Jean Shaoul
WSWS

A classified cable from the US embassy in Beirut has revealed how Lebanon’s ruling March 14 alliance discussed with the US its preparations for a military attack by Israel against its rival Hezbollah. This and other secret cables released by WikiLeaks are destabilising already tense political relations in Lebanon.

According to the dispatch in March 2008, Elias Murr, Lebanon’s defence minister,

attempted to use the US to pass on information to Israel. He told US diplomats how in the event of a military attack by Israel on Lebanon, Israel should avoid damaging Lebanese infrastructure in order to stop public opinion turning against the March 14 Alliance, as had happened when Israel invaded Lebanon in the 2006 war.

In that six week operation, Israel killed more than 1,200 people, injured many more, damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of homes, and devastated much of the country’s infrastructure. Israel, he warned, should also not touch the Blue Line or the UNSCR 1701 areas, the border region in southern Lebanon patrolled by UNIFIL, so as to keep Hezbollah out of these areas.

If Israel were to bomb areas under Hezbollah control, Murr made clear that the Lebanese armed forces would not intervene. He said in the course of a two and a half hour meeting over lunch, “If Israel has to bomb all of these places in the Shiite areas as a matter of operational concern, that is Hezbollah’s problem.”

Murr is reported to have said that the Lebanese army would not get involved in the next war and that the army’s objective was to survive a three week war “completely intact” so as to be able to “take over once Hezbollah’s militia has been destroyed”. He said, “I do not want thousands of our soldiers to die for no reason”.

The US embassy concluded that Murr “seems intent on ensuring the army stays out of the way so what Hezbollah bears the full weight of an Israeli offensive.”

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Naomi Klein
Gaia Health

This week, Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein engaged in acts of serious aggression against their own constituents, and the American people in general. They both invoked the 1917 Espionage Act and urged its use in going after Julian Assange.

For good measure, Lieberman extended his invocation of the Espionage Act to include a call to use it to investigate the New York Times, which published WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables. Reports yesterday suggest that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder may seek to invoke the Espionage Act against Assange.

These two Senators, and the rest of the Congressional and White House leadership who are coming forward in support of this appalling development, are cynically counting on Americans' ignorance of their own history -- an ignorance that is stoked and manipulated by those who wish to strip rights and freedoms from the American people. They are manipulatively counting on Americans to have no knowledge or memory of the dark history of the Espionage Act -- a history that should alert us all at once to the fact that this Act has only ever been used -- was designed deliberately to be used -- specifically and viciously to silence people like you and me.

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Stephen Lendman

Post-9/11, Western media, especially in America and Britain, describe Muslims as fundamentalists, extremists, terrorists, and fanatics. Throughout the West, Islam is identified with violence, when, in fact it has common roots with Christianity and Judaism. Their tenets are based on love, not hate; peace, not violence; charity, not exploitation; and a just, fair society for people of all faiths. You'd never know it from Islamophobic media reports.

Islamophobia Defined

The Runnymede Trust identifies eight components, characterizing Islam as:

● monolithic, static, and unresponsive to change;
● having differing values from other cultures and religions;
● being inferior to Western societies;
● barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist, violent, aggressive, threatening, supporting terrorism, and clashing with Western civilization;
● an ideology used for political or military advantage;
● irrationally criticizing Western values;
● warranting discriminatory practices that exclude Muslims from mainstream society; and
● believing anti-Muslim hostility is natural and normal.

A 2004 UK Commission on Muslims and Islamophobia report titled, "Islamophobia: issues, challenges and action," said 1.6 million British Muslims live "on a diet of death, hypocrisy and neglect that is traumatizing and radicalizing an entire generation. What does the future hold" it asks? How can secular Britain accommodate religious Muslims? What's been done to counter Islamophobia's debilitating effects? Why has official action been absent? "Why is the antiracist movement so reluctant to address prejudice, hate and discrimination based on religion?" Is Western Islamophobia institutionalized, and at what cost?

Its societies are led by white, mainly Christian, middle and upper class men. They're responsible for serving all their citizens. However, non-Muslim white people institutionalize Islamophobia, instead of denouncing and expunging it.

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Khalid Amayreh

With the peace process going nowhere, and the US having failed in its role as broker, Palestinian leaders are considering their options.

Palestinian Authority (PA) officials in Ramallah are reluctant to give an unequivocal answer to the question of whether 2011 will see the establishment of the state of Palestine. International goodwill is certainly what many Palestinians are pinning their hopes on. However, international goodwill alone won't be enough, especially if Israel resorts to stonewalling and if its guardian-ally, the United States, refuses to rein in Israeli intransigence and unilateralism.

Unfortunately, Palestinian experience with the way the US deals with Israel leaves little room for optimism that Washington will adopt a responsible stance and meaningfully support the establishment of Palestine. The powerful and extremist US Jewish lobby simply will not allow the current administration -- or any administration -- to take measures not in line with Israeli wishes. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah doesn't want to trivialise the issue by making another theatrical declaration of statehood similar to the one former Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat made in Algiers in 1988.

That declaration generated a lot of hullabaloo and prompted dozens of "friendly" countries, including Islamic and non-aligned countries, to recognise Palestine. But nothing really changed on the ground as the Israeli occupation deepened further and the theft of Palestinian land continued unabated.

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