Reply With QuoteTALK ABOUT THE JEWS BEING PERSECUTED...LOOK AT MEL GIBSON, HE SPEAKS HIS MIND AND IS ACCUSED OF BEING RACIST, ANTI SEMETIC. I THOUGHT THISWAS THE LAND OF FREE SPEECH..OH, ONLY IF YOUR IN THE MINORITY!!!
For - Surrender
Against - Eliminate Hezbollah
So what you're saying is the Hezbollah is to Islam as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and those folks that dance with snakes are to Christianity.Originally Posted by crlachepinochet
Think you can trust the government?
Ask an Indian!
I am starting to wonder who really assinated Lebanese president Rafik Hariri. Do you honestly think any of this would be happening today if Syrian forces were still in Lebanon? This whole thing looks like one staged, planned out event. The cards were set on the table the day that man was assinated. This will not end until Iran is invaded.
Israel is showing great restraint and reserve for the war they need to fight.
There is a definitive collection of Israeli government officials who will not back down to the moderates of Israel.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants a cease fire so as to re-arm Hezbollah and then attempt the elimination of Israel.
They are loosing and want the international community to call a cease fire on behave of Hezbollah. What a joke.
Now is the time to crush Hezbollah and not let them get back up.
Go Israel!
General: Israel Will 'Smash' Lebanon
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles...925.shtml?s=lh
Kenneth R. Timmerman, NewsMax.com
Friday, Aug. 4, 2006
TEL AVIV, Israel -- If Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah makes good on the threat he issued yesterday to launch missiles at Tel Aviv, Israel will respond with massive force against Lebanon, a top Israeli general told NewsMax today.
"At some point, the Lebanese have to decide," Maj. Gen. [res.] Yaacov Amidror said in an exclusive NewsMax interview. "Are they a sovereign state, or under the umbrella of Hezbollah?"
Lebanon's Responsibilities
As a sovereign state, Lebanon "has responsibilities" not to allow its territory be used to attack Israel's former capital and biggest city, he said.
Amidror is a former deputy director of Israeli Military Intelligence, and now is a director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Policy.
In a videotaped statement on Hezbollah's al-Manar television network on Thursday, Nasrallah warned that if Israel launched further air strikes on Beirut, Hezbollah would launch missiles on Tel Aviv.
Hezbollah attempted to launch an Iranian-made Zelzal missile on the first day of the war, but Israeli jets managed to bomb the depot where it was being prepared, causing the missile to misfire and strike Beirut. Israeli military sources believe the Zelzal is the only weapon in the Hezbollah arsenal capable of reaching Tel Aviv. Its range is believed to be somewhere between 175 to 250 kilometers.
"If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity . . . We will bomb Tel Aviv," Nasrallah said.
Israel moved the capital to Jerusalem after the 1967 war.
Israel Pounds Beirut
Just hours after Nasrallah delivered his threat, Israel launched a series of air strikes on suspected Hezbollah facilities in Beirut, and continued pounding them during the night.
Amidror said that Israel would not attack Hezbollah's sponsor, Iran, even though Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers were training Hezbollah in Lebanon and were operationally in charge of Hezbollah's long-range Zelzal missiles.
But there was "no question that Israel will launch massive attacks on Lebanon if Tel Aviv is attacked. No question whatsoever. The attacks will be so massive they will set Lebanon back 20 years," he said. A Hezbollah strike on Tel Aviv "will mean the end of the infrastructure of Lebanon," he added.
While Amidror was not speaking in an official capacity for the Israel army or the government, Israeli military sources said his views were shared by many top commanders.
"Lebanon will suffer in the case of attacks on Tel Aviv," senior officers said in personal comments.
Until now, however, the IDF command has not responded to Nasrallah's threat. A military spokesman told NewsMax that IDF actions "are not dictated by a emotional response," but were "carefully calculated to achieve our objectives of fighting Hezbollah."
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, told NewsMax that Israel has issued no official response to Nasrallah's latest threat. "We're not going to respond to every threat that Nasrallah makes," he said.
"We have done much to neutralize Hezbollah's long-range missile capability, but there's always the chance they have something we don't know about," he added.
Iran's president wasted no time weighing in on the tense situation.
Speaking at an emergency meeting of Muslim leaders in Malaysia on Thursday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the "solution" to the Middle East crisis was to destroy Israel, Iranian state media reported.
"Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented," he furthered.
Hezbollah Shows Signs of Breaking
Israeli officials believe these calls for a cease-fire, which were repeated by Nasrallah in his speech yesterday, are a clear sign that Israel's military campaign on Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon is beginning to seriously degrade Hezbollah's fighting abilities.
"Our operations in the air and on the ground are costing a high price to Hezbollah," the Israel Defense Force chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, said Wednesday. "We are hitting their infrastructure, rockets and villages, and command and control stations and posts."
Amidror believes Hezbollah was surprised by Israel's response to its cross-border attack on July 12, when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. "They had killed our soldiers before and nothing happened. They weren't expecting this."
Iran's strategy was to use Hezbollah as a deterrent to an Israeli attack on Iran or on Lebanon, "and for six years, it worked," he said. "We were attacked repeatedly, and we didn't respond. We were always thinking about the missiles."
The main result of the current war was to "change all the criteria of deterrence in the Middle East," he said.
Israel's Steadfast Determination
Until the massive Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel towns and cities, Israeli leaders had feared the ability of the Israeli population to withstand such a pounding. "We are showing that we can absorb hundreds of rocket strikes, if it's necessary," Amidror said.
"At the end of the day, they know we will win the war, even with hundreds of rockets hitting our civilians." Until now, however, "Hezbollah just assumed Israel would not be able to absorb these attacks."
Israel's fortitude has "changed the mood in the Middle East," and showed the limitations of Iran's strategy.
Iran's goal, Amidror believes, is "to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state in the Middle East, and then move to create a radical Shiite empire from Iran to Lebanon."
Since Iran created Hezbollah in the early 1980s, they have continued to provide it with funding and weapons, and train Hezbollah fighters at military bases in Iran and Lebanon.
Hezbollah is "fully-owned by Iran," he said. "Everything you can touch except for a few weapons that have come from Syria, all has come from Iran."
Hezbollah an Extension of Iran
Hezbollah's spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammad Hossein Fadlallah, is no ordinary Lebanese cleric, Amidror pointed out.
"Fadlallah is in fact the personal envoy of Iranian supreme leader Khamenei in Lebanon. He can go to Khamenei directly on any matter, bypassing the government and clerical hierarchy in Iran."
In addition, two Iranians sit on the Hezbollah ruling council, known as the Majles-e shoura: the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards forces in Lebanon, and Iran's ambassador to Beirut.
"So if you look at the hardware – the weapons - and the software – the ideology - you see that this is not a Lebanese organization, but an extension of Iran," he said. "Hezbollah is the long arm of Iran."
I believe you have answered your own question.
Imagine this a bias for Hezbollah? Nah! Cannot be! No way! Never happens!
The media lie and stag photos and make up stories? Dan Rather must have gone into teaching his style of journalism.
Qana Casualties Only Half of Original Estimates
NewsMax contributing editor and Middle East expert Kenneth R. Timmerman is in Israel covering the conflict there. He reports from Tel Aviv.
TEL AVIV, Israel -- Human Rights Watch released a report in Beirut on Thursday directly contradicting its earlier claims that "at least" 54 Lebanese civilians people had been killed when the Israeli Air Force bombed an apparent Hezbollah target in the Lebanese village of Qana on July 30.
The controversial human rights group now says that only 28 people died in the air strike. It made no apology to Israel for its earlier inflated claims.
Israeli officials told NewsMax they were suspicious of the high death toll right from the start when they examined news photographs of the victims.
"They appeared to have rigor mortis just hours after death," one official told NewsMax. "That seemed odd – not impossible, given the heat. But odd."
As it turns out, NewsMax has learned that news photographers saw aid workers wrapping furniture in body bags hours after the attack then loading the "corpses" into ambulances for the benefit of television news cameras.
Hezbollah officials at the site prevented the photographers from documenting the fabrication, said sources at the scene who asked not to be identified.
International news photographers helped jinn up anti-Israeli sentiment in the aftermath of the attack by filing pictures of a Lebanese aid worker who repeatedly posed for pictures with the bodies of a baby and a young girl the news agencies claimed were being taken from the rubble.
In the earliest photograph, filed by the Associated Press at 12:45 PM – nearly 12 hours after an Israeli missile hit the building – the aid worker carries the body of a toddler toward an ambulance.
The AP caption reads: "Lebanese Red Cross and Civil Defense workers carry the body of a small child covered in dust from the rubble of his home that was hit in an Israeli missile strike in the village of Qana, east of the port city of Tyre."
But two hours later, Reuters filed a photograph of the same rescue worker – with distinctive designer glasses, and a Euro-chic stubble beard, and fluorescent jacket – pulling the same child from the rubble, according to an analysis by British blogger Richard North.
North concludes that the photos were "staged."
Human Rights Watch appears to have played along with the Hezbollah media manipulation, basing its on-scene reports from Qana on information it received from a Lebanese aid worker, the group's latest report acknowledges.
"The initial estimate of 54 persons killed [in Qana] was based on a register of 63 persons who had sought shelter in the basement of the building that was struck, and rescue teams having located nine survivors," Human Rights Watch said in a statement released on Wednesday. "It now appears that at least 22 persons escaped the basement, and 28 are confirmed dead, according to the Lebanese Red Cross and the government hospital in Tyre."
Despite contradicting its own claims that 54 civilians had died - many of them children and allegedly handicapped adults – Human Rights Watch continued to place the blame for the civilian deaths on Israel.
"The deaths in Qana were the predictable result of Israel's indiscriminate bombing campaign in Lebanon," said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division of the controversial group.
Prof. Gerald Steinberg, who edits NGO Monitor – an Israeli Internet-based publication that tracks the claims of notorious anti-Israel groups such as Human Rights Watch – told NewsMax the group's report on Qana was "not credible, because it is based on local ‘eye witnesses' and unverifiable claims."
Human Rights Watch said that Qana "witnesses" and local rescue workers saw no evidence of Hezbollah military presence in or around the house that was bombed.
"These reports cannot be considered reliable," Steinberg told NewsMax. The Human Rights Watch statement "fails to note that this area is controlled by the Hezbollah terror group."
The rights group "usually hires a local to collect evidence, and then the evidence is rigged so Israel will become the subject of an international media campaign, sanctions, and boycott," he added.
[]bThe Israel Defense Force released its investigation into the Qana incident on Wednesday.[/b]
The IDF noted, without explanation, that an Israeli Air Force jet targeted the building at 00:52 on July 30th with two missiles, "the first of which exploded and the second was apparently a dud." But the building didn't collapse for another seven hours.
No one has explained why the people eventually trapped inside didn't try to escape during those seven hours.
"I have heard reports that Hezbollah brought in dead bodies from other areas and spread them around," senior policy analyst Dan Diker at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs told NewsMax.
Human Rights Watch quoted a local witness in the report released on Thursday who graphically described two powerful Israeli hits on the building, not one. "After the second strike, we could barely breathe and we couldn't see anything," he said.
The witness "vigorously denied that any Hezbollah fighters were present in or around the home when the attack took place," Human Rights Watch stated. "All four roads to Qana village had been cut by Israeli bombs, he said, which would have made it difficult if not impossible for Hezbollah to move rocket launchers into the village."
Human Rights Watch did not explain why the witness, described as "a 61-year-old farmer who was in the basement during the attack," should be considered an expert on Hezbollah tactics or Israeli ordnance.
Israeli press reports have described Hezbollah arms caches found by Israeli troops on hilltops, in houses, schools, and mosques.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said at the outset of this conflict on July 12 that Hezbollah had been preparing its attack on Israel ever since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
Since July 12, the IDF said, "over 150 rockets were launched from within the village of Qana itself and the immediate surrounding area" from launchers already in the area despite damage to local roads.
The IDF struck the building "according to information that the building was not inhabited by civilians and was being used as a hiding place for terrorists," and released three separate videos showing Hezbollah rocket attacks from the immediate vicinity.
In the videos, shot by drones and by Isareli fighter jets, rocket launchers on trucks can be seen firing rockets into Israel, then racing through the winding streets of the village of Qana and disappearing into garages beneath ordinary houses such as the one hit.
"The Hezbollah organization places Lebanese civilians as a defensive shield between itself and us while the IDF places itself as a defensive shield between the citizens of Israel and Hezbollah's terror," Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz said on Wednesday. "That is the principle difference between us."
NewsMax is the news of the extreme right. It is one of the most biased and misleading sources of news that exist. Timmerman, who wrote that NewsMax article, has a decidedly anti-Islam, pro-Jewish agenda. He, himself, was held prisoner by the Fatah for 24 days back in the early 80's. Since then he was an Advisory Board Member for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Timmerman is umbilically connected to the godfather of right-wing think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. It was the American Enterprise Institute that spawned the Project for the New American Century, the think tank that gave us Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, the original noise about Iraqi WMD, and the idea that a military takeover of the entire Mideast is a bully idea. The same people that terrorized the American people into unnecessary war in Iraq are preparing to do the same with Iran, and all in time for the midterms.
NewsMax is enough to make Fox News look "fair & balanced".
The path is clear
Though no eyes can see
The course laid down long before.
And so with gods and men
The sheep remain inside their pen,
Though many times they've seen the way to leave.
Can't argue the facts?
Attempt to dicredit the source.
Same old leftist agenda and tactic.
The NewsMax article you posted contained very little factual information to dispute. It was full of speculation and innuendo.
Oh, don't categorize me as a leftist, I find that highly offensive. My philosophy is based on solid libertarian principles. My opposition to the Israeli aggression is rooted in different principles.
The path is clear
Though no eyes can see
The course laid down long before.
And so with gods and men
The sheep remain inside their pen,
Though many times they've seen the way to leave.
Then let me argue this fact:
Newsmax: "They appeared to have rigor mortis just hours after death," one official told NewsMax. "That seemed odd – not impossible, given the heat. But odd."
As it turns out, NewsMax has learned that news photographers saw aid workers wrapping furniture in body bags hours after the attack then loading the "corpses" into ambulances for the benefit of television news cameras.
Rigor mortis DOES set in a few hours after death, sometimes three or less.
What are you trying to say, hardy?
I know the Israelis are making up all kinds of excuses--"oh, we didn't know there'd be children in that building" or, "Gee, we were off target a little bit"
and a dozen more excuses in their hopes the world won't think TOO badly of them. Every newscast there's a little pause and the reporter tacks one of these on to the report. But this is right up your alley--you are the one who says "kill them all" so you must be vicariously happy these days.
And exactly why would aid workers bother to do this--"workers wrapping furniture in body bags hours after the attack then loading the "corpses" into ambulances for the benefit of television news cameras." There are enough real corpses to use.
Are you trying to minimalize the tragedy over there? Shame! Shame, hardy!
Funny thing about wars.
Those who do not get out of the way are either stupid or the enemy and end up getting killed.
Imagine that?
Hezbollah has been allowed to live and operate among those being killed. They knew the risks and took them.
Do I feel sorry for them? No, I do not.
This is the result of supporting and supplying a terrorist group in your neighborhood.
As far a shame is concerned. We shall see who really is to shame. Myself for supporting the rights of Israel or you and your ilk for supporting terrorists.
The enemy knows how soft the simple-minded left leaning Americans are and they hope that there are enough simpletons to stop the US from supporting allies and engaging the terrorists. So the terrorists may have free range to terrorize the rest of the world while the simpletons try to figure out why they hate us.
News flash; the enemy has said so clearly, repeatedly and yet the left and RINOS of this country still do not believe what the terrorists tell us.
Flash back to the days of Hitler’s rise and his onslaught across Europe.
You may also believe the holocaust never happened as well.
All we need to do is understand the terrorists, hold hands and sing, Kumbiyah.
These countries who are at war with each other are NOT terrorists, not as Americans understand terrorists as in Taliban and al Qaeda. Please do not lump them together. Hezbollah is set apart and is a product of Israel occupying Lebanon and fueled by other countries, Hamas has not attacked the US, and there are radical religous sects, and some hate each other more than they hate us.
It's much more complicated than your mind can comprehend. Just do not try to simplify any of this. The US should stay away from this war as they should have stayed away from Iraq.
speaker you had better stop before your ignorance proves to be to much even for yourself.
And no it is not to complicated for myself. I understand and comprehend just fine. Though you and many others on the left and some on the right do seem to be having a problem.
The proof will be in the pudding as they say.
I'll stand by my position.
Israel is wrong - period!
Stop the Band-Aid Treatment
We Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace
By Jimmy Carter
Tuesday, August 1, 2006; A17
The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners. Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israeli soldiers in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004.
This stratagem precipitated the renewed violence that erupted in June when Palestinians dug a tunnel under the barrier that surrounds Gaza and assaulted some Israeli soldiers, killing two and capturing one. They offered to exchange the soldier for the release of 95 women and 313 children who are among almost 10,000 Arabs in Israeli prisons, but this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel. The resulting destruction brought reconciliation between warring Palestinian factions and support for them throughout the Arab world.
Hezbollah militants then killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others, and insisted on Israel's withdrawal from disputed territory and an exchange for some of the several thousand incarcerated Lebanese. With American backing, Israeli bombs and missiles rained down on Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets from Syria and Iran struck northern Israel.
It is inarguable that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks on its citizens, but it is inhumane and counterproductive to punish civilian populations in the illogical hope that somehow they will blame Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking the devastating response. The result instead has been that broad Arab and worldwide support has been rallied for these groups, while condemnation of both Israel and the United States has intensified.
Israel belatedly announced, but did not carry out, a two-day cessation in bombing Lebanon, responding to the global condemnation of an air attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, where 57 civilians were killed this past weekend and where 106 died from the same cause 10 years ago. As before there were expressions of "deep regret," a promise of "immediate investigation" and the explanation that dropped leaflets had warned families in the region to leave their homes. The urgent need in Lebanon is that Israeli attacks stop, the nation's regular military forces control the southern region, Hezbollah cease as a separate fighting force, and future attacks against Israel be prevented. Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms, and release the Lebanese prisoners. Yet yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire.
These are ambitious hopes, but even if the U.N. Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.
Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative "security barrier" that embarrasses Israel's friends and that fails to bring safety or stability.
The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal.
A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support.
Former president Carter is the founder of the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta.
The path is clear
Though no eyes can see
The course laid down long before.
And so with gods and men
The sheep remain inside their pen,
Though many times they've seen the way to leave.
Why anyone would be interested in what Jimmy Carter has to say about a Mideast conflict---given his atrocious record while Commander in Chief--is beyond me.
Truth springs from argument among friends.
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