Stephen Lendman

He's undisciplined, unchecked, and unambiguous. He never knows when to leave well enough alone. He makes more enemies than friends. He's a consummate loudmouth bully. He hurls unrestrained verbal assaults. He presides over Israel's worst government. It's belligerent, hardline, and neoliberal. It's offensive to both Jews and Arabs.

Fiction for him is fact. It's whatever he's saying at the time. He claims he doesn't lie but doesn't tell the truth. Perhaps he can't tell the difference between the two.

He menaces the entire region and beyond. His finger on Israel's nuclear trigger should worry everyone. Maybe he'll squeeze during one in his frequent tantrums.

He claims Armageddon is just around the corner. Who's he afraid of in a region where only Israel threatens neighbors? He presides over a government Gideon Levy calls "racis(t), untranationalis(t), arrogan(t), and messiani(c)" for good reason. Nonetheless, "this country is still not the worst," he says. He's right. It's the second worst. America is number one in every shameful thing mattering most.

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Robert Fisk

On massacres, atrocities and holocausts: Sabra and Shatila...

The memories remain, of course. The man who lost his family in an earlier massacre, only to watch the young men of Chatila lined up after the new killings and marched off to death. But – like the muck piled on the garbage tip amid the concrete hovels – the stench of injustice still pervades the camps where 1,700 Palestinians were butchered 30 years ago next week. No-one was tried and sentenced for a slaughter, which even an Israeli writer at the time compared to the killing of Yugoslavs by Nazi sympathisers in the Second World War. Sabra and Chatila are a memorial to criminals who evaded responsibility, who got away with it.

Khaled Abu Noor was in his teens, a would-be militiaman who had left the camp for the mountains before Israel's Phalangist allies entered Sabra and Chatila. Did this give him a guilty conscience, that he was not there to fight the rapists and murderers? "What we all feel today is depression," he said. "We demanded justice, international trials – but there was nothing. Not a single person was held responsible. No-one was put before justice. And so we had to suffer in the 1986 camps war (at the hands of Shia Lebanese) and so the Israelis could slaughter so many Palestinians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. If there had been trials for what happened here 30 years ago, the Gaza killings would not have happened."

He has a point, of course. While presidents and prime ministers have lined up in Manhattan to mourn the dead of the 2001 international crimes against humanity at the World Trade Centre, not a single Western leader has dared to visit the dank and grubby Sabra and Chatila mass graves, shaded by a few scruffy trees and faded photographs of the dead. Nor, let it be said – in 30 years – has a single Arab leader bothered to visit the last resting place of at least 600 of the 1,700 victims. Arab potentates bleed in their hearts for the Palestinians but an airfare to Beirut might be a bit much these days – and which of them would want to offend the Israelis or the Americans?

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Alex Lantier

NATO coalition forces have killed eight women and girls in
an airstrike. The airstrike came shortly before dawn. (RAWA)

In the latest atrocity carried out by US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan, an air strike killed nine young women shortly before dawn Sunday morning in Laghman province’s Alingar district, near the Afghan capital, Kabul.

The women, aged 18 to 25, were reportedly gathering firewood in a mountainous area NATO forces claimed was being used by insurgents as a base for attacks on Kabul. Laghman provincial officials said that seven more women and girls had also been wounded in the attack, including some as young as 10 years old.

Mourning villagers carried the dead women to the provincial capital, Mihtarlam, in protest. They showed the corpses wrapped in blankets to journalists and lay them down outside the Laghman governor’s residence, demanding an investigation of the massacre and the trial of those responsible.

Commenting on the attack, Alingar District Governor Alif Shah said: “We strongly condemn it—killing innocent women is not justifiable at all. The operation was not coordinated with the Afghan authorities.”

After initially denying reports of civilian casualties and claiming that the strike had destroyed a group of 45 insurgents, the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) released a statement declaring that “ISAF takes full responsibility for this tragedy.” It extended its “regrets and sympathies” to “civilians who died or were injured” in the ISAF attack.

ISAF spokesman US Air Force Captain Dan Einert said that ISAF is investigating the attack. The US-backed regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that it would launch its own investigation.

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