Kofi Annan calls for Israel to lifts it's blockade

Israel should stop humilating Lebanon Warning of a “race against time” to rebuild Lebanon after the recent devastating month of conflict, the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General today urged donors to provide funds for the task, as he repeated calls for Israel to lift its air and sea blockade, saying it severely hinders relief efforts.
“Aid when there is a blockade is like putting someone on life support when there is a foot on their wind pipe. We need an immediate end to the blockade and a political solution to the underlying causes of the conflict.”

An Activist's Journey: From Palestine to Jerusalem

Listen to this interview with a Palestinian woman who lives in Jerusalem and participated in a Peace conference in Lebanon in July. Ironically, the conference which include participants from many different nations was dismissed once the bombing began.

Lebanese women grieve the loss of their loved ones

Lebanese women grieve over the coffins of family members removed from a mass grave and draped with the Lebanese national flag in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006. The bodies were to be buried in their home village of Marwaheen where they died July 15 following Israeli air strikes.
(AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

Removal of men from flight condemned

Passengers feared 'Asian' pair were terrorists· MP describes incident as hugely irrational.
by Alex Kumi Monday August 21, 2006 - The Guardian

Post War Diaries - Day 4

Dear World

August 17, 4th day of peace.

Peace is it? I wouldn't know.
They announced the ceasefire on Monday at 8:00 a.m. local time. And since then, I feel empty.

I don't know whether this is a dream or reality.
I don't know whether this month of war was a short nightmare, or, as a friend told me, that all these days of peace were just a long dream.

I am just wondering where I was the last month. Somewhere ugly, somewhere beautiful, I wouldn't know because most of the time I could not even feel myself. All I could feel was something constantly crumbling within me and a permanent heaviness I could barely drag behind me.

The war is over now, there's nothing to fear. And I don't want to believe it because I believed it once, I believed it for fifteen years and got betrayed again. I stopped trusting peace and gathered a permanent readiness for war situations, a permanent readiness for destruction and death. And it is okay, it can never go wrong.

Now, we don't see the Israelis bombing on television. They stopped bombing and we will not miss them. The refugees on my building's first floor have left. They all left from the moment fire ceased, ignoring the israelis' threats and the warnings from unexploded objects and potential bombs left behind in scary quantities and went back home.

Home sweet home. How sweet it is to find the four walls of your house gathered in mass of rubble that covers potential bodies buried underneath? This is the case of hundreds of families who, despite all that, bowed down the moment they reached their villages and kissed the soil. A soil more precious then ever.

Slowly, things are going back to normal. Slowly, televisions are re-integrating non-war shows such as translated Mexican movies that emerged as a great trend after the civil war. It is funny to see Mexican-moving lips, with an Arabic voice over along with my dear Flash News Grey Band (Yes, it's still alive) numbering the dead they found under the rubble today, the total number of war victims, along with what Junblat said, what Hariri said, what Lahoud said, what Olmert said, what Bush said, what Rays said, what Sanioura said, what Nasrallah said, what Asad said. So many people with so many things to say, it mesmerizes me because there is only one thing that needs to be said: that the world has officially gone crazy.

I am out of things to say, really. I am simply writing whatever is crossing my head. I simply hope that the violence is truly over. There was too much death and too much suffering, much more than anyone could have handled. Yet we have handled it and we are getting up on our feet, and it won't take long before we get along with our lives. Because, simply, life is the only thing we want and we won't give it up for anything.

I hope this is the last thing I write about the war. Whatever I have written before is useless now. Maybe at the time it was useful, but right now it is totally pointless. There is no point in looking back and regretting that we didn't do anything earlier. So better discard them or read them as a story, a fiction. This is all they are now, a fiction.

This is all this war is now, a fiction.
1300 dead so far, but families are still lying under the rubble, bodies waiting to be uncovered and buried.
Slowly, the world will forget. We will just be another set of numbers, a grey memory everyone avoids to remember, a set of dates and events in some history book that a child memorizes late at night because he has to, not because he wants to.

But we will not forget. This war has been imprinted in the deepest level of our senses and even if someday our mind decides to discard it, fireworks will still traumatize us, and television Flash News will still carry the mesmerizing threat they have been carrying for the past month.

Outside, the generator is still on. And even if someday electricity is granted all day and night, my dear generator will still be waiting outside, just in case the city goes dark again. And I will hear its roaring once again, this soft roaring that has now become my silence.

I hope nobody ever experiences what we have experienced this past month.
But somewhere, I hope you do, if you have the nerves for it. There's nothing more interesting that seeing the world madness eating you up, and then slowly receding… or not. How would I know?

All that I know, is that I know nothing.

With Love,
Hopefully my last post

A Lebanese Citizen

Minutes before cease-fire goes into effect, Israel pounds Beirut

The US media has consistently referred to the war between Hizbollah and Israel and now the cease fire between Lebanon and Israel. The discourse suggests there were two armies of equal strength battling but Lebanon has never actually been at war with Israel. Now cease fire, so we can all breath a little bit easier, but who will be held responsible for the devastation of Lebanon. And minutes before the cease fire goes into effect, Israel continues their offensive. What does this say about the possibility of a lasting peace? Even those who supported the Israeli position must recognize the nature of these last minute attacks as working against the interests of a substainable peace.
(AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

Video of Amy Goodman's interview with Richard Debs

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviews Dr. Richard Debs, Former Chair of Morgan Stanley, Chairman Emeritus at the American University of Beirut

"It's Now Considered the American War Against the Arabs..."
Calling Israel's war in Lebanon a "catastrophe," the former president of Morgan Stanley International talks about the democrats' "huge mistake" in backing the Bush administration's Israel policy. Richard Debs talks about the role that Syria, Iran, and the US media play in the crisis, and his view that "democracy has become a code word--and not a good codeword--in the Middle East."

Lebanese Oil Spill Could Rival Exxon Valdez Disaster

Click here to view full article

An oil spill caused by Israeli raids on a Lebanese power plant could rival the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that despoiled the Alaskan coast if not urgently addressed, the United Nations has said.
The Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Tuesday the spill that poses severe ecological and human threats is already comparable to a 1999 oil tanker accident off the coast of France and had the potential to get far worse.
"In the worst-case scenario and if all the oil contained in the bombed power plant at Jiyyeh leaked into the Mediterranean Sea, the Lebanese oil spill could well rival the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989," it said in a statement.

Jordan's King Abdullah fears for Mid-East

Story from BBC NEWS

I think he raises some really interesting points in this interview. Here's a snippet, follow the link for video of the interview.

"Each time we have a crisis it gets far more unstable. The international community has no overall agenda. It's a piecemeal way of dealing with situations, whether it's the Israel-Palestinian one, whether it's Lebanon, whether it's Iraq or the issue of Iran, there's no overall strategy."

War diaries Day 26

Dear World

August 6, Day 26

Hiroshima's anniversary.
My mother's too, strangely.

We entered the phase of apathy. We started getting used to this. And it is dangerous, nobody should get used to a war.
But we don't have another choice. We can either accumulate tension, day by day, or develop immunity against the sounds and images.

Yesterday, I went to a CD shop to purchase a gift for my mum, and I couldn't help commenting on the displayed DVD "Lebanon War; so that History doesn't repeat itself ", an archiving of the 1975-1991 Civil War. Strangely enough, the guy in charge of the sales told me it was one of the most asked for DVDs during the past month. It sounded absolutely surreal to me, yet I understand, somewhere. We already have a 24 hours war on television, and we choose to watch more and more madness going on. So that History doesn't repeat itself.

Then, I couldn't help going into a war conversation with him. How we are getting used to it… And he told me that it is not fair for us to constantly live in wars with 'peace breaks' in between. Funny. He's right. Some Lebanese people have lived more war than peace.

I remember my parents' old photographs. Those shot during the civil war. Yellow-shaded photographs with rounded corners. Mainly shot in Raouche, Modca Café or Wimpy in Hamra, Rawda Coffee Shop or Arouss el Bahr… Places that became forever reminiscent of the war, carrying in them the bitter sweet nostalgia of extremely intense, yet painful days.

Coffee shop History is repeating itself. Modca disappeared few years back, it is true. But Hamra restaurants and cafés are slowly gathering their 'deep intellectual' clientele, and people are once again drawn to political discussions on the light of Beirut's sunset. To this repetition is added the great comeback of the 80s fashion. If it wasn't for the cell phones in all shapes and colors, and laptops hiding consternated eyes, I would believe I am back in time. On the television, the screen is once again split in four, four people discussing, gathered from the four corners of the planet. Discussing the problem. Discussing the solution. Discussing how the problem is a solution, how the solution is a problem, how the problem hides an ever deeper problem and how the solution hides a much, much deeper problem. In one word, a chain of problems crowned by the problem of idiots in power. At the bottom left, an Egyptian general yells and shouts. The three others look at him, expressionless. I look at the four of them, and I really don't know what to think.

I remember my parents' old photographs. Those shot during the civil war. Yellow-shaded photographs with rounded corners. Mainly shot in Raouche, Modca Café or Wimpy in Hamra, Rawda Coffee Shop or Arouss el Bahr… Places that became forever reminiscent of the war, carrying in them the bitter sweet nostalgia of extremely intense, yet painful days.

Coffee shop History is repeating itself. Modca disappeared few years back, it is true. But Hamra restaurants and cafés are slowly gathering their 'deep intellectual' clientele, and people are once again drawn to political discussions on the light of Beirut's sunset. To this repetition is added the great comeback of the 80s.fashion. If it wasn't for the cell phones in all shapes and colors, and laptops hiding consternated eyes, I would believe I am back in time.

On the television, the screen is once again split in four, four people discussing, gathered from the four corners of the planet. Discussing the problem. Discussing the solution. Discussing how the problem is a solution, how the solution is a problem, how the problem hides an ever deeper problem and how the solution hides a much, much deeper problem. In one word, a chain of problems crowned by the problem of idiots in power.

At the bottom left, an Egyptian general yells and shouts. The three others look at him, expressionless. I look at the four of them, and I really don't know what to think.

I hope that by the end of the war, and with the help of all the absurd scenes that I see passing on television along with the mesmerizing Flash News Grey band, I will reach a state where my mind actually stops. I am looking forward to it. Thinking minds are not doing much these days.

Stunned,
A Lebanese Citizen

Article by Robert Fisk

A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11

08/05/06 "The Independent" -- -- The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved. Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you make homeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirut safe to destroy?Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be 40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10 seeking shelter from attack.In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was the little people who died.One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who had gone out on his daily jogging exercise with four friends north of Jounieh. "His friends packed up after four rounds of the bridge because it was hot," a member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to do one more jog on the bridge. That was what killed him." The Israelis gave no reason for the attacks - no Hizbollah fighters would ever enter this Christian Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused to humanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears in Lebanon that the latest air raids were a sign of Israel's frustration rather any serious military planning.
Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what purpose?Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildings can be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy for which the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protect its people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict even further are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Photos from rally in Pakistan

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable- Eric Hoffer

You see what power is - holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!- Amy Tan

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose- Thomas Jefferson
American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians- Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. If today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you, "Be silent; I see it, if you don't." – Abraham Lincoln

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.- Eleanor Roosevelt

Statement by leading intellectuals

The US-backed Israeli assault on Lebanon has left the country numb,
smoldering and angry. The massacre in Qana and the loss of life is
not simply "disproportionate." It is, according to existing
international laws, a war crime.
The deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon's social
infrastructure by the Israeli air force was also a war crime,
designed to reduce that country to the status of an Israeli-US
protectorate.
The attempt has backfired, as people all over the world watch aghast.
In Lebanon itself, 87 percent of the population now support
Hezbollah's resistance, including 80 percent of Christian and Druze
and 89 percent of Sunni Muslims, while 8 percent believe the US
supports Lebanon.
But these actions will not be tried by any court set up by the
"international community" since the United States and its allies that
commit or are complicit in these appalling crimes will not permit it.
It has now become clear that the assault on Lebanon to wipe out
Hezbollah had been prepared long before. Israel's crimes had been
given a green light by the United States and its ever-loyal British
ally, despite the overwhelming opposition to Blair in his own country.
The short peace that Lebanon enjoyed has come to an end, and a
paralyzed country is forced to remember a past it had hoped to
forget. The state terror inflicted on Lebanon is being repeated in
the Gaza ghetto, while the "international community" stands by and
watches in silence. Meanwhile the rest of Palestine is annexed and
dismantled with the direct participation of the United States and the
tacit approval of its allies.
We offer our solidarity and support to the victims of this brutality
and to those who mount a resistance against it. For our part, we will
use all the means at our disposal to expose the complicity of our
governments in these crimes. There will be no peace in the Middle
East while the occupations of Palestine and Iraq and the temporarily
"paused" bombings of Lebanon continue.

Tariq Ali
Noam Chomsky
Eduardo Galeano
Howard Zinn
Ken Loach
John Berger
Arundhati Roy

Important Links and great interview with Amartya Sen

Over 160 Palestinians have been killed since June 25


Eight Palestinians killed in Gaza raid

Israel rejects Hamas call for truce

Brilliant BBC Amartya Sen interview about identity, culture, democracy, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, India, Ancient Greece, Occidentalism, Clash of Civilisations, etc

War Diaries Day 23

Dear World
August 03, Day 23
I will not talk about the war details today.
Everyday, opening my mails and seeing these series of bad news in my mailbox is draining me, so I decided to take a break from the news and simply go through the day.
I decided to spare you from the war news. Just for one day…
The work routine is starting to re-establish itself. And as I go to work everyday, I realize the absurdity of the whole situation. Let me make it clearer.
I graduated as a graphic designer, and work in a design house in the center of Beirut.
And here's my confession: today, my task was to design Ramadan Cards (not for Lebanon, but for another Arab country). Don't be surprised. It is actually a very fulfilling task, makes you feel like Marie Antoinette telling the French people about the hungry population: "Let's feed them cookies!"
Ramadan cards in golden and silver colors, on glossy or matte paper. Embossed or de-bossed? Big dilemma. Ramadan cards that say "Happy Ramadan" and "Seasons Greetings" in fancy calligraphies or elegant geometric styles, organic or geometric shapes, the choice is yours.
I spent two hours creating a Kufi Arabesque that said "Ramadan Kareem" and I cannot describe to you my satisfaction when I succeeded in fitting it into a perfect square (Hurray!) Ramadan cards here, Ramadan Cards there, Ramadan Cards everywhere from 9:30 in the morning till 3:30 in the afternoon. Intersected every once in a while by some bad news about the war, or some threat by the Israeli state, or some phone call by a friend living abroad who, strangely enough, I end up comforting that the war will soon be over and that everything will be okay (isn't it supposed to be the opposite?) Or the office manager who silently climbs up the stairs to check if we are working properly because one wasted minute of work means one wasted cent.
Less than 20 meters away from the office stands the Sanayeh Garden. One of the living witnesses of all the nightmares we have been going through since the late seventies. Our only source of greenery during the civil war. Our Sunday picnic spot, our very own Champ de Mars and Parc de la Villette, in smaller, much smaller scale of course. The very place where, at the age of 7, I bought my first pet, a rabbit called Lulu who ended up, after 2 years under our supervision, eating ham sandwiches and chewing gum. Now inhabited by hundreds of refugees waiting to be housed in an indoor space. Sleeping under the moonlight on bed sheets lined on the grass. Sitting under the trees or by the bushes and waiting. And waiting. I am glad the Sate of Israel is assisting us in being in touch with Mother Nature, but is it really the time for this?
No. It's the time for Ramadan Cards, of course.
Happy Holidays,
A Lebanese Citizen.

Video of Israelis shooting 14 year old boy disappears and BBC's Jon Snow takes on Israel's UK Ambassador

Jon Snow confronts Dp Israeli Ambassador on Israeli "terror". Interesting interview and good to see someone posing the hard questions to an Israeli ambassador...

And a 14 year old boy shot for pleasure by Israelis. Quote from the interviewed makers (AP had full footage of the incident, that could also have helped raising a case against the Israeli military):

"Usually AP and Reuters don't leave the camp before they have footage of someone being shot the Israelis." However AP erased all the materials.Videorecordings from 2004 edited by an American and and English youngwoman.

Also for basic facts over the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, go to www.ifAmericansknew.org

Southern Suburb of Beirut: Dahieh: BEFORE & AFTER