Boker tov, Boulder!

(I don't miss Colorado)

I got this email, and it says at the bottom in large, bold print, "Please forward this email to your lists." Since I don't have any lists, I'll just post it on my blog and hope that will suffice :)

Colorado peace groups open office in Lebanon

In an effort to bring light to the human suffering brought by war, and bridge the distance to the Middle East, Colorado Peace groups are opening a Beirut Office. The office will offer resources to volunteers, journalists and members of the international community so as to see the Lebanese people from a different perspective.

Dan Winters, a veteran peace activist, will leave Sunday, August 27th for Beirut. This will be his third peace mission to the Middle East, following trips to Iraq and Palestine.

The purpose of the office is to act as a clearing house for international volunteers and media. The office will supply volunteers information regarding housing, interpreters, drivers, safety, NGOs, and volunteer opportunities.

Print & electronic media will find similar assistance plus contacts for interviews from multiple perspectives. Stephanie Phibbs notes, "It is really simple. My faith teaches me to love my neighbor, so I appreciate Dan helping me and other Coloradoans learn more about our neighbors in the Middle East."

Winters is planning a web site or blog to allow the citizens of Colorado to get a more personal view of how war is affecting the Lebanese people.

The members of the Coalition for Peace In the Middle East include:

Colorado Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Colorado Progressive Jewish News
Colorado Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Mountain Forum for Peace (pending)
Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center

*** Please forward this email to your lists ****

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Impeach Bush Period - .

Did I mention that I moved away from Colorado? The weather and the scenery are nice and all that, but the peace and justice out there can make you gag.

MSM convenes ... in Jerusalem

"Even when the media makes up things to blame Israel for, it's Israel's fault." -- Mere Rhetoric.

I have to think of something new to say; I can't just keep saying "this is unbelievable." But this is unbelievable.

(YNetNews.com) A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war.

All the Big Boys were there - the Associated Press, al Reuters, Aljazeera - but Steven Erlanger of the New York Times gets the most attention in the YNet report. His blaming Israel and the IDF would be laughable, but don't forget, a good number of people (like for instance, 99.9% of liberal Jews) still take the NY Times seriously.

The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Steven Erlanger, expressed surprise that Israel’s view of the war was different to that of its critics, and said that Israelis didn’t “quite grasp how the war was perceived outside of Israel.”

He lamented the lack of “proportionality” in the war, adding: “This is a charge that came against Israel from the United Nations... the French, the Italians.”

The New York Times bureau chief also said that Israelis “were not interested in whether 1,000 Lebanese civilians needed to die,” adding that the question of “whether Israel fought a proportional war is not much of interest here (in Israel).”

Erlanger added that during the war, he “took General Yadlin (who briefed the press on IDF operations) too seriously.”

Erlanger told the panel he turned down an offer by the IDF Spokesperson Unit to gain access to IDF efforts aimed at enabling humanitarian aid to reach Lebanon, saying he was not interested in the story.

Now read how Erlanger explains himself over at The Media Line (Warning: You may experience a moment or two of cognitive dissonance):

TML: What would you like newspaper readers to understand about the work of a field reporter?

ERLANGER: I would like them to understand…editors to understand too…that stories do not just appear full blown on a screen or a piece of paper, they are made of a long series of judgments, .... You bring your whole experience to bear, and sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you get the people that you need to talk to in time and sometimes you're unlucky and sometimes things get cut out of your copy in the middle of the night because suddenly an ad pops up or some space shrinks or something else happens they have to cram into the paper and they end up taking out just the balancing paragraph you worked so very hard to get in and when you went to bed was in and that's the part that hurts because then you get attacked by people and you know why they are attacking. And you go through this bit of a crisis, because obviously I stand by what was printed, but sometimes you know what is printed isn't exactly what I would have liked to be printed, but it's not my job to try to blame other people...

It is people making judgments, these are not opinionated judgments, these are judgments about what needs to be done, and what holes there are and doing it very often very late at night, very early in the morning, traveling distances, going out into the field, sometimes being shot at and sometimes not. People are not kind of sitting around on their behinds in air-conditioned offices all the time opining -- that is not what we do. And that's what I hope people will understand.

There isn't a kind of scoreboard that we use, what we try to do is over time, is to give people the best, most accurate narrative that we can and that's partly about analysis, context…

Maybe the key phrase here is "over time." If we are patient and wait a few more years, Erlanger might develop a taste for covering some Jewish perspectives. I mean, c'mon, he lives in Jerusalem after all.

Olmert vs. Kahane: The Nightline Debate

Israel Insider

Through the magic of YouTube, revisit a great debate, circa mid-80s, between Rabbi Meir Kahane, former MK murdered by an Arab Jihadist, and Israeli PM Ehud Olmert.

Ted Koppel asks tough questions about demographics and Zionism and transfer of Arabs as an option for the Jewish State.

01/25/2005 I posted the NY Times quoting Kofi Annan at the first ever UN General Assembly commemoration of the liberation of Nazi death camps: "On occasions like this, rhetoric comes easily .... We rightly say, 'Never again.' "

I had to laugh. There was Kofi Annan quoting Rabbi Meir Kahane for all the world to hear!

In 1968, Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League and adopted as its motto this shortened version of the slogan of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters:

"Never again will Jews stand by as their brothers cry for help."

You have to laugh at the great irony of it all. Maybe the world is learning, in spite of itself.

A year and seven months later, I cannot remember being that optimistic. A year and seven months later, I can no longer even imagine laughing at what I then thought was a great irony.

Neo-Nazis attack 2 Israelis in Belgrade

B92

Bojana Petković and Yariv Avram were beaten by the hooligans wearing Nazi t-shirts and singing Nazi songs. What is even more worrying is the fact the police present at the concert held at Belgrade’s Tašmajdan stadium have so far done nothing to locate the perpetrators.

Attending a concert in the capital might prove to be dangerous for foreigners, Israeli citizens in particular. The two Israelis have experienced precisely this when they attended a Tašmajdan concert after spending, in their words, two wonderful weeks in Serbia.

Instead of entering the stadium, they ran into a group of Skinheads on the stairs. “They surrounded us singing ‘Auschwitz’ to me. They yelled at me that I am a bloody Jew and asked me whether I knew what my country did to theirs. They shouted: go to Germany. Then my friend stepped in and we started running, but they caught up with us and started beating us with all their might. They hit me on the head, one of them hit my eye. They hit my friend too. It was horrible”, Yariv Avram recounted.

“We started running, but they surrounded us again and started beating us. Yariv was hit on the head and body, and they kicked me around. We somehow managed to reach the police”, Bojana Petković said. Yariv Avram now has a stitched forehead, while his friend is covered in bruises. The Israeli embassy in Belgrade has been notified of the incident.

Kofi's doing a bang-up job of diplomacy in the Middle East

Lebanon refuses contact with Israel

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said Wednesday that he refused to have any direct contact with Israel and Lebanon would be the last Arab country to ever sign a peace deal with the Jewish state.

"Let it be clear, we are not seeking any agreement until there is just and comprehensive peace based on the Arab initiative," he said.

He was referring to a plan that came out of a 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut. It calls for Israel to return all territories it conquered in the 1967 Mideast war, the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem - all in exchange for peace and full normalization of Arab relations with Israel....

Saniora said Lebanon wants to go back to the 1949 armistice agreement that formally ended the Arab-Israeli war over Israel's creation.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said earlier Wednesday that the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire could be "a cornerstone to build a new reality between Israel and Lebanon."

While the Arabs keep wanting to turn the clock back, everything with Olmert has to be "new." His "new reality" with Lebanon sounds a lot like his "new morning of great hope" with the Palestinians. And we all know what happened with that.

Know your enemy

Courtesy of Tel Aviv's Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, via the good Clarity and Resolve blog, we get to see what the IDF found in south Lebanon.

Hezbollah fund-raising leaflets were found in the possession of Hezbollah terrorists in the village of Aita al Sha'ab . They had been distributed to the local population at home, in schools and in stores to encourage contributions. The leaflet's illustration makes it clear that the contributions will be used to buy weapons to destroy Israel . They were produced by the Islamic Resistance Support Association for a fund-raising campaign nicknamed “savings account.” To that end thousands of collections boxes like those shown on the leaflet were distributed, especially to children.

The back of the leaflet states: “So that all our houses may be [part of the] resistance [i.e., Hezbollah] – [This is] a resistance collection box – place it in your house .” The picture shows a collection box in the form of the Dome of the Rock 3 and the portrait of the former Hezbollah leader, Abbas Musawi, who was killed by Israel. Coins drop into the box and drop out as bullets which shatter the Star of David symbolizing Israel.

Hezbollah has a very sophisticated program of fund-raising intertwined with indoctrination, geared toward the younger generation. Please go to www.terrorism-info.org and read all about it. Our children will have to face the children being raised on this Hezbollah propaganda... in Lebanon and around the world.

This stuff is worthy of a major blogswarm. See what you can do.

It would be a good idea, too, to bring this material to the attention of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch -- you know, the ones who say Israel committed war crimes by attacking poorlebanesecivilians.

Walt & Mearsheimer CAIR: the transcript

A big Thank You Much to Vital Perspective for posting a full transcript of The Professors' appearance yesterday on C-SPAN.

Please note that the Vital Perspective bloggers are participating in a new blog run by the Washington Post, called Post Global.

Is a blog still a blog when it's run by a newspaper? If WaPo can pull that off, it would be a Very Good Thing.

Mazal tov to Vital Perspective.

Mister Rumsfeld uses the F-word

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration's Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease "a new type of fascism."

In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration's critics as suffering from "moral and intellectual confusion" about what threatens the nation's security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.

Atlas has more.

In Lebanon: Where's the truth?

Veteran U.S. civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, right, walks past an anti-U.S. banner placed among the rubble of a building that was destroyed following Israeli bombardment during the 34-day long Hezbollah-Israel war, in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2006. Jackson, who said Tuesday that an Israeli soldier seized by Palestinian militants and two others held captive by Hezbollah are alive, also said Syria, a main backer of both Hamas and Hezbollah, wanted to be involved in a prisoner swap that included the three Israelis and Syrian nationals detained by Israel in the Golan Heights. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Tawil)

Alan Dershowitz writes at the Huffington Post, August 7, that "Lebanon is no more a victim of Hezbollah than Austria was a victim of Nazism."

In fact a higher percentage of Lebanese--more than 80%--say they support Hezbollah. The figures were nearly as high before the recent civilian deaths.

This is considerably higher than the number of Austrians who supported Hitler when the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. Austria too claimed it was a victim, but no serious person today believes such self-serving historical revisionism. Austria was not "Hitler's first victim." It was Hitler's most sympathetic collaborator.

Fawaz A. Gerges confirms the Dershowitz outlook, though he states it much differently in this (August 15) publication of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

... Hezbollah is not just a militia or conventional army, but a social and political movement deeply rooted in its society, with a big constituency within the Lebanese Shia community that comprises about 40 percent of the country's 4 million people. Hezbollah organizes a welfare system providing schools, clinics, daycare centers and jobs to hundreds of thousands of poor Shia.

Equally important, Hezbollah provides the Shia community, historically disadvantaged and marginalized in Lebanon, a sense of identity and a source of pride.

Second, Hezbollah is falsely portrayed by Israel and its friends in the US as a rotten tooth that can easily be plucked out – a terrorist organization that must be wiped out. In fact, Hezbollah is a pivotal political player on the Lebanese landscape. More than a million men and women vote for its candidates in elections. The radical organization is part of the Lebanese political landscape, and there is real dialogue to integrate Hezbollah paramilitary apparatus fully into the army and resolve its dual status.

Hezbollah has two ministers in the cabinet, 14 seats in Lebanon's 128-seat parliament, and a large base of support in the Muslim world.

Third, since the early 1980s Hezbollah has proved itself on the battlefield against Israeli military might...

A national poll conducted in Lebanon two weeks ago by the Beirut Center for Research and Information showed a sharp rise in support for Hezbollah since the Israeli invasion: 87 percent of respondents supported Hezbollah's military response, including 89 percent of Sunnis and 80 percent of Christians. Five months ago, just 58 percent supported Hezbollah’s right to remain armed.

However, according to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur yesterday (via Monsters and Critics) the Lebanese overall are split right down the middle, with 51% supporting the disarmament of Hezbollah and 49% opposed.

The poll also showed a wide difference of views among Lebanon's various religious communities.

Among the Shiite community - Lebanon's largest and the support base for Hezbollah - the poll found 84 per cent wanted the militant group to keep its weapons.

But among the Druze and Christian communities, 79 per cent and 77 per cent respectively wanted the militant group to surrender its weapons.

Among the Sunni Muslim community, the poll found a slender majority of 54 per cent in favour of the militant group disarming.

We blog. You figure it out.

Without an operational purpose

The following is the text of a petition signed by IDF reservists who served in the Spearhead Brigade in Lebanon, in protest at the handling of the war by the government and senior military officials [from 8/21 Haaretz, via Naomi Ragen]:

We, fighters and commanders at the Spearhead [Hod Hachanit] Brigade, were called up to enlist under an emergency mobilization order [Tzav 8] on July 30, 2006. Our attendance was complete in all battalions.

As we were signing on the battle equipment and weapons, we knew that we were signing for much more. We left behind wives and children, girlfriends and families. We put aside our jobs and livelihoods; we were prepared to carry out our mission under the most difficult of conditions, in heat, thirst or hunger.

At the back of his mind, each and every one of us knew, that for the just cause of protecting the citizens of Israel, we would even put our lives on the line.

But there was one thing we were not and would not be willing to accept: We were unwilling to accept indecisiveness. The war's aim, which was not defined clearly, was even changed in the course of the fighting.

The indecisiveness manifested itself in inaction, in not carrying out operational plans, and in canceling all the missions we were given during the fighting. This led to prolonged stays in hostile territory, without an operational purpose and out of unprofessional considerations, without seeking to engage in combat with the enemy.

The "cold feet" of the decision-makers were evident everywhere. To us the indecisiveness expressed deep disrespect for our willingness to join the ranks and fight and made us feel as though we had been spat on, since it contradicts the principles and values of warfare upon which we were trained at the Israel Defense Forces.

The heavy feeling that in the echelons above us there is nothing but under-preparation, insincerity, lack of foresight and inability to make rational decisions, leads to the question - were we called up for nothing?

We are now on the day after, and it seems that the immorality and the absence of any shame are the fig-leaves to be used in order to cover up for the blunders. The blunders of the past six years and the under-preparation of the army have been carried on our backs - the backs of the fighters. In order to face the next battle prepared - and this may happen soon - a thorough and fundamental change must take place.

The crisis of confidence between us as fighters and the higher echelons will not be resolved without a thorough and worthy investigative commission under the auspices of the state. When the commission completes its task, conclusions must be drawn both on the level of strategic planning and national security, and on the personal level of the parties involved.

We paid a heavy price in order to fight and come out of the battle victorious, and we feel this has been denied of us. We will all attend calls to enlist in the future for any mission we will be required to complete, but we would like to know that these missions will be part of a clear objective and will be carried out by striving to engage in combat.

As soldiers and citizens we expect a response at your earliest convenience,

We the undersigned

Fighters and officers of the Spearhead Brigade

While we're on the topic of operational purpose, let's check on the progress of Kofi Annan's tour of the Middle East. Yesterday he was in Beirut, tonight he's in Yerushalayim (Jerusalem).

The families of three IDF hostages being held captive by Hizbullah and Hamas terrorists met in Jerusalem with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan Tuesday evening. He told them nothing new.

The relatives of Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were deeply disappointed following their meeting with the world body leader who said he had no new information on their loved ones.

Before the meeting, Karnit Goldwasser, Ehud’s wife, said she wanted to see action and not words. “We have not received anything until now, not even a sign of life. We want to begin seeing acts and not only hearing nice and important words,” she said.

.... Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Gillerman met with the families prior to their talk with Annan, and urged them to keep the issue on personal and moral ground. “In the coming days he (Annan) is about to visit countries with both an interest and great influence in terms of this issue,’ he said. “I certainly hope that this meeting will raise his moral commitment.”

I wonder if Gillerman knew at the time that just before leaving Lebanon to fly to Israel, Kofi Annan said:

"We need to deal with the lifting of the embargo -- sea, land and air -- which for the Lebanese is a humiliation, and infringement on their sovereignty."

Black is white and white is black. The Israeli blockade that is (hopefully) keeping Syrian and Iranian weaponry out of the hands of Hezbollah is humiliating. And infringes on Lebanese sovereignty. The fact that Iran bought Lebanon and is using Hezbollah to run that country is neither humiliting nor an infringement on their sovereignty.

Yeah, right, Kofi. Off you go to spread more of that special United Nations brand of good will.