h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

yeah for you, your family and your countryfolk, Wilma. It's a bloody mess!

Have you read some of those? They are amazing. I also love the fact that the Lebanese on the ground are hand in hand. That has been our greatest challenge, uniting the people - of all hues and flavours - into one identity. Very ironic that it is happening now. God and His mysterious ways again, huh?

Thanks, Fanny

I apologize, Lady W. I know I said that I wouldn't post here. And yet, ... I can't help but admire your own stamina in the face of everything. And how you have proven a guidance to make such admirable youth. Your post of today's rally, an earlier one of the junior Trog explaining the situation to the . It always comes back to the role-models they have to follow.

Simply, respect and

Thank you, Nick, although you make it sound somehow heroic. All I am doing is trying to make some sense of the madness by providing an illusion of being able to do something. I am not in a position to deal with berserk kids. It is all I can do to keep my own head together I suppose it is a question of simply getting on with it and accepting a certain aspect of your fate while not accepting another - so you fight it. It is all I know how to do.


Just read that. It doesn't make sense. I think I need some sleep

'night all.

W

*briefly sees the Lady Neanderthal in an operatic Valkyrie costume, with a massive in each mitt, ... to smack sense in to all the fools involved ... *

We now return you to your regular programming.

Whenever I see the word trolling, I always think of fishing boats...

The metaphor of America helping only after the fire has burnt the arsonists is particularly apt. Never mind that the arsonists may escape the burning house, never mind that there are more arsonists waiting outside!

I've thought long and hard about this, and I've decided that I'm okay with being American. I'm not okay with my current administration. In fact I'm furious with my current administration. Fiddling while Lebanon burns. Their most important goals are tax breaks for the wealthy, gay marriage bans, and constitutional protections of the stupid flag. None of them have ever been in the military, and yet they send our young men and women to be killed every day.

Wilma, I think you have a good point there. Most Americans can't conceive of the notion of their homes being under attack. The one attack by foreign nationals on the North American continent threw the whole country into shock. Tens of thousands more people have been killed in the invasion of Iraq than were killed by the destruction of the World Trade Center.

How can you advocate war when you've never experienced what it's like to be in one? If every American could know what it was like, I think we'd be a much more peaceful nation. Certainly a more sympathetic one.

Hi Wilma, I'm just back from a week at my sister's, and can't read the backlog here, but I send a big to all of you

- disclaimer -

This came to me via my cousin and I think some very pertinent points are made. However, it is a rant - a very coherent intelligent rant by a very coherent and intelligent man, an Armenian, no less Please, if you are upset or offended by harsh words of a verbal political nature, do not read this. It upset me...
Suzy



Article written by an Armenian Lebanese from Chili.

----- Original Message -----

This is from my friend's weekly e-mail newsletter. The author is a
classmate of mine from IC in Beirut. He is from the Armenian families that took refuge in Iraq first, then moved to Lebanon. He left Lebanon in the late sixties to continue his studies in Europe then ended in Chile, where he continues to live now. He is a prominent, well known economist and thinker, specialized in Latin America and is widely consulted by businesses in that area. He is also a member of the Center for Strategic Studies in London.


THE OBLITERATION OF A COUNTRY
Lebanon's Fate at the Hand of Israel
by Armen Kouyoumdjian
July 24, 2006

Once again I have had to redirect my report towards a subject other than the one I had planned to cover this week-end. Israel's assault on the Lebanon cannot leave me silent. May I also declare that more than ever in this particular case, I shall not tolerate any critical action to what I am about to write, none whatsoever. This is not a moment for debating in the Agora, and if you (or your mother-in-law to whom you pass-on these papers) do not like it, do not read them.

PROGRESSIVE TREND

Believe it or not, I used to be quite a fan of Israel during my young days in Beirut. I do not think it has anything to do with the fact that we are of the same age (I am 12 days older than Israel and much, much wiser). It probably relates to my early interest in military affairs. I even applauded its victories in the 1967 war, though it <<>>ed up my last summer in Beirut, before I left that city for good in September of that year. It probably had not much to do with the several Jewish classmates I had at both school and university there, many of whom ended up for a short while in Israel before leaving it in disgust. I myself avidly followed all the great military prowesses with great admiration. I soon realised how wrong I was.

My first inkling that this was not a show to be admired came on December 27, 1968. I myself was just recovering from the May student revolution at the Sorbonne where I was studying, when Israeli commandos flew into Beirut airport and blew up in cold blood the 13-strong fleet of its once proud Middle East Airlines. Hey, I thought, this is not war, this is vandalism.

If that did not change my mind, the following four decades have given
plenty more ammunition. The 1978 invasion of the South, the 1982
occupation of half the country with the resulting destruction, and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Any lingering doubts that may have remained within me would have been swept away when Menachem Begin stopped Armenian scholars from attending seminars on genocide in Israel, after which followed repeated denials of the Armenian Genocide by various top Israeli officials, finally culminating in an unholy alliance with Turkey. They even instructed Jewish organisations worldwide to shamefully collaborate in the negation campaign. Begin's real name was actually Wolfovitch (hey, just like that guy at the White House).

THE TARGET The country which Israel has now decided to obliterate is
not just any country. It is the cradle of the ancient Phoenician
civilisation that gave the world its first modern alphabet, and pioneered international commerce. It has been the home of great artists and thinkers. It has given birth to some of the world's most brilliant business brains, and at least half a dozen country in Latin America have had presidents from among the ranks of the large Lebanese Diaspora. In my Beirut school we spoke three languages during break, never discriminated in any way among the many communities which made up our classes, in an educational system the quality of which I never saw again in the three countries where I have subsequently lived. We followed the latest pop music and films from all around the
world. Half a century ago there were two French-language weeklies dedicated to movies in Beirut. There is not a single one in Chile.

Above all this was the most hospitable country and people to have ever
roamed the earth... Though it does not apply to my own family history, when Armenian survivors of the 1915 Genocide arrived in the Lebanon, itself in the midst of a famine and other difficulties, the local authorities built an entire village (Anjar) to house as many as they could. The Armenians owe the Lebanese, and in fact Arabs in general, a debt which can never be repaid enough.

This country, whose modern independence is recent, is built on a fragile equilibrium which cannot easily take traumas. It is not the solid balance of the cement-less vault of medieval cathedrals, but the delicate one of a pyramid of Chinese acrobats. Mess around with one and the whole thing collapses, as happened several times over the past half century. To expect its authorities and modest armed forces to do other people's dirty work in as unrealistic as it is unjust. If the genesis of the Hezbollah problem are Iran and Syria, supposedly card-carrying members of the Axis of Evil, how come their territory is not being attacked, whereas poor Lebanon is obliterated?

THE PERPETRATOR AND HIS ACTS The answer is: the cowardly bully always targets the weak and defenceless. To call Israel a Terrorist State would be an undeserved compliment. Terrorists at least have an ulterior motive, however warped it may sometimes be. Israel is a Vandal State. Vandals just destroy for the sheer pleasure of causing harm. Within a few days, this trading country's transport and energy infrastructure is in ruins, and half a million of its population are refugees. Its painful recovery from a long and also foreign-induced internal conflict has been wiped out at a stroke. Its trading and tourist activities are dead. It will probably have to default on its large public debt, much of which is held by its own banking system which in turn might become insolvent. Customs revenues are one of
the main sources of treasury income. The cosmopolitan fabric of its
population will once again be ruined by the mass exodus, which will take years to reverse, if ever. Meanwhile, there is an immediate humanitarian problem of massive proportions, when medical help cannot even get to the victims, and the power shortage prevents even those getting to a hospital from getting proper treatment.

TIRED ARGUMENTS The main argument presented by Israel to justify its
actions is Self Defence. This does not stand any scrutiny. Both national and international laws restrict your field of action in this respect. If you are a private individual and someone throws stones at your house, you can try to stop them and nobody will blame you for it. However, you have no legal nor moral right to go to his house, kill his family, set fire to his possessions, and then go on to do the same with his neighbours, the whole town where he came from and the whole country it is situated in.

Articles 33 and 147 of the Geneva Convention are very clear about banning collective punishment and destroying targets of no military relevance. It is amazing that a state with a secret service and armed forces that carry such a high reputation, could not seek out the Hezbollah culprits who "kidnapped" three of its soldiers (whatever happened to the concept of prisoners of war, aren't they part and parcel of a military conflict?). Instead, not just areas known to be used as Hezbollah hideouts, not just the country's entire infrastructure, but residential areas of both Muslims and Christians, not to mention United Nation posts and more have been struck. Now there is a land invasion developing. The refugees who cannot leave
the country are clogging up the capital, causing an immediate refugee
situation which will then turn into deep social tension.

The territory of Lebanon will not only accumulate understandable
additional hatred against Israel, but will become a place of unrest which cannot be of any comfort to its neighbour. Their old claim to annex Lebanon up to the Litani river may be fulfilled, but it will only increase the pressure in the overpopulated remainder of the country.

Let me get on to a more controversial argument, that of Israel's Right
to Exist. I think by its behaviour as a Rogue State, it has long lost this right. Having a right to a country is not divine, even for God's chosen people. It is a capricious gift of history. Some have it, others have it for a while, and others never get it. Nobody has the right to mess up the whole of humanity every few years, in order to "guarantee" their own geographical survival. The Kurds are a nation that never managed to have a country, but they are not responsible for the 1973 start of the long rise in oil prices, which were multiplied by 30x in the following 33 years. The Poles have been in and out of having a country for most of their history, and though France and Britain went to war for them in 1939, they were sold down the river as soon as WWII ended. The Kashmiri are fighting for a country. We Armenians were without one for the best part of a thousand years. Did we go out and steal anybody else's country as a result? Does Hillary Clinton say for us what she said last week ("We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli
ones"). Those values appear closer these days to those of Corporal
Schillgrüber in the 1930's.

THE CURSE If it is anything but a small consolation, everyone I have spoken to in recent days has been highly critical of Israel. It is understandable that the US administration has done nothing to prevent or stop this outrage, but the indifference of the Europeans is harder to fathom. In any case, the damage is done. A wonderful country has been wilfully destroyed. It might recover, one day. There is a spot just north of Beirut, a gorge through which flows the Nahr el Kalb (the River of the Dog). From Antiquity, it became a tradition for conquerors passing through Lebanon to carve their names on the stony walls of the river bank. Assyrian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Greek and Roman generals and the more modern armies (such as the nostalgic Régiment de Marche du Tonkin of the French Army). Tourist guides loved to show them to visitors and say: "they all came, they all went, but we are still here".

Maybe, Insh'allah, they will still be there again. In the meantime, I am putting an old Armenian curse on the State of Israel and all those who sail in her, adding that if God elected that as the country of his chosen people, I do not know who is the schmuck who gave Him the voting bulletin. The Armenian Curse is very effective but secret, though I can tell you that compared to its consequences, the Seven Plagues of Egypt appear as harmless as an old ladies' bridge afternoon.

The day before Yom Kippur, you have to seek forgiveness from all the
people you have wronged. On the day of Yom Kippur, you have to seek forgiveness from God. There are things, however, which have no forgiveness...

I have read this and shall think about it Wilma.

*without words*

I'll just set this down in the corner here: http://www.dailyherald.com/news/nationworldstory.asp?id=212173 It is going to take us sooo long to put Humpty together again...

Hi Lentilla, sorry I did not see you there. Yes, you are right, it is difficult to envisage what war does, what it means, even for soldiers. My friend from College is in the Marines and he has said that even he, after years of being a professional soldier, had no concept until he was sent to Baghdad. He said something about video games at the time. He has just been in touch with me to say that he left the Marines last week as a direct result of current events. I think he hs been thinking abut it for a long time but he said this is the straw and he is the camel's back

There is a quote by Socrates that I have recently been using as my email signature: "Political rhetoric is only effective if the public is ignorant of the facts." The more I read that the more meaning unfolds from it to me.

W

Lentilla, I just reread your post. I should think you would be proud to be American. Sheesh, half my family is! I am infinitely proud to be Lebanese and that is why I choose to be so active, and have done since I was able to be. Your nation is more than the sum of its foreign policies, after all, no? I have protested against the inequities of our internal politics for years in Lebanon. I am also very proud to be British and do the same here. It is not enough to be a passive citizen, citizenship carries duties and responsibilities with it. Perhaps I feel this way because I recognise my good fortune. We are all fortunate in the West, whatever our ethnic background, whatever our ancestry. We have a responsibility to hijack back the meaning of the word 'moral'.

W

Now here is something I never expected to see
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=inDepthNews&storyID=2006-07-29T073415Z_01_L29783510_RTRUKOC_0_US-MIDEAST-LEBANON-CLEANERS.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2

Stupid
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-07-29T082050Z_01_SP72921_RTRUKOC_0_US-MIDEAST-AUSTRALIA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-worldNews-6

Left me speechless:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060728/wl_nm/mideast_lebanon_jordan_dc_1

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/roles-reversed-in-refugee-camp/2006/07/28/1153816380824.html

Might not be saying much, but I'm still here love

Bella and Lil, Thank you



It is going to get much much much worst, people. I can see it coming and I don't know what to do.



1. Hizbullah is winning on the ground:

Even acknowledged by Newsweek:

“Let It Bleed - Leaders at the Rome summit on the Mideast are ignoring the real bottom line: Hizbullah is winning “by Christopher Dickey http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14045328/site/newsweek/



2. UN observers Evacuating South, after bombardment & killing of 4 observers by israeli air force

UN pulls back Lebanon observers http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411749/798682



3. US supplies israel with chemical materials for making SARIN NERVE GAS:

Excerpts From: Plane crash in Holland exposes a global health threat by Gar Smith

http://www.earthisland.org/EIJOURNAL/win2000/fe_win2000uranium.html

Flight 1862 was hauling 10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.



4. USA is presently shipping “Hazardous Cargoes to Israel:

Excerpts from: Israeli arms shipped via Scotland

http://u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?id=75477&pt=n



Last night Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was outspoken in her public criticism of the US, accusing it of not following the right procedures over arms flights and threatening a "formal protest" after raising the matter with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

Mrs Beckett said she was "not happy" about reports Prestwick airport had been used for refuelling and crew rest for two chartered Airbus A310 cargo planes filled with GBU28 laser-guided bombs, adding she had "already let the United States know that this is an issue that appears to be seriously at fault.

“Procedures for handling hazardous cargoes did not appear to have been followed, she said.”

I don't know what to say, really, this is a nightmare, and I still don't understand that Lebanon has no support from my country

Bella, Germany will not speak out against Israel. It is a political reality... Don't be surprised.

I'm not surprised, and I know they'll not do that, and yet, they should try to get others to do something.It can't be within the conventions of Geneva what is going on. I'm just as helpless as you are

We may be helpless, Bella, but we know it is not right - and we have voices and hands and internet access and a way to put the information out.. I am spending hours everyday, finding information (like the stuff on chemical weapons going to Israel), putting it together then mailing it out to a list of hundreds of people willing to write to their representatives and the media. Anyone can do that. My 8 year old daughter wrote to Tony Blair and posted the letter before telling me about it I wonder what he will think when he receives it...