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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: SARMAN who wrote (14694)8/2/2006 1:05:09 PM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck  Respond to of 32591
 
Anyone who aids, supports, finances or shelters a terrorist IS a terrorist



To: SARMAN who wrote (14694)8/2/2006 1:22:59 PM
From: Proud_Infidel  Respond to of 32591
 
Hezbollah fires record number of rockets
AP on Yahoo ^ | 8/2/06 | Aron Heller - ap

BEIT HILLEL, Israel - Hezbollah launched its deepest strikes yet into Israel on Wednesday, firing a record number of more than 190 rockets. An Israeli-American was killed as he fled for home by bicycle, and a stray rocket hit the West Bank for the first time.

The intense rocket fire defied claims by Israeli leaders and generals that they have considerably weakened Hezbollah's military capabilities. It followed a two-day lull in Hezbollah rocket attacks, and came hours after Israeli commandos in Lebanon captured what Israel said were five Hezbollah guerrillas.

Police said at least 21 people were wounded in Wednesday's attacks, which brought the Israeli death toll in three weeks of fighting to 55, including 19 civilians. Israel's onslaught on Lebanon has killed at least 540, mostly civilians.

The army said an American who immigrated to Israel was among three Israeli soldiers killed in fighting in Lebanon earlier this week.

Michael Levine, 21, of Philadelphia, moved to Israel three years ago and enlisted in the paratroopers, said Mike Ehrlich, who hosted Levine at a kibbutz after he first arrived in Israel.

The 52-year-old Israeli-American killed in the attacks was struck down outside his home in Kibbutz Sa'ar near the town of Naharia. He had been riding his bike home after a warning siren went off when the rocket fell, said Yehuda Shavit, a local government official.

The man was not immediately identified, but neighbors said he was originally from the Boston area and had been living in Israel for the last 20 years. The man's wife and two daughters had moved to southern Israel when the rocket attacks started, Shavit said, adding that more than half of the kibbutz residents also had fled.

At the scene, police removed the remains of the rocket from the crater it blasted, as an orange bulldozer was clearing away the rubble.

Rockets also hit near the Israeli town of Beit Shean, about 40 miles from the border, and near the village of Beit Hillel just before Israel's army chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, briefed reporters there. As he spoke, a ridge enflamed by a rocket hit blazed in the background.

Hezbollah has fired an average of more than 100 rockets every day since the war started July 12, sparked by Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. The previous high for rockets was 157, earlier this week.

Yet Halutz said Israel has dealt the guerrilla group a damaging blow, including killing hundreds of guerrillas and hitting their supplies of medium and long-range rockets. Having significantly increased Israel's ground operation in south Lebanon on Tuesday, the army is also considering more airstrikes, he said.

"We will need to evaluate the airstrikes in the depth of Lebanon, especially in Beirut," Halutz said. "I assume, the matter will come up for authorization in the next day or two."

In the West Bank, the misfired rockets landed near the town of Jenin, between the villages of Fakua and Jalboun, leaving 6-foot crater but causing no casualties.

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have staged daily support marches for Hezbollah, cheering the group's apparent success in fighting the Israelis.

"We know that they did not intend to strike Palestinian territory. They intended to strike Israel," said Fahmi Zarer, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party. "It was only a technical problem that made this rocket land here in the Palestinian territories."

Lebanese security officials said Hezbollah guerrillas fired more than 300 rockets into northern Israel on Wednesday. An Associated Press reporter in southeastern Lebanon reported seeing about two dozen of the rockets launched from that area alone.

Hezbollah's satellite TV network, Al-Manar, reported the guerrilla group used its longer-range Khaybar 2 missiles to hit Beit Shean. Hezbollah used the same rocket last week when it targeted the Israeli town of Afula.



To: SARMAN who wrote (14694)8/2/2006 2:45:29 PM
From: Scoobah  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 32591
 
Sarman,

if you refuse to answer my question, I intend to ban you, without further discussion.

Once and for all,

Will you condemn Hezbollah, if it is determined that they staged the Kana incident,

yes, or no?



To: SARMAN who wrote (14694)8/3/2006 7:44:05 PM
From: Scoobah  Read Replies (4) | Respond to of 32591
 
Here, shove this up your ass: Kana maccare revealed as BULLSHIT!!

Hezbollywood Horror: "Civil Defense Worker" doubles as Traveling Mortician
By Reuven Koret August 3, 2006

In front of the "refrigerator truck" holding a dead girl (not shown). Later he appears with the same girl in his helmet and flak jacket. (AP)

It was the shot seen round the world: shocking, disturbing, heartrending and intentionally so. [Graphic content appears below and in links.] A man dressed up as a rescue worker held up a dead infant, purportedly killed in the basement of a building that supposedly collapsed after it was allegedly hit by Israeli ordnance.

The AP wire story begins: "Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours - two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck [sic]. Somewhere in the middle, Jradi slumped beneath a tree and wept." Since we have a picture of this man pulling the small boy out, it is quite clear that Mr. Jradi is the "Man with the Green Helmet."

Remarkably, although the child was caked the thick dirt, the pacifier -- which in fact was attached to his shirt -- was immaculately clean.

"'There are so many children, so many children," the veteran civil defense worker said Sunday, barely able to get out the words.'"

Certainly the man called Abu Shadi Jradi is a veteran. In April 1996, after a misguided Israeli airstrike which really did kill scores of civilians, he appears in a similar pose [Extremely graphic image], holding up a child's bloodied headless body for the press to photograph. But is he a civil defense worker?

resistance.jeeran.com

Some problematic facts surrounding the Qana incident are already well known. A senior Israel Air Force general said that helicopters fired two rockets -- one of which turned out to be a dud -- just after midnight but the collapse of the house was only reported after 7. Brent Sadler of CNN reported that the only visible crater was 20 or 30 meters from the building. The Israeli general was baffled why the house would have collapsed six or seven hours after the airstrike. It's also possible that, if the crater was up to 100 feet away, the Israeli target was not even the building where the people died.

Other inconsistencies with earlier reports have also appeared in the local press. Rather than a four-story completed apartment building, the Lebanese Star reported on July 31, "The half-finished three-story house belonged to Abbas Hashem and lay at the end of a narrow lane that winds down a hillside flanked by olive groves and small tobacco patches. The Hashem family and their close neighbors, the Shalhoubs, had moved onto the ground floor 10 days earlier, hoping that a large pile of dirt and sand for construction would help protect them."

The fact that it was a building under construction might explain the otherwise inexplicable collapse. But if in fact they sheltered on the first floor, how to explain the fact that the bodies were being pulled from the basement?

Despite extensive coverage in the blogosphere, one key fact has been missing: the identity of the person prominently posing many of the corpses for the international press. Against the powerful images of dead children, facts and reason don't stand a chance.
Later in the AP report we learn about the circumstances by which Jradi said he was summoned to the scene. "Jradi said he got the call to rush to Qana from Tyre. But he couldn't go immediately, with Israeli warplanes still overhead. 'It was too dangerous,' he said."
Abu Shadi, it turns out, has a very distinctive form of transportation.

He was also photographed in Qana holding a dead child while in full rescue worker gear in one picture. But in another he is holding the same child dressed just in a black t-shirt, without his flak jacket, flourescent vest, radio and helmet. In the widely distributed blog entry Milking It, EUReferendum exhaustively examines the photographic evidence and time-stamps of the "rescue" operation.

The man and his refrigerator truck
But here's something new, which may explain a great deal:

Mark MacKinnon of The Globe and Mail reported from nearby Tyre, Lebanon on July 26, describing the many difficulties caused by the rising death toll in that city. "Abu Shadi, the mortician at the government hospital in the city, agrees. He's processed 100 bodies -- many of them grotesquely mangled and burned -- and on his pickup runs has been forced to leave behind many more that he can't recover from cars and destroyed buildings.

"It's much more [than the official count]," he says. "There are many trapped under the rubble. The death toll will reach 1,000."

"Mr. Shadi was standing in front of a refrigeration truck that was packed with 20 bodies, days after he helped bury 74 bodies in a mass grave. When he opened the door to show the black body bags haphazardly piled on top of each other, a staggering stench came out, despite the refrigeration. Next to the truck stood 40 empty wooden caskets, waiting for new arrivals."

Based on these descriptions, it seems highly likely that Abu Shadi the mortician and Abu Shadi the green-helmeted "civil defense worker" are one and the same. And, in the double role, Abu Shadi was among the first to arrive, before the media did, with his refrigerated truck that in recent days had been carrying around corpses.

"The refrigerated truck that bodies are stored in had just emptied the day before with a mass burial. It is already filling up again, with the bodies of children. "

We have pictures of Abu Shadi Jradi standing by the refrigerator truck, corpse in hand, and then, in different dress, posing with the same corpse in a different location.

Complicating the naming issue is a video which shows him at Qana, addressed in Arabic by a journalist by the named of "Abdel Qader" although -- as in the case of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat (Abu Amar) and many others -- the "Abu" may be a nom de guerre.

The tantalizing question, which may never be answered, is this: was Abu Shadi's refrigerated truck empty when he arrived at Qana that morning?

One might also ask: why was a "mortician" was among the first to be called to a presumed rescue situation, the very same "mortician" who ten years ago was posing headless child corpses?

Mr. Shadi had claimed much numbers twice as high, repeated -- even to this day. "Green Helmet" says in the video that fifteen bodies have been pulled from the wreckage, and he estimates that there were 210 (!) total victims.

The Red Cross and Human Rights Watch now confirm that the quantity of deaths has been greatly exaggerated, nearly double what was claimed by Lebanese officials. There were not "dozens" of children killed, as early reports have claimed.

And there really is no way to know by how much the deaths have been "padded" with refrigerated and transplanted corpses from Tyre or other locations.

And there remains the horrific possibility, as reported in a Lebanese publication but not confirmed, that Hezbollah placed rocket launchers on the roof and brought disabled children and the aged to be sacrificial victims, precisely as they became, possibly after a detonation of explosively charges long after the Israeli attack.

Calm, morning light shines on AP photographers
AP headquarters was thrilled by the results of their team at Qana. An internal memo leaked to the LGF blog not only celebrated their excellent work but awarded them a munificent cash prize of $500 to share among them for their accomplishment:

"Nasser's most haunting image showed a man emerging from the rubble carrying the lifeless and dust-covered body of a child. Calm, morning light shone down on man and child, highlighting them against an almost monochrome background of pure rubble. ... Nasser's image ran on the front pages of at least 33 newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Post. It also won a double-page center spread in The Guardian of London. Lefteris's image of a resident weeping next to a row of bodies made the front of The Washington Post, among many others."

For days AP repeated the inflated figures, which continue to be parroted by supposedly reputable news organizations. They don't question or don't worry that the photographs were not staged or posed, even when it becomes clear that the person doing the staging and posing is not a rescue worker but the local mortician, with at least a decade experience specializing in atrocity shots.

Much attention has been focused on the timing of the photographs in an attempt to determine how long Abu Shadi Jradi was parading around the bodies. That would be inappropriate, even ghoulish, if Mr. Shadi Jradi was only a civil defense worker. But it would make perfect sense if his day job is mortician.

A mortician, after all, has the job of making corpses presentable, dressing them and posing them for public viewing. Abu Shadi Jradi is good at his job, so the media can do theirs.

That's Hezbollywood.