Saudi activist held over solo protest

Wajiha al-Huweidar, 45, said she was arrested after walking across the causeway carrying a placard urging King Abdullah, ruler of Saudi Arabia, to grant more rights to women in the conservative kingdom.

[…]

She said her brother later signed a pledge agreeing that she would not repeat her actions.

I never denied it.

… you probably know jackshit about it.

It’s “hizb-ullah” not “hez-buh-la” or “hez-bowl-a” or “khis-ba-la” — seriously, what the hell is “khis-ba-la”? Some morons spell it “hisbala” too — what?

It’s one thing for random joes to pretend to know this and that about Hizbullah, but it’s really annoying when commentators and politicians come on TV and can’t even pronounce properly the name of the country they’re invading or the group they’re fighting that they supposedly have massive intelligence and background knowledge on.

Hizbullah is not a simple group to understand, here are some facts:

1. Hizbullah formed as a reaction to the Israel invasion and brutality toward Lebanon in 1982.

2. Hizbullah is not just a militia, but also has a political and social wing that provides social services (e.g., healthcare, education, etc.) for the traditionally marginalized Shi’ites of Southern Lebanon. Shi’ites form the plurality of Lebanese (perhaps the majority), but have been ignored by the political Sunni, Christian and Druze elites.

3. Hizbullah’s militia stays away from civilians. Contrary to Israeli and American propaganda, Hizbullah’s fighters do not hide behind civilians, it is dangerous and compromising — for them, nevermind the civilians. Hizbullah takes the utmost effort to evacuate civilians from battle sites.

4. Hizbullah has a great deal of support from Shi’ites, because of (2) but also because it drove out the Israeli occupiers who, through their own actions and their proxy fascist racist Christian South Lebanon Army (and others) were responsible for unimaginable brutalities against Lebanese and Palestinians.

5. Hizbullah has a great deal of respect from all sectors of Lebanese society because it drove out the Israelis. Hizbullah is a political party that has 14 seats in Lebanon’s 128 seat parliament. This may seem like it is a relatively marginal party, but Lebanon’s parliament and government operates weirdly along sectarian lines. Also first-past-the-post electoral systems are not representative of proportional voting. It is an integral part of the Lebanese government.

6. Hizbullah has been alleged to have been involved in terrorist operations, such as blowing up American marines in ’83 and such. This has never been proven.

7. Hizbullah’s capture of Israeli soldiers was not unprovoked. This idea of a random, nakedly provocative act is unfounded. For the past six years (since Israel’s exit from Lebanon in 2000), Israel and Hizbullah have been engaged in low-level warfare. Israel has violated the Blue Line on far, far more occassions (by air, land, sea) than Hizbullah. Probably by one or two orders of magnitude (that means, if Hizbullah has done it 100 times, Israel has done it 1,000 to 10,000 times). Israel has been kidnapping — from Lebanese soil, and also when they inadvertently walk into Israeli territory — Lebanese civilians (shepherds and fisherman), among others (including Hizbullah fighters) and holding many without charges. Israel also refuses to give up maps of landmines it planted in South Lebanon that kill people to this day. Hizbullah has been calling for a prisoner exchange, and access to those maps.

8. Hizbullah does rocket civilians in Haifa and other Israeli cities. This is unconscionable and just because we support Lebanese resistance does not mean we should blindly support all of Hizbullah’s activities. Israeli terrorist forces have no morals, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.

9. The Lebanese Army is practically a joke, its Air Force consists of 30-odd helicopters — the types you see in 1970s films. If it were not for Hizbullah, Lebanon would not have any defence whatsoever against Israel. Not that it has much of one now.

10. Hizbullah’s militia is actually proving to be very costly, in terms of human and economic capital, for the Israeli Army. It is probably the most intelligent and formidable Arab army Israel has ever faced.

11. While many Lebanese were at first resentful at Hizbullah for seemingly having started this war, it becomes more and more clear that Israel had this in the cards for a long time. Now, it seems that most Lebanese are actually supporting Hizbullah, or, at the very least, not deciding to fight it but deciding to fight Israel. Israel and the U.S. are seen as the instigators, the perpetuators, the aggressors — and they are. It is not uncommon to hear, in Lebanon and in the Lebanese diaspora, “Labbaik, labbaik, labbaik, ya Nasrallah!” (Here we come, here we come, here we come, o Nasrallah!) and “Birroh, biddam, nafdeek ya Hizbullah/Nasrallah/Lubnaan!” (By our souls and by our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you o Hizbullah/Nasrallah/Lebanon!). Israel’s campaign is doing nothing to make people resent Hizbullah, it is increasing its popularity not only in Lebanon but across the Arab world.

Israeli logic is great. They can bomb indiscriminately, they argue, because they warned civilians to evacuate the areas. (Nevermind that they destroyed roads, bomb civilian refugee convoys, aid workers, and fuel storage sites.)

By this token, Hizbullah should be able to bomb where ever it wants in central Israel now that it has warned them in advance. Besides, people in Haifa have been warned for far too long. Therefore, any Hizbullah strike in Northern or Central Israel is a-okay, by Israeli standards, that is.

edit: Later saw this on Norman Finkelstein’s web site:

fact: Hizbullah does not hide among civilians.

>The “hiding among civilians” myth

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths — the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far — on “terrorists” who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.

For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they’ll get some fighters, too. […] But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to Hezbollah. […] In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports Hezbollah. […]

The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40 percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah’s social services, political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The “terrorist” organization Hezbollah is Lebanon’s second-biggest employer. […]

Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are considered “Hezbollah” installations, the group has a clear policy of keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. […] “You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a military wing fighter with a weapon,” a Lebanese military intelligence official, now retired, once told me. […]

So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah “hiding within the civilian population” clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don’t know what they’re talking about. Hezbollah doesn’t trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield.[…]

fact: Israel deliberately and indiscriminately targets civilians.

>Israelis withdraw from Hizbollah border stronghold

A field researcher from the American based Human Rights Watch (HRW), Lucy Mair, sent pictures to military experts at the organisation’s New York office of munitions being transported to Israel’s northern border and fired into Lebanon from howitzers. She was shocked to discover they were cluster munitions. […]

‘The overwhelming impression is that time and time and again civilians are attacked and only civilian infrastructure is targeted. In cases of civilian casualties our investigators have studied, they have not been able to find the presence of Hizbollah rockets or launchers – only civilian targets,’ she said.

fact: Hizbullah’s actions were not unprovoked or unreasonable

>Lebanon wants return of Shebaa Farms

[Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora] said: “Hezbollah has expressed many times that it has the following objectives: liberating Lebanese occupied land, getting maps of all landmines planted in southern Lebanon during the Israeli occupation, and securing the release of our detainees who are held in Israeli jails.”

Just the facts.

Just came across this comment piece by Greg Palast. He should stick to writing articles about vote fraud in the States and taking pictures in Venezuela, the guy comes across as an idiot when talking about the Middle East — and he admits it himself. There are things in this article that have merit, but the rest of it is utterly simplified and stupid. He ends up denying not just the Palestinians, but the Shi’ite Lebanese and the Israelis as well of agency and ignores the myriad motivations and distills everything down to oil (the chemical irony of this statement just hit me). Too tired to comment fully on it all.

On Monday, July 24, there was a memorial to commemorate Black July, 1983 — where the Sri Lankan government and Sinhalese ethnic nationalists massacred thousands of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The massacres continue to this day, and so this was also a rally of defiance and protest.

And it’s true. Most people largely ignore or are unaware of what’s going on in Sri Lanka.

Click here for more pictures from the memorial/rally.

I was eating a banana and a flashback from when I was a toddler hit me. My mother was “boasting” to my siblings about how I ate a banana all the way to the bottom (there’s this part of the banana at the very bottom that, in normal eating, gets left untouched unless you specifically eat it), and how fantastic that was. I know it made me really proud.

Now I see my mother using similar tactics on my niece (who is three and a half). She “boasts” to me and others about how well she performs something (e.g., drinking milk), in order to encourage her to perpetuate that behaviour. This, of course, is positive social reinforcement.

It was just now that I actually realized and connected the tactics my mother used on me to the ones she’s now using on her granddaughter. Funny how I never really, fully connected that before. I don’t eat bananas all the way down to the very bottom anymore.

There was a rally yesterday Downtown, starting from the Israeli Consulate and ending at the U.S. Consulate, against Israel’s aggression in Palestine and Lebanon.

Click here for more photographs from yesterday’s rally.