Now that UNIFIL has substantially endorsed Israel’s account of yesterday’s fatal shooting on its border, a couple of thoughts…
Archive for the 'Hezbollah' Category
A deadly conflict in Lebanon could derail the prospect of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, thus boosting Hamas at just the time that the Obama Administration is urging the PA to drop its reticence. Iran also has a vested interest in opening up a western front. In the last fortnight, a host of countries from the United States to the European Union to Japan have added a new layer of sanctions to those already agreed by the UN Security Council in response to Tehran’s continued nuclear defiance. And Hezbollah - as Sheikh Naim Qassem confessed in a 2007 interview with Iranian broadcaster Al Qawathar - invariably does Iran’s bidding, to the point of securing clearance for its operations from Iran’s leaders.
From my latest piece on The Huffington Post.
If you click here you can read a report from Télam, Argentina’s official news agency, about the official visit of President Bashir al Assad to Buenos Aires. You can also see a short excerpt from President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s remarks after the lunch which she hosted for the Syrian leader. She talks about the Golan Heights and the Falklands/Malvinas, the importance of founding a Palestinian state and Argentina’s desire to play a leading role in the Middle East peace process. In the story that accompanies the video mention is also made of the signing of bilateral agreements and moves to expand trade; the usual stuff of state visits.
My latest contribution to the Huffington Post, on Hezbollah’s foray into the rapidly-burgeoning flotilla industry, in full here.
As readers of this blog know, Roger Cohen is not a wise man. His latest column in the New York Times gives further evidence of this.
Domestic U.S. politics constrain innovative thought - even open debate - on the process without end that is the peace search.
Continue reading ‘Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974′
This is piece by Kenneth Bandler of AJC is cross-posted from JTA.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is not likely to take a seat at the U.N. Security Council’s horseshoe table, but the Hezbollah terrorist organization he has led since 1992 now has a toehold inside the world body’s most prestigious room.
Continue reading ‘Hezbollah gains a toehold inside U.N. Security Council’
War, when practised by Israel, is frequently seen as having paradoxical consequences. The more often it inflicts damage and defeat on its enemies the stronger they are held to become. Never mind that Egypt and Jordan long since grew sick of defeat and signed peace treaties with the Jewish state, never mind that Syria, with the partial exception of the First Lebanon War, hasn’t risked a direct confrontation with Israel since 1973 and never mind that part of the leadership of the Palestinians accepts Israel´s existence; victory is still seen as making Israel weak and its enemies strong.
1.
We often hear that violence breeds violence, that if states use it against their enemies then they only succeed in radicalizing those enemies and storing up trouble for the future. This view is usually held to be self-evidently correct and not to require either supporting argumentation or consideration of alternative analyses. It is a thesis frequently resorted to by those commenting on the use of force by Israel.
Antisemitism was a prominent focus of the American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were John Mann, the British MP who has spearheaded the global parliamentary fight against antisemitism, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French author and philosopher who has never lost sight of the centrality of antisemitism in his dissection of Islamism and its related ills.
Mindful of his audience, Mann declared: “Let me quote from Rosa Parks: ‘As I got up on the bus I saw that there was only one vacancy, so this was the seat that I took.’ This world and past generations are full of Rosa Parks. People going about their everyday business quietly and with dignity. But people not prepared to be bullied and cowered and intimidated. No doubt a little scared, but those who do their bit by doing what is right.”
You can read the entire speech here and watch highlights of it on YouTube here.
And here are some highlights of what BHL had to say, again on YouTube.
“The case of ‘Hezbollah’s man in New York’ offers a compelling glimpse into the expansive world of 21st-century terrorism, where democratic free speech rights are exploited by terror groups as part of their war against the West,” writes my colleague Kenneth Bandler in the New York Post. Read it all.
Writing in today’s El País, Joan B. Culla i Clarà starts by rejecting Israel’s current operations in Gaza and endorsing a two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The two rockets which landed in the environs of Nahariya, northern Israel, on Thursday morning brought with them the spectre of a regional war, drawing in Hezbollah and by extension Iran, which plays the role of sugar daddy to both Hezbollah and Hamas.
There are two key questions in terms of military strategy in Gaza: how strong is Hamas? And how is Hamas evolving as a military force? According to leading Israeli analysts, Hezbollah in Lebanon is a potent model.
Tzipi Livni’s recent comments on the impossibility of Israel getting all its captured soldiers released (let’s abandon the unbearably sentimental formulation about “bringing them home”) has given rise to considerable controversy when it should have been regarded as no more than an affirmation of the painfully obvious.
