HEZBOLLAH IS NOT A PUPPET OF SYRIA AND IRAN
HEZBOLLAH IS NOT A PUPPET OF SYRIA AND IRAN
Reza Aslan is the Iranian-American author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam"
By Reza Aslan
But it would be a grave exaggeration to claim, as the White House repeatedly has, that Hezbollah is merely a puppet of Syria and Iran. Nor is it necessarily the case that the current conflict between Israel and Lebanon bears the fingerprints of Assad and Ahmadinejad.
Israel's War Against Lebanon's Shi'a
The two weeks of Israeli air and sea bombardment following Hizballah's raidon an Israeli army convoy have placed all of Lebanon under siege. But thebombing has been concentrated in areas populated by Lebanese Shi'a -- thesouthern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and, most of all, the south.This pattern shows that Israel aims to play on Lebanon's sectarian tensionsto impel Hizballah's disarmament, with potentially very dangerousconsequences for Lebanon.
Jim Quilty reports from Beirut on "Israel's War Against Lebanon's Shi'a" in
Middle East Report Online:
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero072506.html
Butler: No, it's not anti-semitic
Judith Butler
It may be that Summers has something else in mind; namely, that the criticism will be exploited by those who want to see not only the destruction of Israel but the degradation or devaluation of Jewish people in general. There is always that risk, but to claim that such criticism of Israel can be taken only as criticism of Jews is to attribute to that particular interpretation the power to monopolise the field of reception. The argument against letting criticism of Israel into the public sphere would be that it gives fodder to those with anti-semitic intentions, who will successfully co-opt the criticism. Here again, a statement can become effectively anti-semitic only if there is, somewhere, an intention to use it for anti-semitic purposes. Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.
Tom Hayden: Things Come ’Round in Mideast
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060718_tom_hayden_things_come_round/
Posted on Jul 18, 2006
By Tom Hayden
Editor’s note: In this essay, veteran social activist Tom Hayden, drawing upon his own rude political awakening to the realities of Israeli and Middle East politics during the 1980s, warns that the Israel lobby in the U.S. aims to “roll back the clock” and “change the map” of the region and that its neoconservative supporters will probably try to use the current Middle East crisis to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
It is still painful and embarrassing to describe these events of nearly 25 years ago, but with Israel today again bombing Lebanon and Israeli officials bragging about “rolling back the clock by twenty years” and reconfiguring the Middle East, I feel obliged to speak out against history repeating.
How do I read today’s news through the lens of the past?
What I fear is the rehabilitation of the discredited U.S. neoconservative agenda to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. The neoconservatives’ 1996 “Clean Break” memo advocated that Israel “roll back” Lebanon and destabilize Syria in addition to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. An intellectual dean of the neoconservatives, Bernard Lewis, has long advocated the “Lebanonization” of the Middle East, meaning the disintegration of nation states into “a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties.”