Syria And Lebanon:
Big Time
Double Standards
By Kurt Nimmo
13 March, 2005
Kurtnimmo.com
If
you were a Syrian, what would you think? Heres the United Nations,
specifically envoy Terje
Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian, telling Bashar Assad to get out of
Lebanon and be quick about it, or face economic isolation,
as the Washington Post puts it. Roed-Larsen used UN. Resolution 1559
like a stick against Assad. If he doesnt deliver, there
will be total political and economic isolation of his country. There
is a steel-hard consensus in the international community, warned
another UN official.
Meanwhile, several
hundred miles to the south, the outlaw state of Israel has violated
literary dozens of UN resolutions (see this list).
Israel has racked up violations of international law for raids on Gaza
and the West Bank, raids against Syria, raids against Jordan, raids
against Lebanon, raids against Iraq, raids against Tunisia, expulsions
of Palestinians, annexation of Syrias Golan Heights, and violations
of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
You may remember
Roed-Larsens comment last year about the deterioration of
law and order in Palestinian areas, a comment deputy Israeli ambassador
Arye Mekel agreed with. If you were a Palestinian, you might be angry
with this European bureaucrat for taking the Palestinian Authority to
task while Israelis settlers and soldiers murder Arab school children,
bulldoze homes (with people still inside), and assassinate your leaders.
If you were a Syrian,
you might think there is a double standard at work here. Terje Roed-Larsen
has not threatened Ariel Sharon with total political and economic
isolation. If you were Syrian, you might wonder why the hell some
European white man is threatening your country. The last time the United
Nations talked like this against Arabs, 500,000 Iraqi children died.
If you were a Syrian, you might remember a little bit of history, for
instance the fact Lebanon was at one time considered part of Syriathat
is until the French arrived and started carving things up in their own
interest and against the interests of the Syrians. If you were Syrian,
you might realize that in fact most of the borders in the Middle East
were contrived by white Europeans for their benefit and when the Arabs
refused to pay along with this nonsense thousands of them were slaughtered.
Winston
Churchill made no bones about it: recalcitrant Arabs should
be gassed. Some eighty years after Churchill said this, the United
States used mustard gas against the people of Fallujah. For
Arabs, nothing much has changed over the last century or so.
If you were Lebanese,
no doubt youd be afraid of the future. Lebanon confronts
nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country
this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bushwhose
anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American
troops in Iraqthere are growing signs that the Syrian retreat
is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil
war, writes Robert
Fisk. Have we forgotten 150,000 dead? Have we forgotten
the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in
the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes,
will be drenched with bloodbut the blood will be that of the Lebanese
who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom
upon them
in the absence of these sisterly Syrian
soldiers, civil conflict might suddenlymysteriouslyreturn
to Lebanon.
This is precisely
what the Bushcons and the Likudites in Israel wanta return to
civil strife and ethnic conflict in Lebanon. As Nasser
H. Aruri writes in the foreword to Livia Rokachs Israels
Sacred Terrorism, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was calculated
to produce results deemed beneficial both to American strategic interests
and to Israeli expansionist goals. The interests of the Reagan administration
and Israels Likud government coalesced around three objectives:
the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure in Lebanon, the redrawing
of the political map in Lebanon, and the reduction of Syria to manageable
proportions. More than 20 years later, not much has changed, except
the diminishment of radical Palestinian elements in Lebanon. The
1982 operation, as well as its predecessor, the Litani
Operation of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy
for Lebanon and Palestine, writes Aruri. In fact, that strategy,
formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least
four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried
out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British
mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern
boundary for a Jewish Palestine from the North Litani River up
to Banias. In the following year, at the Paris peace conference,
the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the
Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani
River. The proposal emphasized the vital importance of controlling
all water resources up to their sources.
Juat about everybody
who lives in the Middle East knows what the Zionists are all aboutstealing
land and water and reducing the Arabsespecially Muslim Arabsinto
third class citizens in their own countries. As Hezbollah demonstrated
in 2000, when they ran the IDF out of southern Lebanon, this will no
longer be as simple as it once was and this is why the Zionists have
included the Bushcons in the operation. France and the United States
believe they can moderate Hezbollah and eventually convince
it to disarm and demobilize its militias. Its not going to happen
so long as Israel has a military presence on the border and occupies
Shebaa Farms and periodically attacks Lebanese villages and Beirut.
Lebanese, Syrians,
and Palestinians are not stupid. They know the problem is not Hezbollah
or even Hamas, but the Americans and the Israelis. For 30 years,
America has toleratedeven supportedSyrias military
presence in Lebanon. In 1976, both the Israelis and the Americans wanted
Syrian troops in Lebanonbecause they would be able to control
the 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanonbut now Mr Bushs
real concern is Syrias supposed support for the insurgency in
Iraq, writes Robert Fisk. The irony is extraordinary: 140,000
American troops occupy Iraqwe shall leave the Israeli occupation
forces in Palestinian lands out of this equationwhile their President
demands the withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from Lebanon. Democracy
indeed!
As almost any Syrian
or Lebanese can tell you, democracy has nothing to do with it. The Arab
and Muslim Middle East with its ethnic minorities, its factions
and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we
can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable
to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore
constitute a real threat against the State of Israel,
Oded Yinon wrote in the 1980s.
How things change.
Both Hezbollah and the persistent resistance in Iraq pose serious threats
to the Zionist plan for the Middle East. Bush may push a Cedar
revolution in Lebanonhoping for an engineered democracy
that will eventually mainstreamize Hezbollah and flat line
its radical appealbut this will not happen, as between 500,000
and over a million Lebanese indicated earlier this week: Hezbollah represents
resistance to Pax Americana and Pax Israelica. Backing Syria in a corner
and threatening to bomb Iran will not change this. In fact, if the United
States attacks Iran, this will catalyze Shia radicalism. As an example
of how this works, consider how the French and US military headquarters
were razed by Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, slaughtering more than
300 servicemen after US warships shelled Muslim areas of Lebanon in
support of Amin Gemayel, a Falangist (i.e., fascist) Maronite Christian
and Israeli sock puppet.