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The Lebanon Stakes
Hezbollah has a history of killing Americans.
Monday, March 14, 2005 12:01 a.m.
We are now approaching the 20th anniversaries of the murders of Robert Dean Stethem and William Buckley. The CIA station chief in Beirut, Buckley was beheaded by the Hezbollah on June 3, 1985. Stethem, a Navy diver, was murdered by Hezbollah the same month aboard hijacked TWA Flight 847. An eyewitness described Stethem's killing:
"They singled him out because he was American and a soldier. . . . They dragged him out of his seat, tied his hands and then beat him up. . . . They kicked him in the face and knee caps and kept kicking him until they had broken all his ribs. Then they tried to knock him out with the butt of a pistol--they kept hitting him over the head but he was very strong and they couldn't knock him out. . . . Later they dragged him away and I believe shot him."
So this is hezb Allah, the Party of God, the spear of Iranian influence in the Levant and chief local enforcer of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Last week, it organized a counter-demonstration in Beirut on Syria's behalf, following weeks of anti-Syrian protests that had led to the resignation of puppet Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami. Now Mr. Karami has been renamed to his post by puppet Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, a move the Lebanese opposition wasted no time in denouncing. The dividing line in Lebanon, separating a pro-independence coalition of Druze, Christians and Sunnis from the pro-Syrian Shiite Hezbollah, has now become clear.
As have the stakes. The size of Tuesday's rally has been exaggerated: Our Lebanese sources tell us there were around 350,000 protestors, not 500,000 as commonly cited, and that many of them were bused in direct from Damascus. Also notable was that while the demonstrators waved Lebanese flags, they mounted Syrian President Bashar Assad's portrait. But all this only underscores how much rides on the question of Lebanon's independence--and how far Syria, Hezbollah and Iran may go to preserve the status quo.
For Syria the stakes are economic and political. An estimated one million Syrian guest workers reside in Lebanon and remit their wages to relatives back home, and Syrian officials have plundered much of the international aid Lebanon received over the past decade. The Bekaa Valley also serves as a lucrative transit point for narcotics and other contraband. Without Lebanon, Syria's economy might collapse.
So, too, might the Assad dynasty: Bashar's grip on power is far less sure than his father's, and the loss of prestige that a withdrawal from Lebanon would entail might well be politically fatal to him and the minority Allawite clique through which he rules.
For Iran the stakes are strategic. Its elite Revolutionary Guards operate terrorist training camps in the Bekaa. Iran has also placed upward of 10,000 missiles in Lebanon, including the medium-range Fajr-5 rocket, bringing half of Israel within their reach. It thus maintains the option of igniting a new Mideast war at any moment, as well as a hedge against the possibility of a pre-emptive Israeli strike on its nuclear installations. Yet if Syria withdraws, no pro-independence Lebanese government will indulge Iran's military presence. The Lebanese have had enough of allowing their territory to serve, Belgium-like, as the battleground of choice for foreign powers.
For Hezbollah, the stakes are greater still. During the years when Israel maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah could present himself as a patriot fighting occupation. But Israel removed its forces from Lebanon in 2000, and now Nasrallah's support for Syrian occupation exposes a different set of motives: not patriotic, but Jihadist. And the last thing the Jihadists want is for Lebanon to again become a flourishing, pluralist, cosmopolitan Arab state.
Syria's withdrawal would likely precipitate a Lebanese decision to enforce U.N. Resolution 520, which requires the Lebanese Army to patrol its border with Israel, a function now performed by Hezbollah. At length, it could lead to the disbanding of Hezbollah as an independent militia, though its terrorist wings would likely continue to operate.
How does the Bush Administration manage the crisis? There are reports that it is considering a softer line toward Hezbollah in the hopes of encouraging its acquiescence to a Syrian withdrawal. But we are confident President Bush would not lightly betray the memory of Stethem, Buckley or the hundreds of other Americans killed by Hezbollah over the years.
The latest news is that the young Assad promised U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen on Saturday that Syria will withdraw completely. This is promising. But given the stakes all around, skepticism is in order and world pressure will have to continue. The help of the French here has been welcome, due in part to Jacques Chirac's personal ties to the murdered Lebanese patriot Rafik Hariri. However, France still declines to call Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
The Cedar Revolution began as an outburst of rage against Hariri's killers. It has been sustained by what former U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross calls "the absence of fear"--the belief that the Syrian government will not do in Beirut's Martyrs' Square what the Chinese did in Beijing's Tiananmen. A joint Franco-American declaration that a crackdown in Lebanon would have serious consequences for Damascus would help give all Lebanese patriots the courage to move forward.
Kathianne said:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_03_13_corner-archive.asp#058133
I tried to post it, but I think the filters at school are having a fit over the Islamic group that spells a teen form of a bad word for poopy.
March 14, 2005
Hundreds of Thousands of Lebanese Rally Against Syria
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 14 - Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese jammed the center of downtown Beirut today, packing its central square and spilling out onto the surrounding roads, in the largest demonstration yet demanding the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from the country.
Nearly every available space around the square was filled with people flying the Lebanese flag, in what was probably the largest demonstration ever seen in Lebanon.
In the main mosque, still under construction, demonstrators crammed the tiny balconies high up on the four minarets, balconies that the muezzin traditionally use to sing out the call to prayer.
A few daredevils inched their way out along the huge construction crane looming over the square to drape a flag at the end.
There have been rallies in the center of the city on every Monday since former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed four Mondays ago, on Feb. 14, but organizers were determined to make this one especially large as an answer the pro-Syrian march last Tuesday that also filled the downtown with hundreds of thousands of mostly Shiite demonstrators.
"This will counterbalance last Tuesday, and now we can sit and talk," said Mazen al-Zain, a 30-year-old financial analyst, taking pains to note that he was from an illustrious Shiite family from the south.
"What is really important after today's gathering is that we all sit down at the same table."
The presence of such a huge number of Lebanese put added pressure on the government of Syria to announce a serious timetable for the withdrawal of both its 14,000 troops and estimated 5,000 secret police officers in the country.
Although President Bashar al-Assad gave a United Nations envoy a limited timetable during talks on Saturday, the full extent of the withdrawal remains unclear. But the marchers today were convinced that the size of the opposition to Syria meant that the withdrawal was only a matter of time.
"They are trying to prove they are still strong to their nation while they are retreating," said Samer Khoury, 32, a manager in the Virgin megastore overlooking Martyrs Square where the demonstrators gathered.
The store's former parking lot is now the burial place for Mr. Hariri and the bodyguards who died with him.
Last Tuesday's rally took place in the nearby Riad al-Solh square, because the two sides take care not to cause undue friction by stepping onto each other's turf.
But President Émile Lahoud incensed many by suggesting that the demonstrations should end because someone might throw a hand grenade, possibly setting off a renewed civil war.
"Who is going to fight who?" asked Marwan Kayrouz, 33, a real estate investor. "All the factions are here."
Indeed, on the square it was possible to find veiled Sunni Muslim women from Tripoli, Shiites from scattered points around the country, Druse and Maronite Christians.
There was a distinctly different dress code among the demonstrators as well, with some women sporting bare midriffs and pierced belly buttons...
NATO AIR said:Inspiring isn't it?
On a darker note, do we send peacekeepers if Syria does indeed fully pull out? Do we back up the disarming of Hezbollah with force? Or will we let them keep their weapons and be Iran's proxy in Lebanon?
Lebanese Staging Rallies Demanding 'the Truth' Behind Hariri Murder
By Claudia Rosett
The New York Sun
March 14, 2005
With a crucial democratic protest planned for today, members of Lebanon's opposition held a vigil last evening, setting out candles across a big swathe of downtown Martyrs' Square to spell out in letters of flame, in Arabic and English, what they are seeking: "The Truth."
These demonstrators want the truth about who was behind the bomb blast that on February 14 killed Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's former prime minister. Today's protest will mark the four-week anniversary of his murder, which ignited Lebanon's democratic uprising. The turnout will be closely watched worldwide, seen as the democratic opposition's rejoinder to two rallies staged this past week by the terrorist group Hezbollah, which has now hitched its wagon - or, some fear, its rocket launchers - to the Cedar Revolution.
Following the American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the massive Iraqi election turnout this past January, the balance is shifting in the Arab world. In Lebanon, which has emerged over the past month as the new frontline of change, Hariri's death - which many blame on Syria - was not the prime cause. It was more, as one opposition member puts it, "the drop of water that finally burst the dam." The truth these protesters are after goes well beyond finding out who, precisely, set up the bomb blast that in killing Hariri blew out windows and shut down buildings still under repair hundreds of yards from the crater.
After a generation spent as a ward of totalitarian Syria, after a long string of murders and disappearances that continued even after the Civil War ended in 1990, after years in which the Baathist apparatus of Syria has wound its way deep into Lebanese politics and cast a long shadow over daily life, many Lebanese want the truth that comes with living in a free society.
"Something magnificent is being done in Lebanon. It is being reborn," says parliamentarian Muhammad Kabbani, a member of the late Hariri's party, and one of more than 10,000 protesters who gathered in Beirut's Martyrs' Square this past Saturday to hold up red, white, and green placards to make a huge, human Lebanese flag. One of the organizers of the protest, Alain Lahoud - an anti-Syrian cousin of the country's pro-Syrian president - provides a tour of the demonstrators' graffiti, including a trash can on which someone has scrawled the name of the head the Syrian intelligence service in Lebanon, inviting him to deposit himself within. "They have broken the wall of fear," says Mr. Lahoud "They are tasting freedom."
To what extent the Lebanese will get more than just a taste is now the subject of hot debate and frenzied activity, from the coffeehouses of Beirut to the diplomatic huddles at the United Nations. Under the combined pressure of protests in the streets of Beirut, last year's United Nations Resolution 1559, requiring Syria to withdraw from Lebanon, and big public nudges from America, France, and even Saudi Arabia, (where Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, held dual citizenship), Syria has pulled a few thousand troops out of Lebanon, so far still leaving behind some 9,000-10,000, plus some untold number of secret police. U.N. special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen has been clocking up frequent flier miles to report to the world that Syria will pull out of Lebanon entirely - though there is as yet no public timetable or deadline.
The tragedy would be if the world community, having finally noticed that the totalitarian regime of Syria was desperately unhealthy for Lebanon, should now give a pass to the terrorists of Hezbollah. Having watched the democratic opposition gain momentum for the first three weeks following Hariri's death, Hezbollah leaders last week stole some tactics from the democrats, wrapped themselves for the first time in the Lebanese flag, held a huge rally last Tuesday in Beirut and a smaller one yesterday in southern Lebanon, and are now singing the national anthem while paradoxically parading pictures of President Assad. By the time Hezbollah held its second demonstration, all of five days after its sudden adoption of the Lebanese flag, experts both in Lebanon and abroad were already deep in discussion over whether, as the New York Times put it in an editorial yesterday morning, Hezbollah leader "Sheikh Nasrallah is not above changing his stripes, if it is politically expedient."
Hezbollah's tactics bear a closer resemblance to the manner in which communist front groups once infiltrated democratic organizations than they do to any sudden conversion to democratic ways. At yesterday's Hezbollah rally in the terrorist group's southern stronghold of Nabatiyeh, talk of freedom and independence for Lebanon was framed in such terms as hatred for America; threatening posters aimed at opposition member Gebran Tueni, editor of Lebanon's leading democratic newspaper, and effusive thanks to the Syrian regime for all it has done for the Lebanese people - by which Hezbollah basically means Syria's interest in supporting Hezbollah's attacks on Israel.
In the thick of the Hezbollah crowd, beneath the sea of suddenly adopted Lebanese flags, a young English teacher, Hawraa Ghandour, chats with this reporter about the need for peaceful dialogue and a free Lebanon, then interrupts herself to raise a fist and chant along with the crowd, "Death to America, Death to Israel." It would be easier to dismiss such chants were it not for Hezbollah's grim record of murder and murderous doctrine over many years, stretching back to the bombing of the American Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, 1983, and continuing forward to the current broadcasts of Islamist hatred from its own TV station in Beirut.
On the edge of the same Hezbollah rally, 33-year-old Sheik Yusuf Hareb, schooled in Iran, which founded and helps fund Hezbollah, says his prime concern is "to make sure that we support 100% the weapons of Hezbollah." He adds that he is "very worried" about the possibility of another civil war in Lebanon - an intriguing concern, given that Hezbollah - which styles itself as a "resistance" force - is the only militia to have refused to disarm.
William Joyce said:NO, Hezbollah does not have a track record of killing Americans. They're upset with Jews because Jews are destroying their people. Kinda like Jews didn't take it so well when Nazis tried to destroy them. What about this is so hard for the liberals and neocons and other assorted America-haters to understand?
I invite all America-hating neocons to step up and provide an answer to this. Right after they've finished wiping their ass with the American flag.
Hezbollah's New Threat
By Washington Times Editorial
The Washington Times | December 10, 2002
Hezbollah boss Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, whose organization has more American blood on its hands than any terrorist group except al Qaeda, delivered a chilling threat after Friday prayers 10 days ago. Speaking to 10,000 gun-waving Hezbollah operatives and several hundred "suicide commandos" in southern Lebanon, he suggested that, if violence erupted near Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Muslims should "act everywhere around the world" in order to take revenge against their foes. And, just a few days earlier, he issued an even more explicit threat, saying that "Martyrdom operations suicide bombings should be exported outside Palestine," he stated. "I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don't be shy about it." Given the Iranian-funded group's history of violence, it would be folly to dismiss or ignore Sheikh Nasrallah's comments.
Hezbollah, for example, claimed responsibility for the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut (which killed 63 persons), the October 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon (241 Americans died) and the 1984 bombing of the annex to the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon (killing 14 Americans). In 1985, Hezbollah staged the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during the course of which U.S. Navy SEAL Robert Stethem was tortured and killed. The CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, was kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah, as was William Higgins, an American serving with U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon.
Hezbollah is also believed to be responsible for the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina and the July 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which more than 100 people altogether were killed. U.S. investigators believe that an offshoot known as Saudi Hezbollah was behind the June 1996 bombing of a military housing complex, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials believe that virtually all of these attacks are the handiwork of Imad Mugniyeh, Hezbollah's former security boss, who continues to maintain a relationship with the group and is most likely hiding out in Iran.
While popular wisdom has it that Islamic doctrinal differences prevent Hezbollah from cooperating with al Qaeda, the reality is that, when it comes to targeting the United States and Israel, the terrorist groups have managed to put these differences aside. For example, the U.S. government's 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania states that "al Qaeda also forged alliances with the government of Iran, and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States." Early last year, representatives of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups held meetings in Tehran and Beirut, where they vowed to wage a jihad against Israel and denounced the United States as "a second Israel."
Given Hezbollah's history of anti-American violence and ties with al Qaeda, Sheikh Nasrallah's threats must be taken very seriously indeed.
William Joyce said:But if you're not even open to the possibility that Jewish influence over U.S. foreign policy has anything to do with our current conflict in the middle east, you are like the schoolyard child who holds his hands over his ears and screams "I can't hear you!"
Do you honestly think that we somehow stumbled into a conflict with Arab world on our own, despite one continent and one ocean separating us? What are the chances of that???
You won't even consider the possibility, or any of the evidence. Who's being unreasonable?
William Joyce said:So what would you like me to say? That Arabs will engage in violence? They will. That Arabs will believe things that aren't true? They will. That Jews need a homeland? They do.
That's all true.
But it's just as true that the ONLY reason we are in Iraq is because of Jewish desires for a gelded Arab world. But this gets NO discussion in the Congress or the media or elsewhere. Our sons and daughters should not be losing their limbs and their lives for a lie. Jews can do their own fighting, and if they can't, that's their problem. We need to watch out for our people, white people, and our nation, America. That is our moral duty.
William Joyce said:OK, I understand, it's a good show.
But remember what Osama said: 9/11 happened for several reasons. One, the desecration of holy lands in Arabia by American troops. Two, American support of Israel. Osama had no reason to lie. As a terrorist, he's basically a looking for discount advertising. He wants to get his message out --- and change policies --- with his acts of violence. I was there on 9/11 in Manhattan, and I did not think it was too darn cool. But like Tucker Carlson said, we should at least take the real reasons it happened into account. We're being foolish not too. If we decide that American support of Israel is worth thousands of Americans dead, well, that's one thing. But the thing is, we're not even discussing it with an eye toward reality.
I know you think I'm a nutty far-right guy, but what I'm saying is not without basis. Take a minute to read Pat Buchanan's 'Whose War?' in the American Conservative for some great information.
Here is the link:
http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
Pat is one of the greatest patriots our nation has ever had, and this article slams it home.
