Tag: us

Although people in both diasporas are glued to their television screens, the parallel ends there. While the American Arab and Muslim groups say they are better organized than ever before, they say they have not made a dent in American foreign policy. Their calls for an immediate cease-fire by Israel have been rebuffed by the White House and most legislators on Capitol Hill.

“I’m devastated,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, in Washington. “I thought we’d come further. We’re doing well, so far, in terms of our capacity to deal with everything from the humanitarian crisis to identifying families and working to get people out. What is distressing is the degree to which this neoconservative mindset has taken hold of the policy debate. It’s like everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said, “This is probably the only issue in Washington where there’s no real debate.”

Which is why the fight has to be more aggressive than this.

“I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect — maybe not in intent — the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages.”

“Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you’re killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You’ll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.”

Anti-semite America-hating Hizbullah member Zbigniew Brzezinski. Also a former US National Security Advisor.

On July 20, the U.S. House of Representatives, by an overwhelming 410-8 margin, voted to unconditionally endorse Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. The Senate passed a similar resolution defending the Israeli attack earlier in the week by a voice vote, but included a clause that “urges all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure.” By contrast, the House version omits this section and even praises Israel for “minimizing civilian loss,” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The resolution also praises President George W. Bush for “fully supporting Israel,” even though Bush has blocked diplomatic efforts for a cease-fire and has isolated the United States in the international community by supporting the Israeli attacks.

The resolution reveals a bipartisan consensus on the legitimacy of U.S. allies to run roughshod over international legal norms. The resolution even goes so far as to radically reinterpret the United Nations Charter by claiming that Israel’s attacks on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure is an act of legitimate self-defense under Article 51 despite a broad consensus of international legal scholars to the contrary.

In short, both Democrats and Republicans are now on record that, in the name of “fighting terrorism,” U.S. allies—and, by extension, the United States as well—can essentially ignore international law and inflict unlimited damage on the civilian infrastructure of a small and largely defenseless country, even a pro-Western democracy like Lebanon.

The rest is a deconstruction/critical analysis of the House resolution. It’s worth remembering that there were 24,000 Lebanese-Americans in Lebanon when the war started, and that Congress encouraged indiscriminate Israeli bombing that put them in grave danger.

Also see this by Praktike, who highlights that House Democrats, by trying to get Iraqi PM Maliki to withdraw his criticism of Israel’s war or ban him from addressing a joint session of the US Congress (a rare honor, yes, but one that serves US propaganda interests more than Iraq’s or Maliki’s). So basically Dems are (yet again!) undermining American interests for political point-scoring against Bush (Praktike’s reading) or to yet again prove their slavish loyalty to AIPAC (my reading).