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By Paul Craig Roberts

Gentle reader, do you know that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon?

Israel has ordered all the villagers to clear out. Israel then destroys their homes and murders the fleeing villagers. That way there is no one to come back and nothing to which to return, making it easier for Israel to grab the territory, just as Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians.

Do you know that one-third of the Lebanese civilians murdered by Israel's attacks on civilian residential districts are children? That is the report from Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for the UN. He says it is impossible for help to reach the wounded and those buried in rubble, because Israeli air strikes have blown up all the bridges and roads. Considering how often (almost always) Israel misses Hezbollah targets and hits civilian ones, one might think that Israeli fire is being guided by US satellites and US military GPS. Don't be surprised at US complicity. Why would the puppet be any less evil than the puppet master?

Of course, you don't know these things, because the US print and TV media do not report them.

Because Bush is so proud of himself, you do know that he has blocked every effort to stop the Israeli slaughter of Lebanese civilians. Bush has told the UN "NO." Bush has told the European Union "NO." Bush has told the pro-American Lebanese prime minister "NO." Twice. Bush is very proud of his firmness. He is enjoying Israel's rampage and wishes he could do the same thing in Iraq.

Does it make you a Proud American that "your" president gave Israel the green light to drop bombs on convoys of villagers fleeing from Israeli shelling, on residential neighborhoods in the capital of Beirut and throughout Lebanon, on hospitals, on power plants, on food production and storage, on ports, on civilian airports, on bridges, on roads, on every piece of infrastructure on which civilized life depends? Are you a Proud American? Or are you an Israeli puppet?

On July 20, "your" House of Representatives voted 410-8 in favor of Israel's massive war crimes in Lebanon. Not content with making every American complicit in war crimes, "your" House of Representatives, according to the Associated Press, also "condemns enemies of the Jewish state."

Who are the "enemies of the Jewish state"?

They are the Palestinians whose land has been stolen by the Jewish state, whose homes and olive groves have been destroyed by the Jewish state, whose children have been shot down in the streets by the Jewish state, whose women have been abused by the Jewish state. They are Palestinians who have been walled off into ghettos, who cannot reach their farm lands or medical care or schools, who cannot drive on roads through Palestine that have been constructed for Israelis only. They are Palestinians whose ancient towns have been invaded by militant Zionist "settlers" under the protection of the Israeli army who beat and persecute the Palestinians and drive them out of their towns. They are Palestinians who cannot allow their children outside their homes because they will be murdered by Israeli "settlers."

The Palestinians who confront Israeli evil are called "terrorists." When Bush forced free elections on Palestine, the people voted for Hamas. Hamas is the organization that has stood up to Israel. This means, of course, that Hamas is evil, anti-Semitic, un-American and terrorist. The US and Israel responded by cutting off all funds to the new government. Democracy is permitted only if it produces the results Bush and Israel want.

Israelis never practice terror. Only those who are in Israel's way are terrorists.

Another enemy of the Jewish state is Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a militia of Shi'ite Muslims created in 1982 when Israel first invaded Lebanon. During this invasion the great moral Jewish state arranged for the murder of refugees in refugee camps. The result of Israel's atrocities was Hezbollah, which fought the Israeli Army, defeated it, and drove it out of Lebanon. Today Hezbollah not only defends southern Lebanon but also provides social services such as orphanages and medical care.

To cut to the chase, the enemies of the Jewish state are any Muslim country not ruled by an American puppet friendly to Israel. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the oil emirates have sided with Israel against their own kind, because they are dependent either on American money or on American protection from their own people. Sooner or later these totally corrupt governments that do not represent the people they rule will be overthrown. It is only a matter of time.

Indeed Bush and Israel may be hastening the process in their frantic effort to overthrow the governments of Syria and Iran. Both governments have more popular support than Bush has, but the White House Moron doesn't know this. The Moron thinks Syria and Iran will be "cakewalks" like Iraq, where ten proud divisions of the US military are tied down by a few lightly armed insurgents.

If you are still a Proud American, consider that your pride is doing nothing good for Israel or for America.

On July 20 when "your" House of Representatives, following "your" US Senate, passed the resolution in support of Israel's war crimes, the most powerful lobby in Washington, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), quickly got out a press release proclaiming "The American people overwhelming support Israel's war on terrorism and understand that we must stand by our closest ally in this time of crisis."

The truth is that Israel created the crisis by invading a country with a pro-American government. The truth is that the American people do not support Israel's war crimes, as the CNN quick poll results make clear and as was made clear by callers into C-Span.

Despite the Israeli spin on news provided by US "reporting," a majority of Americans do not approve of Israeli atrocities against Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah is located in southern Lebanon. If Israel is targeting Hezbollah, why are Israeli bombs falling on northern Lebanon? Why are they falling on Beirut? Why are they falling on civilian airports? On schools and hospitals?

Now we arrive at the main point. When the US Senate and House of Representatives pass resolutions in support of Israeli war crimes and condemn those who resist Israeli aggression, the Senate and House confirm Osama bin Laden's propaganda that America stands with Israel against the Arab and Muslim world.

Indeed, Israel, which has one of the world's largest per capita incomes, is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. Many believe that much of this "aid" comes back to AIPAC, which uses it to elect "our" representatives in Congress.

This perception is no favor to Israel, whose population is declining, as the smart ones have seen the writing on the wall and have been leaving. Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims who are being turned into enemies of Israel by Israel's actions and inhumane policies.

The hope in the Muslim world has always been that the United States would intervene in behalf of compromise and make Israel realize that Israel cannot steal Palestine and turn every Palestinian into a refugee.

This has been the hope of the Arab world. This is the reason our puppets have not been overthrown. This hope is the reason America still had some prestige in the Arab world.

The House of Representatives resolution, bought and paid for by AIPAC money, is the final nail in the coffin of American prestige in the Middle East. It shows that America is, indeed, Israel's puppet, just as Osama bin Laden says, and as a majority of Muslims believe.

With hope and diplomacy dead, henceforth America and Israel have only tooth and claw. The vaunted Israeli army could not defeat a rag tag militia in southern Lebanon. The vaunted US military cannot defeat a rag tag, lightly armed insurgency drawn from a minority of the population in Iraq, insurgents, moreover, who are mainly engaged in civil war against the Shi'ite majority.

What will the US and its puppet master do? Both are too full of hubris and paranoia to admit their terrible mistakes. Israel and the US will either destroy from the air the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iran so that civilized life becomes impossible for Muslims, or the US and Israel will use nuclear weapons to intimidate Muslims into acquiescence to Israel's desires.

Muslim genocide in one form or another is the professed goal of the neoconservatives who have total control over the Bush administration. Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz has called for World War IV (in neocon thinking WW III was the Cold War) to overthrow Islam in the Middle East, deracinate the Islamic religion and turn it into a formalized, secular ritual.

Rumsfeld's neocon Pentagon has drafted new US war doctrine that permits pre-emptive nuclear attack on non-nuclear states.

Neocon David Horowitz says that by slaughtering Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, "Israel is doing the work of the rest of the civilized world," thus equating war criminals with civilized men.

Neocon Larry Kudlow says that "Israel is doing the Lord's work" by murdering Lebanese, a claim that should give pause to Israel's Christian evangelical supporters. Where does the Lord Jesus say, "go forth and murder your neighbors so that you may steal their lands"?

The complicity of the American public in these heinous crimes will damn America for all time in history.

(07-30) 09:49 PDT QANA, Lebanon (AP) --

At least 56 people, more than half children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that crushed a building, the deadliest attack of the campaign against Hezbollah. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to return early to Washington with her diplomatic mission derailed after Lebanese leaders told her not to come.

Lebanon's prime minister said his country would not talk to the Americans over anything but an unconditional cease-fire. Rice, in Jerusalem for talks with Israeli officials, said she was "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life" but stopped short of calling for an immediate end to the hostilities.

However, she made one of her strongest statements yet saying: "We want a cease-fire as soon as possible." Before news of the strike emerged, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Rice that Israel would likely fight on for another 10 to 14 days.

The United States has resisted world pressure to call for a halt to the fighting, saying it wants first to ensure a deal is in place that will eliminate Hezbollah guerrillas from Israel's border and bring an international force to southern Lebanon.

The missiles struck just after 1 a.m., leveling a three-story building in Qana where two extended families, the Shalhoubs and Hashims, had taken refuge in the basement from heavy Israeli bombardment in the area. Throughout the day, rescue workers dug through the rubble, lifting out bodies dressed in colorful clothes of women and children. At one point they found a single room with 18 bodies, police said.

"Why are they killing us? What have we done?" screamed Khalil Shalhoub, who was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother's body taken out on a stretcher. The dead included at least 34 children and 12 adult women, security officials said.

Israel said guerrillas had fired rockets from near the building into northern Israel.

In Beirut, some 5,000 protesters gathered in downtown Beirut, at one point attacking a U.N. building and burning American flags, shouting, "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv" and chanting for Hezbollah's ally Syria to hit Israel.

At an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "deeply disturbed" that his previous calls for cease-fire had gone unheeded. He pointed to the Beirut protests, saying, "People have noticed (the United Nations') failure to act firmly and quickly during this crisis."

Olmert said Israel "is not in a hurry to have a cease-fire" before it achieves its goals of decimating Hezbollah. He told Rice that Israel would need 10 to 14 more days to finish its offensive, according to a senior Israeli government official.

"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this morning," Olmert told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a participant. "We will continue the activity and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation."

The Lebanese government this week had put forward ideas on disarming Hezbollah and deploying an international force in the south. But after the strike, Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said any negotiations on a broader deal were off.

"We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of innocent people," he told a news conference, though he added that his government still supported the ideas it offered.

Saniora and Rice spoke by telephone after the strike, and Saniora said he told her not to make a planned trip Sunday to Beirut. Rice told reporters in Jerusalem she had called to notify him she wouldn't fly to Beirut, "because I felt very strongly that my work toward a cease-fire is really here, today."

A U.S. official later said she had decided to return home Monday morning to work on a U.N. Security Council resolution.

Israel said Hezbollah guerrillas had fired 40 rockets into northern Israel from Qana, wounding five Israelis, before the airstrike — including some rockets launched from near the leveled building.

"We deeply regret the loss of any civilian life and especially when you talk about children who are innocent," Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir told AP. But he accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields" and said the military had warned people to leave the area.

The attack drew immediate condemnation from the Arab world, with Jordan's King Abdullah II voicing his strongest criticism of his Israeli peace partner yet, calling it an "ugly crime." Israel promised an investigation.

In April 1996 more than 100 Lebanese civilians were killed in Qana in the hills east of the port city of Tyre, in an Israeli artillery shelling of a U.N. base. The civilians had sought refuge with the U.N. to escape Israeli bombardment and the attack sparked an international outcry that helped end an Israeli offensive.

Meanwhile, Israel launched its second ground incursion into southern Lebanon. Before dawn Sunday, Israeli forces backed by heavy artillery fire crossed the border and clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas in the Taibeh Project area, about two miles inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah said eight Israeli soldiers were killed, while the Israeli army said only that one of its soldiers had been moderately wounded.

Heavy artillery rained down on the nearby villages of Yuhmor and Arnoun as Israeli jets were seen in the skies overhead.

The incursion came after Israeli forces pulled back Saturday from Bint Jbail, the furthest point of their first major ground incursion across the border, launched a week ago. The incursion sparked heavy fighting with Hezbollah guerrillas, who put up a tougher resistance than expected and appeared to still be in the area after the pullback. Bint Jbail is further west along the border from Taibeh.

The United Nations World Food Program canceled an aid convoy's trip to the embattled south, after the Israeli military denied safe passage, the group said in a statement. The six-truck convoy had been scheduled to bring relief supplies to Marjayoun.

Israel launched its assault on Lebanon after Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid July 12 and killed eight others in fighting the same day.

Some 458 Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed in the campaign through Saturday — before the attacks on Qana. Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died, and Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel have killed 18 civilians, Israeli authorities said, correcting earlier reports of 19 civilian dead.

More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south, taking refuge in schools, hospitals or basements of apartment buildings amid the fighting — many of them too afraid to flee on roads heavily hit by Israeli strikes.

In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub and several other residents said people were simply too terrified to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked repeatedly by rockets and bombs. Charred wreckage and smashed buildings line the roughly seven-mile road from Qana to Tyre, where a small amount of humanitarian supplies had arrived. European ships had picked up foreign citizens from Tyre's port, but there were no evacuations of Lebanese.

On Thursday, the Israeli military's Al-Mashriq radio that broadcasts into southern Lebanon warned residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles are fired from them. Leaflets with similar messages were dropped in some areas Saturday.

A senior official in the Israeli air force said the village had been warned "several times" that it would be attacked because "hundreds of rockets have been fired from inside the village in the past two weeks, from the backyards, from the squares ... from as close as 50 to 60 (yards) from this building."

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr disputed allegations that Hezbollah was firing missiles from Qana.

"What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?" he told Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/07/30/international/i061500D99.DTL

Blast Kills 10 as Violence Flares in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 10 — More than 40 people died today, as the brazen daytime violence that wracked Baghdad on Sunday continued despite a plea from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for Iraqis to “unite as brothers,” news services reported.

An apparently coordinated pair of bombs killed at least 10 people in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, a Shiite stronghold, while seven people were killed in an attack on a commuter bus in Amriya, a Sunni neighborhood, according to Reuters. Others died in shootouts in the Dora section of the city and in bomb blasts and drive-by shootings reported in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Baquba, Yusufiya and Hilla.

On Sunday, a mob of gunmen rampaged through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

Speaking to the Kurdish regional parliament in the country’s north today, Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, said “our destiny is to work together in brotherhood to defeat terrorism and insurgency.” The country’s president, Jalal Talabini, called for calm and warned that the nation was “in front of a precipice.”

But a member of the largest Sunni coalition in Parliament, Ayad al-Samaraie, responded to the rampage by calling today for the United Nations Security Council to send peacekeepers to Baghdad, since what he called the “occupation forces” were unable to restore order, The Associated Press reported.

The violence coincided with an announcement by American military officials on Sunday that they had formally accused four more American soldiers of rape and murder, and a fifth soldier of “dereliction of duty” for failing to report the crimes, in connection with the deaths of a teenage Iraqi girl and three members of her family.

And the final phase in the trial of Saddam Hussein began, with defense lawyers delivering closing arguments. The lawyers for Saddam Hussein and his brother-in-law, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, boycotted the session to protest what they said was a lack of adequate security, citing the recent killing of another member of Mr. Hussein’s legal team.

A military cordon was established to suppress the violence on Sunday, making movement around the city difficult and the full extent of the killings hard to ascertain. Reports of the death toll from the shootings alone ranged from fewer than a dozen, according to the American military, to more than 40, according to some news services. The bombing near the mosque later claimed at least 19 lives and left 59 wounded, officials said.

The military’s announcement about the indicted soldiers brought to six the number implicated in the rape-murder case, one more than previously disclosed. The case has enraged Mr. Maliki and prompted apologies by the highest American military and civilian officials in Iraq. A photograph of the girl’s passport, distributed by news agencies on Sunday, showed that she was 14.

In office only seven weeks, Mr. Maliki’s government is facing increasingly difficult obstacles. Worsening violence has undermined his intention to disarm the country’s sectarian militias. At the same time, the growing furor over criminal accusations against American troops has tested Mr. Maliki’s divided loyalties to his American allies and to an Iraqi public that has grown weary of the American presence.

The killings on Sunday in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad began in late morning, near the site of a car bomb explosion in front of a Shiite mosque on Saturday, residents and officials said. Initial reports said the bombing had killed three people, but the American military said Sunday that at least 12 people, including 3 children, had died in the blast, and at least 18 had been wounded.

According to some residents and Sunni Arab officials interviewed by telephone, the gunmen, whom they accused of being members of a feared Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, set up checkpoints around the neighborhood, indiscriminately pulled scores of Sunni Arabs from their homes and cars and killed them on the street. Other bodies were found with their hands bound behind their backs and gunshots in their heads, residents said.

But as often happens in Iraq, accounts of the violence varied widely. Residents and some Iraqi officials said in interviews that more than 35 people had been killed in the attacks. The Associated Press quoted Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq of the Iraqi police as saying that 41 bodies had been taken to hospitals. And an official at Yarmouk Hospital, the main medical center in western Baghdad, said in a telephone interview that at least 23 bodies had been delivered from Jihad, and 10 people had arrived wounded from the shootings.

But American and some Iraqi security officials said the casualty figures were far lower. Lt. Col. Jonathan B. Withington, spokesman for the Fourth Infantry Division, which oversees security around Baghdad, said the Iraqi police had reported finding only 11 bodies. It was unclear whether that toll included victims delivered to the morgue.

American and Iraqi security officials also said they could not confirm the accounts of the seemingly arbitrary street killings, and Colonel Withington said the Iraqi security forces were mobilized immediately after reports of “sporadic gunfire” in Jihad. By early afternoon, Iraqi and American forces had sealed off the neighborhood, officials said.

Several prominent Sunni Arab political and religious leaders criticized the Iraqi and American security forces for their inability to control the violence. In comments broadcast on Al Jazeera, Salam al-Zubaie, a deputy prime minister and a Sunni, called the events in Jihad “a real massacre,” and suggested that the country’s Shiite-led security forces were to blame because they had been infiltrated by militiamen. The government forces, he said, “coordinate with these filthy terror groups who are roaming the streets.”

Mr. Maliki’s office, in a statement, tried to distance itself from Mr. Zubaie’s comments, saying “they do not represent the government’s point of view.” Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, has vowed to crack down on militias regardless of sectarian affiliation and to eradicate militia influence from the government’s security forces.

In recent days, American and Iraqi troops have conducted several operations against the powerful Mahdi Army militia, which is loosely under the control of the influential Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and is regarded by Sunni Arab leaders as a main force behind many sectarian reprisal killings. Iraqi and American forces captured two Mahdi Army leaders on Friday and raided a suspected militia bastion on Saturday.

Some Jihad residents and Sunni Arab leaders accused the Mahdi Army of committing the killings on Sunday, but officials in Mr. Sadr’s organization denied that. “The Mahdi Army takes care of the national interest,” Abdel Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, told Al Jazeera. Mr. Sadr joined other government leaders in publicly calling for calm, and he requested an emergency session of Parliament to discuss the crisis and “prevent a sea of blood,” his office said in a statement.

In the rape-murder case, the American military today identified the five newly accused soldiers, who remain on active duty in Iraq. They are Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, Spec. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard, news services reported. Mr. Yribe faces charges for his failure to report the incident, which took place March 12, while the others are being charged as participants.

The first to be implicated was Steven D. Green, a recently discharged private first class who was arrested June 30 in North Carolina.

An affidavit filed in the case against Mr. Green implicated five soldiers: Mr. Green; three soldiers who accompanied him to the farmhouse in the town of Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, where investigators say the rape and murders took place; and another soldier who remained at a checkpoint.

The formal accusations against the five soldiers set in motion the military’s court-martial process. According to military officials, the soldiers will now face an investigation under Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a process similar to a grand jury hearing, which will determine whether enough evidence exists to put the men on trial.

Kirk Semple reported for this article from Baghdad and John O’Neil reported from New York. Reporting for this article was contributed by Khalid al-Ansary, Khalid W. Hassan, Hosham Hussein, Mona Mahmoud, Qais Mizher, Sahar Nageeb, Omar al-Neami and Iraqi employees of The New York Times in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Tikrit.