The Changed Dutch Attitude Towards Israel · 8 September 2006, 11:51 CET by Charles Vermeulen
In his column in yesterday’s edition of Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, this time entitled ‘The Disturber of Peace’ (‘De rustverstoorder’), J.L. Heldring refers to an article in The Economist which tried to explain why Europe’s support for Israel has waned over the years. He lines up the findings of The Economist and moreover adds the following, possible explanation. Acording to Heldring Europeans, especially the Dutch, tend to resent the one who, in their eyes, disturbes their peace and therefore endangers their ‘pleasant prosperity’. In this case they resent Israel and ‘not the ones who threaten its existence’.
Ammar Abdulhamid on the Prospect of War · 23 August 2006, 07:32 CET by Charles Vermeulen
Ammar Abdulhamid, a ‘non-Resident Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington’, in an entry in his blog entitled ‘ Countdown to Armageddon!’, on the prospect of war between Syria (and Iran and Hezbollah) and Israel (and the US) and the intentions of Bashar Assad’s regime in this matter.
(The above mentioned article was originally published on bitterlemons-international.org last Thursday. Todays edition of The Daily Star website includes the article too.)
ammar abdulhamid,
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Nasrallah and Hezbollah Fighting Imperialism · 19 August 2006, 17:29 CET by Charles Vermeulen
In an interview by CounterPunch News Service entitled ‘Goodbye to the Unipolar World’ Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah explains that his Party of God is not just fighting Zionism in Lebanon. In fact it’s waging a war against the ‘imperialists of the west’, just like Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Click here to read the interview.
How Iran May Profit From the Lebanon Crisis · 4 August 2006, 15:16 CET by Charles Vermeulen
Philip H. Gordon and Kenneth M. Pollack see several possibilities for Tehran to benefit from the current crisis in Lebanon and considering these they deem the US government’s determination to give Israel time to deal Hezbollah a decisive blow as unwise. Read their interesting article ‘The Iranian Calculus’ on the website of the Brookings Institution.
International Peacekeepers Israeli Puppets · 3 August 2006, 10:46 CET by Charles Vermeulen
‘If an international force simply allows Ehud Olmert’s government to pursue its plans further, the countries that provide troops for the international force will (...) be seen as rubber-stamping Israeli policy (...)’, says former director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs Christoph Bertram in his article ‘International force for Lebanon, but conditionally’, which can be read on the website of the Tapei Times since today. To visitors who are readers of NRC Handelsblad the title might sound familiar, for the article was also published in Dutch in last Mondays edition of this newspaper (‘Stel voorwaarden aan een troepenmacht naar Libanon’).
Israeli Proof of Hezbollah Violating Jus in Bello · 2 August 2006, 10:11 CET by Charles Vermeulen
On the website of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs a page is dedicated to the ‘Incident in Kafr Qana’. The page provides in a video which ought to prove that Hezbollah was launching rockets from Qana and as such that it used Lebanese civilians as human shields in Qana too, suggesting a causal connection between this and last Sunday’s killing of 54 civilians.
The video reminds of the satellite photo’s used by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, as he addressed the U.N. Security Council to prove that Iraq did possess WMD. The photos themselves didn’t show anything, accept for a few ‘cubes’ whereof Powell explained that we were dealing with a ‘weapons of mass destruction facilities’. If there wasn’t any explanation added to the photo’s the ‘cubes’ would have remained just ‘cubes’.
The same is the case with the Israeli video: without any ‘explanation’ added to it, it doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t show which location we’re dealing with, the things happening in it can easily be interpretted in various other ways and, last but not least, it remains unclear when the video was shot. For example, it could have been shot days before the fatal airstrike.
Peace in Lebanon with Hezbollah (2) · 2 August 2006, 02:00 CET by Charles Vermeulen
My statement at the end of the previous entry appears to resemble, more or less, the view on current affairs of Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. For to Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post he stated the following:
Peace in Lebanon with Hezbollah · 1 August 2006, 09:15 CET by Charles Vermeulen
As a result of the enormous devastations and the steady mounting death-roll in Lebanon the international pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire was alreadly considerably increasing, but Qana may very well be the last straw. Considering the short amount of time that will be left in that case and the fact that after three weeks of Israeli airstrikes and ground operations Hezbollah is still able to fire rockets on a large scale into Israel, it seems unlikely that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will be able to deal a decisive blow to Hezbollah before a ceasefire is agreed upon. The US government wrongly assumed the IDF was capable of accomplishing this and saw the conflict as an opportunity to rewrite the map of Lebanon. Therefore it attempted to postpone any agreement on a ceasefire as long as possible. It has been criticized for this stance and as a consequence became internationally isolated. But to what extent did the US government misjudged the situation? Is a sustainable peace possible without a shift in the balance of power in Lebanon and with Hezbollah maintaining an army? And if not: will it be possible to have Hezbollah disarmed by an international peacekeeping force? If Hezbollah remains a military power to be reckoned with, however, the continued existence of a democratic republic of Lebanon at any rate can only be a farce. For not its elected goverment in Beirut will determine the fate of the Lebanese, but a sectarian force with an own army and an own agenda, which includes the maintenance of close ties with Damascus and Tehran.
Al-Zawahri Summons Muslims to Support Hezbollah · 27 July 2006, 19:00 CET by Charles Vermeulen
On a video broadcast today by Al-Jazeera television Al-Qaida’s second man in charge, Ayman al-Zawahri, ‘issued a worldwide call (...) for Muslims to rise up in a holy war against Israel and join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza until Islam reigns from Spain to Iraq’. (source: ‘Al-Qaida Calls for Holy War Against Israel’, an article by Associated Press writer Willa Thayer). In a previous entry I referred to a research on the internet by journalist Edward Wong into the views of Islamic fundamentalists on the recent war between the Shiites of Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon. He concluded that Sunni radicals hesitated wether they should support Hezbollah or not. Apparently the Al-Qaeda top is aware of this and by the video it tries to lead the way for the average Sunni radical. His support for Hezbollah should not come as a surprise, however, considering his letter to Abu Musab Zarqawi of July 9 2005, in which he urged the then leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq to end his slaughter of Shiite civilians, because it was alienating the ummah, whereas Al-Zawahri considered it necessery to gain the support of a broad Muslim movement. But what is remarkable about the video message, is that Al-Zawahri also urges the non-muslim, ‘downtrodden’ of the world to join the battle against the ‘tyrannical Western civilization and its leader, America’. Is the Al-Qaeda top so hard pressed, that it tries to enter into an alliance with ‘infidels’?
Hezbollah Not After Escalation? · 26 July 2006, 09:35 CET by Charles Vermeulen
If Komati tells the truth and Hezbollah is indeed surprised by the ferocity of the Israel’s response on the kidnapping of the Israeli two soldiers, it would imply that it wasn’t after a serious confrontation with Israel. But according to Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University and an export Hezbollah, ‘Hezbollah had envisaged, though perhaps not expected, a response of this kind’. Click here to read Saad-Ghorayeb’s article ‘Hezbollah’s Apocalypse Now’, on the question ‘What on earth was Hezbollah up to when it abducted two Israeli soldiers and provoked a punishing response that is creating orphans and bringing down buildings all around us?’, wich was published in the Washington Post last Sunday.