will not obey orders, who will not follow procedures, who will not tell the truth and who have no respect for their officers ... It is wrong to suggest that the people of Ireland are getting value from every Garda employed by them” A damning report by a tribunal
into - - - - - - Quote: “What [I am looking] for in a Rose [is] someone a bit like myself, someone who is direct and not afraid to express an opinion ... the old days are gone.” Weird remarks from
Royston Brady, - - - - - - - - - - F O R M U L A O N E - - - - - - - - - - Quote (via Graham in Perth):
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ISSUE #132 - 13th August 2006 [240+93=333]
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I recently read down (and eventually chipped in to) a long discussion thread that followed a post, “Israel-Lebanon”, on the blog of Sunday Times columnist Sarah Carey, which she drew attention to in her weekly Sunday Times column. Though it was lively, and a few valid points were made, its contributors largely lacked knowledge of history, logic or indeed grammar, though there was no shortage of emotion. Needless to say, a large proportion of contributors criticised Israel for its effrontery in resisting and retaliating against Hezbollah's unprovoked attacks. Well-meaning people throughout history and across the world have always had genuine sympathy for the plight of Jews, the globe's eternal downtrodden, from pre-Christian times when they were enslaved by the Egyptians to post-Christian Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to the early twentieth century when six million of them in Europe were murdered by the Nazis. Of course among Christians they lost tremendous empathy for urging the Roman conquerors in Jerusalem to crucify Jesus, though it has always struck me as odd that even greater odium was/is not directed against the Italians since it was the Romans who made the actual decision and then carried it out. It's largely explained by Saint Paul, who left a huge corpus of inspirational writings, but who included in his first letter to the Thessalonians that awful calumny, “the Jews ... killed ... the Lord Jesus” (2:14-15). He surely knew better, or else there was a mistranslation. Then in 1948 the United Nations, in a fit of post-Holocaust guilt, agreed to establish as a homeland for the remaining Jews the state of Israel, in a small piece of the landmass they used to occupy during the time of Christ. Most of this land had been vacant for centuries because it was nothing but arid and empty earth and scrub. The absentee Turkish and Arab landlords from whom the Jews had during the early years of the twentieth century bought most of it couldn't believe their luck in getting hard cash for worthless real estate. But then, having got their country, those pesky Jews stopped reading the script, and started mouthing cheeky phrases like, “Never again”. It seems they didn't intend to become victims any more. Not ever. They not only created a thriving economy out of that desert, in the process attracting thousands of hitherto unemployed Arabs to take up the jobs that were suddenly created. This show of independence was bad enough. But when their neighbours started - and continued - to attack them, from the very day the state was formed, they for the first time in their millennia of history fought back - and won - instead of becoming punchbags yet again. In so doing, they created and honed the first Jewish army in 2,000 years. So suddenly, simply because they refuse to be on the losing team any more, everyone hates Jews again. Well, lots of people do and by no means only Muslims. The whiff of anti-Semitism within polite society and across the media is as overpowering as the stench from an open latrine in the summer. With such Jew-hatred alive and well within developed Western economies, Hitler can rest happy in his grave; his work has not, it seems, been in vain. But there was humour within Sarah Carey's discussion thread. One particular contributor, a Billy Waters, between sneers at Israel's “reckless” self-defence against an enemy sworn to annihilate it, remarked. “You don’t see the Dalai Lama bunker-busting Beijing do you?”, which appears to be his advice to Israel. There is of course one answer to this: Tibet. Tibet is a country brutally invaded by the illegitimate Communist regime that runs China, which for the past five decades has been single-mindedly focused on eradicating all vestiges of Tibetan identity, culture and language. It does this through military force, the chasing away of unco-operative religious leaders (hint: the Dalai Lama), the imprisonment or execution of any other awkward Tibetans, the wanton destruction of Tibetan holy and historic places, and massive immigration of ethnic Han Chinese. The latest step on this road is the opening of a hugely uneconomic direct train service from Beijing to Lhasa, covering some thousand kilometres, climbing higher than five thousand metres and costing well over four billion dollars. Outstanding engineering feat that it is, its primary purpose is to make further colonisation by the Han and other non-Tibetans even easier. It has nothing to do with tourism or trade, though no doubt the money these bring in will be welcome offsets to the enormous capital and operating costs. Tibetans are now a besieged, discriminated-against minority in their own country, much as the Koran demands that in Sharia-ruled lands infidels become dhimmis (if not dead). Indeed, thanks to Tibet's new demography, the Chinese thugs who run it might even at some stage feel brave enough to allow a little bit of democracy to creep in, and everyone will cheer. Oh, and by the way, the world has looked on at the rape of Tibet, virtually applauding, for the past 55 years. You see Tibet is not like the Middle East. It is not important in the material sense, so it can be safely ignored. No oil, no minerals, little fertile soil, no coastline, no vital trade-routes, no pipelines, no influential or rich friends. Only the Dalai Lama keeps us feeling faintly guilty. Tibet's fate is the logical result of not resisting (with bunker busters if needed) aggression aimed at your annihilation. You can be sure if, as Billy Waters speculated, the Dalai Lama had possessed bunker-busters, along with both the aircraft and the desire to deliver them to Beijing, Mao Tse Tung would have thought much more carefully before marching in roughshod. The world's greatest-ever mass-murderer would not have enjoyed one of them landing on Tiananmen Square. Yet not using its bunker-busters or whatever else in its arsenal it might need, is precisely what many Western anti-Semites seem to advocate for Israel. Because they would love to see those Jews turned if not into cinders, then Tibetans. Eternal victims again, for whom we can all feel sympathetic once more, and quietly go “Tut-tut”. And why does anyone imagine that, once the Jews are all disposed of, the remaining infidels are not next on the shopping list? What is happening in Lebanon is part of an existential battle not only for Israel, but for all us infidels. We better hope they win.
Last week I alluded to the dreadful Qana incident, where an errant Israeli bomb (or as others would have it a carefully directed Israeli bomb) struck a building containing only women and children, killing up to 54 of them. But I also pointed out that later reports gave a figure of “only” 28 dead. It seems there is more to this story than just an inability to count dead bodies, and an Israeli attack on a town from the area of which Hezbollah had launched some 130 rockets into Israel. That the count had actually reduced should have immediately raised suspicions: typically in a disaster (think of the tsunami), people record the bodies as and when they are recovered. With time more bodies are recovered so the tragic number goes up. It never goes down, at least not appreciably so, because you can't easily overcount corpses. And you certainly can't count 54 if there are only 28. Some have dug deeper and the story gets curiouser.
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But if Australians have a reputation, if unwarranted, for whinge-free
toughness, it is as nothing to
that
of the New Zealanders and their terrifying
Well,
New Zealand, who's doing the whinging now?
at the top right of his blog)
