http://brickburner.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/11/bombing_a_mosqu.html

Like I said, that is all.

There's a 2nd crucial lesson, which I think is much more important. Hezbollah showed not only that you can defeat Israel. It showed how to defeat Israel. It proposed a relatively simple, but to my thinking fundamental, formula. So in this speech, the last speech (09.23.2006), Nasrallah raised this issue: "what is the Hezbollah model?" He considers it as follows: "Resistance depends on planning, organization. This resistance experience, which should be conveyed to the world, depends - on the moral and spiritual level - on faith, certainty, reliance [on God], and readiness to make sacrifices." Ok, you have to be committed. You have to be willing to go the full nine yards. The next sentence I found remarkably interesting. It says: "It also depends on reason, planning, organization, armament, and, as is said, on taking all possible protective procedures.... The pious, God-reliant, loving, and knowledgeable resistance is also the conscious, wise, trained, and equipped resistance that has plans. This is the secret of the victory we are today celebrating, brothers and sisters." To most of you this doesn't sound like anything particularly profound but, in fact, it is because at the end of the day Israel always depended on the fact that its adversaries were stupid, incompetent, blowhards and windbags, and hot air baloons, and, in fact, they were right... That when they were dealing with a Nasser, he was a blowhard; a Saddam Hussein, he was a windbag; when they were dealing with Yasser Arafat, he was a hot air ballon. They were nothing of any substance... [inaudible]... That was Israel's ace in the hole. Now comes along an Arab leader who says we have to use "reason." It's a very remarkable thing to read. We have to use "reason." We have to think, plan, organize. And he didn't just say it ... [inaudible]... As I'm sure, as most of you know, that the Israelis were reporting that their [Israeli] population was waiting anxiously for each speech from Nasrallah to find out what's going on [Poll: Israelis believed Nasrallah over Peretz,Ynetnews.com, by Anat Breshkovsky, 09.03.2006]. They [Israelis] stopped believing their own media and they only believed what he had to say. No more of the Arab windbaggery -- on the second day of the war in '67 Nasser says 'we destroyed all of the Israeli Air Force.' Or when the hot air baloon Saddam Hussein, after defeat in 1991, gave out Victory Medals to the Iraqi Army. That era is over. This is a serious leadership whose commitment is matched by its intelligence and its incorruptibility. And that really is the formula. And now the United States and Israel are in living dread because they don't fear Hezbollah -- it's 3,000 fighters -- that's not what they fear. What they fear is, throughout the Arab world all the anti -- they call it American, I'll call imperialist -- all the anti-imperialist movements will now be emulating the Hizbullah model. Those who want to defeat the Americans, the American designs in the region, they're going to look for the Hezbollah model and the Hizbu'llah model says you have to "reason," you have to think, you have to "plan," you have to anticipate, and if you do that, you can win. And the fact is, it's true. If you do that, you can beat them.


Video: Finkelstein on Hamas, current crisis, Lebanon, Hezbollah
(Burlington, VT, 09.30.2006)

"Nothing in Clouds Hill is to be a care upon the world. While I have it there shall be nothing exquiste or unique in it. Nothing to anchor me." T.E. Lawrence


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8613542103331739937&q=hamza+yusuf

http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/currentread/currentread02.html

To Trust or Not to Trust

"As I reflect on my conversation with my Arab friend I understand his frustration. Trusting motives is one thing when trust has been earned, and something else entirely when it has not. Should we be surprised at the Arab world's attitude toward the West. Probably not. Should we endeavor to understand Arab culture and history and earn their trust. The obvious answer is yes, and reading Seven Pillars is a good place to start."

No. It is not easy when trusts have all shattered. Particularly when a person is under attack, to be nice let alone be what one is supposed to be: forgiving.

The 85% of all Israelis who supported the attack against us in Lebanon...well, what can I say. It isn't my forgiveness that they need. And those who continue to remain silent about the slaughter being perpetrated on their behalf, both Jew and Israeli.....it isn't mine that they require.

That is all.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5991.shtml

On 25 June 2006 Israel embarked on a military operation in Gaza that has resulted in over 300 deaths, including many civilians; over a thousand injuries; large-scale devastation of public facilities and private homes; the destruction of agricultural lands; the disruption of hospitals, clinics and schools; the denial of access to adequate electricity, water and food; and the occupation and imprisonment of the people of Gaza. This brutal collective punishment of a people, not a government, has passed largely unnoticed by the international community.

http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Israeli_Bulldozer_Driver.html

"Rachel Corey [sic], 23 years old from the state of Washington, was killed while she was trying to prevent Israeli army bulldozers from destroying a Palestinian home. Other foreigners who were with her said the driver of the bulldozer was aware that Rachel was there, and continued to destroy the house. Initially he dropped sand and other heavy debris on her, then the bulldozer pushed her to the ground where it proceeded to drive over her, fracturing both of her arms, legs and skull. She was transferred to hospital, where she later died. Another foreigner was also injured in the attack and has been hospitalized - at this stage his nationality is unknown." (15 March 2003)

BREAKING NEWS: ISRAELI STATE TERRORISM ACCEPTED BY US MEDIA.

IF THIS WERE A SUICIDE BOMBER TARGETING ISRAELIS, THERE WOULD BE A PUBLIC AND NATIONWIDE BREAK IN COVERAGE OF ELECTION RESULTS.

WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE IS THE MEANING OF THIS?

"A number of Iraqis, increasingly pessimistic as violence on the streets shows no signs of fading, said they had not even followed the U.S. election race." Today on Yahoo's frontpage.

Good Morning Democrats:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061108/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_gaza

Little Terrorists Killed While Sleeping

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip - Israeli tank shells crashed into a residential neighborhood, killing at least 18 people including eight children in their sleep early Wednesday, Palestinian witnesses and officials said.

According to witnesses, all those killed in the neighborhood north of the town of Beit Hanoun were women and children. Khaled Radi, a health ministry official, said 13 of the dead were from the same family. He said at least 40 more people were wounded, all civilians.

In the popular Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, a Hamas member was quoted:

"The reaction is coming. [Israel] prepare the coffins and black body bags," Nizar Rayan, a hardline Hamas leader shouted to an agitated crowd outside a morgue in Beit Hanun.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/785407.html

The Whimpers

"The advantage poets have over other mortals is not their ability to "show us the way," but their gift of finding the right words to address reality; words that were once sent into the ether will keep resonating in the sound boxes of human minds. "

Eliot wrote his poem in 1925, and, according to the accepted view, it reflects upon Eliot's skepticism about the men of his time - Europe after World War One -, the posterity, and society as a whole. The epigrams preceding the poem point the reader to Joseph Conrads' "Heart of Darkness" and to Guy Fawkes (whose day is November 5th, a strange coincidence), and Eliot readers will easily identify the allusions to Dante and Christian symbolism.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/784587.html


"This mosque is more than 800 years old. It is part of our heritage and thousands of people visited it every year," lamented Akram Abdel-Jawd Qassam, whose family have been caretakers of the holy site for half a century.http://www.dailystar.com.lb

"The Jews want to destroy everything. Even our heritage and our history. It's a tragedy," the elderly man said.

"They are crazy. They fired on everyone. Children, women, the elderly. Afterward they say the Palestinians are terrorists but it's not these people who are the real terrorists," he said.

Palestinians said they were stripped down to their underwear upon arrival, fed only bread and tomatoes during a three-day detention in the field while they were brought one-by-one for questioning at the college.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=76731

Bad Manners in the Post Anti Semitism Age
...a must see article.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/11/wolff200611?currentPage=2

Mel Gibson's meltdown, Günter Grass's past, and Joe Lieberman's primary loss all have reminded the world of a centuries-old hatred. But right now, the author argues, given Israel's controversial influence in Washington and recent invasion of Lebanon, people might be a little too eager to cry anti-Semitism.

"But no matter. Indeed, it may be exactly that goyishness, that reasonable assumption of latent anti-Semitism—what The New York Times characterized in recent coverage of the mock-anti-Semitic comic Sacha Baron Cohen as "that most risky of social toxins"—that helps create the leverage we're talking about. Walt, Mearsheimer, and Massing argue that because of the great effectiveness of an ad hoc group of determined Jews and their organizations, sometimes called the Israel lobby, or what my father—once president of the Jewish Federation of North Jersey—called "professional Jews" (that is, people who made their living off of being Jewish), the correlation of anti-Semitism with even the slightest qualms about Israel has become, year by year, ever more rigid. (Walt and Mearsheimer's own experience on the receiving end of great opprobrium for their article would certainly seem to demonstrate this point: nobody who ventures into this debate gets out in one piece.) The result is that every politician and media figure defaults to fixed sentiments about Israel. Everybody uses the same stamp-of-approval language. If you doubt Israel, you're suspect. You're practically Mel."

"On the other hand, if there is really no anti-Semitism, if it is as dead as … what? Communism … then a different sort of debate inevitably begins. If there is no anti-Semitism, then you can't so easily use the anti-Semitic card as a line of polemical defense. You can't be soft on an issue if there is no issue. If it becomes less than credible to accuse people of anti-Semitism, then there are aspects of the Israel situation—for instance, the disproportionate amount of U.S. aid to Israel, cited in Walt and Mearsheimer's article ($3 billion a year, one-fifth of the foreign-aid budget), or, more recently, the whole Lebanon-invasion thing—that reasonably intelligent people might want to consider at some greater length. So, in that respect, the very absence of anti-Semitism—if that's what we've achieved—becomes, practically speaking, anti-Semitic."

Hahaha, did everyone know that there is a WAR in Palestine lately?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/784887.html

Beats me! Who cares about them.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=76715

Several top Israeli officials have said the Jewish state must prepare for a second round of hostilities with the militia, which it says is armed by Syria and Iran. Both Damascus and Tehran deny the charge.

Hizbullah media officer Hussein Rahhal told The Daily Star on Monday that the Israeli threat was real.

"The Israelis continue to reveal aggressive intentions towards Lebanon all the time," Rahhal said. "That is why we have to take into consideration that the major military power deployed along our southern borderline can, at any moment and under any pretext or without an excuse, launch an attack on us. ... The Israeli generals' statements are the clearest proof that the resistance's reasoning is true. The resistance has to be ready to face any attack at all times. There has to be conformity between the resistance and the Lebanese Army and the role of the government and that of the people."

And one fifth of the US foreign aid budget goes to this war mongering nation each and every year...since WWII. Such a hard time they have of it!

November
(2004)

Today is the day I was born
forty odd years ago at five pounds no ounces,
pregnant women were still allowed to smoke back then,
in the good old days. Fags were fags and no
one accused anyone of putting out a butt.
Not that it didn't happen.

I promised that it would be like just any other day,
but as usual that feeling envelopes me
as I wake to November Seventh Skies,
having just started re-reading Ted Hughes,
Birthday Letters for Sylvia, re-appreciating
the man's willingness to digress
on all that love meant to him,
in sentimental ways, not meaning to please
anyone, remembering Plath's rejection
at the hands of England in its Entirety.
As if I'd never read that book the first time.

What is it about this being born that matters
as you conjure up one of mother's old stories,
the time she saw The Light in her placenta previa,
the Voices told her:
"We aren't ready for you yet," and brother John
lived to be allergic to human milk and cow's milk,
the only answer a goat's teet before Similac.

And I had to be born. I definitely had to be born.

Now that John is an homeless addict and Mom is dead,
you wonder why she lived so that he could die
so many years in the future,
unrecognisable save for the knowledge that it really is him
casing my sister's house for a burglary.
It must have killed her as it kills me now.
He was born the November day six years before
JFK was shot and it always mattered
to us all in some familial way that we couldn't fathom
when we remembered it before it ever happened.

Oh November! Oh November here you are again
In the refrain, the afterbirth,
The light and the stain. November again.

....and on November 5th, I finally finished V for Vendetta. Now...there is a movie that ought to be watched. Once the movie started, it was only a moment or two until V mentions, the Fifth of November. And there it was! We were watching V for Vendetta on the Fifth of November.

It was a real Jimmy Judd moment.

http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

And of course, there is always the Crowhaven moments of yore:

http://www.lastdriveinontheleft.com/crow-secret.html

Poor old Meg Porter.

Ah! The much anticpated annual seventh letter arrives from Lan.

It wouldn't be a seventh without one! After all of this...it is such a fine thing to be reminded of the oldest friendships on the planet. Those of the soul class. One enjjoys so few of those!

Giggster is gone. Suicide isn't painless.


http://www.lochravenreview.net/2006spring/baig.html Three poems by the late poet.

http://www.criticalpoet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18093&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Farewell Sandi Blakemore Baig

Sandi fought a very long battle with chemical addiction, health problems and so wanted to be a professional poet. She finally took her own life, just couldn't take it anymore. She is survived by her son Josh. My prayers go out to her family.

The Russian Warnings

Asked about the violence in Volsk, Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman said his office is gathering information about such incidents around the country to try to determine whether there is a common cause, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported. - September 15, 2006

Talk is such a bunch of razors,
sharp bouquets of steel
with determination. There
is no explanation better
than the cut save the abstraction.
We are a pile of reasons
in a sturdy stack of faults.
To wonder which wound
would bleed the most
is a bet, a challenge.
Way too big for the dull knifes
with lost hopes, unlucky bachelors
lost on the hunt for actions.
Analysing your time
what is left, what is spent
and which part you still hold onto.
Too soon some say to die.
A slaughterhouse of promise
with the usual guilty pose,
just shivering in the laughter.
It is a butchery of the present.
The blood runs colder than the rivers
in Russia, the Volga strewn
with haymakers and vodkas
make the best antifreeze.
Car guts don't bleed like people though.
Tragic men all go home
just like the animals and ice.
They drop their instuments,
leave them for the others,
in the times known as al kharj.

The Broadcasts

It is a fundamental truth to awaken
with fused eyes not from the tears
but the infections. Day after day
with each decrease in sight
the idea of the wet-eyed elders
with their tissues tosses about
on tables in gnarly heaps
of time origami, these used-up paper puzzles.
Stacks of literature near
the resevoirs of waiting
for pills of hope counted dearly.
Two o'clock to ten, eight hours
of constant sleep, rainbows
full of impossibility, this one
for life, a pleasant pot of gold.
The furnace blows in fierce reminders
yet the schedule remains the same,
the retirement accounts are growing.
Nothing beats an investigation
but a trial, the fuzzy light
of TV where old women go
and big men rest in the constant
chatter of radiation, whole dynasties
of excuse and banter, fickle
drainage and chalk philosophies
where the girls look fairly good.
Here is the etiology of the bloodshot
where the blind call the blind, the blind.

http://www.jewdas.org//zionpostings/lebanon.htm

Anti Zionist Jews who accuse Israeli Zionists of Nazi Collaboration:

http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/

You know, what is surprising to me as an American, is the fact that Americans have accused Bush of being a Nazi, a fascist among other things. Americans have accused Clinton of murder, collaboration, sexual misconduct, etc. The TV is just chock full of "Anti American" sentiment. That the press is no longer an unbiased press (CNN for democrats/FOX for Republicans). You know, in police states, the control of the press by the state is of paramount importance and it is no different in the "so called" bi-partisan pissing match the US government not only supervises but allows to exist as a "free press". It is no longer a free press. In fact, the press controls the government and it is clearly evident in Kerry's HONEST appraisal of the young men who fight and die in Iraq on a daily basis...mostly under the age of 21 years old. Kerry wasn't misrepresenting anything. He was telling the truth but the press intervened and placed a gag order on him. Is the US government answerable to the press? I most definitely think so. Absolutely. It is worse than the methodology of police states who control their presses. It is a higher level of abuse and uses "Freedom of Speech" in a most exploitative way. To suprress information that would actually lead to change not only in the ME, but in the United States of America...which is rapidly becoming one of the most oppressed countries on the planet. Oppressed not only by the government, but by individuals themselves. Like our friends at the JD who have taken it upon themselves to police my politics, my poetry and my involvement online at the Daily Kos. America is a very sick old man indeed.

But to this day, a person is censored for declaring Zionism an evil ideology born in the minds of two men who were documented racists. Who were complicit in diverting attacks that would have eliminated places like Auschwitz. And who garnered a deal to sell German goods as "Made in Palestine" during the Jewish boycotts of German goods in the first half of the 20th century.

To this day, Zionism is a "no man's land" involving censorship, baiting and targeting of anyone who is brave enough to speak the word out loud and accuse those who support Zionism of sponsoring ethnic cleansing and terrorism of the worst sort: STATE terrorism.

Thank God not all the Good Jews are dead. There are many who are crying out for justice for the Palestinian people and muslims worldwide. Most of them live outside Israel and many of them are horrified to be linked to the war crimes of Israel.

No one though seems to be listening to them and the press never covers much about them. It is no wonder that they operate in obscurity. The press is much more involved in Building the Government that allows the press to continually manipulate news events and hence, world history as a documentation of actual crimes against humanity and against entire countries.

Sura Al-nas, Mankind

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,

The King of men,

The god of men,

From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking (Shaitan),

Who whispers into the hearts of men,

From among the jinn and the men.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=17&article_id=76541

Israel insists that it needs to conduct surveillance flights over Lebanon in order to monitor alleged arms smuggling, but this claim is a blatant lie.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/2/15112/4240

Join Tim Smith and I for a debate party at the Daily Kos.

Thanks Tim! I couldn't have done it, "without" your help.

Lolita in Tehran @ Silliman.com

[ Uthman bin Hunayf was the Governor of Basra. He was one of those persons who were held in respect by Imam Ali (a). During his governorship Ibn Hunayf once attended a feast given by a rich man of Basra. It was a very sumptuous dinner. When Imam Ali (a) heard of this he wrote the following letter to him. It shows that the more Imam Ali (a) liked a person the more severely he judged his activities. ]

The Amish, the non Amish and others who prefer Fiction instead of Fact:

Happy November.

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061101/ts_nm/mideast_dc

Moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel was waging "all-out war," and called the operation "despicable."

....you see to Israelis, all Palestinians are the "infrastructure of terror" because they all share a belief, a knowledge that they have been the target of over a half century's worth of ethnic cleansing, theft and murder. Goes to show you how the arrogance of the US's stance in the world i.e. "The Greatest Country on Earth" has led to the noxious and entirely inexcusable arrogance of Israel which has no legitimate right to exist regardless of whether or not it does.

Many countries exist (including the US) without a "legitimate right" to exist and now..these two belligerent tyrants with bloody hands not only condone violence, they pay for it.

Thanks America. Not a single candidate on EITHER roster who pledges to eliminate US funding for Israeli terrorism. Not a single one.

Israeli Terrorism Continues Unabated:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=76560