ISRAEL

JEFF J. BROWN—Like the Rafic Hariri bombing, Eurangloland will scream that Iran-supported Hezbollah and Syria, the forces that are keeping Lebanon from being overrun and stolen by Israel, are the guilty parties for the Beirut Port explosion. After 13 years of investigation and $1 billion blown, half paid by the USA and France, to reach a UN Tribunal verdict, only one lowly Hezbollah member was charged with being involved in Hariri’s assassination

PATRICE GREANVILLE—What can we learn from all this messy history? The bottom line is that racial and ethnic generalizations are socially and politically dangerous, not to mention possibly immoral. Using that perspective, we can argue that anti-semitism, historically grounded in arbitrary generalizations, cannot be equated to anti-zionism, which is planted in specifics, far firmer terrain, and is historically verifiable.

TAXI—The US having lost Pakistan to the China sphere of influence, thus losing an attack dog bordering China, and having recently assigned Turkey as its new enforcer in the middle east, it now behooves the US to use its Mideast allies of both Turkey and Israel, two infamous terrorist states who regularly break international law with impunity: use them as spoilers and saboteurs against an advancing China and against any of Beijing’s Mideast regional allies. Beirutshima is clearly an apparent US endeavor to push-back the Chinese advance in the highly strategic eastern Mediterranean, as the US attempts to simultaneously pivot eastwards itself through secured territories wherever China is successfully backtracked by the US and its regional henchmen.

TAXI—Running out of time, and desperate to gather focus and forces to fast pivot east to confront a rapidly rising Chinese superpower, America is currently arranging for its exit from the Middle East in a way that militarily secures its allies and proxies there, especially that of Israel. Naturally, it has to pick a top dog from its kennel of allies to police the region in its absence, and pick one, indeed, it has.
Turkey. Not Israel.

Israel’s support for the “American” plan is not surprising, B’Tselem would argue, since “the plan eternalises the fragmentation of Palestinian space into disconnected slivers of territory in a sea of Israeli control, not unlike the Bantustans of South Africa’s Apartheid regime”. Human rights abuses against Palestinians – including daily indignities which have been criticised across the world – will continue, the group has argued.