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In case anyone is still reading this dead thread:

Way up the line, Mark said:

"Yehia Skaff: held since 1978 for participating in a military
operation against the Israeli Army"

That operation was a terrorist attack on an Israeli civilian bus. Along with 37 Israeli passengers, American photograph Gail Rubin was shot for taking pictures nearby. No army. Just wanted to set that record straight. It's easy enough to check. See "Coastal Road Massacre."

Karim,

This will be my last post. I think this thread has run its wandering course.

Anyway, you seem to be fairly thoughtful, but you tend to judge people's motives too quickly. I'm not prejudice and I don't see how my position was dishonest.

When I said that I wanted to learn, I meant it. I considered what you said, followed it up with some research and these appears to be facts:

1) Israel used to inhabit the land and was removed from it, starting around 70AD

2) The land of Palestine was eventually settled by Arabs but was ruled later by the Ottomans and British.

3) There was not a nation of Palestine when the Zionist movement began.

4) Jews came to the land and made the most of it. Some of them behaved badly; some did not. Most of all, they were industrious and well organized. It appears that Jews and Arabs coexisted peacefully enough, though there were occasional flare ups. Some Jews were killed in Arab uprisings.

5) Persecution of Jews during WWII increased the strength of Zionism, eventually leading to the Jewish desire for a state of Israel.

6) Both Jews and Arabs tried to break free of British control. Jews, to their shame, bombed the King David Hotel as a protest.

7) The British and UN tried to partition the land in an attempt to satisfy Arabs and Jews. The Arabs violently revolted and attacked the Jews. The Jews resisted and won - the modern state of Israel was born in 1948.

8) Israel has had continual victories since 1948 (mainly to fight Arab aggression) and have created a state with a consensual government that will accommodate all Palestinians if they will cooperate. Will there be racial problems and bigotry? Yes. Can their be peace? Hmmm - only if the Arabs will choose to live peacefully. But I'm not hopefull because it appears that Palestinian leadership (Hamas) doesn't want peacefull coexistence. Israel wants it, but the Palestians, according to their votes, do not.

Karim, where am I wrong here? If you want to insist that the Palestinians should continually revolt because they were the first to inhabit the land, then that game can be played by other peoples (e.g., Jews) that preceeded the ancestors of current Palestinians. That kind of I-was-here-first reasoning has to stop somewhere and it seems that the current Israeli government is good place to stop. If they were trying to crush the Palestians, then revolt is justified. But Israeli aggression is now mainly defensive. As I said before, when Israel eases restrictions they are attacked.

I'm open to correction, and there is still much about the conflict that I don't understand, but I'm not sympathetic to people who deliberately target civilians of a decent, civil (not perfect) government and then call it "resistance."

DK:

I thought you said you were trying to learn. From your latest post though, it doesn't seem the case.

If there could be any analogy between Indians and the middle east then one could argue that the Indians would be justified to follow the Zionist path, which included terror and violence, in order to recover their "lost lands".

Your position is a dishonest one.

It is, I might add, a position rooted in prejudice, contempt and some kind of racism towards the Arab people.

I am confident that if we reverse the situation today, that is, if Palestinians and Arabs were Jews and Israeli were Arabs, you would be calling on Arabs to leave Jewish lands and trying to impose sanctions on them (it was done against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait and against Syrian vs Lebanon).

This is not about pride but about rights, something you don't understand when they are the rights of brown people.

Excessive Pride (aka arrogance) is America's problem, not ours. Most polls showed that most of the world, including Europeans, perceive America as an arrogant state.

Why did America invade Iraq and killed hundred thousands of its people if it was not a question of wounded pride?

If to you the issue boils down to who is stronger, well Arabs might be not strong now, but that's not going to be the case forever.

Josh:

Some Americans consider many other things heroic, such as the war on Vietnam that killed over 2 million Vietnamese.

Also majority of Americans shy away from acknowledging their near-genocidal war that pretty much exterminated all native Indians.

But this is not what we are discussing. Whatever some Americans think of their own past is irrelevant. The world outside of America knows quite well who massacred the native Indians. That's another reason why it is easy to hate America and why many clueless Americans don't even understand it.

Make no mistake, Arabs are not going to be like the Indians. We will never forget the way Zionists never did (for 2000 years).

Our duty is to teach our children so they can carry the message to their children until the day when justice can be done.

The Mexico/Texas analogy, like most analogies, doesn't work well. Maybe a better one is US and American-Indian relations. The Indians inhabited the land, but weren't part of a "state" - just like "Palestine" was not. The Indians were gradually pushed off by superior organization, the needs of settlers, and greater fire-power.

Whatever the injustices toward the Indians were, would they now have the right to be terrorists in the goal of reclaiming their land. They, like the Arabs, were defeated.

The Palestinians are only hurting themselves by not living peacefully with a better organized and stronger state, a state that will give them freedom and economic opportunity if terrorists will stop trying to blow it up. The Palestinians need to swallow their burning pride and get on with productive lives.

Karim,
I hope you appreciate the irony of your example involving Mexico and Texas.

Texas was founded by Americans who settled in the middle of what was then Mexico, then decided after a while that they didn't want to be part of Mexico and broke away, declaring themselves an independent state for a while before eventually joining the U.S.

To this day, this is considered almost heroic by most Americans. In particular, the battle at the Alamo, where a relatively small Texan militia held off the larger Mexican army for a while before succumbing. It's a story where people root for the little guy. Somehow we tend to overlook the part where Texas broke away because Mexico was outlawing slaves and Texans wanted to keep them. Similarly, I suspect that people tend to have a slight bias towards Israel as the "little guy," no matter how unfair the original partitioning of the land by the British was.

So while your point is valid, you might want to choose a different analogy. :-)

DK:

If you're trying to learn then we understand your position.

I agree with you that Israel APPEARS to be defending itself.

Israel always try to portray itself as a small country surrounded by these many Arab states who only know one thing: they want to destroy Israel. Reason? well because we Arabs supposedly don't like the Jews, we supposedly just hate them for no reason. We are just bad evil people, if we happen to be Muslim, it is because of Islam, if we happen to be Christian, well it is because we are Arabs.

Well of course you would believe this if you never get the chance to read the history surrounding the establishment of Israel. That's what pro-Israel zealots want you to ignore. For many of them, 1948 is old history, but 100BC is not.

To give you an example, consider the following:

Imagine a group of Mexicans who settle in the middle of Texas and then all of sudden declare that half of it is going to be part of a new independent Mexican state.

Imagine that the local people of Texas couldn't face this new state that was imposed on them by force and asked for help from the rest of the states. The other states come to its help, but for some reason (Israeli believe God intervened on their behalf against us evil Arabs) they fail.

Looking at this from Europe and without prior knowledge of how it started, it would appear that the new small Mexican state is attacked from all fronts and they are the victims of American attacks.

That basically sums up the situation in this conflict. Just replace Mexican with Zionist-Jew, make them more fundamentalist and fanatical (promised land, God's chosen nation, prophecy, etc), and replace the Texans with Palestinians.

Israel was literally founded on injustice and aggression. For some to claim that this is God's promised land is actually sacrilegious. If anything, Israel should serve as a good example that if God actually exists, then it must be a monstrous God.

It is one thing when some state engages in aggression against others but it is another when the very foundations of the state are based on aggression.

That's the reason why Arabs oppose Israel.

It is like Germany taking over Europe, declaring it part of it, and then telling the word that Germany is only trying to defend itself against attacks from other nations.

Convenient how you mention the attacks in 1956, 1967 and 1982 without mentioning the reasons for them.

In 1956, the attacks were in response to frequent Egypt sponsored acts of sabotage and terrorism that had begun the previous year. In August of the prior year, Egypt's president had announced "Egypt has decided to dispatch her heroes, the disciples of Pharaoh and the sons of Islam and they will cleanse the land of Palestine....There will be no peace on Israel's border because we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel's death."

In 1967, the attack was launched due to interceptions which indicated a coordinated, imminent assault on Israel by several of its neighbors. Egypt had removed UN observers, blockaded sea routes and added a large number of troops to Israel's border. While I'm not sure that there is ever a justification for preemptive strike, it was not the completely unwarranted attack you portray it to be.

In 1982 the PLO was launching attacks on Israel and the Lebanese government (such as it was) did nothing to stop it. How precisely were they supposed to react when attacked? File a grievance with the U.N.?

As for the comments on how Hezbollah, Hamas and Ahmadinejad only want equal status, I'd say you are fooling yourself. The leaders of all three groups do moderate their tone when interviewing with English speaking reporters, but somehow they always go back to murderous language when they aren't being broadcast on CNN and don't have to be politic.

If by defensive you mean, the 1948 war that sought to establish a Jewish state in a sea of Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arabs, or the 1956 war against Egypt in conjunction with France and Britain to stop the Egyptian goverment from nationalizing the Suez canal, or the 1967 war where Israel preemptively struck the Egyptian air force before any attack by an Arab nation, or in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon or the last fourty years of Israeli occupation of 4.5 million Palestinians in the territories.

In spite all of this, even Hamas, Hizbullah and the rabble rouser Ahmadinejad do not seek to exterminate Israeli Jews, which would be odious and unacceptable to the Arab public. When they speak of destruction of the state of Israel, they are referring to a one state solution where all Jews and Arabs can live in Israel and the occupied territories as equal citizens.

I'm learning here. It seems that Israel tries to exist peacefully with Arabs, but it is attacked whenever it eases restrictions in its territories. It appears that all of Israel's post 1948 actions have been defensive - against Arabs that want to destroy it. Obviously, Israel has the military capability to destroy Lebanon and Syria but they exercise restraint. They could, if they were offensive, bomb these entire countries into rubble.

Karim,
You seem to read a lot into my remarks. I was responding directly to Zain's point. Where you get that I don't care about the Palestinians is beyond me.

I personally think the whole situation will drag out indefinitely for the next hundred years and the thought of that saddens me greatly. Neither side believes that they should have to make any concessions; both sides are driven by fear.

Both sides have legitimate reasons for their stance, but both sides use violence in excess and without justification.

The only thing that makes me lean slightly Israeli is that, by and large, it seems that when they launch attacks, they are at least attempting to target military or infrastructure targets; when civilians are killed it is an unfortunate side-effect, not the aim. The attacks on Israel seem to intentionally target civilian populations with no military value.

Zain,

You are correct.

Josh:

The President of Iran explained his position in the CBS 60' interview:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/09/60minutes/main1879867_page3.shtml

Arabs do not wish for any genocide against the Jewish people. Even after the establishment of Israel, there were many hundred thousands of Jews still living in Arab countries.

Where were Jews killed in mass in the Arab world?

You will not find a single incident of mass killing, not in 1948 or in the last 1400 years of Muslim/Arab rule over Palestine.

Arab position is simply a reaction to Israeli policy that drove hundred thousands of natives out of their homes and still bans them from returning up to this day (something you don't care about).

If justice had to be done, then Israel would have to be dismantled and repartioned according to the actual makeup of the original population not according to myths and religious texts.

If you are so concerned about Israel and its safety, then why doesn't congress vote in favor of carve out a state from US land and give it to Israeli.

Let's see that happen.

Israel should be a state of all its citizens and its occupied noncitizens. Sooner or later it will not have a Jewish majority whether in ten years in historic Palestine or in thirty years within 1948 Israel. I think this should be the time of reconciliation to prepare Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land for their inevitable common citizenship. Should Israel stay a Jewish majority even at the cost of fighting Israeli Arab citizens, expelling them or a regional war within and without Israel?

I don't know about all those groups, but I believe the goal of "driving the Jews into the sea" as stated by Hamas directly contradicts your point Zain.

While I don't know of explicit, completely unequivocal quotes from Hezbollah or Ahmedinijad, the tone of the remarks from Ahmedinijad at the very least suggests more than a mere political change. And the actions of Hezbollah go well beyond the bounds of anything resembling reasoned political discourse.

The phrase "elimination of Israel", as it is used by groups such as Hizbullah, Hamas and leaders like Ahmedinijad, does not refer to some sort of genocide of the Jews or even a mass expulsion. From what I understand, the "elimination" refers to the elimination of Israel as a Jewish theocratic state and the formation of a single state with both Arabs and Jews living together.

Ideologies like Al Qaida however, probably do advocate mass extermination of Jews, Americans, Shia's, women, orangutans.....

Karim,

Do you want the state of Israel eliminated?

It sounds to me like Andrew, much like the VAST majority of Americans, has zero appreciation for the complexity of the history and relationships among Arabs, Israeli, Palestinians, etc. This ignorant assumption that Arabs are Arabs and Palestinians are no different from Iraqis (let's not even begin to address America's ignorance to the history and differences among the people there) leads us to the heart of the conflict and anger toward America among the vast array of Middle Eastern peoples.

Americans need first to learn some history, overcome their incredible ignorance, gain some perspective and only then will *we* be able to come to an adequate solution.

For the record, there is a *reason* why we call the Palestinians *REFUGEES* - But don't tell that to America!

It sounds to me like Andrew, much like the VAST majority of Americans, has zero appreciation for the complexity of the history and relationships among Arabs, Israeli, Palestinians, etc. This ignorant assumption that Arabs are Arabs and Palestinians are no different from Iraqis (let's not even begin to address America's ignorance to the history and differences among the people there) leads us to the heart of the conflict and anger toward America among the vast array of Middle Eastern peoples.

Americans need first to learn some history, overcome their incredible ignorance, gain some perspective and only then will *we* be able to come to an adequate solution.

For the record, there is a *reason* why we call the Palestinians *REFUGEES* - But don't tell that to America!

Andrew:

"The only point I was trying to make was that Palestinians are not treated well in many of the Arab countries they fled to, can anyone give me a good reason why they should be kept from owning land and holding certain jobs and prevented from holding citizenship in these countries without blaming Israel?"

The Palestinian refugees have not given up on their right of return.

Find me a single poll or some evidence that majority of Palestinian refugees would give up their legitimate rights as refugees.

Most of Jews from the Arab world were quite happy to join the promised land.

When Palestinian refugees were forced to settle in refugee camps living their homes with sorrow and bitterness, brainwashed poor Jews from the Arab world were kissing the ground of Israel when they reached it (I challenge you to deny this).

I can direct you to documentaries covering the great play of the "Aliyah" of Ethiopian Jews who in 1948 were not considered Jewish enough to be allowed in.

Secondly, don't pretend that you care about Palestinian suffering. It is like some Nazi complaining that Jews were mistreated in America in the 30s.

The issue of citizenship of refugees in some Arab countries is quite simple: Arab states do not grant citizenship based on religion or ethnicity like Israel does. The case of Lebanon is indeed a problem. Amnesty and HRW have been pressing Lebanon to resolve it.

Israel would grant automatic citizenship to some US born Zionist (of Russian ancestry) but will refuse ENTRY (let alone citizenship) to a Palestinian refugee BORN in historical Palestine.

That is how cruel and unjust Israeli apartheid policies are.

"State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Israel and the occupied territories, the Israeli government "did little to reduce institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country's Arab citizens." You know that if the US says something bad about Israel, then it must be ten times worse...."

Absolutely.

AIPAC has been trying to shut the state department up for years.

Each time the state department released its annual report, supporters of Israeli oppression would criticize it and protest its content even though it looks nothing like the Human Rights reports on Israel by Amnesty and HRW.

I guess we still don't get it. Israel is ruled by God, it is off limit to ANY criticism, ANY.

Israel accepted over 1 million Jews from all over the Middle East after its founding. I find it very hypocritical when Arabs decry the plight of the Palestinians, but then treat them like second class citizens in places where they actually have power to help them, or when they are outraged by the deaths of a few hundred Lebanese, but are silent about the thousands murdered in Iraq and Sudan by Arab muslims. The only point I was trying to make was that Palestinians are not treated well in many of the Arab countries they fled to, can anyone give me a good reason why they should be kept from owning land and holding certain jobs and prevented from holding citizenship in these countries without blaming Israel? History is full of people displaced for terrible reasons, but I cannot think of another example of people being treated this poorly by other nations that claim to champion their cause (ie other Arab nations).

Palestinians living in Lebanon are not Lebanese citizens and if they suffer today in their refugee status it is because they were expelled during the founding of the Jewish state. All Lebanese governments, rightly or wrongly, have decided not to issue citizenships to Palestinian refugees as not to shift the confessional balance in Lebanon. As they are not citizens, they have less opportunities. However, the Arab Israelis in Israel are in fact citizens of the Jewish state, and yes they are not Jewish but Muslim, Christian and Druze. they have been heavily discriminated against to the extent that the 2004 U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Israel and the occupied territories, the Israeli government "did little to reduce institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country's Arab citizens." You know that if the US says something bad about Israel, then it must be ten times worse....

As for the non-citizen Palestinian population under Israeli control in the carved West Bank and cramped Gaza, well no one in the world would envy their overcrowded ghettos and the walls sealing them in and their demolished homes nor their endless bombardment by American made fighter jets....

What I don't understand is why everyone is not going for the obvious solution to this mess: One state with both Jews and Arabs living together. We can't get a two-state solution to work because of indvisible Jerusalem, the obstinate 300,000 West Bank Jewish settlers, Palestinian refugees right to return or at least compensation, and the fact that Gaza and the West Bank are not contiguous. A one state solution would solve all these problems.

It is also inevitable. Israeli Arabs constitute a fifth of the Israeli population today and have a reproduction rate that is almost three times higher. They are projected to be 25% of Israel's population in ten years and a majority in thirty years. Israel's fate is to be home of the Jews and the Palestinians.

"There are currently about 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon (12.5% of the total population). They live mainly in Beirut, Sidon and Tyre in twelve refugee camps of which Bourj Al Barajneh and Shatilla in Beirut are the most well known. They feel that they have been forgotten by the international community and excluded from Middle East Peace discussions. There are restrictions on where they can work or travel, so unemployment is high and their future uncertain. Within the camps, housing is poor and inadequate basic services, such as water, electricity and sanitation, combine with over-crowding to cause low morale among the refugees and health professionals."

And this quote is from this article:
http://www.nda.ox.ac.uk/wfsa/html/wa01/wa01_015.htm

Took me 4 posts to actually get something to show up on here.

"A petition campaign in 2003 to amend the law that forbids Palestinian refugees from owning property in Lebanon collected thousands of signatures"

"Although the Lebanese government has abolished the law that denies work permits to foreigners, Palestinian refugees are prohibited by law from working in 72 professions. In the available job market, Palestinians are largely unable to find stable jobs or work unskilled occupations because they are discriminated against in the economic sector (ECDIS01-03 = 4). In recent years, the income level of Palestinians continued to decline."

These quotes are from this website:
http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/assessment.asp?groupId=66003

Israel is a bad State whose foundation is based on killing, plundering of other countries' resources, and annexation of land. Anything to justify it's genocide after genocide of muslims since 1948 cannot legitimize it. It needed clean source of water so it annexed Shebaa Farms, it needed land -so Palestinians homes were bulldozed, it needs no competition in tourism or business so Beirut is destroyed again and again, and the list goes on and on..

testing since my last two messages didn't show up

your job is to prove how other arab countries treat palestinians worse than israel does... make it happen

its that ish that makes your slow burn slow

Maybe he did give me the ether, but he failed to address the subhuman treatment of Palestins in other Arab countries.

karim just gave andrew the ether.

Andrew,

Please don't insult my intelligence.

The NATIVE Palestinian-Arab Israeli (20%) are considered by most Israeli (many foreign-born) as a fifth column and suffer many systematic discrimination in the state of Israel.

For instance, did you know that 93% of lands in Israel are available for Jews only?

Did you know that Israeli-Jews can take up as many citizenships as they wish, but Palestinian-Arab Israeli are not allowed to?

In 2002, Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon launched, through his party Moledet, a campaign calling for mass expulsion of "Palestinian-Arabs" in Israel.

This immoral racist Minister party funded billboards in Tel-Aviv that called openly for mass expulsion of Arab-Israeli. Here is the link:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0206/p05s01-wome.html

There are no words to describe this racist apartheid oppressive state of Israel.

Israel does enforce modern-day Jim-Crow laws (lands for Jews only etc), just substitute white for Zionist-Jew and black for everyone else.

There were exactly 4 lebanese nationals held by Israel before the latest Hezbollah attack:

Samir Kuntar: in 1979 killed two Israeli civilians (a twenty eight year-old man and his four year-old daughter) and two Israeli policemen, serves four life sentences. Some more details: "Kuntar and his group took Danny and Einat Haran to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed the little girl's skull against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar." Nasrallah wants him released.

Nassim Nasir: arrested in 2002 for spying for Hezbollah.
Yehia Skaff: held since 1978 for participating in a military
operation against the Israeli Army.
Ali Faratan: fisherman.

Nasrallah primary demand was to release Kuntar.

Now, Shebaa Farms was captured by Israel from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967, which did not involve Lebanon. Israel's annexation of the Shebaa Farms has been contested by Hezbollah (since May 2000) as a reason for its continued attacks on Israel after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon.

It should be clear that acceepting phony demands from a terrorist organization can only further secure Hezbollah's grip on the Lebanese government worsen the already bad situation.

Mr. Kuttab has the right idea regarding promoting successes of the legitimate governments in the region in order to win public support. The Lebanese government needs a win and the credit on this one. Everyone involved needs to come together in order to make it happen. Israel, Lebanon, the UN, the US, all united and clear must say to Hezbollah "you will not operate here".
Instead of pumping money into Israel alone, maybe the US should pump some cash into Lebanon's government.
Hezbollah should be presented with a choice: disarm, join Lebanon as a legit political party; or leave the country. With Syria right next door providing support all along and a massive flow of refugees already in progress, Hezbollah fighters who refuse to disarm should have no trouble simply fading into the region. All sides get to call it a win with Israel safer, Lebanon in control of its territory, and Hezbollah still in existence, even if in exile.

-Avid Protagonist.

Karim, so are you saying that the Palestinians that have very few rights in other Arab nations, such as Lebanon, had those rights stolen by Israel? From the way I understand it, Palestinian citizens of Israel have more rights than Palestinian residents in most if not all Arab countries.

Freedman:

Palestinians and Arabs in general want their RIGHTS, that were stolen from them by Israel, back.

What Israeli want is to get away with what they stole and to force peace with the people they persecuted.

Aint gonna happen in this century.

I have read many columns of Daoud Kuttab and have a fair understanding of the way he thinks. He is , as opinion- writers go, the so- called moderate 'Palestinian voice' and as that he has now been taken up by the NY Times, that bastion of 'political non- wisdom'.
Kuttab's bottom line is always to blame Israel, and demand some concession from it. This is the basic thread which goes through his thought.
He is first and above all a 'Palestinian Arab nationalist' and as a Christian has to swim with some trouble through the Islamic sea which has swept away good parts of the Christian communities in the Holy Land.
Here too he focuses on two issues in which he demands concessions from Israel, one the Shaba farms( which Syria not Lebanon is the true address on) and the other the Lebanese prisoners, all three of them before this war, including the monster who murdered a father before his child, and then bashed the child's brains out. This man named Kuntar was especially held back in a prior prisoner release, because of the particularly horrific nature of his crime. Arguing for his freedom does not make Kuttab a very good human rights activist.
In any case Kuttab's way is to be the 'moderate ' Palestinian voice. And to his credit he does not spout hatred. He always finds Israel at fault but without introducing the kind of vicious , violent speech so characteristic of the Arab and Islamic media.
He is about as 'moderate' as Palestinian voice as there is . But he is neither fair in his relation to Israel, or truly representative of the Palestinians.
A trinket the Left dawdles before itself in convincing itself that 'Palestinians' want peace when they do not.

The members of the security council
do control the U.N. and, in instances like Lebanon and Darfur,
they should be the ones sending the
largest number of troops. To paraphrase an old political slogan:
"It's the security, stupid !!!"
Sadly, talk is cheaper than actions
for these clowns.

I agree that the UN is fairly impotent in these world flash-points, but that's not to say it is useless. One thing that the UN could do better is to get out of the peace keeping business and concentrate on humanitarian aid facilitation. One thing the Israeli and Arab/Palestinian populations need to decide is do they want to keep killing each other for the next 25 years, or learn how to live with one another.

History tells us that there will be no stability in the Mid. East as long as Israel continues to be un accountable to its bad deeds. Unfortunately the situation will stay the same as long as the US gives Israel 100% cover to all it crimes and the EU looks the other way.

I agree the UN has become a farce, controlled by those who have veto power in the so-called security council. With Bolten as the US rep, it does not take a rocket scientest to see that the UN is meerly a foil for US propaganda and a tool to prevent the world community from taking effective action to settle the fundamental problems mostly exacerabated by the western powers. However, it is unlikely nthat these same powers will do anything to help Lebanon, there only goal is to avoid any responsibility for this genocide by the Palestinian Jewish forces.