Archive for July, 2006
chutzpah |ˈhoŏtspə; ˈ kh oŏtspə; -spä| (also chutzpa or hutzpah or hutzpa)
noun informal
shameless audacity; impudence.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: Yiddish, from Aramaic ḥu ṣpā.
That is the word i would use to describe the excuse given by an Israeli defense force spokesman on the massacre of 56 Lebanese civilians, including 34 children, by a bomb dropped by an Israeli jet.
“We don’t know what the people were doing in the basement. It is possible they were being used as shields or being used cynically to further Hizbullah’s propaganda purposes.”
What were those people doing in the basement? Instead of accepting the responsibilities for the monstrous act of killing those civilians, he has the chutzpah to question why they were hiding in the basement. Worse, he even attempted to shift the blame to the Hizbullah by claiming that they “were being used as shields” to “further Hizbullah’s propanganda purpose.”
May be they were hiding in the basement because they thought it was the safest place in the house to avoid being killed by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of southern Lebanon? Or may be because they had nowhere to go since Israel had bombed and destroyed all the routes out of southern Lebanon? Could it be that they did not want to be like those who were killed and maimed by Israeli fighters-bombers in their cars in their attempts to escape north after heeding Israel’s advice to abandon their homes?
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Mk-84: Made in the USA. Dropped by Israel. Annihilation in Lebanon.
‘How can we stand by and allow this to go on?’
By Robert Fisk
7/31/2006 | The Independent | informationclearinghouse.info
They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. “Mehdi Hashem, aged seven - Qana,” was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy’s body lay. “Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 - Qana’,’ “Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one - Qana.” And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas’s little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father’s shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the “pinpoint accuracy” it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified this massacre. Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about “Muslim terror” threatening “western civilisation” - as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: “For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B”. No doubt the manufacturers can call it “combat-proven” because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.
Continue reading ‘Made in the USA’
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Condi Rice decided to play the piano at the annual ASEAN dinner, instead of the normal playful skits because “given [the current] world events, a lighthearted ski wouldn’t be appropriate.” She was quoted as saying that the piano piece would fit her “serious mood” at the dinner.
It will be “a reflective piece,” she said. “It’s a serious time.”
Oh, how thoughtful of her to be playing “a reflective piece” by Brahms because, as she said, “it’s a serious time.” Given the deaths and destructions being rained down by Israel on Lebanon, i find it extremely inappropriate for Condi to even attend the ASEAN annual meeting, not to mention playing the piano there.
Being the representative of the chief armament provider for Israel’s military, all Ms Rice has to do in order to force the Israeli to immediately stop their murderous bombing across Lebanon is to threaten to suspend the shipment of weapons. But instead, “I say to the Lebanese people, no one wants to see the spilling of Lebanese blood,” Ms. Rice said. “But I also don’t want to see the spilling of Lebanese blood three months from now because we allowed the situation to go back to the status quo ante.” I have a word of advice for her. Why not stop the spilling of Lebanese blood right now and in the meantime, work on a solution so that there won’t be any spilling of Lebanese blood in future? Do Lebanese civilians have to continue to spill their blood because the temporary solution might not last more than three months? If a dam is leaking water, shouldn’t a short-term plug be used to stop the leak while a more permanent solution is being worked on?
While Condi plays, Beirut burns.
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The harddrive on my server finally went south yesterday morning. I had been having problem with it every so often the last 6 months or so, but problem had always gone away after a reboot. Rebooting my server multiple times didn’t help yesterday morning. Fortunately, i have a spare drive in my test server of the same capacity.
At first, i was hoping that somehow i would be able to transfer the data from the bad drive to the replacement drive. I could not even boot up my server with the bad drive. So i was left with no choice but to install the base FC4 onto the replacement drive and then restore from my backup server. To my relief, i was able to restore from my backup server. Other than fixing a missing link to a library, the restore was able to get everything back like it was.
After being down for more than 16 hours, ktula.com is up and running!
I have one advice if you want to host your own server at home. Backup your stuff.
Whewwwww…….
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War on Lebanon Planned for at least a Year
The Bush Administration’s Grand Strategy and the Birth Pangs of Terror
By Juan Cole
07/23/06 “Information Clearing House” — – Israeli war planes hit the cities of Sidon, south Beirut and Baalbak on Saturday and Israeli ground troops fought a hard battle to take over the village of Maroun al-Ras, said to be a Hizbullah rocket-launching site. The Israeli bombing of Sidon hit a religious complex linked to Hizbullah. The BBC reports that ‘The UN’s Jan Egeland said half a million people needed assistance - and the number was likely to increase. One-third of the recent Lebanese casualties, he said, appeared to be children.’
Matthew Kalman reveals that Israel’s wideranging assault on Lebanon has been planned in a general way for years, and a specific plan has been in the works for over a year. The “Three Week War” was shown to Washington think tanks and officials last year on powerpoint by a senior Israeli army officer:
“More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.”
The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers. It is a long-planned war to increase Israel’s ascendency over Hizbullah and its patrons.
Continue reading ‘War on Lebanon Planned for at least a Year’
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http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14141.htm
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Schadenfreude |ˈ sh ädənˌfroidə| (also schadenfreude)
pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.
ORIGIN German, from Schaden ‘harm’ + Freude ‘joy’
That is no equivalent word for Schadenfreude in the English language. That is the word i would use to describe President Bush in view of his administration’s stance on what can only be described as the wholesale destruction of the Lebanese society by our so-called friend Israel. If President Bush is not taking pleasure from the devastation being inflicted by the US-backed* Israel on the Lebanese, why else would he urge the Middle East countries to put pressure on the Hizbollah, instead of pulling the leash on Israel? After all, the US not only provides a few billion dollars worth of armaments to Israel each year, it also backs its unofficial 51st state by vetoing resolutions after resolutions (more than 75 vetoes) that were drafted against Israel in the UN Security Council. If President Bush wishes the conflict to be temporarily halted, all he has to do is to threaten to withhold the more than $3 billion dollars of aid to Israel each year. That is all he has to do.
But no.
Instead of immediately sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over when Israel started bombing Lebanon indiscriminately more than a week ago, he is only now sending her over, but not before she makes a detour to Asia. If there is a 5-alarm fire burning in a 10-storey building and gas-related explosions are occurring all over the building, imagine what would have happened if the firemen decided to stop by a McDonald’s for some lunch before leisurely heading over to put out the fire. Also imagine what would have happened if city utility has the ability to shut off the gas supply to the building but chooses not to. This is exactly what the Bush administration is doing. No sane person with the power to stop this madness will stand by and watch it unfold unless he is taking a pleasure in seeing the Lebanese suffer at the hands of the Israelis, who are targeting the Lebanese infrastructure and has threatened to “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years.”
But no.
Even now, President Bush is still standing by “his stance that Israel had a right to act in its own defense.” Remember, this is supposedly over the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah. At this moment, President Bush surely must be acutely aware that this right to act in “self-defense” by Israel has caused the deaths of more than 350 Lebanese civilians while displacing easily more than 500,000, and at the same time destroying every known infrastructure in Lebanon. If this is the result of the act of “self-defense”, i shudder to think about what would have happened if it is not. According to journalist Robert Risk, President Bush’s “promise to ask Israel to stop destroying any more of Lebanon’s infrastructure” was an “eloquent gesture” and “no doubt touching”, but “there isn’t much of Lebanon’s infrastructure left to destroy.” Israel’s campaign, as stated by former President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, not only showed an “indifference to the scale of collateral damage,” but was also “morally not justifiable”.
Every Lebanese knows too well that the guided missiles and “precision” bombs, as well as the F-16 fighter-bombers and the Apache attack helicopters that are launching them are all made and supplied to the Israelis by us. From every destroyed buildings and apartments, fragments from the bombs read Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Raytheon, made in places like Seattle, Duluth and Miami. Every Lebanese is fully aware that the Bush administration is giving the Israelis the green light to destroy the Hizbollah and at the same time letting Beirut burn. Sooner or later, this is going to come back to haunt us. It is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.
* Note: Whenever Hizbollah is mentioned in the mainstream media, terms like “Syrian-backed” and “Iranian-backed” almost always come up next to Hizbollah. So for a change, from now on when i mention Israel, i will use the term “US-backed”.
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Instead asking questions which the official Israeli spokespersons are easily cakewalking over, mainstream media like CNN, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, FoxNews, BBC, NPR should be asking:
- Israel claims that this indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon is “self-defense” against Hizbollah. Why are the majority victims of this so-called “surgical” bombing Lebanese civilians ? So far, there are more than 300 civilians killed and thousands more severely maimed. The number of Hizbollah fighters known to have been killed from the bombing and shelling: 1.
- Why does the “self-defense” of Israel involves bombing milk factory, schools, restaurants, airport, houses, apartments, ambulances, UNIFIL positions (yes, UNFIL is created to keep the peace between Israel and southern Lebanon) and mosques ?
- Why did Israel warn the residents in southern Lebanon to leave but then targeted the fleeing refugee convoy? How should residents of southern Lebanon head north to escape when all the bridges across the Litani river have been destroyed by Israel?
- One of the conditions for ceasefire as demanded by Israel is the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, part of which “called for the disbanding and disarmament of all militias.” When will Israel fully implement UN Security Council Resolution 242 which requires the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent (1967) conflict“?
- The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said “he would halt fighting if two Israeli soldiers were freed, rocket attacks stopped and the Lebanese army deployed along the border.” Why is the IDF attacking the Lebanese army in Tripoli, Sidon and Beirut? How is the Lebanese army going to take control of southern Lebanon when it is being weakened by IDF? Also, when will the hundreds of Lebanese held by Israel be freed?
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