Lebanon: Judeo-Christian Savagery

Evidence that Israel contaminated Lebanon with radioactive weaponry provides a tragic transition from the first four depleted uranium articles to this second "Over the Rainbow" series.

The underlying theme of the coming articles is the new American "Judeo-Christian" religion. "Judeo-Christian" used to be a respectable scholarly term for a tradition that includes both the Old and New Testament.

However, in the United States during the last three decades, Judeo-Christian has also become a powerful code word. Among Zionists and Christian Zionists-especially politicians-it refers to a political and religious alliance among strange bedfellows.

"Judeo-Christian values" now justify the creation of an "Eretz (Greater) Israel" and the expulsion of millions of Muslim and Christian Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The almost unanimous Congressional vote last month to support unconditionally Israel’s brutal aggression against Lebanon shows the power of "Judeo-Christian values" in America today.

Christian Zionism is a modern theological and political movement that embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism, thereby becoming detrimental to a just peace within Palestine and Israel. The Christian Zionist programme provides a worldview where the Gospel is identified with the ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it laces an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ’s love and justice today.

"The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism" - Statement by the Patriarch and Local Heads of Churches In Jerusalem, August 25, 2006

Many commentators have written about the dangers of the symbiotic relationship among Israel’s militarists, some Christian Evangelicals and Bush’s corporatist administration. In six years this coalition has ripped apart the Middle East with brutal wars of attrition in Palestine Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and, possibly, Iran. These conflicts are costing the United States international respect and more than ten million dollars an hour.

They are about to tank our economy.

Americans are waking up to the fact that the "War on Terrorism" is a manufactured scare campaign that seemingly pits "peaceful" Christianity and Judaism against "radical" Islam, but that really serves a number of hidden agendas-all opposed to our interests and those of the rest of humanity.

Many complain about the Israel Lobby, Christian Right, and Hallburton. In this series we will show how the lash-up between wealthy Zionist political contributors and Christian millionaire televangelists has also perverted America’s traditionally shared religious values.

During the Bush and Cheney adminstration the civilized universal values of New Testament Christianity, enlightened modern Judaism, and tolerant Islam have degenerated into a racist, bloodthirsty, vengeance-seeking Old Testament tribalism.

This major religious and political shift in the United States took place in my lifetime. It began with the new state of Israel in 1948, and matured after Israel’s 1967 War and the publication of Hal Lindsey’s "Late Great Planet Earth." It was nurtured by Israel’s bloody ethnic cleansing of its neighborhood.

The very phrase "Judeo-Christian" is intentionally discriminatory among three monotheistic religions with the same roots: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The odd omission of Islam (a religion of a billion people) is exclusively American, profoundly political and historically unfair.

Judaism rejects the divinity-even the existence— of Jesus Christ. Christian anti-Semitism produced both the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Islam, however, reveres both the Hebrew prophets and Jesus.

As conservative columnist Charley Reese writes,

"The God Muslims worship is the same God Christians and Jews worship. The oldest Christian communities in the world are all in Muslim countries. There have always been Christian and Jewish communities in the Muslim world. Muslims are commanded to treat Christians and Jews as they would treat themselves. They revere Jesus as a prophet and highly respect the Virgin Mary. The disputes you see in the modern Middle East are not religious; they are all about secular matters, principally Israeli occupation of Arab lands."

The first few blogs focus on the editorials of the Jewish editor of the local newspaper in a predominantly Christian community and how his mindset mirrors that of the corporate media with its pro-Israel bias. If you bear with me, you will understand how a (bare) majority of Americans were just persuaded to see Israel as the victim, Lebanon as the aggressor, and Hizbullah as crazy terrorists using civilians as "human shields".

Above all you will understand why so many Americans, including those in the "peace movement" did not raise their voices for a full 34 days while the Bush Administration single-handedly blocked the world’s demand for a ceasefire as tiny democratic Lebanon was pulverized by the world’s fourth largest military machine largely financed by our taxpayer dollars.

This is also the first in a series of reports from New York State’s two "battleground" Congressional districts (the 24^th and 25^th) where Democratic candidates have a November shot at replacing Republican incumbents and helping to return control of the House of Representatives to the politically divided Democratic Party. Where do the candidates stand on the War on Terrorism and unconditional support for Israel?

The author is working on "We’re Not in Kansas Anymore," a series of comic novels set in Florida in autumn 2000. The first, tentatively titled "The Einstein Sisters Zap the Flying Monkeys," should be completed this year. The alliance of Zionism and Christian Zionists is a major theme. The reader will find experimental chapters of two novels on this site. Contributions to "Over the Rainbow" can be applied to pre-publication purchases.

Judeo-Christians Kick The Hell Out Of Lebanon!

"Israel has "one of the world’s best armies, probably the finest fighter pilots on the planet, incredible military intelligence. . .that could kick the hell out of Iraq all by itself. . ."

"It’d be nice to have Israel in the fight"

February 1, 2003 The Daily Star

Oneonta, New York (24^th Congressional District)

Perhaps I’m someone who shouldn’t read my local newspaper’s editorials. Or maybe I just shouldn’t take them so seriously. But I’ll never forget my first reaction to Editor Sam Pollak’s cocky opinion piece, published a few months before Bush and Cheney’s 2003 "shock and awe" attack on Iraq.

"Is this guy a professional journalist or a schoolyard bully?" I groaned.

Blame my reaction on the circumstances.

I’d opened the morning newspaper during a break from mounting a new set of bookshelves in my library. I’d run out of space for two recently acquired collections of used books: the first on the Nazis’ seizure of power in Germany and the second on the horrors of the Holocaust.

In February 2003, like millions of informed Americans I knew that the Bush Administration was pumping us up for a catastrophic war with a batch of whoppers that shamed Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister.

And Mr. Pollak proudly identified himself as a Jewish-American.

Kicking Hell Out Of The Viet Cong

Then again, perhaps I was suffering from the Vietnam Syndrome.

The street brawling phrase, "kick the hell out of," took me back forty years to my first high school teaching job. Desert Sun School, perched in the mountains above Palm Springs, prided itself in placing all graduates in college. I’d been hired to fill three chairs: college counselor and senior class English and American Government teacher.

Quite a responsibility for $4000 a year plus room and board. Believe it or not, that was a respectable salary in 1965. Gas was 29 cents a gallon. The campus setting in the San Jacinto Mountains was spectacular. Desert Sun’s senior class rarely exceeded a dozen students. It’s breezy, pine-shaded classrooms resembled summer camp recreation rooms. Hollywood celebrities sent their kids. Frank Sinatra’s son had once previewed "The Man with the Golden Arm" in a darkened dormitory lounge. One of my seniors was Diane Linkletter, the daughter a famous TV host.

Sweet spot. I planned to stay awhile.

I vowed to be a teacher whom students would never forget. I recalled the shock my own college Freshman year when I discovered that memorizing facts no longer gained brownie points. Success depended on thinking for oneself. I was as idealistic a government teacher in that little prep school as Jimmy Stewart’s senator in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington".

Classes had yet to begin when I introduced myself in the rustic dining room to my first senior-to-be, soccer star, Jamie Ross. Unsurprisingly, I asked him about his plans after graduation.

"I’m goin’ over to ’Nam, kick the hell out of the Viet Cong, come back and go to college on the GI Bill."

Wow! What a serious mixture of patriotism and self-interest.

As it turned out, Jamie didn’t kick the hell out of a single Viet Cong. Nor did he return from Southeast Asia in a flag draped coffin, as did a few students from my later teaching career.

After a restless night’s sleep I decided to set aside the stuffy foreign policy reader that I inherited from my predecessor. I copied a half dozen articles from my personal Berkeley library from the early ’sixties.

Fortunately the parochial headmistress had never heard of the authors, Bernard Fall, Wilfred Burchett, I. F. Stone...or Sun Tzu. Nor did she have a clue about their subject: the Vietnamese’s successful resistance against the World War II Japanese occupation or the Viet Minh’s awesome defeat in the ’fifties of the returning French colonialists at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu.

My enthusiasm for "college level" research won her over.

Soon the members of the class of ’66 were expostulating over the dinner table about the strategies of guerilla warfare. In the classroom they debated the State Department White Paper on Vietnam. Dorm bull sessions dissected the latest New York Times and Washington Post reports from jungle battlefields.

Faculty old-timers marveled at this senior class’s unusual interest in American Government. If memory serves me right, a weekend college-counseling seminar took me down the mountain during the year’s first visit from San Bernardino by the Marine Corps recruiter.

The headmistress listened to the exchange between the recruiter and my seniors in disbelief.

My fate was sealed.

At the end of the year I was fired for abandoning the traditional curriculum and-in the headmistress’s homey language-for "pulling the rug out from the United States."

Ironically, twenty years too late for my teaching job, a later version of the school’s stuffy textbook offered the same conclusion about the Vietnam War that my students reached in the mid-’sixties.

The Vietnam War was a lost cause from the get go.

The world’s most powerful occupation army with the latest military technology couldn’t defeat a popular insurgency using guerrilla tactics devised by the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, five-hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount.

Even with a half million troops, "the world’s best army’ with the "finest fighter pilots on the planet" and a billion dollar military intelligence service, the United States was defeated by a peasant army of a Third World country. Yesterday’s "guerrillas" have been tagged today’s "terrorists." Both groups consider themselves the resistance against imperialism.

(The so-called "War on Terrorism" is a story for a future blog).

The Vietnam defeat brings us back to the looming defeat in Iraq and Sam Pollak’s 2003 cocky editorial.

My students figured out the plot line in advance. Why couldn’t editor Pollak, an informed journalist, see it coming in Iraq or Lebanon?

The United States hasn’t been able to "kick the hell" out of Iraq’s resistance. And a reported 30,000 Israel soldiers couldn’t "kick the hell" out of a few thousand Lebanese defenders of their homeland.

In the Jerusalem Post Kenneth Besig summarized the current post-Lebanon shock of many Israelis:

“Fewer than 5,000 poorly-armed Hizbullah terrorists stood off the mighty IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] for over a month. An Islamic terrorist gang with no tanks, no artillery, no fighter jets, no attack helicopters, and just a few RPG’s and rifles held to a standstill nearly 30,000 crack IDF troops with the finest tanks, the best artillery, the fastest and most advanced fighter-jets and attack helicopters in the world. And they can still empty our northern communities with their rockets whenever they want. If that is not a victory, then the word has no meaning.”

American Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn summed it up less charitably. Note well his last sentence.

"Disfigured by its ’special relationship’ with the US arms industry, of which the US Congress is an integral component, the IDF has been morally corrupted by years of risk-free brutalization of unarmed Palestinians, many of them children.

"It’s one thing to level an apartment building with a missile from a plane or crush a protester with a bulldozer or lob shells at a Palestinian family having a picnic on a beach or kidnap middle-aged and democratically elected Palestinian politicians.

"It’s another to confront a foe, with modest but effectively deployed weaponry, prepared to fight back.

"Years of racism have taken their toll too. Think of Arabs as subhuman ’terrorists’ and you end up making a lot of misjudgments, tactical and strategic.

Kicking The Hell Out Of Lebanon

It’s been three years since President Bush’s "Mission Accomplished" speech when he landed in his macho flyboy tights on the U. S. S. Abraham Lincoln. Three weeks have passed since Israel’s humiliating defeat by Hizbullah. The historical 2006 midterm elections are ten weeks (and as many blogs) away.

Everyone in the world has a troublesome understanding of what it means for the United States or Israel to try to "kick the hell out of" a conventionally defenseless country. Call it a Judeo-Christian blitzkrieg.

Tourists back from Lebanon, ("the Switzerland of the Middle East") used to rave about cosmopolitan Beirut, the peaceful little fishing villages, and the bucolic countryside in a nation where Christians, Muslims and Jews had lived peacefully together for centuries and now enjoy a European-style democracy.

No longer.

A few days before the ceasefire, Agence France Presse reported, "In Lebanon, more than 1,000 civilians—some 30 percent of them children under 12—have been killed by Israeli attacks and nearly a million have fled their homes, sparking what relief agencies described as a humanitarian crisis."

Later the Los Angeles Times quoted Fadl Chalak, president of Lebanon’s Council for Development and Reconstruction, "I’ve never seen so much destruction in such a very short time." The Times reported "nothing in three decades of war and recovery prepared him for the ferocity of Israel’s month-long bombing campaign."

The Beirut Daily Star on August 23 cited Jean Fabre, a spokesman for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). "’The damage is such that the last 15 years of work on reconstruction and rehabilitation, following the previous problems that Lebanon experienced, are now annihilated.’ Lebanese authorities estimated last week that direct structural damage inflicted by the offensive reached $3.6 billion, including 15,000 housing units, 80 bridges and 94 roads destroyed or damaged.

"About 35,000 homes and businesses were destroyed in the conflict, while a quarter of the country’s road bridges or overpasses were shattered, according to the UNDP’s initial estimate. UN agencies said it would take weeks to assess the full extent of the damage in South Lebanon and Southern Beirut."

Veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk wrote in "A land reduced to rubble" that "These places now look like French villages did after German bombardment during the First World War. . .I am sending my dispatch to The [London] Independent from an internet café when an American nurse whom I have known for years walks up to me. ’We have a badly burned woman in emergency and we’ve just had to tell her that her three children are dead,’ she says. And how did she take this news? ’You can imagine. We found out she’d had her tubes tied so she can’t have any more children.’ And her husband? ’Dead,’ the nurse replies.

In a later article, Fisk wrote, "There are few marks on the road where the missiles hit the innocents of Marjayoun. But there are the memories of what happened immediately after the Israeli airstrike on the convoy of 3,000 people after dark on 11 August: a 16-year old Christian girl screaming "I want my Daddy" as her father’s mutilated body lay a few metres away from her; the town mukhtar discovering that his wife, Collette, had been decapitated by one of the Israeli missiles; the Lebanese Red Cross volunteer who went into the darkness of wartime Lebanon to give water and sandwiches to the refugees and was cut down by another missile, and whose friends could not reach him to save his life.

"There are those who break down when they recall the massacre at Joub Jannine - and there are the Israelis who gave permission to the refugees to leave Marjayoun, who specified what roads they should use, and who then attacked them with pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft. . .

"Who flew the drones? An Israeli soldier of the invasion force? A nameless officer in the Israel Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv? The Israelis knew a civilian convoy was on the road. Yet they sent their pilotless machines to attack it. Why?"

If the Israeli rain of death and destruction during hostilities were not horrific enough, Israel sowed dragon seeds of even greater suffering and devastation for generations to come. The IDF reportedly dropped half ton "bunker buster" bombs laced with deadly depleted uranium, like those used in Iraq that we labeled "Dick Cheney’s Time-Release Poison," in our four-part series on this website.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of fuel oil leaked from the electric power plant bombed by Israel.

According the August 23 Beirut Daily Star, "Greenpeace Lebanon revealed on Tuesday [that] exclusive underwater footage show[ed] large amounts of oil polluting the seabed off the coast of Jiyye. . . causing the most severe oil spill in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Environmentalists say they are concerned by the possible use of depleted uranium, air pollution caused by fires and the destruction of houses and factories as well as the long term effects of war on rural communities’ interaction with their environment.

"The most serious issue is the oil spill. According to the UN, the spill has created a toxic spray containing class 1 carcinogens that will affect the long-term health of as many as three million people who live on Lebanon’s coast. . .All these impurities and chemicals will go into the marine life. . .They are going to go into to the food chain and they are going to build up for years and years.

"The spill has already reached Turkey and Cyprus and according to environmentalists will have a huge impact on the biodiversity of the eastern Mediterranean. Beaches that are used as nesting grounds for the endangered green turtle and spawning waters of the blue fin tuna will be affected by the spill. . .

"For five weeks the Israeli air force flew around 9000 missions. . .Many of Lebanon’s largest factories were hit resulting in large fires.

"The fuel depots at Beirut airport (which were hit at the beginning of the conflict) and the bombing of the power station, ignited fires that burned for three weeks sending plumes of smoke that could be seen from 60 kilometres away.

For several days many parts of Lebanon were covered by thick clouds of smoke. . .filled with chemicals that can cause cancer, hormonal problems and respiratory difficulties. . .

According to Israel’s daily Ha’aretz, "Amnesty International accuses Israel of war crimes, saying it broke international law by deliberately destroying Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. . .

"The human rights group said initial evidence, including the pattern and scope of the Israeli attacks, high number of civilian casualties, widespread damage and statements by Israeli officials ’indicate that such destruction was deliberate and part of a military strategy, rather than ’collateral damage.’

"The Amnesty report cited ’the widespread destruction of apartments, houses, electricity and water services, roads, bridges, factories and ports,’ which, taken with statements by Israeli officials, ’suggests a policy of punishing both the Lebanese government and the civilian population in an effort to get them to turn against Hizbullah."

Deadly Gifts From The Sky

The Qatar Pennisular reported "Israel dropped cluster bombs on at least 170 villages and other places in south Lebanon during its 34-day war with Hizbullah guerrillas, a senior United Nations de-mining official said yesterday. . .

"’The devices are known to have killed eight people and wounded at least 25, including several children, since a truce took hold on Aug. 14,’ said Tekimiti Gilbert, operations chief of the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre in Lebanon.

“’It’s a huge problem. There are obvious dangers with children, people, cars. People are tripping over these things.’ Gilbert said he had ’no doubt” that Israel had deliberately hit built-up areas with cluster bombs, in violation of international law which states that such munitions must not be used in areas where there are civilians.

"’These cluster bombs were dropped in the middle of villages,’" he said. . .

"Some are small, black and cylindrical, easy to overlook and to detonate. Others are round and can look like dusty rocks.

The London Telegraph reported, "British mine clearance experts have accused Israel of "carpeting" Lebanese border villages with deadly cluster bombs, claiming that more appeared to have been used than in the American-led invasion of [much larger] Iraq.

"There have been growing calls in recent years to outlaw the use of cluster bombs, which scatter hundreds of small ’bomblets’ no bigger than an AA battery over a target area. Although designed to explode on impact, they often fail to do so, remaining a deadly threat to civilians who might tread on them.

"Among the victims was Ali Turkiye, 13, who was harvesting grapes in the village of Zawte when he accidentally dislodged a bomblet that had been caught in a vine. ’It tore the top of his skull off,’ said Ali Haaj Ali, the director- general of the Najde Hospital in Nabatieh. ’We tried to save him but we could not.’

"Yusuf Khalil, died while helping the Lebanese army to clear the munitions. ’He was close to one of the bomblets and a frog jumped from next to the device and set it off, leaving him with fatal head injuries,’ said Mr Ali.

"’The Israelis dropped these in the last few hours of the war when the fighting was nearly over,’ said Hussein Khatib, a family friend. ’They were dropped at night and landed in the rooftops, on the road, everywhere. Israel and America both know that these weapons should be banned, yet they still keep using them.’"

On August 23 Ana Nogueira reported from Southern Lebanon for Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! on Free Speech TV.

"The United Nations interim force in Lebanon estimates that Israel dropped approximately 150,000 bombs. . .Many of these remain unexploded, even as villagers return home to start clearing away the rubble. The large unexploded missiles, while extremely threatening, are easier to find. It is the estimated 15,000 cluster bomb munitions, each carrying anywhere from 80 to 600 small bomblets, that pose the most immediate threat.

"Mark Garlasco is the senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch. He stated, ’The use of submunitions here in Lebanon really is at a crisis point. We’re seeing the contamination levels far higher than many areas during the Iraq war. Interestingly, though, we’ve also seen the exact same cluster bombs used here that were used in Iraq.’

"In Nabatiya, an 11-year-old boy was killed after stepping on an unexploded bomb in front of his house. His father, running out to help him, stepped on another and died 72 hours later. Not even the hospital grounds, where many of these patients are being taken, are safe. Doctor Fouad Faha shows us around the hospital in Bint Jbeil, where we counted six visible unexploded devices, including a 500-pound missile in the backyard.

"’And we have counted over 30 villages so far, where people are coming back to their homes to find unexploded ordinances in their living room, in their patios, on their rooftops, and in their cars. This is truly very dangerous, and it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. . .’"

The New York Times reported on August 11 that the United States provided many of the cluster bombs to the Israelis.

"During much of the 1980’s, the United States maintained a moratorium on selling cluster munitions to Israel, following disclosures that civilians in Lebanon had been killed with the weapons during [a previous] 1982 Israeli invasion. But the moratorium was lifted late in the Reagan administration, and since then, the United States has sold Israel some types of cluster munitions, the senior official said.

"The M-26 ’is a particularly deadly weapon,’ Bonnie Docherty, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, who helped write a study of the United States’ use of the weapons in the 2003 Iraq invasion. ’They were used widely by U.S. forces in Iraq and caused hundreds of civilian casualties.’”

The outrage over the use of these weapons is not limited to Lebanese.

British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim is a professor and researcher at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Shlaim, is one of Israel’s prominent "new historians." In an article in the August 4 International Herald Tribune, Shlaim states, "No strategic gain would justify in moral terms the death and destruction that Israel has visited on its defenseless neighbor. . .Killing children is wrong. Period. A ’war on terror’ cannot be won by a democratically elected government acting like a terrorist organization."

"My own personal opinion is that the Iraqi people are not better off as a result of the invasion and people in America and Great Britain are not safer."

— Jimmy Carter

Previously quoted Fadl Chalak president of the Lebanese Council for Development and Reconstruction, said "You see, watching TV every day, I get so angry, I just give up," he said. "Make no mistake. Every Arab now, every Muslim, has a little bit of Bin Laden in himself. We’re not religious fanatics. . .but we just feel we have nowhere to go.

"We get together, and one of us will raise the glass, ’Here’s to Bin Laden.’ And everybody will raise the glass."

Hymn-singing Condoleezza Rice justified Bush’s refusal to stop the wholesale slaughter of civilians with the ghoulish observation that the carnage reflected the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

What a Nativity message from a Christian Secretary of State who never birthed a child, much less buried one.

---

Irving Wesley Hall, author of "Depleted Uranium for Dummies". For notes and sources, visit www.notinkansas.us.