Will The Fundamentalists Have Their End of Days?

Watching, as is not my custom, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer Friday night on PBS I found the analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah war astounding. The entire discussion was about Hezbollah: who are they, what do they want, who supports them, etc? And no mention of Israel's attitude and actions at all. Israel is bombarding the Beirut airport on the other end of the country from the Hezbollah heartland. It is bombing the roads and bridges to Syria. It has a naval blockade off Lebanon's coast. It is attempting to cut off the entire country from the outside world. Of course, it is also bombing Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon. I've listened to an official Israeli spokesman and Prime Minister Olmert himself say that Hezbollah must and will be disarmed and nothing else will satisfy Israel. Our fearless Leader was quoted as saying that Israel has the right to defend itself and he won't try to dictate military tactics to them but he hopes they will try to minimize civilian casualties! Yet not a word about this in an "analysis" on the News Hour.

I found the stated Israeli position fairly clear and I take them at their word. To me it seems that Israel intends, here and now, to eliminate Hezbollah and that will mandate mass killings. Hezbollah will not surrender; in fact, their leader, in response to Israeli demands, more or less said 'bring it on.' I have to think that, minimally, Israel informed the US regime in advance. It's possible, perhaps likely, that US collusion is also involved, including satellite imagery and communications intercepts to aid Israel's attempts to kill Hezbollah leaders. This could be part of a larger plan for Israel to destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrian military as well, while the US bombs Iran. For months people have thought that Bush and his minions were on the defensive since Iraq isn't going so swimmingly, popular reaction to snooping is negative and even the Supreme Court ruled against military tribunals. The difficulty is that the regime is made up of true believers with a long term view and resistance only raises their hackles and makes them press on even more fiercely. We may think the regime has been weakened but Bush is secure in his "mission from god" and will not be deterred. This is the big time and as the old saw has it: Eagles don't hunt flies.

Assuming that Israel intends to make Hezbollah "vanish" the killing would be massive enough to outrage world opinion, particularly Islamic opinion - and there are one and one half billion Islamic opinions in the world - and would probably precipitate intervention from the Arab or Persian community, a possibility that Isreal, maybe even the US administration, are counting on to "justify" attacks against Syria and Iran. Fifty-eight years ago, in a fit of imperial hubris, the West decided to solve the holocaust residue by establishing Israel in Palestine. Unfortunately, they didn't ask the resident Palestinians and ever since pushing the Arabs out of desired areas Israel has continued encroachment into Palestinian lands and treated those people like dirt, actually worse than dirt as food, not dissension, grows in soil. If the Palestinians fought back they were terrorists; if the Israelis fired guns or dropped bombs they were merely defending themselves. The public presentation of the issues to western audiences was, and is, based on a fundamental (and absurd) asymmetry: Israelis are good people and Arabs are bad people.

By Sunday morning Israel's actions and intentions had sunk in. The Lebanese President condemned Israeli aggression and appealed to the UN to work towards a cease fire. Israel justified its destruction of Lebanese infrastructure by claiming that they are responding to a state of war between sovereign states, not terrorism, that since the Lebanese government had not eliminated the "private" Hezbollah militia, the sovereign country of Lebanon is accountable. Listening again to NPR and watching TV programs such as Face the Nation on CBS opinions were united in some ways:

• everyone is worried about a regionwide expansion of war;
• everyone defends Israel;
• everyone condemns Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran;
• not even one person on these shows was an Arab or capable and willing to represent the "other side's" views.

When listening to Americans officials, such as Condaleeza Rice, there's lots of blather about democracy and terrorism, as though these issues are simplistically obvious to everyone. If you had been working at the Beirut International Airport when Israeli bombs fell you would have felt terrorized and having found out later that they were "official" Israeli Air Force jets and not caused by some small, non-descript group of "official terrorists" would have been a distinction without a difference. What we have been indoctrinated into believing about the "look" of terrorism is only a small subset of the dangers we face. In fact, what the US government labels terrorism is mostly attacks by the weak and poor. That's why they use small bombs in mostly small places: if they had the resources they'd probably use ICBMs.

One of the difficulties of loosely throwing around a word such as democracy is that ordinary people might start thinking about it. Do "average" Americans think changes in tax laws that have benefitted the wealthy, indebted the country, and helped impoverish themselves are democratic? Do "ordinary" Americans think that the export of jobs and whole industries and the totally free play of capital are democratic? Do John and Jane Q. think that spying on them by "their" government is the action of a free, open and democratic society? I heard Martina Navratilova interviewed on the radio on Saturday and she said that the US, her adopted country (paraphrase from memory: I've been here for three decades and am as American as one can be) is becoming very like the Czechoslovakia she fled 31 years ago.

At bottom, and thought of simply, democracy should be about people in-the-large choosing how to organize their own societies and how to live their individual and collective lives. (Mr. Bush seems to think it means he gets to decide how other peoples live their lives!) So the Palestinians elected Hamas. Now, elected representatives of Hamas to the Palestinian parliament have been kidnapped and are in Israeli jails. I've learned that in Lebanon governmental representation is "confessional" according to religion within a very diverse population. Hezbollah represents the Shia Islamic community and that community is highly underrepresented, that Shias are 45% of the population and if Hezbollah, as one commentator put it, played their trump card and demanded one man = one vote, Hezbollah would likely dominate the Lebanese government. In such a case a private militia might become the official army. It's worth remembering that Hezbollah was born in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 24 years ago when Ariel Sharon earned the sobriquet of the "Butcher of Shatilla." That was a Palestinian refugee camp and Sharon's troops provided the "blockers" as their allies, the Christian Falangists entered the camp and massacred thousands of Palestinians. Israel's intent was to destroy Al Fatah and kill Yassir Arafat. But Arafat and his council had fled to Tunis and we know the past 20 years. Hezbollah was born and grew and eventually got Israel out of Lebanon along the way killing 241 US Marines in their barracks in 1983. Those were the days of Iran-Contra; was the presence of those Marines part of pay to Israel for their central role in that affair? (Any readers that can increase my knowledge, or correct my mistakes, are invited to comment. I, and we, need an accurate and comprehensive path of knowledge and understanding of this past if we are to plan our futures.) When Bob Schieffer of CBS pressed Ms. Rice about diplomacy she said that we had high officials in the region, including Elliot Abrams! Mr. Abrams was convicted, and later Presidentially pardoned, for felonies he committed during Iran Contra and like that proverbial bad penny he's baaaack! Lord help us.

Are Muslims a threat to the West? Does such a question even make any sense? Was the USSR ever a true threat to the West? If it were so evil and expansionist why did it collapse in a whimper? (One line of thought is that as a socialist country, everyone, akin to noone, owned industry and capital; thus, they had nothing to fight for. I seriously doubt ordinary Rooskies foresaw what was about to befall them, just as few Americans look some moves ahead to forecast where god's messenger, Dubya, is leading them.) Like crime in our streets we want protection but fearing our neighbors is no solution. Criminals will perhaps always be with us but we don't have to increase their numbers by driving more and more people into poverty and desperation. I've read that to investors fully 1 in 6 of the world's people are superfluous! The favelas or barrios or slums of the world are growing and more are headed our way. If a person can work he deserves a job, a job with a living wage. Mr. George Dubya Bush speaks of an ownership society but with his policies more and more of us are unable to "own" anything. We, ourselves, in the wealthy West are rapidly heading into superfluity. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world less because of his growing wealth than because Sam Walton died and his $90 billion dollar fortune is now divided among 9 heirs. That's one way to increase the number of billionaires: die and multiply. I read that the annual expenditure from Warren Buffet's philanthropy will exceed the spending by large UN agencies. Philanthropy sounds good. What would sound even better is societies and peoples so ennabled as to not need charity.

When attacked, defend. But don't go on offense, threatening peoples throughout the world and among large self-identified constituencies. We need deals, not death. We need to listen as well as to speak. We need to accept as well as to reject. And if we favor democracy then we cannot dictate. Dubya prances about talking of democracy even as he establishes an autocracy in his homeland. He rains down death, destruction and terror wherever he goes. If his is a mission from a god I reject that god. And good riddance.

Fundamentalist Christians await the Second Coming. This necessitates the Jews to be in Israel and Armageddon for the forces of light to prevail. (This also requires the Jews to convert.) If the "paranoid" scenario above turns out to be true, with attacks against Syria and Iran by both the US and Israel they may get their Armageddon. As to the forces of light prevailing and any fantasized second arrival, believers could be disappointed, as with the comet Kahoutek. Even the destruction of Hezbollah alone, with many thousands of deaths, may be enough to cause a real conflagration throughout the region and worldwide. And if you're worried about terrorism you may find yourself wishing that our dear Leader had spent a few more dollars protecting our coastlines and ports and fewer dollars reading our emails.