Iran warns the west: ignore us at your peril Options

[0jijaji0]

Iran warns the west: ignore us at your peril

Tehran predicts summit failure as UN observers die in Israeli airstrike

The Guardian - July 26, 2006
Iran warned the west yesterday that attempts to broker a Lebanon peace deal at today's Rome summit are destined to fail and it predicted a backlash across the Muslim world unless Israel's military forces were immediately reined in.

Senior government officials said the exclusion from the summit of Iran, Syria and their Lebanese ally Hizbullah meant that no lasting settlement was possible.

Hamid Reza Asefi, the foreign ministry spokesman in Tehran, said: "They should have invited all the countries of the region, including Syria and Iran, if they want peace. How can you tackle these important issues without having representatives of all countries in the region?"

The Rome conference is to be attended by the US, Canada, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, as well as the UN and the World Bank. It is due to publish a statement setting out the broad outlines of a possible deal, including the injection of a muscular international stabilisation force which Hizbullah rejected yesterday. But the mood in Rome was soured last night when an Israeli air strike hit a UN monitoring post in south Lebanon, killing four UN peacekeepers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, immediately demanded that Israel investigate the direct hit that he said was "apparently deliberate".

"This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked UN post ... occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," Mr Annan said. Israel expressed regret, and promised an investigation, but denied it had targeted the post.

Fears that the conflict could spread across the region intensified yesterday. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a normally placid US ally, warned that "if the option of peace fails as a result of Israeli arrogance, then the only option remaining will be war, and God alone knows what the region would witness in a conflict that would spare no one".

Tony Blair's official spokesman, confronting criticism that the prime minister had failed to call for an immediate ceasefire, insisted he had been working "on a daily, almost hourly basis" for more than a week on the details of a Rome deal.

Responding to yesterday's Guardian ICM poll reflecting widespread unease over the closeness of Mr Blair to George Bush, the spokesman said the findings were contradictory, wanting him to distance Britain from the US while demanding he use his influence on the US to bring about a ceasefire.

The ceasefire, a prisoner exchange and the new international force are expected to comprise the main elements of the Rome deal. The US is also thought to be ready to offer Lebanon the return of the contested Shebaa farms region occupied by Israel since 1982 as part of the package.

But Iran claims that no amount of western effort can bring a breakthrough, with key parties shut out of the negotiating room. A senior Iranian official, speaking by phone from Tehran, said: "Iran and Syria should be involved [in peace negotiations], not because they are sponsors of Hizbullah, but because they are regional powers. If Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are involved, then Iran and Syria should be as well, if they are looking to be successful."

The official added that a continuing failure to halt the fighting and reach a just settlement would "certainly spark a backlash" across the Muslim world. He said that public opinion was increasingly outraged by the destruction of Lebanon.

Last night, Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said his group's missiles would start hitting targets deeper into Israel, and warned he would not accept a "humiliating" ceasefire. Another Hizbullah leader hinted that the group had not expected such a ferocious response from Israel, as previous border incidents have usually played out in low-key fashion.

The US, Britain and Israel blame mainly Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria for the bloodshed in Lebanon, claiming they supply missiles and money to Hizbullah and say that Iran is seeking to deflect attention from UN moves to take punitive action over its nuclear programme.

But Iranian and Hizbullah officials say they suspect Israel's action against Hizbullah is part of a wider US-inspired tactic. Mr Nasrallah said the US-Israeli "assessment" had identified obstacles to their vision of a "new Middle East" and had set out to eliminate them. He said Israel had been looking for a pretext to launch an offensive; the abduction of two of its soldiers two weeks ago gave it the perfect excuse.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said UN inaction was not helping. "Upon hearing the slightest criticism against the Zionist regime, they issue dozens of resolutions. But now, 13 days after that regime's massive attack against Lebanon, using most fatal weapons, they even refrain from asking for a truce," he said.

Britain has been criticised for aligning itself too closely with the US, and last night the Foreign Office was looking into a report that a British airport was used as a staging post last weekend by US planes transporting bunker busting bombs to Israel. "If the Americans have done something wrong, then we will raise it with them," a spokesman said of the report in the Daily Telegraph.

An official involved in preparations for the summit lowered expectations for the Rome meeting: "It's going to be a talking shop," he said.

He added: "Iran and Syria are definitely protagonists and people will need to speak to them as this goes on. But this meeting will not find the silver bullet."

[Tapati]

Things in the middle east have reached such a serious point that maybe we should devote a topic to updates on the whole region. People might miss important connections if they are spread out among various topics.

Just a thought. These days I'm afraid to hear or read the news...

[Dhyana]

Things in the middle east have reached such a serious point that maybe we should devote a topic to updates on the whole region. People might miss important connections if they are spread out among various topics.

Right. Now how do we decide which one?

Anyway, than may be best left to the posters, like Jijaji, Kula-pavana and Oneiros. If you have another article to post on the Middle East situation, consider adding it to an existing topic rather than opening a new one.

[0Kula-pavana0]

Just a thought. These days I'm afraid to hear or read the news...

yes, this is a very depressing time. the primitive brutality and open defiance of international laws world has seen in WW2 has been replaced with sophisticated brutality and sneaky policies meant to circumvent such laws. the public is apathetic and kept in check with very sophisticated propaganda issued at the highest levels of government controlled by the ultra rich people getting richer from all this blood and turmoil... if there was ever time for a major revolution it would be now

you know, one of the things that attracted me to the movement was the revolutionary social agenda... and what the heck happened? nothing... the expected big explosion turned into a peepsqueak whimper...

[0jijaji0]

If you have another article to post on the Middle East situation, consider adding it to an existing topic rather than opening a new one.

That format doesnt work for me at all sorry..

you dont see the headlines, the headlines are important, breaking news etc...

I will be posting news at my forum from now on...

strange ruling in times like these...

later

[0Kula-pavana0]

Source: Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
Published: July 28, 2006 Author: staff

WASHINGTON - July 28 - In the wake of the most serious outbreak of Israeli/Arab violence in years, three leading US papers—the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times—have each strongly editorialized that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon were solely responsible for sparking violence, and that the Israeli military response was predictable and unavoidable. These editorials ignored recent events that indicate a much more complicated situation.

Beginning with the Israeli attack on Gaza, a New York Times editorial (6/29/06) headlined "Hamas Provokes a Fight" declared that "the responsibility for this latest escalation rests squarely with Hamas," and that "an Israeli military response was inevitable." The paper (7/15/06) was similarly sure in its assignment of blame after the fighting spread to Lebanon: "It is important to be clear about not only who is responsible for the latest outbreak, but who stands to gain most from its continued escalation. Both questions have the same answer: Hamas and Hezbollah."

The Washington Post (7/14/06) agreed, writing that "Hezbollah and its backers have instigated the current fighting and should be held responsible for the consequences." The L.A. Times (7/14/06) likewise wrote that "in both cases Israel was provoked." Three days and scores of civilian deaths later, the Times (7/17/06) was even more direct: "Make no mistake about it: Responsibility for the escalating carnage in Lebanon and northern Israel lies with one side...and that is Hezbollah."

As FAIR noted in a recent Action Alert (7/19/06), the portrayal of Israel as the innocent victim in the Gaza conflict is hard to square with the death toll in the months leading up to the current crisis; between September 2005 and June 2006, 144 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B'tselem; 29 of those killed were children. During the same period, no Israelis were killed as a result of violence from Gaza.

In a July 21 CounterPunch column, Alexander Cockburn highlighted some of the violent incidents that have dropped out of the media’s collective memory:



Quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we're really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing eight civilians and injuring 32.

That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



On July 24, the day before Hamas' cross-border raid, Israel made an incursion of its own, capturing two Palestinians that it said were members of Hamas (something Hamas denied—L.A. Times, 7/25/06). This incident received far less coverage in US media than the subsequent seizure of the Israeli soldier; the few papers that covered it mostly dismissed it in a one-paragraph brief (e.g., Chicago Tribune, 7/25/06), while the Israeli-taken prisoner got front-page headlines all over the world. It's likely that most Gazans don’t share US news outlets' apparent sense that captured Israelis are far more interesting or important than captured Palestinians.

The situation in Lebanon is also more complicated than its portrayal in US media, with the roots of the current crisis extending well before the July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. A major incident fueling the latest cycle of violence was a May 26, 2006 car bombing in Sidon, Lebanon, that killed a senior official of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group allied with Hezbollah. Lebanon later arrested a suspect, Mahmoud Rafeh, whom Lebanese authorities claimed had confessed to carrying out the assassination on behalf of Mossad (London Times, 6/17/06).

Israel denied involvement with the bombing, but even some Israelis are skeptical. "If it turns out this operation was effectively carried out by Mossad or another Israeli secret service," wrote Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s top-selling daily (6/16/06; cited in AFP, 6/16/06), "an outsider from the intelligence world should be appointed to know whether it was worth it and whether it lays groups open to risk."

In Lebanon, Israel's culpability was taken as a given. "The Israelis, in hitting Islamic Jihad, knew they would get Hezbollah involved too," Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at Beirut’s Lebanese American University, told the New York Times (5/29/06). "The Israelis had to be aware that if they assassinated this guy they would get a response."

And, indeed, on May 28, Lebanese militants in Hezbollah-controlled territory fired Katyusha rockets at a military vehicle and a military base inside Israel. Israel responded with airstrikes against Palestinian camps deep inside Lebanon, which in turn were met by Hezbollah rocket and mortar attacks on more Israeli military bases, which prompted further Israeli airstrikes and "a steady artillery barrage at suspected Hezbollah positions" (New York Times, 5/29/06). Gen. Udi Adam, the commander of Israel’s northern forces, boasted that "our response was the harshest and most severe since the withdrawal" of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000 (Chicago Tribune, 5/29/06).

This intense fighting was the prelude to the all-out warfare that began on July 12, portrayed in US media as beginning with an attack out of the blue by Hezbollah. While Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers may have reignited the smoldering conflict, the Israeli air campaign that followed was not a spontaneous reaction to aggression but a well-planned operation that was years in the making.

"Of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, told the San Francisco Chronicle (7/21/05). "By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board." The Chronicle reported that a "senior Israeli army officer" has been giving PowerPoint presentations for more than a year to "US and other diplomats, journalists, and think tanks" outlining the coming war with Lebanon, explaining that a combination of air and ground forces would target Hezbollah and "transportation and communication arteries."

Which raises a question: If journalists have been told by Israel for more than a year that a war was coming, why are they pretending that it all started on July 12? By truncating the cause-and-effect timelines of both the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts, editorial boards at major US dailies gravely oversimplify the decidedly more complex nature of the facts on the ground.

[Dhyana]

If you have another article to post on the Middle East situation, consider adding it to an existing topic rather than opening a new one.

That format doesnt work for me at all sorry..

you dont see the headlines, the headlines are important, breaking news etc...

I will be posting news at my forum from now on...

strange ruling in times like these...

later

It wasn't a ruling, it was a suggestion to consider doing it that way. Yes, headlines are important. But when they become too many, one gets confused as to which ones one has already read and which ones are new. It is also easier to comment and have a discussion in one thread rather than having the same subject spread over many threads.

We had just one thread (later two) for the entire Dhanurdhara Swami debate, with at least a dozen articles posted by Metamorphosis as they appeared. I thought it worked very well.

Goodbye Jijaji. I have deleted your account as you requested.

[Dhyana]

Source: Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
Published: July 28, 2006 Author: staff

Good article!

[Ananda]

Goodbye Jijaji. I have deleted your account as you requested.

Where did he request that?

[Dhyana]

Goodbye Jijaji. I have deleted your account as you requested.

Where did he request that?

In a PM to me later yesterday. I couldn't say goodbye in a PM, since I was just about to delete his account.

[metamorphosis]

Just see, the mideast turmoil even brings down my brother Jijaji, he was deleted

[babu]

Source: Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
Published: July 28, 2006 Author: staff

Good article!

one of the founders of Fair and a resident of the area (forget his name but i've seen him on various panels) was in my bar last night for a blues concert... his two daughters were too... about 7 & 8 and i had to tell the kids they were far too well-behaved and i would have to ask them to leave if they didn't start getting rowdy

anyways, my whole take on this conflict is i'm not taking sides whether it be hezbollah or israel and i just want to see a good clean war with no violation of the geneva convention accords

[metamorphosis]

Iran denies threat to blow up US ships

US defence officials said five speedboats from the naval forces of Iran's Revolutionary Guards menaced three US warships in the strategic waterway on Sunday, radioing a threat to blow them up.

[angrezi]

they were just trying out some new fishing gear