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The organization Bush condemns as “terrorists”
| Message Board > Controversy and Quarantine > The organization Bush condemns as “terrorists” |
| Lordpatch User Info... |  Who is Hezbollah? September 22, 2006 | Page 5 JON VAN CAMP explains the history of the group that came to lead the resistance in Lebanon. ISRAEL CALLS it a “terrorist” and “extremist” organization. George Bush says it is a tool of Iran, and claims it has “killed more Americans than any terrorist organization except al-Qaeda.” But the leaders of governments trying to destroy Hezbollah are not the only ones condemning it. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have accused Hezbollah of human rights violations, and Robert Fisk, the Independent journalist who has helped expose some of the worst Israeli and U.S. crimes in the Middle East, says that Hezbollah “provoked the latest war” in Lebanon, and bears responsibility for “bringing catastrophe upon their coreligionists.” Meanwhile, however, Hezbollah has gained growing support in the Middle East, well beyond its base among Shia Muslims in Lebanon--for the simple reason that it is, in the words of Aijaz Ahmad, writing in Frontline magazine in India, “the only entity which has, through armed resistance, forced the Israelis to relinquish any territory that the Jewish state has ever captured.” What kind of organization is Hezbollah, and how should the left view it? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - HEZBOLLAH CAME out of a Lebanon fractured by civil war. What else to read The Middle East Research and Information Project has produced a good primer on Hezbollah by Lara Deeb. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero073106.html For a summary of the history of Lebanon and U.S. intervention, see Stephen Zunes’ “The United States and Lebanon: A Meddlesome History.” http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3237 Despite its unfortunate title, Hala Jaber’s Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance is a good journalistic account of the party from its roots in the 1970s until 1996. Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb explores the ideology of Hezbollah and the tension between its Shia theology and the practical demands of operating in the Lebanese political scene. The region of Lebanon has always contained various religious communities, but the French colonialists who dominated the area favored the Maronite Christians, who became the most powerful community once the state of Lebanon was formed. According to the terms of a 1943 pact, Maronites were given the presidency, and Christians were allocated a majority of seats in the parliament. The post of prime minister was reserved for a Sunni Muslim, and Shia Muslims--soon to become the largest segment of the population--were left with the relatively powerless position of speaker of parliament. Maronite leaders were traditionally pro-Western and pro-Israel, while Muslim leaders became increasingly influenced by Arab nationalism. These tensions were at the roots of Lebanon’s civil war, which lasted more or less continuously from 1975 to 1990. Israel and the U.S. backed the right, grouped around the Christian Falange. In 1978, Israel seized a strip of territory in Southern Lebanon, and four years later, it launched a full-scale invasion--with the aim of installing a right-wing Christian government and driving out Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters based in the country. The U.S. sent Marines as part of an international force to oversee the withdrawal of the PLO--these “peacekeepers” began to intervene more and more openly on the side of the Lebanese right and Israel’s occupying force. Throughout this conflict, the group that suffered the most was the Shia--by then the most numerous religious community in Lebanon, comprising about 40 percent of the population, and by far the poorest, inhabiting the slums of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the villages in southern Lebanon directly in the path of Israeli attacks and invasions. By 1982, several Shia military groups emerged--many with funding and training from the new Islamist government in Iran, which took power after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and was seeking to project its influence in Lebanon amid the other rival forces of the civil war. The Iranian-backed militias, though only loosely connected, were known together as Hezbollah, meaning the “Party of God” in Arabic. Shia militias engaged in several small but devastating attacks, including the bombing of the U.S. embassy, and a suicide truck bombing of the Marines barracks in October 1983 that killed 241 Marines. These attacks led Ronald Reagan to “cut and run”--and withdraw troops from Lebanon. In 1985, Shia clerics declared the foundation of Hezbollah in an “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World.” Still associated mainly with its backing from Iran, Hezbollah continued to battle for influence among Lebanese Shiites, including military clashes with the more moderate Amal, formed in the 1970s. Quickly, however, it became predominant in the military resistance to the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah attacks did use suicide bombers, but increasingly into the 1990s, the balance shifted toward guerrilla operations directed at inflicting damage on the Israeli occupation force. Hezbollah is generally credited with forcing Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. After 2000, Hezbollah continued to carry out military operations to pressure Israel to leave Shebaa Farms--the last sliver of Israeli-occupied territory in Lebanon--defend against repeated Israeli incursions and provocations, and win freedom for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Hezbollah’s July 12 raid that captured two Israeli soldiers--which the Israeli government made the pretext for its war against Lebanon this summer--fits this pattern. Unlike Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign, Hezbollah primarily targeted Israeli military forces. A majority of Israeli casualties during the onslaught were soldiers, while the vast majority of Lebanese killed by Israeli missiles and bombs were civilian bystanders. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - HEZBOLLAH IS a political party that runs a network of schools, clinics and other services that many people rely on to fill the gap for what the Lebanese government doesn’t provide. It also controls an array of businesses, including bakeries, banks, factories and an Islamic clothing line, as well as a satellite television station and a radio station. Hezbollah organized relief efforts for southern Lebanon after the Israeli bombings of 1993 and 1996, and is currently promising furniture and rent money to all whose homes were destroyed in this summer’s assault. Beginning in the early 1990s, Hezbollah decided to take part in mainstream politics, first winning election to the Lebanon’s parliament in 1992. Currently, the organization has 12 members in parliament and two in the cabinet. It leads a parliamentary bloc in which other forces, including secular parties and non-Muslim parties, are involved. The list of candidates for this alliance during the 2005 elections included not only Shiites, but Christians, Sunni Muslims and Druze. Hezbollah gets aid and support--including military backing--from Iran and Syria. But it is not a puppet of these governments, as the Bush administration insisted. While Iran had decisive influence during Hezbollah’s early years, the organization has since developed its own elected council and command structure to make political and military decisions. According to a post-ceasefire report by the mainstream political analyst Anthony Cordesman, “[N]o serving Israeli official, intelligence officer or other military officer felt that the Hezbollah acted under the direction of Iran or Syria.” More generally, Hezbollah is viewed as a legitimate national resistance organization, among Shia and non-Shia, throughout much of Lebanese society. Even before this summer’s war, a 2005 Center for Strategic Studies survey found that three-quarters of Lebanese Christians--the traditional base of the right--identified Hezbollah as a legitimate group in challenging Israeli aggression. Some on the left focus on Hezbollah’s commitment to Islamic fundamentalism to minimize its political importance--for example, a recent letter-writer to Socialist Worker who dismissed Hezbollah as “a movement partially analogous to our own fundamentalist right.” Hezbollah’s Islamism need to be understood concretely. For example, though it accepts prejudices against women predominant in Islam--and Christianity, for that matter--Hezbollah’s Shia ideology is not as reactionary as, for example, the Wahhabists of Afghanistan’s Taliban and the rulers of Saudi Arabia. Thus, women lead many of Hezbollah’s social service projects, although they are excluded from political and military leadership. Hezbollah does uphold anti-gay attitudes common to many currents of Islamism, and some of its leaders have used anti-Semitic slurs in describing their opposition to Israel. On the other hand, unlike its backers in the Iranian political establishment, Hezbollah does not have a goal to building of Islamic state--at least in Lebanon. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has said, “Lebanon is a pluralistic country. It is not an Islamic country.” This sheds light on why Hezbollah has been able to gain support beyond its Shia base--both within Lebanon and more broadly across the Middle East. Hezbollah’s main appeal lies in its willingness to challenge Israeli aggression and U.S. imperialism, not its Islamist ideology and the backward elements of its social and political program. By successfully preventing Israel from accomplishing its objectives in this summer’s onslaught, Hezbollah has set an example of resistance that could inspire further struggles across the Middle East--potentially opening the way for a secular, left-wing alternative to take root and grow. http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-2/602/602_05_Hezbollah.shtml - Wed, 20 Sep 2006 8:21pm Edited: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 8:51pm | ||
| Lordpatch User Info... | THE MEANING OF MARXISM Myths and slanders to justify the “war on terror” Bush’s lies about Lenin September 22, 2006 | Page 8 PAUL D’AMATO tells the real story of the Russian revolutionary Lenin. A FEW days before September 11 this year, in an address to the Military Officers Association of America, George Bush compared Osama bin Laden to Adolph Hitler and to the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them,” Bush said. “The question is: Will we listen?” Comparing every potential target of U.S. military attack to Adolph Hitler has become the tired mantra of almost every U.S. administration since Eisenhower. These superficial and misleading historical analogies are made for obvious reasons. If every war is a crusade against “fascism”--rather than, say, a sordid conquest for control of oil--who can stand against it? Good arguments have been made to counter these crude efforts. However, very few, if any, writers have responded to Bush’s remark about Lenin. To anyone familiar with Lenin, his life and his politics, including him on a list with Hitler (or bin Laden for that matter) is jarringly out of place. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BEFORE THE fall of the ex-USSR, the likes of Osama bin Laden were not only praised by U.S. leaders as “freedom fighters” in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but supported and funded. What else to read To cut through the myths (east and west) about Lenin, read Tony Cliff’s Lenin: Building the Party and Lenin: All Power to the Soviets. Other good books on Lenin are Leon Trotsky’s Stalinism and Bolshevism and the collection of articles Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism. These books, along with other Marxist classics, can be found at the Marxists Internet Archive. On the real history of the U.S. role in the Second World War, see Ashley Smith’s “The Good War” in the International Socialist Review. John Buchanan’s article “Bush-Nazi link confirmed” in the New Hampshire Gazette covers the Bush family’s ties to the Nazis. On U.S. support for Osama bin Laden specifically, and for its sponsorship of international terrorism in general, see Phil Gasper’s “Afghanistan, the CIA, Bin Laden and the Taliban” and Katherine Dwyer’s “Rogue State: A History of U.S. Terror.” Bin Laden, a rich businessman with ties to the Saudi royal family, worked closely with the CIA, Pakistani intelligence and Saudi officials to recruit 4,000 of the 35,000 non-Afghan Muslims who fought in Afghanistan. “In 1988, with U.S. knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries,” writes Indian journalist Rahul Bhedi. “Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the U.S.” Allies come and go, but the goals--U.S. domination of the Middle East region--remain the same. Thus, throughout the postwar period, the U.S. backed brutal right-wing dictators and trained and armed various terrorist organizations (not just in Afghanistan, but also in Central and South America) to promote its interests abroad. If yesterday these goals were justified in the name of fighting communism, today, they are justified--just as spuriously--in the name of fighting Islamic “terror.” Bush’s anti-Nazi crusade, moreover, is not all that it is cracked up to be. The U.S. did not lift a finger to combat anti-Semitism, stop the rise of Hitler or prevent the Holocaust. Nazis scientists and SS officers were recruited to work for the United States after the war. Members of the Bush dynasty even collaborated with the Nazis in the 1930s. Bush’s paternal and maternal grandfathers, Prescott Sheldon Bush and George Herbert Walker, were bankers with the Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman. According to documents uncovered at the National Archive and Library of Congress, the firm’s subsidiary, the Union Banking Corp., was the main financial conduit in the U.S. to Friz Thyssen, the Nazi Party’s biggest financier. According to John Buchanan, writing in the New Hampshire Gazette, “Prescott Bush...served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942.” Much of German big business swung behind Hitler’s storm troopers by the early 1930s as a necessary means to restore German capitalism and put an end to the threat of workers’ revolution. It isn’t surprising, then, that many U.S. businessmen of the time were impressed by Hitler’s success in fulfilling these goals--though some were alarmed by German rearmament and its potential threat to the great power interests of the United States. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TO SUMMARIZE, Bush hasn’t a moral leg to stand on when he denounces Nazism or terrorism. Lenin, on the other hand, stood unalterably opposed to exploitation and oppression--economic, national or religious--and was committed to building a mass organization of workers capable of ending them. True, Lenin was no pacifist--and an unwillingness to passively accept the cruelties of capitalism is invariably denounced by the system’s defenders as outrageous extremism. “Social Democracy,” wrote another Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, “has nothing in common with those bought-and-paid-for moralists who, in response to any terrorist act, make solemn declarations about the ‘absolute value’ of human life. These are the same people who, on other occasions, in the name of other absolute values--for example, the nation’s honor or the monarch’s prestige--are ready to shove millions of people into the hell of war.” But neither were Lenin and the Russian Marxists proponents of individual terrorism. For them, only the mass action of millions could bring about a complete transformation of society. In his formative political years in the 1890s, Lenin cut his teeth debating the Russian populists, who, among other things, believed that acts of terror by individuals or small groups of dedicated conspirators could stir a popular revolt (or in some cases simply substitute for a lack of one) in Russia. The new Marxist current in Russia argued that individual terror was a dead end that made the mass of Russian people spectators rather than participants in their own liberation. “Are there not enough outrages committed in Russian life without special ‘excitants’ having to be invented?” Lenin wrote in 1901. He rejected flatly the idea that a small group of terrorists could substitute themselves for the self-emancipation of the working class. “Is it not obvious,” he wrote, “that those who are not, and cannot be, roused to excitement even by Russian tyranny will stand by ‘twiddling their thumbs’ and watch a handful of terrorists engaged in single combat with the government?” Lenin argued that socialists needed to find ways to tap into the mass discontent, draw together the various strands of popular struggle, and combine them “into a single gigantic torrent” to bring down the system. The continued support of some Russian radicals for terrorism, he argued, “reflects an utter failure to understand the mass movement and a lack of faith in it. Only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a spirit of struggle and courage in all.” Individual terrorism on the other hand, he argued, “leads to apathy and passive waiting for the next bout.” - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LENIN DID not live to witness the emergence of Hitler, but the socialist movement in Russia systematically combated the Russian monarchist variant--the Black Hundred gangs that attacked workers’ organizations and organized anti-Semitic pogroms in an effort to divert mass anger away from the regime. In a 1919 radio address, Lenin said of anti-Semitism, “When the accursed Tsarist monarchy was living its last days, it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews.” “In other countries, too,” Lenin noted, “we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital.” The rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and elsewhere sadly confirmed Lenin’s observation. In all of Lenin’s writings and actions, there is not a trace of elitism, of contempt for the majority, or of the evil tyrant that so many try to attribute to him. He was concerned above all with enhancing the self-consciousness, unity and fighting spirit of the oppressed everywhere against any attempts to weaken or degrade that unity through scapegoating, national chauvinism or religious intolerance. “The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses,” he argued. “But the working class needs unity, not division. It has no more bitter enemy than the savage prejudices and superstitions which its enemies sow among the ignorant masses. That is why the working class must protest most strongly against national oppression in any shape and form.” Compare this appeal for international workers’ solidarity to the U.S. political establishment’s incessant rants against Muslims and Arabs--which, like anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, are designed to play on “prejudices and superstitions” in order to keep working-class people weak and divided. http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-2/602/602_08_Lenin.shtml - Wed, 20 Sep 2006 9:00pm | ||
| Lordpatch User Info... |  SEE: http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2006/21-09-2006.htm - Thu, 21 Sep 2006 7:14am | ||
| Lordpatch User Info... | Hezbollah gears up for massive 'victory' festival 21/09/2006 Hezbollah supporters and allies were headed toward the Lebanese capital Thursday for a massive "victory" festival after the group defeated the Israeli military that launched a 33-day long offensive against Lebanon. Many southerners were taking the road to Beirut, on foot as well as by car, for Friday's rally. The gathering, expected to be the largest in Lebanese history, will be held in Beirut's southern suburb, on an area of more than 140, 000 square meters, making it one of the largest places to host such massive festivals. Supporters, allies, politicians and even the Israeli enemy are waiting to hear the speech of Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah. According to analysts, Sayyed Nasrallah will set up a final boundary to separate what's before July 12 from what's after the victory. Sayyed Nasrallah is also expected to renew the call to form a national unity government that would include MP General Michel Aoun of the Free Patriotic movement, as he represents more than two thirds of Lebanon's Christians. Hezbollah's Secretary General will also thank his allies and his supporters for standing by the Islamic Resistance while confronting the Israeli aggression against Lebanon, particularly the Amal Movement, Aoun's FPM, former minister Suleiman Franjieh's Maradah party, former minister Talal Erslan's party, former Prime Minister Omar Karameh's stream and many others. Sayyed Nasrallah will renew his rejection to the new international tutelage over Lebanon and to handing Lebanon's political and military fate to countries that take from UN resolution 1701, an umbrella to cover their operations in the country. He will also renew his position that the arms of the resistance will not be removed. - Thu, 21 Sep 2006 7:25am | ||
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