Empire comes to Lebanon

The U.S.-Israel axis goes all out to remove the last impediments to building a "New Middle East".
AIJAZ AHMAD

LET us begin with a supposedly "undisputed" fact: The official story, told first by the Israeli government and automatically accepted by governments and media outlets across the world, is that Hizbollah is a Muslim fundamentalist, terrorist organisation which periodically lobs shells and rockets into civilian population centres of northern Israel and that, in its latest outrage on July 12, it attacked a border military post inside Israeli territory, killing six Israeli soldiers and capturing two. Having waited several years for "the international community" and the Lebanese government to disarm this "terrorist" organisation, Israel is said to have been finally exasperated by this latest outrage and, acting in self-defence, it decided to retaliate so as to "break Hizbollah" for ever and ever, for the sake of the security of its citizens. This official version raises some basic questions regarding the character of Hizbollah itself, about the very incident that is supposed to have "provoked" Israel beyond endurance, and about the scope of Israel's "retaliation"...

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